This feeling lasted for the entire book. The writing style pulled me in so much that the story didn't even matter, although it is really cool as well. Kidder basically shadowed a fifth grade class in a poor, rundown, public school for an entire school year and wrote about the experience.

Because she reacts very poorly to unhappy endings, we had decided to recommend against her reading certain novels. So, for example, after significant discussion, we decided that Lois Lowry's The Giver was too intense for her, for now at least.

But she had loved Zilpha Keatley Snyder's The Egypt Game, and the illustration (by Alton Raible) on the back cover of Below the Root made us yearn to read the book, even though our resident teenager warned against it.

So we decided to read Below the Root together.

Living as we do near the coast, I was surprised that it took my ten year old more than a week to react to the recent devastating tsunamis.

Last night, finally, she began to take the tsunamis very personally. "We live at the top of a high hill," she said. "So I'm not worried about what would happen if I were here and the tsunami hit. But, my school is much closer to sea level. What would we do if the tsunami hit when we were at school?"

Run uphill, I told her. Run fast. What else should I have said?

Today, I paid a visit to my daughter's school. I asked them whether they would be notified if a tsunami were detected. I asked what the procedures would be in case that sort of a warning is issued. I suggested that everyone at the school get together to discuss what the plan would be.

Picked this up as a quick read. Not gripping per say, but interesting.

Accidentally exiled from his castle in Scotland, the poor Boggart discovers peanut butter and that playing around with electricity and streetcars in modern-day Toronto can lead to dire (unintended) consequences.

Even the gifts the Boggart bestows on his hosts, ten-year old computer nerd Jessup and his twelve-year old sister, Emily, cause terrific problems.

And yet, I have recently come across a few novels that consider thoughtfully the role(s) a mother may play in her daughter's future. In the two grimmest, White Oleander and The Book of Ruth, the power of the mothers to destroy their daughters despite great distance, time, and, in the case of White Oleander, despite tall prison walls, is absolute. The sorrows of mothers, say Janet Fitch and Jane Hamilton, are visited on their daughters.

Bull Run is written weirdly. There are sixteen people's stories of the first battle of the civil war. The story switches from one person to the next for the whole book.

My then-10 year old daughter fixed her eyes on me, eyes that implied that she'd just realized that a Truth had been withheld from her, and she was going to get to the bottom of it.

"Hmmm," I answered. "What you mean is that a story is not just about its plot. Sometimes, often, in fact, a story has a message and the message is conveyed by the plot, but also by the author's choices of words. The message is sometimes called the theme of the book. It's what the author wants you to learn from reading the book. It's why authors go to all the trouble of writing books."

I explain that in those times long ago, nearly everyone was more likely to die but that women of childbearing age were particularly at risk. Dd asked, "So, are you going to die? Am I going to die?" ....

Set in the time leading up to World War I and before women's sufferage, the plot tells of a group of families and their associates and friends. There is a destitute young boy who is nurtured to become the artist he deserves to be. There are the young women who, lacking the vote and receiving conflicting messages about how to behave socially and politically, pay terrible prices. The subplots about how various characters resolve their needs to express themselves politically, even when expressing their opinions may adversely affect those they love should be required reading for anyone thinking of a career in politics.

Flippant. Flippant. And, entirely unfair to this book.

• The Lives of Christopher Chant
• Charmed Life

Charmed Life is the story of Cat and Gwendolen, brother and sister orphaned when their parents were drowned. Gwendolen seems to be a talented magician. And Cat -- well, not so much. Both are adopted, for reasons Cat finds difficult to understand, by a very powerful sorcerer, the Chrestomanci.

Both stories explore the problems of gifted children who are made to feel inferior because they are special.

• Magicians of Caprona
• Witch Week

But the first book in this volume, The Magicians of Caprona, a Chrestomanci-universe-based story with many similarities to Romeo and Juliet was a real disappointment.

A 16 yr. old Christopher Chant and his future wife, Millie, play supporting roles in this, the eventful, but not frenetic story of how Conrad avoids the terrible fate his uncle attempts to foist upon him and instead finds himself a mentor.

My least favorite aspects of Discworld are the elephant-riding-the-turtle parts (its creation myth). And in the first books of this series, that seems to be given a great deal of attention.

And yet, here is another "boy book" in which a boy wreaks near-disaster time and time again because of his own willfulness and yet seems unable to stop himself from succumbing to peer pressure.

