Celebrate the New Year with these excellent reads!

There are quite a few tear-jerkers in this month's reads, so pull up a box of tissues. Invisible Boy is sure to get the tears flowing, as it's a tale of human trafficking. And I was balling -- in public -- after the first 20 pages of Mary Underwater. Loved that one!

Not Your All-American Girl had me laughing out loud. It's a sequel to This is Just a Test, which had some truly wicked middle grade grandmother humor. 

Wild Fire and Wild River are considered hi-lows, high-interest stories with relatively low vocabulary and not very complicated sentence structures, so they read super-fast and are great for capturing and holding older but still struggling readers' attentions.

For teachers, I'm offering Reading Roles Pages for the William Shakespeare's Star Wars Book 8, Jedi the Last. That's my favorite SW in iambic pentameter series I've been plugging to English teachers to consider teaching, instead of Romeo and Juliet, for several years now. I'm not giving up! I also reviewed Steve Sheinkin's Most Dangerous and recommend it for high school US History teachers. It's an excellent non-fiction account of the man who released the Pentagon Papers into the press.

Coo is a new take on the raised-by-wolves trope: a girl raised by pigeons in a city rooftop dovecote. Hazel Bly had me reading for a mermaid, but you'll have to read for yourself to see if she makes an appearance. And finally I loved The Box in the Woods, a YA reads-like-a-classic-slasher-flick murder mystery by the wonderful Maureen Johnson.

Enjoy!