Alison Reads

Fifteen-year-old Meline and 16-year-old Jocelyn are cousins who go to live with their eccentric uncle after their parents are killed. Their uncle lives on an uninhabited island near Vancouver, B.C. The story is told from alternating points of view of Meline, Jocelyn, Uncle Marten, the housekeeper, and the butler. Strange and quirky as Horvath’s books […]

Parallel stories of two boys abandoned by their fathers told in spare blank verse. One story is the biblical one of Ishmael and the other is about modernday Sam, whose father has a new wife and son. Both boys rely on their faith in God to help them adjust to their new status. A quick […]

Jerry Oltion is a Eugene science fiction writer. I tried two other books of his and didn’t much like them, but I did like this one. When a friend of theirs develops a drive that enables interstellar travel in a converted pickup truck, Trent and his wife Donna decide to leave an increasingly dictatorial America […]

A fascinating book that starts with the premise that all people have suddenly disappeared and then examines various ecosystems to see what is likely to happen over the next ten or fifty or thousand or ten thousand years. By detailing the proliferation of plastics in the ocean and the long-lived residue of nuclear reactors, the […]

Landvik has done it again with her seventh book. She excels in writing about characters who survive terrible tragedies, so her books are not the best to listen to in a car–though the tragedy is not the central focus of the book. In this book, the main characters are a young man named Joe and […]

Two stories bound together which were originally written in Britain several years apart and published separately. One story is about a girl who is very very strong and the other is about a boy who becomes invisible when he meets a young alien. The author is a Roald Dahl wannabe without any of his charm […]

One day, a boy reluctantly working in his father’s bookstore sees a strange man pull out a straw and stick it between the pages of a book. He follows the man and ends up at a cemetery on the edge of town, where he talks to the man and discovers that he’s an ink-drinking vampire […]

Thirteen-year-old Peter and his scientist parents go to Greenland to study glaciers. He stumbles upon a group of people who have lived secretly underneath the ice for 200 years. Told in alternating chapters between Peter’s life above ground and 14-year-old Thea’s life underground. Both children end up learning long-buried family secrets. Includes information about mitochondrial […]

Those who have read Gabaldon’s Outlander series will remember Lord John Grey as a minor but important character. This is the first of a parallel series where he is the main character. It is London in 1757 and Major Grey must discreetly investigate the man who is enganged to marry his young cousin. He discovers […]

After 9th-grade classics prodigy Jack is struck by a car in New York, he realizes that he can see a dead girl named Euri. She leads him into the depths of Grand Central Station, where he discovers that the dead of New York reside while they still have unresolved issues. He searches for his mother, […]