Un Lun Dun / China Mieville (Y)
Not only a fun and nicely illustrated adventure through a fantastical city, but also bends and breaks the rules of genre to great effect. Five stars.

Shanghaied to the moon / Michael J. Daley (Y)
Nice to have an old-style nuts and bolts space adventure for the younger set. Three stars.

Twisted / Laurie Halse Anderson (Y)
For Mock Printz, quite good, though not totally fabulous literarily. The protagonist’s changes are quite well reflected in the changes in writing style through the book. Three stars.

The secret world of American communism / Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov
A new look at historical controversies over the Communist Party of the USA in light of newly-available (well, newly in ’92) documents from the Soviet Archives. Quite satisfying to read about history and have new and firm answers provided! The CPUSA was funded and the upper levels were run on orders of the Soviet Union. The various members at lower levels may have had any number of good intentions, but the upper levels’ loyalties were firmly with the Soviets, with many a spy ring operated and rapid changes in position based on the foreign policy needs of Moscow. This stuff is dynamite! Five stars.

Harmless / Dana Reinhardt (Y)
Another for the Mock Printz. Felt like I was going through a book by the numbers. Pick a theme (lies and sexuality), pick a format (three alternating voices), pick some characters (the shy good one, the bad girl, the confused one), and start ticking off boxes. Bah. No stars.

Now you see her / by Jacquelyn Mitchard (Y)
Another Mock Printz. Less annoying than Harmless, but sure seemed like wasted opportunity. The narrative is told by a person who turns out to have a borderline personality, but at the end of the book she’s on the way to being ok. So less of the mirror-world thriller than just turning out to be a problem novel. Bah again. No stars.

The absolutely true diary of a part-time Indian / by Sherman Alexie ; art by Ellen Forney (Y)
Another Mock Printz, but this one should win. The blurb on the back from Neil Gaiman says that it’ll be winning awards and being banned. It has already started the awards, so let’s wait for the banning. It’s one of those books that gets inside your guts and makes you laugh and cry. Awesome. Five stars.

The new policeman / Kate Thompson (Y)
Another Mock Printz, which I will give four stars for being well structured and having realistic family relationships and generational baggage in a family of traditional musicians in Ireland. But since this is my forum, I shall air my two complaints: assigning authorship of folk tunes to fairies may be all charming and stuff, but shows an appalling lack of faith in human creativity, and a land without time could hardly specialize in music what with time being pretty vital to the whole undertaking. So there. Still four stars.