Is it sunny yet?

The 39 Clues: The Maze of Bones, by Rick Riordan. This was quite good. The main characters are 11 and 14, but it is appropriate for audiences a little younger than that: maybe 8 or 9 to about 12 or 13? There is a male and a female main character, and nothing about this book cries either "girl" or "boy," and is appropriate for adventure/mystery lovers of either gender. In our library, these are in the children's department, but I think they are pushing the tween-age line and would be appropriate for older groups.

A few months ago, I tried to read some urban fiction, as a popular urban fiction publishing company had openings for readers. I tried a few previously published works to get a feel for the genre, but just really couldn't get into it. Anyway, I found some notes I'd taken on one I'd read about half of (moving is awesome!), so here ya go: Life, by Lee Sullivan. I have two complaints about this book. 1) It was poorly proof-read. There were missing opening quotes, missing halves of parentheses, etc. And 2) both the characters and the narration ran a gamut of grammar and vernacular. At first, I thought the characters were being given a certain speaking style and the narration was more... English. But the two kind of merged, and perfectly grammatical sentences soon abutted sentences that had no verbs and incorrectly used every other part of speech. So, not a fan. I can't read the story if I can't read the book.