Completely Full Bookshelf

Before we get started, I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving—ours was very peaceful, and it was when I actually finished reading the book I'm reviewing today! Also, I want to quickly mention an album of music I've been enjoying lately. Aimee Mann, who I first started listening to around 2 years ago, just debuted a new album called Queens of the Summer Hotel , and it is awesome! You can go read  this interview to learn about it, but just know that it's brilliant and worth a listen (or several)! (And especially a listen in order, since the order really matters.) Finally, I have the winners of the Holiday Picture Book Giveaway to announce! The first winner is... Danielle! Danielle will be receiving a copy of Eyes That Kiss in the Corners . The second winner is... Carlo! Carlo will be receiving a copy of A Map into the World . The third winner is... Patricia (a fellow MMGM blogger at Children's Books Heal )! Patricia will be receiving a copy of A Big Mooncake for ...

I hope you all are holding up well! I'm writing this review on Saturday afternoon , not Saturday night—that's how you know I'm relatively organized right now. (I used to have these done way earlier in the week, but this year, college has thrown a real wrench in that.) Also, as a judge for the Cybils Awards, I wanted to remind everyone that you have through Friday, October 15  to nominate your favorite kidlit books for the awards! You can  see the details here —I highly encourage you all to take a look and suggest some books for consideration! Now I just need to figure out what to nominate...   (Update on Sunday night: I submitted my first nomination, and you can expect to hear about it on the blog in the coming weeks!) Anyway, today I am recommending an absolutely fabulous YA graphic novel: The Girl From the Sea  by Molly Knox Ostertag. And I'll warn you, I just wrote a paragraph where I said I would "briefly" discuss something and then had to go back and del...

So here's a funny story. For my Four Weeks of Witches event, I planned to review a graphic novel I had on my shelf called The Witch Boy , written by Molly Knox Ostertag (I discovered this book because Ostertag is actually the wife of the multitalented author of The Fire Never Goes Out , ND Stevenson). So I grabbed The Witch Boy  and read it. And it was so good  that I wanted more. And there was more. Two sequels, to be exact, The Hidden Witch  and The Midwinter Witch . So I ordered them on Amazon. And I read both of them as well, all in the span of about a week. And they weren't just so good , they were even better  (a quality rarely found in sequels). And because I am but a humble servant of the book gods who bring us these gracious gifts, I determined that the best way to convey how absolutely amazing this series is would be to review the whole series in one mega-review, thus illustrating the fact that I literally read all three of these books in one week bec...