This Full House by Virginia Ewer Wolff

I have waited a long time for this final installment in the Make Lemonade trilogy. It has been years since I have read Make Lemonade and True Believer, but the pleasure of reading those books came back to me as soon as I started reading. LaVaughn is an inner city girl who dreams of getting out of the projects and going to college. She's now in her senior year and accepted into a "women in science" program that may be her ticket to college acceptance. She's feeling regret about the way she once treated a boy named Patrick and she's still babysitting the two children of Jolly, a teen mother who she worked for in the first book of the trilogy. Oh, and her best friend Annie is pregnant. All the lines of the story come together when she comes to suspect a connection between Jolly and the head of her science program. Unfortunately, the coincidence is too great to believe, but the writing is so good and the characters so real that it didn't really matter to me. I was just interested in seeing LaVaughn through to college and achieving her dreams. There was a strong theme of acting according to your conscience and doing the right thing. And Wolff doesn't shy away from the complexity of figuring out what the right thing is. It's not always clear and it certainly can cause pain. The free verse format makes this a quick read and even when using dozens of scientific terms, Wolff makes it all sounds like poetry.

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

This book has it all. For those who like horror and suspense it's dark and creepy, and the book begins and ends with an attempted murder. But at the same time it's also got humor and heartwarming family moments, a sweet friendship between a boy and a girl, and it becomes a tearjerker on the final page. It's hard to believe that an author could take such a ridiculous sounding plot and put so much substance to it, but Neil Gaiman did it. Nobody Owens (Bod for short) survives the murder of his entire family when as a toddler he wandered into a nearby graveyard. Now he is being lovingly raised by the dead residents of the graveyard and the mysterious Silas who is neither alive nor dead. Bod is human but has been given some special powers in the graveyard. His early adventures are within the graveyard, but as he gets older he longs to see a little more of the world and even go to school. Eventually he finds out that the man Jack who killed his family is still after him and he will not ever be safe until he confronts this enemy. It's really a story of growing up, moving away from the "family" that raised you, confronting your fears, and moving into the wider world. It will be a popular middle school book and would be a great read-aloud. And of course, it won the Newbery Medal for 2009.