One thing that's weird, though. Is that when you are always INSIDE the brains of the characters, it's hard to always keep track of what's actually happening to whom and/or whose brain you are inhabiting, even if it says so right at the beginning of the chapter. Not to mention that, once the novel is over, you still have no idea what the characters look like.

After reading this book, I was not certain I understood much more than I did before about the French Revolution, but I did empathize a great deal more than I had before with the French aristocracy of that time. For example, Moorehead continually implies that Talleyrand was evil (and was he so terrible compared to the many other participants of the Terror??!!!) but never quite tells us what awful things he did.

There are many neat, zany characters who jump in to help throughout their long journey, which leads deep into the depths and mysterious places of this new world.

This book is about a man who discovers how to switch from his evil self to his good one, purposefully. It is Gothic (creepy and mysterious), and very exciting.

One of the many delights:
The brownie named Sorrel lives to eat mushrooms. But when she doesn't like someone and calls him or her names, Sorrel uses the names of poisonous mushrooms as epithets. SO CUTE!!!

I was upset with the end of the book because it was sad but I'm still going to read the other books in the series.

I recommended Dune to my older daughter when she was about 13. Her opinion on Dune (but then she read it just about at the same time she read Winter's Tale & Monte Cristo, which have remained some of her favorite books, now 4 years later), was that it was "OK", compared to these others which really captivated her.

We loved East, which describes in great detail, the life of Rose (called Karen in EOTSWOTM), who, like Beauty in Beauty and the Beast, comes to love the beast (in this case a white bear) who forces her to leave her home and loved ones.

Perhaps coming from a small town in Mississippi helps with that?

They are for-real chapter books set in a very odd post-apocalyptic time/place, but they include very interesting pen drawings on nearly every page. The only downside to them is that there is a great deal of violence and death throughout, including deaths of very prominent characters.

And, well, Eldest is ok.

But Eldest, like many of the middle volumes of many trilogies, was much more of a chore and less of a pleasure to read than Eragon was.

For one thing, the author tells the story in a very interesting way: The story is narrated by two very different, but also very similar, characters. One is a 12 year old genius and the other is a 50-something year old concierge in the fancy hotel she lives in.

On the ship she meets the 6 year old captain who explains that once you die you go to Elsewhere and live backwards until you're a baby, then you sail back to Earth to begin a new life.

Also on the ship, Liz meets a dead superstar and another girl named Thandi who's around Liz's age, with whom she becomes friends. Everyone else on the ship is an old person.

But as her backwards life progresses, Liz meets a boy named Owen Welles, and she starts to feel like she could enjoy her not-life.

I enjoyed this book very much, because you really get to know the characters and the thoughts of Liz sound like what she'd actually think. This is a new version of what happens after life that I've never heard before, and I think that it's very interesting.

Before my parents let me read this they were worried that it would be too scary for me, Liz being dead and all, but it isn't like that at all. The book is somewhat sad and dreary in the beginning but it's not like it would give nightmares or something bad like that. This book really put new thoughts in my mind, new thoughts that weren't bad.

I recommend this book for maybe 6th or 7th graders and up, even though I read it at a somewhat younger age.

The plot follows a girl who wants (and is destined) to be a wizard, but is not allowed to be because she is a girl. Wizarding is OBVIOUSLY only for boys.

I got this book because I'm not a fan of horror, but wanted a chance to read a book by Stephen King.

Wrenching, but the characters are so endearing that I found myself alternately clutching the book, putting it down in horror and sadness, then grabbing it up again to find out how everyone was doing.

This book really got me worried about how horrible human beings are and what we're going to do to the world... It gave me a very depressing feeling while and after reading. It is set in the (near??) future, and most people are basically controlled by their "feeds" implanted directly in their brains, which are used mostly as an excuse to constantly show them thousands of advertisements. I guess the ending is supposed to be a little hopeful, in that the main character is considering fighting the feed, when he sees its awful power over humanity, but... I think hopeful is not a word that anyone can truthfully apply to this book.

Flight of the Dragon Kyn tells the story of a girl named Kara who can call birds down. The people in her village don't like her or her gift; When she was very little she came down with a deadly sickness and they left her in a cave for dead. When she came back to them, her eyes had turned from blue to green.

Some villagers claimed that a dragon gave her its milk and that that's why she had changed.

