Liam is a big lad. So big that strangers mistake the 12-year-old for an adult. Even his teachers seem to conflate tall with old. So heaven forbid he should ever make a mistake. Then it’s all, “You should know better, big lad like you.” Life sure is hard for poor, burdened Liam (did I mention the Premature Facial Hair?)—until, that is, he decides to enter the Greatest Dad Ever Contest and in short order finds himself on a rocket ship that is off course and 200,000 miles above the earth. Yes, quite a few things—some of them cosmic and all of them extremely funny—do happen in between. Boyce is a Carnegie Medal–winning author, after all (for Millions, 2004), and he knows how to tell a compellingly good story. But in his latest extravagantly imaginative and marvelously good-natured novel he has also written one that is bound to win readers’ hearts, if not a clutch of big prizes—though Cosmic was shortlisted for both the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize when it was published in England. There are lots of surprises in Liam’s story, and without spoiling any of them by saying more, just know that this is not only a story about big lads, but also about dads and dadliness! Grades 4-7. –Michael Cart

This companion to Newbery Honor Book Savvy (2008) provides the same high level of satisfying plot, delightful characters, alliterative language, and rich imagery. In this story, Ledger Kale’s thirteenth birthday arrives with the traditional family inheritance of a particular “savvy”—a power unique to each individual, who must then learn how to manage his or her new talent. At first it seems that Ledge’s savvy is one for destruction: “I could blow stuff apart without a touch, dismantling small things in bursts of parts and pieces: a light switch here, a doorknob there, garage door opener, can opener, Dad’s stop watch, his electric nose-hair trimmer too.” But during a summer visit to the Flying Cattleheart, Uncle Autry’s Wyoming ranch, Ledge learns to tame, train, and deploy his power to good ends as he struggles against 13-year-old Sarah Jane Cabot, an aspiring reporter looking to expose the family’s secrets, whose businessman father is trying to foreclose on the ranch. Other characters include Ledge’s safety-slogan-spouting seven-year-old sister Fedora, levitating twin cousins, and Grandpa Bomba, who is comforted in his last days by sweet music, preserved in old peanut-butter jars, from his long-dead wife. While adult readers will see this all as a beautiful conceptualization of the drama and metamorphosis of adolescence, younger readers will delight in the tall-tale tropes and Ledge’s authentic physical, emotional, and artistic challenges. Grades 5-8. –Francisca Goldsmith