Goodreads. The beginning of a new year means signing up for new reading challenges over at Goodreads. This year, I’m tackling another A to Z Challenge at Great Middle Grade Reads, where I’m a moderator. While I still hope to get through the alphabet twice, I’m going to do it with a twist. Just for the fun of it, I’ll be reading my MG books in alphabetical order. (Why not?)

I’ve set my annual goal on Goodreads at 100 books, though I may adjust that if I happen to have a really good reading year. (I’ve had over 200 books in years past, but last year, I scraped in at 101 because of one thing and another.) I’ll also be taking on the #BookADayMay reading challenge over at Middle Grade Carousel, and I may attempt their Bingo Boards again this year. All fun stuff!

Happy New Year, reading friends! ~CJ

In Fortune Falls, you’re either born Lucky or Unlucky. Sadie is doing everything she can to change her luck so she can go to school with her best friend, who’s a Lucky. But Fate seems determined to thwart her at every turn. In Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer, Theodore’s parents are lawyers and many of his friends are lawyers (and police detectives and judges and bailiffs and secretaries and janitors at the courthouse). If he could get away with it, he’d skip school to sit in on trials all day long. Someday, he’s going to be a lawyer. In the meantime, he offers legal advice to friends… and applies his quick mind to ongoing local cases. And, hey! I finally got around to starting the Artemis Fowl series. When millionaire boy genius Artemis Fowl learns of the existence of fairies, he sets out to catch one in order to learn more secrets of the People. When Holly Short (a member of LEPrecon) takes a shuttle to the surface in order to contain a troll outbreak, she falls into Artemis’s trap. What a mess.

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Okay for Now is a sequel/spin-off of The Wednesday Wars, so it’s set during the Vietnam War. Doug’s (overbearing, verbally abusive, heavy-handed) father moves the family to a different town to find work. It’s not great, but it’s not all bad. And then it gets better. A little at a time, thanks to people who don’t look at Doug and see nothing but a skinny thug. In Emily Out of Focus, Emily and her parents travel to China in order to bring home a new baby sister. They’re in a large group with other adoptive families, and Emily meets Katherine, who was adopted herself and hopes to (secretly) find out something about her birth mother. The Printer’s Apprentice is a story based on real historical events. Gus is apprenticed to a printer in New York in 1735. Tidbits of life in pre-Revolutionary America, with plenty of name dropping. Sprinkled with adages from Poor Richard’s Almanac. Although my favorite part may be how Krensky deftly wove in examples of how printer’s jargon worked its way into the English language (eg. “out of sorts”).

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In Goodbye Stranger, three girls who’ve promised to always be friends navigate their way into seventh grade. An honest story with discomfiting moments, deftly balanced by all the reasons we keep going, even when stuff’s complicated. In The Stone Girl’s Story, in the years following their sculptor/father’s death, his statues grow more weathered, and the marks that animate them are dangerously faded. Before they go still, his final masterpiece, a stone girl named Mayka, decides to travel into the city below their mountain home to find a sculptor to recarve their stories and save their lives. In Nothing Ever Happens Here, Izzy is thrilled to land a part in her school’s upcoming production of Guys and Dolls, but the very same day she carries home the wonderful news, her dad steals the limelight by making a shocking announcement. He’s always been a she … and needs the whole family’s support while going through transition.

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