2012: A look back in books!

As another year comes to a close I always like to take the time to think about which books I loved best.

I would have to say my favorite book of the year was, The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls.
This little chiller of a novel follows the adventures of a too-perfect, little miss know-it-all named Victoria.  Victoria prides herself on being the best.  She is the most studious in her school, the neatest and the most polite.  Victoria only has one friend, Lawrence.  Lawrence is Victoria's project.  He is a strange messy boy who is always humming and has a streak of gray running through his dark hair.  Victoria feels sorry for Lawrence and assures herself she only looks out for him because he would never make it on his own, after all, friendships are too much trouble.
That is until Lawrence vanishes and no one seems to care about where he could be.  Victoria finds herself in a frightening mystery which leads her to the mysterious Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls.  Here she will find Lawrence, along with many other horrors, least of all being the truth about Victoria herself: that she is far from perfect.

Cold Cereal, by Adam Rex is a mad romp through fantasy and science fiction.  It also may be one of the more inventive titles you will read in its genre.
The story follows Scottish Play Dough, or Scotty, as he moves to a strange town in New Jersey with his physicist mom and younger sister. 
The town itself is pretty much owned by Goodco, a ceral company which keeps magical creatures captive as its mascots.  So basically, we have a grumpy leprachaun named Mick and a paranoid magical rabbit named Harvey on the run from their Goodco captors and Scotty is the only one who can see them. 
Why does Scotty have this power and what does it have to do with a mysterious pair of twins named Emily and Erno Utz?  Check this book out and then wait to ring in the new year with a sequel (I hope)!

Who Could that be at This Hour? chronicles a young Lemony Snicket (the same one who wrote about the Baudelaire orphans in A Series of Unfortunate Events.) as he begins his life as a member of a secret organization. 
Not too surprisingly, this first book in a new series raises more questions than it answers.  Lemony (Snicket) talks like an old fashioned detective and is often bemused by the ineptitude of the adults he meets along his journey.  In addition to a few red herrings and femme fatales, Lemony is trying desperately to send a message to a female friend in a city far away.  Who could she be?  How can someone want something stolen that belongs to them in the first place?  Who can he trust?  This is a very different type of story than Snicket's first series.  Luckily for us, different can be good!

-Posted by Miss Jessikah