And, Sad Ending Alert. The foreshadowing is quite subtle, so it might come as a shock to young readers.

Newbery Winner, 1952

A lovely, interesting, intense survival story.

Unrealistic and puts the "high-school-girls-should-just-go-around-trying-to-get-a-boyfriend" spin on life. It's about this girl named Jennifer who discovers that she can turn invisible because she is a goddess.

I just love how Pratchett mercilessly mocks how stupid and horrible people can be, and still makes this into a great book, and is able to slip in some big moral problems.

-- Fizzy

Bartimaeus Book Two: The Golem's Eye is a very good book, but before you read it you should read Bartimaeus, Book One: The Amulet of Samarkand, because things in Book Two will make much more sense that way.

• Kitty the feisty commoner,
• Bartimaeus the sardonic djinni, and
• Nathaniel (John Mandrake) the annoying magician.

I was always on the edge of my seat with this book, because even if no magic was happening, or she wasn't being chased by a monster, the social conflicts of teenage girls can seem terrifying sometimes.

The metaphors here come fast and heavy-handed. The husband, Jonathan Casper, is a nerdy scientist who forgets his promises to his family as he quests after a "prehistoric" giant squid. In her off-hours, the wife, Madeline, chases a giant man-shaped cloud. At work, Madeline investigates the pecking order of pigeons by disrupting their power structures and witnessing the devastating results. (Perhaps like many academics, Madeline neglected, before she started her experiment, to understand what a pecking order is. How lucky she is to have an adviser to explicitly explain that pigeons NEED to be dominated by moderately violent males in order to avoid rampant rape and murder by the underclasses in their society.)

One of the two Casper daughters copes with her problems with excessive piety. The other responds to the chaos at home by building a bomb and ignorantly attempting to apply the Communist Manifesto to the running of her school.

Her biggest challenge in the book was realizing that the labels "normal" and "abnormal" are nothing more than labels, and that nobody is the same, so "normal" is subjective.

Chenoweth's heroine, still a college student, has known but refused to know consciously that her mother's brain cancer is terminal. In a story that could have been maudlin, Chenoweth lays out a "good" way for this young person to surface the bad news: in the company of her parents' good friends, with some younger people to interact with.

Death's granddaughter Susan, along with a toothfairy and the oh-god of hangovers have to save the world.

My then-10 year old loved this story so much that she insisted we go see the movie as a family. Which turned into a nine hour ordeal, long story, but the movie was/is not playing in many places. The book is much, much better than the movie. Perhaps that's not saying much, though ...

I'm not sure how to rate this book. It was very disturbing: The whole point is that 24 teenagers all fight to the death. Yay. But it was also very gripping and exciting, and talked about the price of freedom. It definitely kept me up with vivid images in my head...

When she discovers that Mockingbird was her mother's favorite book, (it's her favorite too), Erin decides to make a pilgrimage from her home in Minnesota to Lee's in Alabama on a Greyhound bus.

This is book two of what is promised to be a trilogy.

My daughter was engrossed by the topics discussed, and inspired by the author himself. At one point, Sacks riffs on the wonders of the Paleozoic cycad forests, and my daughter, with love and admiration, exclaimed, "My but aren't WE a nerd?" (Acknowledging in the intonation of that sentence that she is one too.)

Not that horrors bear comparison, but the shock to the folks at home when, eventually they heard of the carnage of World War I seems to me as if it should have been mind-altering. Hard to believe they went right back to killing each other even more horribly in World War II.

Brilliant geologist and his apprentice/nephew discover, de-crypt, and then, with their imperturbable guide Hans, follow the directions in a Renaissance manuscript that describes how they can travel to the center of the Earth.

"Then what about The Jungle Book? Did you find that easy to read?"

"Well, no, actually. It was very hard. But beautiful."

My daughter's only misgiving about the book: It's clear that Kipling does not hold monkeys in high regard. Unlike people who do not even know of the Law of the Jungle, monkeys know of the Law, but refuse to submit to it. Monkeys are dear daughter's favorite animals. She will need to write her own book, in which they state their reasons for their recalcitrance.

Anyway, this book is better than any movie.

Ella doesn't like the palace either, it's too stuffy, but she does manage to make some good friends who end up saving her from a life of for ever just looking pretty and sewing all day long.

