Reviews written by Megan Kelly

If the new Common Core Standards are going to force me to teach more nonfiction, I hope I can use texts like How They Croaked: The Awful Ends of the Awfully Famous. This is probably the grossest book I've ever read, which is the ultimate compliment for adolescent readers. ...

Sonya Sones has written many free verse novels, but none are more personal than her first, the aptly titled Stop Pretending: What Happened When My Big Sister Went Crazy. Sones has crafted her journal entries from when she thirteen into poems that may help readers coping with loved ones with...

Orchards is a hefty free verse novel, both in pages (325) and theme (teenage suicide). Despite its weight, I read it in one day and loved it completely. Holly Thompson has crafted memorable characters and a unique setting for a YA novel. The daughter of a...

"When the Black Girl Sings" is the story of Lahni, a black girl adopted by white parents who are about to divorce. She is struggling in a lot of different ways: with snobby girls at school, with feeling betrayed by her father, with a strangely rude boy who is essentially...

Katherine Applegate's gorgeous Home of the Brave tells the story of Kek, a Sudanese refugee who moves to Minnesota to start his new bittersweet life. Almost everyone in his family is dead and his mother is missing, so he stays with his aunt and a cousin who lost a hand...

Paul Fleischman's tale of atonement is deceptive. It has a strange drawing on the cover (which turns out to be a whirligig) and is only 144 pages, so one would think that is a breezy little ditty. It's not. Whirligig starts out with a bang (literally, a drunk driving accident)...

Meet Maureen, a self-described baked potato. She's the reluctant leader of a trio of misfits, also known as the Nerd Girls, just trying to get through the eighth grade without further persecution by the ThreePees (for "pretty, popular, perfect"). After a humiliating youtube video of Maureen goes viral, the girls...

I want to teach this book so that I know that people are reading it. I've avoided OUT OF THE DUST for awhile, mostly because of the boring cover (I'm that girl) and that it won the Newbery Medal in 1998 and I don't usually love Newbery winners (I'm that...

I have previously enjoyed Lauren Myracle's books Eleven and Twelve, so I was psyched when the cover of Peace, Love & Baby Ducks caught my eye at the library. The cover is fantastic and the novel is even better. It is, simply put, a love letter...

While reading Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, I realized that I had read this novel before, when I was in the target demographic. At the time, I was in early high school and thankfully not dealing with the issues of the book's characters. Now I am a teacher and know...

Do teenagers still like The Beatles? This is a question that came to mind as I read The Lonely Hearts Club. Elizabeth Eulberg's novel is brimming with Beatles references, from the awesome cover to the name of the main character, Penny Lane Bloom. I'll be interested to hear my students'...

DEAD IS THE NEW BLACK is pure fun. It joins all of the other books in the werewolf/vampire category that Twilight has inspired. Marlene Perez's first book in this series is a welcome, frothy addition. Daisy Giordano is the youngest in a series of psychics that live...

Esme Raji Codell's writing makes you feel good. She has the ear of a teacher who has sat in the back of the classroom and really listened to what matters to young people. She shows the heart in all of her characters, including the ones that you really want to...

I really love short story collections: the satisfaction of reading a tale in a short amount of time, the completeness of a world in a few pages, the feeling of "oh I wish this was a novel" when I finish a great story. When they are fantasy stories, it's even...

Based on the lives of historical figures Rosa La Bayamesa, her husband Jose Francisco Varona, a slavehunter known as Lieutenant Death, and fictional characters, the poems detail Cuba's war-filled years between 1850 - 1899. Over the course of these 50 years, Rosa and Lieutenant Death live parallel lives: she heals...