Won Ton is a shelter cat who is pretty skeptical of his new home and family.  Like most cats, he pretends not to care about any of the new toys or food his adoptive family gives him… but sneaks just a peek.

A cute story told in perfect haiku that everyone will enjoy.

Mo Willems has done it again, (though really, has he ever not?) perfectly epitomizing the many expressions of a good friendship in Hooray for Amanda and Her Alligator!

The book takes the form of several stories about the title best friends.  Whether you read them aloud, to yourself, or listen, you are sure to love Amanda and her Alligator.

When we last saw Miss Penelope Lumley, governess to three wolflike children (but making tremendous strides!), she was trying to recoup after the Incorrigibles had brought Lord and Lady Ashton’s Christmas ball to a disastrous halt. Now home renovations are needed, so the Ashton household is on the move to London, where Lady Ashton hopes she will be the belle of British society, and Penelope looks forward to civilizing the Incorrigibles further with trips to the theater and museums. But the undercurrent of something wicked this way comes and the signs of impending trouble for both governess and charges make the air here thick with (dreadful!) possibilities. Of course, there are some happier times in the city, too, as Penelope meets up with her beloved headmistress from the Swanburne Academy for Poor Bright Females and finds a new friend in a helpful, unemployed playwright. Questions about the children’s backgrounds, Penelope’s connections to them, and Lord Ashton’s own wolfish behavior set the stage for the next act of this most excellent adventure, the follow-up to The Mysterious Howling (2010). (Book description from Amazon.)

Like the last book in the series, this ends on an abrupt note.  We never quite discover what’s up with the hidden gallery, but it doesn’t matter because of the time spent with the children, Lumawoo, and precious Nutsawoo.  Anxiously waiting for the third installment.

Mackie Doyle is not one of us. Though he lives in the small town of Gentry, he comes from a world of tunnels and black murky water, a world of living dead girls ruled by a little tattooed princess. He is a Replacement, left in the crib of a human baby sixteen years ago. Now, because of fatal allergies to iron, blood, and consecrated ground, Mackie is fighting to survive in the human world. Mackie would give anything to live among us, to practice on his bass or spend time with his crush, Tate. But when Tate’s baby sister goes missing, Mackie is drawn irrevocably into the underworld of Gentry, known as Mayhem. He must face the dark creatures of the Slag Heaps and find his rightful place, in our world, or theirs.  (Description from GoodReads.)

I did not know what I was getting myself into when I checked this book out from my library’s e-book service. In fact, I’m not even sure I know what the heck I read, months after the fact.  What I do know is this: this book is creepy, and this book is good.  Don’t read it at night.

Read-alikes:
Meridian by Amber Kizer
Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl

Eagan has been figure-skating practically since she could walk, and she’s good. Really good. It’s just not feasible that she could ever hurt herself while skating. But she does. Coming down from a triple axel, Eagan lands too close to the boards, smacking her head.

Amelia has lived the past few years of her life quietly, without moving much or making too much of a fuss about anything. Amelia has a heart defect, and needs a transplant. One morning, she gets a phone call. The hospital has a heart for her.

Eagan’s heart.

Er…. I was really behind on reading and then finished like… a lot of books today. So, catching up on book reviews Saturday didn’t really… er… accomplish anything, it seems, because now I’m just as backlogged as I was before, since I want to review… well… all the books I read today.  