--Fizzy, age 11

We started reading Kim together in early fall. We finished in mid-December. The difficulty of:

• The language (and there are many languages used here: British English, of course, but also Irish, Hindi, Urdu, Arabic, others we probably don't know the names of...)
• The concepts: Tibetan Buddhist vs. Hindu religious beliefs, Islamic concepts, the differences between Catholic and Protestant attitudes, and
• The politics: What are the Russians, French, British, and the various native Indians trying to accomplish in all their complicated plots

Kim is like Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell meet James Bond meet Harriet the Spy, only harder.

In this version, Theseus expresses his wonder at the radically different ways of life in the patriarchal Greek world in which he grew up and the matriarchal Minoan lands he comes to rule.

The story is so intense that if Trish Connolly, the reader, were not so compelling, there were many points at which I would have stopped. No way I could read this story -- I'd have been crying too hard.

High concept, but not as stirring in its execution as I'd expected.

Janna Levin (our madman who is not at all mad) worms us inside the minds of Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing and forces us to look out into the world through their eyes. When we hear Gödel's story, we may be tempted to think that paranoid insanity is part of terrific genius. But then what are we to think of Alan Turing (yes, he clearly was on the autistic spectrum, but he was not crazy and not harmful to himself or to others), who only wanted to solve very hard problems and love the occasional man and was forced to ingest hormones that destroyed his body and his self-respect?

Doctorow also puts forward an interesting business model - the 6 months and you're out theory of manufacturing anything. Seems exhausting, but true to life. And may very well be the only viable model for hardware manufacturing in the future.

That said, Makers is the book that Ayn Rand would have written instead of The Fountainhead if she'd lived a few years later and chosen engineering rather than architecture as her metaphor.

Women in the Makers world are very, very bright, attracted to Makers, attractive, moral, tolerant, thrifty, ... well, you know, they are pretty much not very reality-based.

Maniac's athletic gifts and personal fortitude give him entree behind the window curtains of many homes in his small Pennsylvania town, where he is privileged to share meals and experiences with old and young, black and white, humans and zoo animals.

• An autistic-spectrum woman carries on a lengthy affair with a geologist afflicted with Alzheimer's disease intersects with
• a 19th century capitalist assault on a bog and
• a 21st century romance

In this setting the future seems just like now, except for updated space travel and things like that. It doesn't get toooo into details on the world, because almost all of it takes place in space. Anyways. The story follows Carmen, who is the first to discover inhabitants on mars. I like her as a character because she is very questioning of the rules and is just an interesting perspective to view the book through. Within the book there is also a romantic strand, so I'd more recommend this for women then men.

-- Fizzy

Warning: Each book in this series veers broadly from (usually) a very cheerful first few chapters, in which the happy life of the narrator's family is depicted to subsequent harrowing chapters in which death, danger, and/or permanent dismemberment often occurs. The books usually resolve relatively pleasantly, but my daughter had difficulty sleeping after reading some chapters. (Although she always insists on getting the next book in the series.)

In this extremely gentle, wise, moving story, Lucy, a physician who is also a mother and a graduate of the foster care system, unconsciously applies this rule to her family and work life.

In this episode, Molly must learn to travel through time so she can rescue her beloved dog, Petula, her friends Forest and Rocky, and her earlier selves, all of whom have been kidnapped from the present to India in the 1870s.

Another endearing trait that Molly has is that she is very aware both of her great abilities and of her shortcomings. The all-knowing narrator of the book takes especial care to let us know what Molly is thinking when she masters her self-doubts, carefully thinks through her options, and then puts her all into implementing whatever solution she thinks will work best.

I've just finished reading one of my old favorites to my daughter, and it occurs to me that it's a very good book for homeschooled kids. The book is "My Side of the Mountain", by Jean Craighead George (1959). I vividly remember that I cherished this book at about 8 or 9 years old, little pioneer girl that I was. We lived "out in the country", with woods bordering our 10 acres, and I spent many a happy hour out in the woods, in my own world, imagining myself an adventurer from some time past, probably as a male protagonist (they had all the fun; the feminist revolution hadn't hit our small town yet).

My daughter's well into chapter books but this one's a little long and deep for her, but when I saw it in the library I couldn't wait. I read a lot to her when I can find a break in her own reading. I knew this was one we would enjoy together, and we did.

As for Nation.... "You won't like this book," my daughter said as she handed it to me. She meant that SHE did not like this book. "I usually would give every Terry Pratchett book I read a 10 out of 10. I give this one a 6, maybe. He is usually at least amusing, even when he is grim. This one is mostly just grim though."

