Neva lives in a world where someone is always watching. The government built the Protectosphere she lives in to keep everyone safe, yet that same government also seems to make people disappear and never come back. As life inside the dome becomes more limited, the government squeezes its citizens ever more tightly to squelch insurgencies [...]

When Zita finds a gadget in what appears to be a crashed meteorite site, she can’t resist pushing the button. When she does, a creature with octopus-like limbs reaches through a tear in the sky and grabs her friend Joesph. Zita runs away, but soon she realizes that she must follow Joseph and try to [...]

Sixteen-year-old Molly is on the adventure of her life. Sneaking into the U. S. from her family’s farm in Canada, she’s on a mission to find out if her grandparents are still alive and living near Portland, Oregon. Travel is severely restricted in a time when most of the world’s oil has run out, and [...]

Imagine a prison that encompasses a whole world of fantastical people and creatures inside its walls: cities, metal forests, deep caves, and sanctuaries in the sky. That is Incarceron. Built to be the perfect prison after a time of unrest in the greater world around it, Incarceron was also meant to be a utopian place [...]

My daughter wrote this review after we read The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer for our mother-daughter book club. When I first found out that we were going to read this book, every instinct told me not to. I had heard that it was a very scary book about cloning. Once we had [...]

I received this review from a mom who recommends this series for mother-daughter book clubs. I’d like to recommend Anne McCaffrey’s young adult series for your 8-12th grade range.  I don’t see anything else I recognize as science fantasy, and this is a classic, with a female main character. The books, in order, are Dragonsong, [...]

My book club with my daughter, Catherine, just read The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson. It’s a great science fiction title for young adult readers 14 and up. The issues are complex, and they make for a great discussion with mother-daughter book clubs. It brings up questions in bio-ethics for plants and [...]

I’m back after a nice, long, recharging trip to Italy. The whole family went—me and my husband and our two daughters—and  we survived 3-1/2 weeks of 24-hour togetherness better than any of us would have guessed. We weren’t the only ones who decided to travel to Italy this summer; every place we went was pretty [...]