My to-review list now stands thus:
Bray, Libba - Beauty Queens
French, Thomas - Zoo Story: Life in the Garden of Captives
Funke, Cornelia - Inkheart
Gibbs, Stuart - Belly Up
Gravett, Emily - Blue Chameleon
Gravett, Emily - The Rabbit Problem
Green, John and Levithan, David - Will Grayson, Will Grayson
Grey, Mini - Three By the Sea
Hamilton, Laurell K. - Hit List
Haughton, Chris - Little Owl Lost
Henkes, Kevin - Little White Rabbit
Holmes, Janet. A. - Have You Seen Duck?
Howe, James - Bunnicula Meets Edgar Allen Crow
Jaffe, Michele - Rosebush
Jenkins, Martin - Can We Save the Tiger? 
Johnson, Maureen - 13 Little Blue Envelopes
Kaplan, Michael B. - Betty Bunny Loves Chocolate Cake
Kessler, Jackie Morse - Hunger 
King, A. S. - Please Ignore Vera Dietz
Knudsen, Michelle - Argus
Landon, Kristen - The Limit
Lerangis, Peter - wtf.
Marcus, Kimberly - Exposed
Martin, George R. R. - A Game of Thrones
Martin, George R. R. - A Clash of Kings
McClatchy, Lisa - Dear Tyrannosaurus Rex
McDonnell, Patrick - Me, Jane
Murray, Martine - Mannie and the Long Brave Day
Ness, Patrick - The Knife of Never Letting Go (audiobook)
Peot, Margaret - Inkblots: Drip, Splat and Squish Your Way to Creativity
Rapp, Adam - Punkzilla
Rawlings, Marjorie Kinnan - The Secret River
Revis, Beth - Across the Universe
Rey, H. A. - Whiteblack the Penguin Sees the World
Rosen, Michael - Tiny Little Fly
Rostoker-Gruber, Karen - Ferret Fun
Sachar, Louis - The Cardturner
Savage, Stephen - Where’s Walrus?
Schmidt, Gary D. - Okay For Now
Schoonmaker, E. - Square Cat
Scott, Elizabeth - Living Dead Girl 
Smith, Andrew - The Marbury Lens
Smith, Sherri R. - Flygirl
Staake, Bob - Look! A Book!
Sternberg, Julie - Like Pickle Juice on a Cookie
Suma, Nova Ren - Imaginary Girls
Tsang, Evonne - My Boyfriend is a Monster: I Love Him to Pieces
Travesty, Shrill - The Taking Tree
Tullet, Herve - Press Here
Underwood, Deborah - The Loud Book
Van Cleave, Ryan G. - Unlocked 
Wardlaw, Lee - Won Ton: A Cat Tale Told in Haiku
Willems, Mo - Hooray for Amanda and Her Alligator! 
Willingham, Bill - Fables Vol. 1 - Legends in Exile
Wood, Maryrose - The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place Book 2: The Hidden Gallery
Yovanoffr, Brenna - The Replacement 

Ella Minnow Pea is a girl living happily on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina. Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, author of the immortal pangram,* “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Now Ella finds herself acting to save her friends, family, and fellow citizens from the encroaching totalitarianism of the island’s Council, which has banned the use of certain letters of the alphabet as they fall from a memorial statue of Nevin Nollop. As the letters progressively drop from the statue they also disappear from the novel. The result is both a hilarious and moving story of one girl’s fight for freedom of expression, as well as a linguistic tour de force sure to delight word lovers everywhere.

*pangram: a sentence or phrase that includes all the letters of the alphabet
(Description from GoodReads)

This book could not have been more fun to read.  For some depressing reason, I didn’t get the joke of the title until the very end (and I still feel foolish about it). Sometimes books like this (and The Eyre Affair) swoop over my head, which makes them all the more pleasurable to re-read over and over.

Room is home to Jack, but to Ma it’s the prison where she has been held for seven years. Through her fierce love for her son, she has created a life for him in this eleven-by-eleven-foot space. But with Jack’s curiosity building alongside her own desperation, she knows that Room cannot contain either much longer.  Room is a tale at once shocking, riveting, exhilarating—a story of unconquerable love in harrowing circumstances, and of the diamond-hard bond between a mother and her child.To five-year-old-Jack, Room is the world… . It’s where he was born, it’s where he and his Ma eat and sleep and play and learn. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits.  (Description from GoodReads)

This book is unbelievably creepy.  Like, really creepy.  So creepy that when my boyfriend asked me what I was reading, and I told him the basic story, he interrupted me and told me to stop, that he didn’t want to know any more about it.  After I finished I gave the book to my mom, and she still hasn’t forgiven me for the night she spent wide awake reading on the couch until 4:30am. During times I wasn’t reading the book, I retreated into myself, not wanting to talk to anyone or do anything.  It’s that haunting. But still, you should read it.