WARNING: Plot spoilers in the long description.

The Pearl is a very sad book. Too sad for me. It shows you what greed can do to people. Which in Kino's case causes a lot of death and misery. I didn't like The Pearl very much.

It starts as an orphan boy, Peter, (who doesn't know his last name or even how old he is), and his four friends: James, Thomas, Prentiss, and Tubby Ted are in an old smelly wagon cart on their way to a ship called the Neverland, being shipped into their adventures.

On the Neverland Peter meets a girl named Molly, (who he thinks is VERY pretty) who needs his help protecting the magical trunk the Neverland has on board. Peter doesn't hesitate in saying yes. During their voyage, they are being followed by the wickedest pirate on the seven seas, Black Stache, who is after their ship and its mysterious cargo.

I liked this book very much, and I feel that it does a good job of explaining how Peter Pan became Peter Pan. This book could appeal to anyone from 8 years old to full grown adults, especially if they like the story of Peter Pan.

And yet, Annie Dillard's beautiful yet clear-eyed vignettes about the resplendence and horrors of the natural world captivate me.

Cat has learned how to learn from a very gifted nine-lived enchanter who is (obviously) very talented, but possibly not as talented as Cat is. Throughout the book, Cat works on identifying skills Chrestomanci has that Cat still needs to learn, on when to solve problems on his own and when to call for help, and on how and when to intervene in the lives of the less gifted inhabitants of the universes he is destined to govern.

These nerdy people, all obsessed with doing the arcane thing that they do very well, figure out how to combine their efforts for the good of the group and themselves.

In this version, narrated by the frog who becomes the prince's wife while he is a frog, the prince gradually adapts to his watery environment and becomes content in his amphibian incarnation.

This is a book for parents of kids who have, or resemble those who have, any of several closely related, and confusingly similar, challenges: Asperger's Syndrome, Pervasive Developmental Disability - Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS), Nonverbal Learning Disorder, Sensory Integration Dysfunction. But it's about the kids, not the disorders.

What Quirky Kids does, and from my perspective does better than any other publication I'm seen, is to serve as a wise, perceptive and sympathetic counselor and friend for parents of kids who are in this spectrum. It speaks respectfully and helpfully about the whole range of real-world issues, including schools, helpful and non-so-helpful friends, maintaining your own mental health, balancing the needs of multiple kids when one or more has exceptional needs, genuinely appreciating your kid's strengths and quirks, understanding the aches and long-term worries.

We must write our homage to X-Men someday. After all, this is a group that thinks that hiding out in a school for the gifted will somehow shield its members from bullies. A creative, if foolish, concept.

In Questing to the top of the mountain with six fellow villagers to obtain water for his village, Rowan, a frail, young shepherd, gains confidence and courage.

The moral of the story? Perhaps that teaching one's children to observe closely and act on their observations is more important than preaching a strict morality that is no longer adhered to by grown-ups, teenagers, or even those who preach it.

In this less anachronistic modern-day Newbery Honor Book, the first-person narrator, Catherine writes down rules for her autistic brother, David, although she's learned from experience that he routinely ignores them.

Very well written chic lit.

The book is not about people eating each other, but two separate story-lines. One is about a girl named Sadima who can hear the thoughts of animals. The other is about a boy named Hahp sent to a gruesome magical academy. The only thing the plots share in common is a man named Somas, who owns Sadima's kind-of boyfriend, and lets Hahp's friends die of starvation.

I liked Small Steps; I read it in less than a week, although it gets a little smushy in some parts -- lots of kissing and stuff.

It also approaches the question of faith versus science, and blindly following versus scoping out your paths.

In this non-fiction collection, Jean Craighead Geoge, author of My Side of the Mountain, describes the many wild animals she and members of her family have adopted over many years, their adventures and how they fared in captivity, and (for most), how they came to be released.

The story is about the twelve signs of the Chinese Zodiac, with a person who represents each animal. A girl named Brenda discovers early in the book that she is the future Rat, and she has to help regain the memories of her father and other "animals" whose memories of their identities have been stolen. Brenda is forced into a battle she hadn't been aware of until just weeks before, and although only a "Rat-ling", she must help the twelve and the grandson of the original emperor.

Our teenager had many more misgivings about this book than I did. And, thinking back on it, I think she's right.

