February can seem to drag on even though it’s the shortest month. The holidays are over, but it’s still freezing cold. Luckily, the five authors and illustrators at  The Brown Bookshelf have started a campaign that should really brighten up this month...

This Wednesday’s Website of the Week is www.engrish.com. English is a difficult language to learn. The whole meaning of a sentence can be changed if one word is wrong or out of place, often with very funny results.  www.engrish.com is a website that has pictures of hilarious mistakes in English printed on products and advertising, mostly from Japan.

Peach Girl: Change of Heart Vol. 1 by Miwa Ueda

Are you ready to read something really juicy? Peach Girl: Change of Heart is a sweet and romantic manga series that also has a lot of angsty drama.  

The Night Tourist by Katherine Marsh 

Weird things start happening to ninth grade bookworm Jack Perdu after he is nearly killed in a car accident.  He sees a pale stranger who disappears into thin air, finds a 100 year old map of New York City with his dead mother’s name scrawled on it, and overhears a mysterious conversation about a ghostly underworld that living people cannot enter. But that's just the beginning of his adventure...

In the last two new YA books I read, the characters love the show My So-Called Life and talk about it often. This surprised me because the show was a short-lived teen drama from 1994.  Don’t get me wrong, because during our senior year, my friends and I watched the show every Thursday night on ABC.