Skip to main content

Review: The Secret Library

Image
By
 
The Secret Library
By Kekla Magoon 
Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press, 2024. 373 pages. 

Dally finds a mysterious letter from her grandfather who just passed away. The letter sends her to a library that is full of secrets with books that she can check out and read —if reading was holding a book that is a portal that transports Dally back in time so that she can see the secret play out in real life. Secrets about her past, her family’s past, or secrets from other families. Basically, the Secret Library is a place full of adventure where she must learn and survive each family secret. However, all secrets come with a price, and there is one price that the Secret Library wants Dally to pay that she isn’t sure she wants to pay. 

Readers who love all the various types of genres mashed up together will enjoy this particular novel. It has adventure, fantasy, historical fiction, and realistic fiction —just to name a few. A lot is going on, and yet Dally and the various family members that she keeps meeting while traveling through time to see her family’s past secrets are all well-developed and will become friends to those who read about them. Also, I am dying to talk to someone about the ending of this book. So, if you end up reading it, please talk to me! This book left me thinking about it for many days afterward. And any other readers who like to think through what might happen if you play with time, may also be left thinking long after the book has finished.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review: The Factory

By
The Factory By Catherine Egan New York, NY : Scholastic Inc., 2025. Fiction. 306 pages.  Thirteen-year-old Asher Doyle has been invited to join the Factory, a secretive research facility in the desert which ostensibly extracts renewable energy from the electromagnetic fields of its young recruits. But Asher soon realizes something sinister is going on. Kids are getting sick. The adults who run the Factory seem to be keeping secrets. And the extraction process is not only painful and exhausting, but existentially troubling. Asher makes a handful of new friends who help him with an investigation that turns into a resistance, which turns into...a cliffhanger! The Factory is a page-turning sci-fi with multidimensional characters, an intriguing plot, and refreshingly straight-forward writing. Egan weaves in detail about climate crises and social unrest, making the story's dystopian setting feel rich and plausible. With its sophisticated themes and accessible storytelling, I would recomm...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review: Blood in the Water

By
Blood in the Water By Tiffany D. Jackson New York: Scholastic, 2025. Fiction. 255 pages. 12-year-old Kaylani McKinnon can't help but feel like a fish out of water. She's a Brooklyn girl spending her summer on Martha's Vineyard surrounded by wealthy family friends in their mansion. All she really wants is to stay home all summer where she her incarcerated father can easily reach her, and she can keep working to find ways to prove him innocent of fraud and embezzlement. Despite her protests, she finds herself on the island with the snooty granddaughters of her host. Soon after Kaylani's arrival, a popular teen boy is found murdered and she decides to conduct her own investigation. As she tries to discover what happened to Chadwick Cooper, Kaylani finds that not everything on Martha's Vineyard is as perfect as it appears. Thrillers for middle grade readers can be hard to find, but Tiffany D. Jackson succeeds in her first middle grade novel. A quick moving plot, tight d...
Post a Comment
Read more

National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry

By DeeDee
National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry Edited by J. Patrick Lewis National Geographic, 2012, 183 p. Poetry In this beautiful poetry collection, the National Children's Poet Laureate, J. Patrick Lewis, has teamed up with the amazing photographers at National Geographic. The result is 200 poems about animals, all illustrated with stunning nature photography.  The poems are well chosen and include rhyming, free verse, and shape poetry. Some of the poems are funny, many are contemplative and all are nicely typeset on top of the full color photographs. One of my favorites is a shape poem about flamingos, with a photograph of a flock of flamingos which seem to be standing the the shape of a flamingo (how did they do that?).  Lewis ends the collection with a brief but interesting section about writing animal poetry.  This selection is sure to turn any animal lover into a poetry lover.
Post a Comment
Read more