Reviews written by Jason Gallaher

Ho-ly HECK this book is good! Never before did I think I would want to spend time in a world that’s so close to H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks, but that was before I read Dale E. Basye’s “Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go.” “Heck” follows siblings Milton and Marlo Fauster,...

You know those epic fantasy adventures from childhood that stick with you forever? For me it’s movies like “FernGully,” “The Dark Crystal,” and “The Secret of Nimh.” After reading Trevor Pryce’s “An Army of Frogs,” I’m sure this is going to become a fantasy adventure that sticks with the next...

I love me some good ol’ fashioned world development. Don’t even get me started on the complexities of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, or J.K. Rowling’s developed magical world in the Harry Potter series, because you’ll need a Time-Turner to get back the time you spent listening to me go on...

I don’t even know where to begin with Stephan Pastis’s “Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made,” and that’s such a good thing! There are too many wonderful things about this book to count, so in true Timmy fashion, I’ll just write down my observations that stood out the most to me....

“Where and when are we?” These were the questions I kept asking myself as I flew through Sally Gardner’s “Maggot Moon.” Rather than being frustrating, this mystery kept me turning page after page until I could figure it out. “Moon” follows teenager Standish Treadwell who lives in...

Being the huge Rick Riordan fan that I am, I always feel this huge hole in my heart when I have to wait months for his next release. I have totally found the answer to my woes in Peter Lerangis and his new “Seven Wonders” series. The first book, “The...

Never before has crap been so endearing! DC Pierson’s “Crap Kingdom” follows Tom Parking, a regular, ho-hum kind of guy, who lives a life so normal that he’s become the poster child for the Average Joe way of life. He lives life solidly in the middle, and...

Being the regular Nickelodeon cartoon watcher that I am, when I saw that Shannon Messenger’s “Let the Sky Fall” was about teens who could control the wind, my initial thought was this could be too much like “Avatar: The Last Airbender.” Well hold onto your airbending hats, boys and girls,...

Talk about taking my sweet time getting around to reading Jay Asher’s “Thirteen Reasons Why.” I have been wanting to read this book for ages, and I finally had the opportunity this weekend. It is completely not what I was expecting, and once again, that was because I was a...

More often than not I hear kids and grownups of all ages say they don’t like to read historical fiction. It feels too much like learning, they say with disgust, and when they read, they read for enjoyment, not to learn. Well I think I’ve found the answer to these...

You know that feeling you get when your favorite character is killed off your favorite TV show? Or when you’ve misplaced your keys and you just can’t fight them anywhere? Or when there’s that nagging in the back of your mind telling you you’ve definitely forgotten something, but you just...

For thousands of years humans have been trying to decide whether or not we have any role at all in our fate. Do our actions affect at all the way our lives turn out, or are we all just pawns in some cosmic being’s version of Sorry! with celestial forces...

It is so easy for us to get stuck inside our personal little bubbles. I rarely ever escape outside of my Los Angeles world, going to the same restaurants and hanging out at the same spots over and over. Reading Walter Dean Myers’s “Darius & Twig” reminded me how important...

You thought your headaches were bad, try lifting an entire tree with your mind! That’s just what Faith Daniels learns she can do in Patrick Carman’s “Pulse.” Faith lives in a dystopian America that has been split into two states, the Western State and Eastern State,...

When I put down Amber Dermont’s “The Starboard Sea” I knew I had just finished a book that changed my life. That sounds like such a dramatic statement, I know, but it’s really true. Dermont’s characters resonated with me so much that I’m still mulling over the lessons I’ve learned...