Mixed Up


Mixed Up by Gordon Korman
Publisher: Scholastic Press
Special thanks to Scholastic Canada for sending a copy for review.

Summary:
From the author of Restart , the story of two boys who are losing their memories… to each other. Reef and Theo don’t know what’s happening to them. They’ll be going about their days and then suddenly they’ll have these strange flashes of memory — but the memories don’t belong to them. And at the same time, their own memories are starting to… vanish. For Reef, this is a big problem, because memories are all he has left of his mom. For Theo, it’s strange because the new memories give him a freedom he doesn’t have with his domineering dad (Goodreads).

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A Pocketful of Stars


A Pocketful of Stars by Aisha Bushby
Publisher: Egmont
Special thanks to Firefly Books for sending a copy for review.

Summary:
When I next open my eyes, I’m back…in front of the house again.
It’s night time. The stars wave hello, like they’ve been expecting me.
The door of the house, Mum’s house, is wide open, like it expects me too.
This time, I go inside…

Safiya and her mum have never seen eye to eye. Her mum doesn’t understand Safiya’s love of gaming and Safiya doesn’t think they have anything in common. As Safiya struggles to fit in at school she wonders if her mum wishes she was more like her confident best friend Elle. But then her mum falls into a coma and, when Safiya waits by her bedside, she finds herself in a strange alternative world that looks a bit like one of her games. And there’s a rebellious teenage girl, with a secret, who looks suspiciously familiar… (Goodreads).

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Tiny Infinities


Tiny Infinities by J.H. Diehl
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Special thanks to Raincoast Books for sending a copy for review.

Summary:
When Alice’s dad moves out, leaving her with her troubled mother, she does the only thing that feels right: she retreats to her family’s old Renaissance tent in the backyard, determined to live there until her dad comes home. In an attempt to keep at least one part of her summer from changing, Alice focuses on her quest to swim freestyle fast enough to get on her swim team’s record board. But summers contain multitudes, and soon Alice meets an odd new friend, Harriet, whose obsession with the school’s science fair is equal only to her conviction that Alice’s best stroke is backstroke, not freestyle. Most unexpected of all is an unusual babysitting charge, Piper, who is mute—until Alice hears her speak. A funny and honest middle-grade novel, this sharply observed depiction of family, friendship, and Alice’s determination to prove herself—as a babysitter, as a friend, as a daughter, as a person—rings loud and true (Goodreads).

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The Lady and the Octopus


The Lady and the Octopus: How Jeanne Villepreux-Power Invented Aquariums and Revolutionized Marine Biology by Danna Staaf
Publisher: Carolrhoda Books
Special thanks to Carolrhoda Books for sending a copy for review.

Summary:
Jeanne Villepreux-Power was never expected to be a scientist. Born in 1794 in a French village more than 100 miles from the ocean, she pursued an improbable path that brought her to the island of Sicily. There, she took up natural history and solved the two-thousand-year-old mystery of how of the argonaut octopus gets its shell. In an era when most research focused on dead specimens, Jeanne was determined to experiment on living animals. And to keep sea creatures alive for her studies, she had to invent a contraption to hold them―the aquarium (Goodreads).

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