The Chaos King
By Laura Ruby
EOS/HarperCollins, $16.99
Ages 10-14 years
Two characters from Chicago writer Laura Ruby’s earlier fantasy, “The Wall and the Wing,” Gurl/Georgie and Bug, stand between a book of reanimation spells and villains. You’ll have a sense of how much fun this fast-paced book is when you learn, for example, that the chief bad guy has renamed himself from Sid to Mandelbrot, the name of a chaos theorist and a kind of cookie. Ruby sets the battle in New York City and then wittily populates it with figures from the best teen satires. Meet, for instance, The Second-richest Girl in the Universe (who made up the phrase ” ‘That’s so fab’ “) and vampires so bored they look like “a bunch of disgruntled Goth kids at a square dance.”
The Girl’s Like Spaghetti
By Lynne Truss, illustrated by Bonnie Timmons
Putnam, $16.99
Ages 9-14 years
Lynne Truss finds sentences where punctuation makes the difference, focusing on the apostrophe. After a succinct introduction — acknowledging that “it’s” and “its” are maddeningly inconsistent — pictures illustrate such sentences as, “Those smelly things are my brother’s,” and, “Those smelly things are my brothers.”
My America
By Jan Spivey Gilchrist, illustrated by Ashley Bryan and Jan Spivey Gilchrist
HarperCollins, $16.99
Ages 5-9 years
For the speaker, “my country” is a full canvas, with magic skies and cities, animals and people, and pictures to sweep us through it.
Skin Hunger
By Kathleen Duey
Atheneum, $17.99
Ages 11-14 years
In our overtrilogied era, it’s a delight to read a Book 1 and be so exquisitely left short of answers about its engaging characters at the end. We follow, in two apparently different time periods, a handful of people involved in the transmission of magical knowledge in a kingdom where magicians and kings struggle for dominance.
Lawn Boy
By Gary Paulsen
Wendy Lamb, $12.99
Ages 10-13 years
Coming of age, humorously, via Grampa’s old riding mower. A tale of “portfolio diversification,” sort of, in a narrative respecting numbers and people.
Toad by the Road: A Year in the Life of These Amazing Amphibians
By Joanne Ryder, illustrated by Maggie Kneen
Holt, $16.95
Ages 6-9 years
Toads are not flashy, like dinosaurs, for instance, but they’re alive and accessible, and, well, neat in their capabilities, like absorbing moisture through their skins. Poems, pictures and funky facts in just the right size package.
