It's Monday! What Are You Reading? 12-2-13

Visit our hosts Jen & Kellee at Teach Mentor Texts and Unleashing Readers for their reviews as well as links to all the other blogs participating in the book sharing fun!

Books I Read this Week:

Lockwood & Co.: The Screaming Staircase by Jonathan Stroud

Disney-Hyperion Books, 2013

Fantasy

390 pages

Recommended for grades 7+

If you know me in real life you know that I can sometimes get excited about a book I've recently read and loved.  This is one of those books that I can't stop praising!  And as much as I urge my students to avoid the phrase "It was a good book," I find myself saying over and over: This is such a good book!

So pardon me for being elementary in my review, but I've got to say, this book is really, really good.

We find ourselves in London, time period unknown.  The Problem is in full effect, that being the issue of ghosts plaguing citizens by threatening to give them "ghost touch."  Ghost touch can range from being short and painful to stronger and lethal.  

Lockwood & Co. is a team of three young investigators that risk their lives to enter haunted locations to locate the source of the haunting.  Once they uncover the item that is tying the spirit to Earth it can be destroyed or through other methods, un-haunted, thus ridding the danger of ghost touch on people living with or near the haunting.

Full of English wit and incredible visual imagery, I simultaneously wanted to keep reading and also to never finish.  You will love the characters for their vivid individual personalities, and the action literally never ends.  Thank goodness there are more to come in this series!

The 9 Lives of Alexander Baddenfield by John Bemelmans Marciano, illustrated by Sophie Blackall

Viking, 2013

Science Fiction/Fantasy

140 pages

Recommended for grades 4-5

And then I read this one...

Now, I'm a big fan of fantasy, grim humor, and naughty characters.  But I just couldn't fall in love with this story.  In a nutshell, Alexander Baddenfield gets a mad scientist to remove the 9 lives from his cat and transplant them into Alexander.  Next Alexander goes on a dying binge, doing reckless and deadly things simple because he has so many lives to spare.  Until he is down to the last one, and naughty Alexander takes a turn for the worst, too scared to do anything at all.  Too scared to live his last life.  The illustrations and size of the book will appeal to young readers, but the content is slightly iffy to me.

I'm Currently Reading:

On Deck:

Thanks for stopping by!  Have a great reading week!