Reviews written by Amber McKinney

In this book, we learn that the FBI is bad and likes working with evil aliens, the Mogadorians are flippin' everywhere all the time, and Cepans are not the sturdiest of guardians. Seriously...Cepans need more battle training. And maybe invincibility. There is a lot going on in...

Can I just love on this book? A lot? The Darkest Minds is completely fantastic! It's full of emotion-twisting moments, captivating writing and awesome characters (Chubs, I love you, man!). This is one of those books that I devoured. I slipped into the story and let myself get wrapped up...

Ever wanted to live in paradise? Just bask in the sun, play all day, relax without the worry of any work whatsoever? Demesne offers just that to its human inhabitants...but not for the clone workers who serve the humans as slaves, taught from the moment they are created that they...

My feelings about 'Ever' are rather neutral. I didn't hate it, though there were some parts of the book that I really disliked, and I didn't love it even though there were parts of the book I enjoyed. So I'm sort of in ambivalent book limbo here... ...

While I was reading this book, I made a decision: NO MMORPGS. I can totally see after reading this book how someone could be sucked into an alternate reality world like Erebos. Of course, Erebos is no ordinary RPG, but still any MMORPG gives you the ability to basically recreate...

Wow. This is a pretty intense read. I mean...when I got done with the book, I sort of stared at it for a little while, digesting what I had just finished. The ending of this book is a head-rush of drama, action, mystery and terror; questions are answered but more...

Okay…so I’m not really into angel-loves-human books. They’re not my thing. That being said, I wanted to give an angel book a try anyways, since I recommend books to the teens in my library and some of them are really into angel books. Really, they’re into any kind of forbidden...

So I was a huge fan of Brown’s “You Will Be My Friend!” so I was really excited when this book hit our library’s in-coming shelf. It was for one of our branches, but I momentarily snatched it for story time. It’s basically a “what-if” story where a peppy young...

This Caldecott Honor Book was a big hit with my storytime kids! My story time parents, grandparents and babysitters got into this one too; they were snickering and laughing at the notes the cows, chickens and ducks wrote and the reactions of Farmer Brown. This is a funny little story...

I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect when I picked up ‘A Single Shard.’ I like historical fiction, but it isn’t what I turn to first thing when I’m perusing a shelf; I’m more of a sci-fi/fantasy kind of woman. But ‘A Single Shard’ is a Newbery Medal winner, and...

This short novel is a terribly sad but very powerful story. It’s the story of a boy, a dog and the horrible tragedy that affects the boy’s family. The boy is the son of an African American sharecropper, a poor farmer who works the land that belongs to another man....

I’ve always liked the Harry Potter supplementary materials, mostly because I love reading things that the characters could have read. I was an especially big fan of the little book about all the beasts in the Harry Potter world, and when I was younger, I had a running list of...

Cute, cute, cute! This book is really adorable, super fun and probably going to be loved by the pre-school/early elementary kid crowd! It’s a how-to book for young children who want to be the best babysitters for their grandpas; they learn how to greet, feed, walk and entertain their grandpas...

This book just did not do it for me. I read it partly because I thought the cover was pretty and partly because I had heard both very positive things about the book and very negative things; I wanted to judge for myself. It was decent at first and then...

It’s spring, and therefore it’s time to clean the animals on the farm but things go awry when Farmer gets to his pigs; they refuse to take a bath! Hilarious attempts by the farmer to wash the pigs fail miserably, and his best chance to wash his hogs turns into...