Book reviews - YAdudebooks

October 7, 2022

Murder at the Hotel Hopeless

Helping his mother run the family hotel doesn’t usually offer much excitement. The only other people around are Penny Price, a spoiled child actor and star of the hit TV series Little Miss Murder being shot in town, and Mr. Ignato, an elderly resident at the hotel. When Mr. Ignato dies from a fall down the stairs, Charlie suspects foul play. Nobody believes him except for Penny, who jumps at the chance to solve a real murder. The two of them discover that Mr. Ignato was once a famous international jewel thief who stole a million-dollar diamond that was never recovered. Is […]

October 7, 2022

Forging Silver into Stars

Magic has been banished in the land of Syhl Shallow for as long as best friends Jax and Callyn can remember. They once loved the stories of the powerful magesmiths and mythical scravers who could conjure fire or control ice, but now they’ve learned that magic only leads to danger: Magic is what killed Callyn’s parents, leaving her alone to raise her younger sister. Magic never helped Jax, whose leg was crushed in an accident that his father has been punishing him for ever since. Magic won’t save either of them when the tax collector comes calling, threatening to […]

October 7, 2022

Secret Schools: True Stories of the Determination to Learn

Education goes undercover in this compelling look at some of the world’s most secretive schools through history. Can you keep a secret? What if it meant hiding from your loved ones, sneaking out late at night or risking imprisonment? And what if that secret was that you were going to school? From covert classrooms created by enslaved Africans in the United States, to academic schools disguised as “sewing lessons” for women in Afghanistan, to espionage schools run by powerful governments, Secret Schools explores the hidden classrooms that have opened their doors so children and adults could learn. Vivid linocut […]

October 7, 2022

Felix Silver, Teaspoons & Witches

After his parents announce that his bizarre, emerging abilities are getting in the way of their divorce, Felix Silver relocates to Dorset Harbor and becomes the charge of his Grandma Aggie. As Felix adjusts to life in a new school, Aggie decides that it’s time he learns The Silver Way, and teaches him all she knows about sorcery and magical arts. When Felix and his new friends decide to solve the mystery of local teenagers who have gone missing, Felix learns that his crush, Aero, has a big secret. Is dark magic creeping into the town, and can Felix learn […]

September 2, 2022

Falling Shadows

Growing up, Cori, Maz and Sam were inseparable best friends, sharing their love for Halloween, arcade games and one another. Now it’s 1992, Sam has been missing for five years, and Cori and Maz aren’t speaking anymore. How could they be, when Cori is sure Sam is dead and Maz thinks he may have been kidnapped by a supernatural pinball machine?

These days, all Maz wants to do is party, buy CDs at Sam Goody and run away from his past. Meanwhile, Cori is a homecoming queen, hiding her abiding love of horror movies and her queer self under the bubble-gum veneer of a high school queen bee. But when Sam returns—still twelve years old while his best friends are now seventeen — Maz and Cori are thrown back together to solve the mystery of what really happened to Sam the night he went missing. Beneath the surface of that mystery lurk secrets the friends never told one another, then and now. And Sam’s is the darkest of all.

Award-winning author of If You Could Be Mine and Here to Stay, Sara Farizan delivers edge-of-your-seat terror as well as her trademark referential humor, witty narration and insightful characters.

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