An Unnecessarily Detailed Account of my Journey into Books for 8-12 Year-Olds.

So recently I read Peter and the Starcatchers by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson (a book that tells Peter Pan's origin story) because I received it as a gift last year for my birthday and hadn't gotten around to reading it. And I loved it.

Peter and the Starcatchers is a book with a target audience of probably 8-12 year olds. (Does anyone know what that level of book is called? Middle Grade? Young Reader? It's like the one that comes in between what I will forever know as "chapter books" and what everyone knows as "young adult". I don't know.)

Anyways, I really enjoyed it because it had pirates and adventure and to be honest I often feel like by the end of the day my brain can no longer process anything at a higher reading level than that, so I returned to my bookshelf to decide where to go next. 

I picked up a book called Cold Cereal by Adam Rex, which... did you ever see the Dreamworks movie Home? The one about the purple aliens? Well if not, you should, because it's the best movie ever, and it was based on one of my favorite books that I read in middle school, The True Meaning of Smekday, also by Adam Rex. Since I originally purchased Cold Cereal because I assumed it would be another nonsensical journey just like his other book, and I was correct. 

So I took a trip to Half Price Books and hit up the Young Reader section and I left with a copy of Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library by Chris Grabenstein, which was also amazing, and with that, I was hooked forever. 

Then, I went online to thriftbooks.com to find the sequel to Cold Cereal and the sequel to Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library and made the mistake of scrolling down to the "You May Also Enjoy..." section, and, well, I may or may not have several shipments of books coming my way over the next two weeks. 

Moral of the story, books for 8-12 year olds are just so much more fun. 

And you can probably expect several upcoming posts about said books in the near future.