Posts Tagged ‘mystery’

“…what I liked about Ellis’ challenging character is that her actions made me think hard about how I would act in the same situation…I’d recommend True Blue for young to mid teen readers.” Click here to read the full review.

Pajama Press is pleased to announce that all three of the books we published in our first season have been selected for Bank Street College of Education’s “Best Children’s Books of the Year 2013” list. No Shelter Here: Making the World a Kinder Place for Dogs by Rob Laidlaw and Last Airlift: A Vietnamese Orphan’s […]

Pajama Press is proud to announce that three of our titles have been nominated for 2013 Ontario Library Association Forest of Reading Awards. Don’t Laugh at Giraffe by Rebecca Bender is nominated for the Blue Spruce Award. Last year, Rebecca won the Blue Spruce Award for her debut picture book, Giraffe and Bird. No Shelter […]

This is an amazing book that pulls you slowly into Jess’s mind.  It wasn’t until fairly far into the book that I was struck by Jess’s character.  It’s difficult to describe without giving away too much because the joy for me was when I realized what the author was doing and began to squirm a […]

This is a beautiful book.  I don’t mean the story, but the package.  Congrats to the design department at Pajama Press: I was so busy admiring the fonts and running my fingers over the jacket that I almost forgot to read the book.  But I’m glad I did. True Blue is not beautiful.  It’s gritty and […]

This intelligent mystery is a complete 180 from the author’s leprosy-in-India tale, No Ordinary Day (2011), but is similar in how its impact sneaks up on you…The unreliability of Jess’ first-person account becomes increasingly obvious as we learn the depths of Jess’ jealousy and the dubiousness of her morals. The mystery here is not just […]

Ellis explores the courage it takes to stand up for a friend in a town shattered by a murder. Jess’s best friend, Casey White, has ambition and passion. A budding entomologist, she seeks an adventurous life outside their small town. So when Casey is inexplicably arrested for the murder of a girl at a camp […]

“TRUE BLUE is gripping and suspenseful, and its surprise ending will leave readers demanding that Deborah Ellis write another mystery.” Click her to read full customer review.

“Jess’s relationship with her mentally unstable mother is beautifully nuanced, revealing the faults and reasonableness of both parties without violating Jess’s perspective. Ellis creates complex adult characters as seen through the narrator’s critical perspective, a difficult challenge that many YA novelists fail, or do not attempt, to achieve. Finally, Ellis’s bold ending causes the message […]

“Known for powerful tales of social injustice in the developing world, Ellis here offers readers a flawed but gripping character study of teens in small-town Canada…. Jess—sharply insightful, but selfish and entirely lacking in empathy—may be a piece of work, but she grabs readers’ attention and never lets it go”