Cluck, cluck, cluck.  Do this, Little Chicken, do that, Little Chicken.  Come here! Brush your teeth! Get dressed!  Little Chicken is sick of being told what to do!! But uh oh…

Big Chicken?

Where are you?

Bunnies are supposed to be nice and quiet, nibbling clover and grass, and staying out of the mud and dirt.  Suki loves to SHOUT and YELL and play in the mud. One day, Suki leaves her burrow and gets lost… will her loud voice be able to reach her mother’s ears?

Catalina and her class are on a field trip to New Orleans when odd things start to happen everywhere they go.  Is someone working voodoo against them?  Who is responsible for all the accidents?

                Ann Michelle has a quiet life, living with her grandma, going to school, hanging with her friends, listening to hip hop music and lusting after the artists. Everything changes when Rachel, who insists everyone call her Raq to acknowledge the rock star that she is, crashes into Ann Michelle’s life.  Raq is everything Ann Michelle isn’t – she’s sassy, loud, confident, boisterous, and (according to Ann Michelle’s grandma) <i>dangerous</i>.  But Ann Michelle likes the person Raq brings out of her, and one night, she sneaks out to go to a concert with her new friend. True to her rock star lifestyle, Raq scores the girls backstage passes, and soon Ann Michelle finds herself face to face with her favorite hip hop artist, Piper.  Ann Michelle introduces herself to him as Glitz, and with that first simple lie, her personality whirlwinds into a sexy, confident, bold girl.  When Piper and his entourage invite Raq and Glitz to the recording studio with them, the old Ann Michelle’s propriety and adherence to rules are squashed.  Before she realizes it, the girls are on their way to New York City with Piper and his crew to record a big demo, which Raq hopes she will push her way onto. The further she gets from home, the more Glitz realizes the mistake she’s made.

You might think that a dog or a cat is the perfect pet, but you would be wrong. The perfect pet is a dragon. Read this funny book about how to find, train, and have fun with a dragon that’s just right for you!

Poppy knows exactly what she wants to be when she grows up – a veterinarian.  So when she gets the opportunity to spend the summer with her Uncle Sanjay, who runs a veterinary practice in a small Washington state town, she leaps at it with a vet kit ready.  But as she begins helping out at Uncle Sanjay’s clinic, she starts to question whether or not veterinary medicine is really the thing for her.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could tailor-make a girlfriend for yourself?  Make sure she’s got the perfect height, the perfect smile, the perfect hair and eyes.  Even better, she is guaranteed to love you.

Like many kids, David’s online presence is often more real and confident than offline.  Worried, his parents provide him with a Companion bot – the perfect girlfriend.  Rose is programmed to help David cultivate face-to-face relationships – specifically their face-to-face relationship. Wowed by his amazingly sexy new head-over-heels-for-him girlfriend, David can’t get enough of her. But the Companion bot has protocols – David must complete certain hurdles in their relationship before he is allowed to touch Rose without an electric shock.  Frustrated, David tries to hurry along her “intimacy clock” so he can get inside those sleek pants of hers.  But when he does, he learns she isn’t a real girl, and sends her away.

Rose is programmed to love David no matter what, but as a result of her time with him, she has become more human herself, and is crushed by his rejection.  Rose finds solace in David’s best friend, Charlie, but the Corporation wants her back just as much as she wants David back.

An interesting look at robotics, Internet culture, what it means to be truly human, and love, Girl Parts lacks consistency in its writing, but is overall an enjoyable science fiction novel.