GreenBeanTeenQueen

This will be a dual review! Rating: 4/5 Stars Genre: Contemporary Release Date: Shakespeare Bats Cleanup: 2/14/2006, Shakespeare Makes the Playoffs: 3/9/2010 About the Books: 14-year-old Kevin is stuck at home with Mono, which means he's not allowed to play any baseball. To pass the time, he starts to write. First he writes so it looks like poetry, then he begins to take an interest in poetry and explores different types of poems. He writes about his mom's death, baseball, and life in middle school. He also meets Mira, a new girl in school that makes him not want to hide the fact that he's a writer. In Shakespeare Makes the Playoffs , Kevin is back. He's grown more confident in his writing, he's dating Mira, and he's playing baseball. But when Kevin meets Amy at a poetry reading, he can't stop thinking about her-but that's not right-he has Mira! Why should he care that Amy understands his poems and Mira doesn't? On top of his own dating confusion, Ke...

Please welcome author Ron Koertge to GreenBeanTeenQueen! Mr. Koertge is the author of Shakespeare Bats Cleanup , and it's upcoming sequel Shakespeare Makes the Playoffs , as well as many other YA novels. 1. Why do you write for teens? Since I've got a few miles on me (70 in April), I never started out wanting to be a YA writer. Not many people from my generation did and not many men, for sure. And nobody from my pathetic little hometown. Poetry was bad enough, but I couldn't tell anybody about that, either. I've turned out to be a pretty good poet for alleged adults (though any high school kid would like my poetry), but I wanted to be a novelist, too. I did publish one novel foradults twenty or so years ago but the next ones were failures. Pathetic and embarrassing. Unpublishable. That's when a friend of mine reminded me what a persistent adolescent I was (I have a sort of an Inner Teen with a smart mouth), so why not write for other adolescents? I tried, and it wo...

Tween Tuesday is a weekly meme where I highlight great tween reads! Share your own Tween Tuesday post in the comments! The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg by Rodman Philbrick Rating: 3.5/5 Stars Genre: Historical Release Date: 1/13/2009 *This book is a 2010 Newberry Honor Book About the Book: When Homer's older brother is illegally sold into the Union Army, Homer sets off on an adventure to get his brother back. His trip leads him to a traveling road show, a hot air balloon ride, the underground railroad, and the Battle of Gettysburg. Here are Homer's (mostly) true adventures! GreenBeanTeenQueen Says : We all know those tweens (or even adults!) who exaggerate their stories. Homer's story is one those exaggerator's would love. This is one I listened to on CD and I thought it worked really well as an audiobook. The narrator was great! Many times historical fiction can be bland and boring and it's not always a popular genre with tweens. The Mostly True...

Rating: 3.5/5 Stars Genre: Mystery Release Date: 1/12/2010 About the Book: Teen psychic Claire Voyante is back in this second installment. Claire's friend Becca has started to hang out with her old prep school friends and Andy is sending mixed signals. When Claire discovers Becca's part of a secret society-and that someone is out to get them-Claire must use her cameo necklace and dream gift to save the girls-and her beloved New York. GreenBeanTeenQueen Says: The second book featuring Claire Voyante was just as fun as the first. (It is the second book, but you could read this one without reading the first book, Dream Girl since the author does include a minor re-cap) I felt the mystery storyline picked up faster in Dream Life than it did in the first one and we spent more time with Claire trying to figure out what was happening. The thing I liked the most about this one was that the rich girls were all nice. There wasn't a typical mean girl rich snob, which I thought mad...

Please welcome author Laura Pedersen: I was a slow starter, pretty much a turnip in a sleeper the first couple of years. Once I began public school, kids were separated by ability. Our first grade reading groups had cutesy inspirational names such as Cheetahs, Jaguars and Blue Jays. Still unable to form words using letters, I was classified as a Dinosaur. I tried not to read too much into it but since I couldn’t read at all that really wasn’t possible, aside from a vague feeling that I’d been marked for extinction. It was not unlike the day my teacher dropped the bomb that “y” could sometimes be used as a vowel and I was so discombobulated that I couldn’t remember more than one verse to “Kum-bi-yah” during the sing-along after lunch. And that was saying a lot since the neighborhood was 80% Catholic and everyone knew at least 18 verses and a really good elementary school teacher could do the deaf version too. So children’s books were mostly read to me. When I finally twigged on to the w...

Tween Tuesday is a weekly meme to highlight great tween reads. Leave a link to your Tween Tuesday post in the comments. Today's Tween Tuesday will be a movie review, since my husband and I went to see Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief over the weekend. Both my husband and I are big fans of the books, but it's been a few years since I read the first one and my husband re-read the books about a month ago. But even with his recent refresher and my lack of remembering what was from the book and what was new, we really enjoyed it! I thought the casting was great-I loved all the actors, even though they aged-up the characters and cut out some of the gods. They did cut out Ares, which annoyed my husband, and the rest of the gods didn't have very big scenes-I would have liked to see them a little more. I really loved Grover-I think he was my favorite and exactly how I pictured him. And I really loved the casting of Luke-he was perfect, which made me ha...

Win Wherever Nina Lies by Lynn Weingarten About the Book: Nina was beautiful, wild, and adored by her younger sister, Ellie. But, one day, Nina disappeared. Two years later, everyone has given up home that Nina will return, but Ellie knows her sister is out there. If only Ellie had a clue where to look. Then she gets one, in the form of a mysterious drawing. Determined to find Nina, Ellie takes off on a crazy, sexy, cross-country road trip with the only person who believes she’s got a chance—her hot, adventurous new crush. Along the way, Ellie finds a few things she wasn’t planning on. Like love. Lies. And the most shocking thing of all: the truth. Check out the Wherever Nina Lies website. About the Author: Lynn Weingarten spends a lot of time writing in coffee shops while occasionally reading strangers’ laptops over their shoulders. In the past she has been a book editor, a barista, a counter girl at a bakery in Ireland, a waitress at a bar, and a seller of tiny homemade clay anima...