Jennifer Hubert's Blog, page 7
June 17, 2019
When the Ground is Hard by Malla Nunn
Prim Adele Joubert and brash Lottie Diamond could not be more different. Adele is green-eyed and rule -abiding. Lottie is blue-eyed and law-breaking. Adele tries to work within the system of their British boarding school, desperate to be friends with the “right” kind of girls, while Lottie gave up caring what people thought of her […]
June 2, 2019
Kiss Number 8 by Colleen AF Venable and Ellen T. Crenshaw
Amanda, or “Mads” as her friends call her, is not that into kissing. It’s usually too awkward, handsy or wet. No big deal, she has enough to fill her days without worrying about locking lips. There’s minor league baseball games and trash TV with her dad, Mass on Sunday with her mom, and after hours […]
May 19, 2019
Frankly in Love by David Yoon
High school senior Frank Li has never had a girlfriend. His big sister Hanna made the mistake of falling in love with a non-Korean, and now his parents act as though she died. Frank knows that should his heart follow the same path, he will no doubt suffer the same fate. But since “Korean-Americans make […]
April 10, 2019
Runaways: Find Your Way Home by Rainbow Rowell and Kris Anka
Readers of this blog know that while I love me some graphic novels, I’ve never been a huge superhero comic fan. The one exception is Marvel’s Runaways, which captured my heart way back in 2007. That’s why I was THRILLED to discover that hotshot romance author Rainbow Rowell has penned a new chapter in the […]
March 31, 2019
The Grace Year by Kim Liggett
Adolescence isn’t fun for anyone. But it’s particularly awful for the girls of Garner County, a rural community that seems vaguely colonial or dystopian. Sixteen year old girls are sent away from home and forced to endure the “Grace Year,” twelve months of living rough in the wilderness with little access to fresh food, water […]
March 26, 2019
Bloom by Kevin Panetta and Savanna Ganucheau
Ari just knows his future calling is to play in an indie pop band with his best friends, not work from the crack of dawn every day in his family’s struggling Greek bakery. But until he can convince his parents of that and scrape together enough rent money, he’s stuck at home making sourdough rolls. […]
March 17, 2019
New York Times YA Crossover Fantasy
Dear Teen Peeps, Some of you may have noticed that I did not post to RR AT ALL the whole month of January. No, it wasn’t because I was hibernating or binging Russian Doll while the slush piled up and the temperatures flip-flopped. It was because I was working on this tidy round up of some of […]
March 5, 2019
With the Fire on High by Elizabeth Acevedo
Aspiring chef Emoni Santiago has a lot on her plate (no pun intended!) It’s senior year, and she’s still not sure if college is in the cards. She so busy juggling school, her greasy spoon job, her demanding elective cooking class, and her baby girl Emma that college seems like a distant dream. If she’s […]
February 17, 2019
Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation by Ari Folman and David Polonsky
It’s no small task to take an iconic piece of prose, break it down into a graphic format and also manage to say something new. But that’s exactly what Ari Folman and David Polonsky did in this utterly arresting transformation of one of the world’s most iconic texts, The Diary of Anne Frank. As many […]
January 2, 2019
2018 Top Five
Dear Teen Peeps, Like in 2017, I haven’t read nearly as much YA as I wanted to/should have, due to number of tedious, adult-ing reasons. So in the category of better late than never, here is a leaner, meaner list of my top five best YA reads of 2018. I mean, I could have dragged […]