A bit too mushy for me, and it bothered me that the man-woman relationship was based on the traditional beliefs that men are brave adventurers and women stay at home and worry and do housework while they cry and wait for their husbands to return...

I really enjoyed the book from that perspective, reading about her interesting and unusual theory about what time travel would be like (if it was possible) emotionally for the traveler, and its physical qualities.

For older readers. Their relationship is very heavily based on sex....

True Believer is the second first-person fiction I've read by Wolff; the first was The Mozart Season, another great favorite of mine. Like The Mozart Season, True Believer is told in the voice of an entirely believable girl.

But unlike Allegra Shapiro, heroine of The Mozart Season, LaVaughn, narrator of True Believer, has so many worries in the present day that she cannot dwell on her past or the past of her family. LaVaughn describes her day-to-day life in the inner-city projects, a life so relentlessly hard that keeping her eye on her future becomes nearly impossible sometimes, in free verse so compelling that it reads like prose.

From the perspective of 10-year-old Winnie, Babbitt shows us many details rich with color and motion that Winnie notices at first only through the bars of her fence. As she strays out of her yard for the first time, she comes to know the Tucks, who enchant her (as well as us).

Winner, 1948 Newbery Medal

And yet, I have recently come across a few novels that consider thoughtfully the role(s) a mother may play in her daughter's future. In the two grimmest, White Oleander and The Book of Ruth, the power of the mothers to destroy their daughters despite great distance, time, and, in the case of White Oleander, despite tall prison walls, is absolute.

Unless and What To Keep convey more nuanced messages. In Unless, a mother is beside herself at her daughter's transformation from promising college student into street person. Eventually, the mother reassures herself that not every activity she undertakes is invested with deep meaning and that she is not responsible for every anguish that afflicts every member of her family.

As in other Nancy Farmer stories, many of the bad guys in this tale are space aliens.

Great book. REALLY cool. It follows the story of one man for one summer, as he runs away to the circus. Accidentally.

Emily says:

Not hard to read, although the stories of how the children came to live in the home are sad.

And yet, I have recently come across a few novels that consider thoughtfully the role(s) a mother may play in her daughter's future. In the two grimmest, White Oleander and The Book of Ruth, the power of the mothers to destroy their daughters despite great distance, time, and, in the case of White Oleander, despite tall prison walls, is absolute. The sorrows of mothers, say Janet Fitch and Jane Hamilton, are visited on their daughters.

Early in this tale, Tiffany Aching, a very mature and gifted if reluctant witch, makes the awful mistake of arousing the romantic attention of the Wintersmith (God of Winter), and nearly simultaneously but through no fault of her own, loses her teacher and home.

• Rectifies (with the "help" of her silly blue friends the Nac Mac Feegle and her not-quite-as-silly boy?friend, Roland) the wrong she's done,
• Learns to fit back into her home, and
• Comes to appreciate, understand, and learn from other mentors.

But in the society evoked in Witch Week, anyone identified as a witch is burned at the stake. Which puts the students at the Larwood House School, all of whom are orphaned because of a family connection to witchcraft, in a desperate position. Many of them know they are witches. And although it's exhiliarating to know that one has great power, they know from experience that the penalty for getting caught, or worse, being turned in by one's peers, is death by fire.

I liked With Every Drop of Blood, but it was sad. I never have understood how people thought they were better, and smarter, and deserved a better life than black people just because they looked different.

There were two main characters: Johnny and Cush. Johnny is a white kid whose dad got killed in the civil war. When his dad died he left Johnny, his mom and his two younger siblings Sam and Sarah alone. They needed food and money (and Johnny wanted to revenge his dad's death) so Johnny went teamstering food in a wagon for the rebel soldiers.

And, yes, the standard required elements of chic-lit are provided:

• Insecure heroine
• So-so job
• Unfulfilling romantic life
• Moralistic philosophizing

My daughter and I loved the way the tiny Bard Cat interacts with her less gifted human allies. The seeming contradiction between the way wizards look -- ordinary -- and what they have to do -- extraordinary -- might be heartening to a child who feels that his or her specialness is not reflected in appearance or circumstances. And, the cameo appearances by Celtic mythological beings are fun.

Wright 3 is about three kids named Calder, Petra, and Tommy. Petra and Tommy at first don't like each-other but are both friends with Calder. They have to work together to save the Robie House, a historical house in their neighborhood that has lots of secrets.