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There’s Always Room in My Life For Middle Grade Mysteries

The Bell, The Book, and the Spellbinder by Brad Strickland

The Chessmen of Doom by John Bellairs

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I got these books by mistake since I confused them with John Bellairs’ other middle grade gothic horror/magic series starring a boy being raised by his grandparents. I cut myself some slack for this one, especially since I also read this Johnny Dixon series as a child and the titles were familiar. I do still want to do a re-read of the Lewis Barnavelt series, so I’ll have to get my hands on those soon. My idea in getting these was to read the series from […]

When that ticking clock does more than keep you up at night….

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It seems appropriate that I finished my cbr10bingo for #The Book Was Better? on Halloween as it was a scary(ish) book called The House with a Clock in Its Walls by John Bellairs. I think I read this as a kid about thirty years ago. This is probably why I have no real memory of it. Therefore, I was reading it for the first time. I had hoped to read it as the movie just came out. And while I am not a Jack Black fan, […]

I Read This Because of Cate Blanchett

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Bingo Square Round 2: The Book Was Better Due to some last minute work schedule changes, I wasn’t able to go see the movie yet as planned but should be making up for that in the next few days.  As a result, I can’t quite say if the book or the movie was better but I expect it might be one of those where I enjoy the movie more because of the cast. There are also quite a few descriptions of visual that I think […]

In which a favorite from my childhood stands up to an adult re-read.

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When I was a kid, one of my favorite things to do on a summer day was to go with my mom to the New England Mobile Book Fair. The Book Fair was an amazing, enormous wholesaler Book warehouse in my town (Newton, MA), where you could look up books in an enormous database (or when I was really young, a HUGE book) that told you who the publisher was. The warehouse was set up by publisher, and all of the books cost less than […]

Old-School Horror for Kids

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When I was a kid, my dad and I read books together. It’s a bittersweet memory, since we’ve been estranged for most of my adult life. My favorite author then was John Bellairs, who wrote Gothic horror set during the era of his own childhood in the 1950s. The early editions had covers and sometimes illustrations by Edward Gorey, and between Bellairs and Gorey, I grew up with a lifelong love of the macabre. This weekend, I had to do an assignment for my editing […]



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