In a slightly fantastical New York City, one very special library branch has been designated for possible closure. Bookish, socially awkward Pearl, the daughter of the librarian, can't imagine a world without the library—its books, its community of oddballs, its hominess. When the head of their Edna St. Vincent Millay statue goes missing, closure is closer than ever. But Pearl is determined to save the library. And with a ragtag neighborhood library crew—including a constantly tap-dancing girl who might just be her first friend, an older boy she has a crush on, and a pack of raccoons who can read and write—she just might be able to. With an eclectic cast of richly drawn characters, a hint of just-around-the-corner magic, footnotes, sidebars, and Jessixa Bagley's classic illustrations throughout, this warm-hearted, visually magnificent tale of reading and believing from beloved author Karen Romano Young tells of a world where what you want to believe can come true.

ChÉrie Witkowski is twelve, and she doesn't want to turn thirteen this year. This is the year, 1968, that everything -- absolutely everything-seems to be changing. At home her parents are expecting a new baby, her mother is fixing up the house so they can sell it and move who-knows-where, and everyone is starting to tease her about the boy next door. Meanwhile her newspaper route brings the changes of the outside world crashing in on her: the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and the disappearance of a girl from a few towns away -- a girl who more braids like ChÉrie, who was about the same age as ChÉrie, who could have been ChÉrie.Suddenly ChÉrie is scared; nothing seems safe and simple anymore. She longs for easier fears-for playing hide-and-seek in the dark, skipping school, daredevil bike tricks..She builds her own inside world: an elaborate elf house under a bush, complete...

She doesn't just love doodling, she needs it. . . . In Stuck in the Middle (of Middle School) by Karen Romano Young, moving is tough. Being the new kid in school is even tougher. But the hardest thing of all about the move that Doreen "Dodo" Bussey's family is making is that she suspects it might be because of her. She got into trouble at her last school.On the drive to their new home, her mother gives Dodo a blank notebook, which she uses to chronicle the move, the first days in a new city, and the ups and downs of starting a new school and making new friends. In the process, she reinvents herself as the Doodlebug. Her little sister seems to adjust to everything so easily—why is it so hard for Dodo?

A girl walks across the Brooklyn Bridge, a backpack full of knitting slung over her shoulder, a green fish kite in her hand. A boy balances on the bridge#146;s crisscross webbing, waiting for the girl to pass. Are they angels? Spiders? In love? Or in danger? Once they connect, they#146;ll start a chain of events that could stretch out smoothly like the river below them -- or become knotted like a tangled web of spider silk.From School Library JournalGrade 7 Up - Sixteen-year-old Nancy's family is odd. It's not that her mother is white and her father is black - she lives in New York, where biracial families are not uncommon. It's not even that her mother, a master weaver, is agoraphobic, or that her father moves out of their basement apartment every spring to live on a nearby rooftop. It's that her father produces sticky silk threads from his hands to help him travel Brooklyn by rooftop, and her mother comes from a line of powerful healers. So far, Nancy is neither spider nor healer, and she can't get her parents to tell her why. She meets strange, ghostly Dion as he balances on a high railing above the East River, and feels an obvious connection. Their families have more in common than they know, and the author unravels this web of connections one deliberate and deftly foreshadowed thread at a time. Young's prose is simple and graceful, and her depictions, including several freakishly authentic New York neighborhoods, are subtly drawn. Nancy's struggle with spider/human identity is as touching and real as any coming of age: thoughtful, earnest, and more innocent than her urban upbringing might suggest. To sustain mystery, Young drops otherworldly details into an otherwise realistic story, to the temporary confusion of readers and, often, to the protagonist as well. While this might frustrate those unwilling to suspend disbelief, adventurous readers will gladly put the pieces of family history and personal destiny together as Nancy does. - Johanna Lewis, New York Public Library Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistGr. 9-12. Brooklyn teenager Nancy has an unusual dilemma: "No spinnerets inside her, no silk." She descends from a "peculiar family" whose arachnid genes give rise to spidery specialties: her Scottish-Italian mother weaves; her Jamaican father applies his uncanny climbing abilities to a career in roofing; her maternal grandmother uses her cobweb silk to heal wounds. But not a hint of spiderness emerges from Nancy. Feeling suffocated by her hovering family, she becomes increasingly interested in Dion, a runaway whose knowing gaze is both disturbing and compelling. Young's novel forms a literal web of connections--from a blackmail scheme that involves both Nancy's and Dion's families to the evil-averting Angel of Brooklyn, a real-life superhero whose identity is an ongoing puzzle. Some readers may be mystified by the story strands' refusal to braid neatly together; others, especially teens of an artistic, assertively alternative stripe, will happily immerse themselves in the poetic, free-associative narrative, and the imaginative, comic book-inspired premise. Jennifer MattsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved