When a Dragon Moves In read by Mark Duplass

Playful Planets children's book series.

Young children love having authors come to visit them at school and clearly benefit from the experience. Nothing is better than encouraging our next generation to read by bringing the intangible vision of a beloved story to a real face-to-face encounter. At the same time, if the author happens to be a child, the value is just as penetrating and tangible for him or her as well.

“Monsters Below” is the first mystery in the “Mystery at the Lake House” series written by Laura Wharton, author of “Leaving Lukens” and “The Pirate’s Bastard” and her ten year old son, Will Wharton. Join Jock Avery and his new friends for a summer at the lake, where the Loch Ness Monster might just be hiding. Can Jock and his friends get to the bottom of the mystery before the monster gets them?

Spring announces the arrival of Major League Baseball and Little League in communities nationwide. Sixth grader, Jack Mogens, gears up for his sixth season of youth baseball on the Tall Pines Braves team. He gets “plunked” by an inside pitch Opening Day, which shakes his confidence. Author, and Sports Illustrated Kids writer, Michael Northrop, has a talent for writing children’s literature. Any middle school-aged boy can relate to homework, sports and girls. For them, Plunked is a must-read…

Sam’s Desert Adventure may be the best young reader book of the year. Filled with humor, warmth, hard-learned lessons, and superbly well-drawn characters, this story is guaranteed to please adults and young readers alike. Sam Davenport and his mule, Bucket, are destined to be classic young reader characters.

Books for children should be selected on the basis of their age and choice. Books are very essential for children and help them learn languages.

Excitement is in the air. It is a happy feeling that brings wonderment and expectation. Could this feeling of joy be duplicated each and every day? It can so begin.

Pretty Dolls by Kimberly Dana, a finalist in the Children’s Picture Book category at the 2011 Pacific Northwest Writers Association Literary Contest, is a delightful story about overcoming jealousy and the love a girl can share with her special doll, no matter what she looks like. Little Tasha has several dolls, but her favorites are Emily-Nicole and Gracie. Emily-Nicole is the most beautiful of all, with porcelain skin, silky red hair and turquoise-blue eyes.

An eBook is a book in an electronic format that is downloaded to a computer, laptop or PDA. It looks exactly like a book and has numbered pages, pictures, graphics and a table of contents. As the world becomes obsessed with electronic gadgets, eBooks are gaining popularity amongst adults and children.

How do I begin writing a review of a book that tackles a subject a cannot fully comprehend? Mathematics and physics, anyone? But, I am getting ahead of myself.

Riordan fashions a modern tale of the Olympians that will keep you turning the pages with “The Lightning Thief.” Percy Jackson is a 6th grader with a lot of problems. Diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia, school isn’t easy for him. His step-father is barely civil to him. Then there’s a horde of monsters who want to kill him. Things only get more complicated when he discovers he’s a son of Poseidon.

People around the globe are always on the lookout for a development book on relationships with personal issues, healing traumas from the past, just to keep them sane and balanced in today’s crazy and ruthless world. Such self help books are extremely popular in the market today. This only goes to show that there are an awful bunch of people out there who are not at ease with their relationships and are trying to improve them.

What do you get when you combine a homunculus, an evil society and two brave kids? A fun story kids will love. But what should parents think?