Val Muller

The Electronic Wordsmith

Browsing Posts in book reviews

My daughter is obsessed with reading all of Raina Telgemeier’s graphic novels, which she will read multiple times in one day. I have been in the middle of celebrating “Valoween,” which is just my way of celebrating all things Halloween starting on August 1. Anyway. My daughter thought I would love this book, given the […]

Book 2 in the Lily Barlow series follows Lily as she ponders what to do about her future: continue at a college sort of far from home, or stay closer to home, where her recovering father is. (You can read my review of book 1 here. It’s not essential to read book 1 before this […]

I haven’t been that great about leaving reviews for books, but I wanted to review this one. It was recommended to me by a student who was reading it while we were reading The Things They Carried in literature class. The story follows a young woman who signs up to serve as a nurse in […]

While my son was in the library, I decided to pick up a graphic novel from the middle grade/young adult section to read over while he ignored storytime and played with all the hands-on activities in the children’s section. This story caught my eye because of its multicultural elements: it follows a Muslim student who […]

The reason I picked this book up is because I saw an interview with Ben Montgomery about how to encourage high school journalists to improve their interview skills, so I was curious to read a book-length piece by him regarding a woman he researched after her death. The book follows Emma “Grandma” Gatewood, a woman […]

When I was in college, I heard an author speak. I did little research about her before I went to hear her read a passage from her book, When the Emperor was Divine, but I do remember a poignant passage she read about a woman, a shovel, and a dog. I won’t say more, but […]

Original story by Mary Downing Hahn. Adapted by Scott Peterson, Meredith Laxton, and Russ Badgett A while back, I reviewed the original novel Wait Till Helen Comes, though when I first became aware of the title, it was as a graphic novel at a book fair.  So of course I had to check out the […]

Now that school’s out, I’m catching up on posting reviews of some of the easier reads I’ve read over the school year. I try to preview books that my daughter might be interested in reading. Having grown up in the age of dinosaur computers that ran The Oregon Trail game, this book appealed to me, […]

I picked up this book in a classroom one day while substituting for another class, and it was a super easy and fast read, but with complex themes that would be good for a reader in the coming-of-age years, someone confronting the drive to be independent of parents and their beliefs and someone examining their […]

Last year, this was the Loudoun County 1book1community pick, and I grabbed a copy after we had excess in our school library. I had forgotten about it until now. It’s about a seventh grader, so that gives you an idea about the target age range. To me, it was odd to choose a book for […]