Basketball Bats By Betty Hicks

The Bats are an unbeatable basketball team. The Tigers are an unbeatable team, too. The Tigers challenge the Bats to play Around the World. The Bats are worried because the Tigers have a player that's older, faster, and better than them. Both teams are good, but who will win?

Jesse Alexander Polio, 13 years old

Rose by Jeff Smith

Rose is a story of a battle between good and evil. The good people and the good dragon battle bad rat creatures and the bad dragons.

I liked how the illustrator, Charles Vass, showed how the world started. Jeff Smith should write a sequel.

Carlos Ortiz Melendez, 11 years old

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Katniss and Peeta are selected to play The Hunger Games, a grisly reality TV show sponsored by the totalitarian state of Panem.  Twenty-four players between the ages of 12 and 18 are selected by lottery, then forcibly taken from their families to prepare for the Games. Only one will return. The rules are simple. The last player left alive wins.

Katniss and Peeta know they have to kill to win, but there is a connection between these two. Peeta kept Katniss and her family from starving during the terrible time following the death of Katniss's father, so she owes him a debt of gratitude. And Peeta loves Katniss.

How can they kill each other?

Airborn by Kenneth Oppel

Imagine a world which is almost like ours. Airplanes do not exist. Instead, people travel in leisurely luxury to their destinations on huge airships. Matt Cruse is a cabin boy on one of these magnificent airships named the Aurora.

One night, when Matt is on watch in the Aurora's crow's nest, he and the crew rescue a balloonist, who dies, leaving behind a puzzling journal filled with drawings and detailed descriptions of a strange, never-before-discovered flying animal. Much to Matt's surprise, on their next voyage out, one of the passengers, young Kate de Vries, turns out to be the grand-daughter of the dead balloonist. She is intent on proving the truth of her grandfather's story of the strange new animal, even though her parents and scientists think her grandfather was hallucinating when he wrote of his find.

Kate enlists Matt in her quest for evidence that will prove her grandfather right. Along the way, they battle Kate's domineering but dim-witted chaperone and crafty and evil pirates.

The author takes you from one edge-of-your-seat, hold-your-breath adventure to the next in this strange and beautiful parallel world.

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Inkheart by Cornelia Funke

Mo can literally bring books to life. Objects and people come out of the books when he reads aloud. He hasn't read aloud in years because of his fear of his great power. For not only does Mo bring characters and objects out of books, but for every person or thing that comes out, something or someone from our world goes in.

Villains that he read out of a book (a book also titled Inkheart) catch up with him and kidnap him, his aunt-in-law, his daughter, and the author of Inkheart, and demand that Mo read treasure out of books for them.

People often talk about the vivid world of books, of being able to enter new worlds through books, of being "lost in a book." But what if the opposite were true, that book characters could become lost in our world? That villains could enter our world and work their nefarious deeds on this side of the page? Cornelia Funke explores this intriguing possibility and weaves a tale that is totally engrossing.

A movie was made of Inkheart (2008) starring Brendan Fraser, Helen Mirren, and Paul Bettany.

The Angel Experiment and School's Out Forever by James Patterson

Seems that someone (we don't know who) thought it would be a good idea to meld the DNA of human children with bird DNA. Their most successful effort is Maximum Ride, the protagonist of the series. She and five other hybrids--the flock--all have wings and can fly. They escape "the school" where they were made, studied, and imprisoned, and try to find out the big "why." Why were they made, why were they made, and why won't these people leave them alone?