Deirdre Langeland

Twelve-year-old Zoey has been home-schooled her entire life but now that her parents are starting their own business, she's being sent to middle school after the school year has already started. She's not too nervous though because she's an expert coder who built her own "cool code" app that analyzes every scenario and lets her know how to act so that she will appear effortlessly cool. Except she soon finds that being cool is harder than it looks, and her app might need some adjustments ...

This was a fun book that is mostly realistic but has the app's mascot (a unicorn) jump out and act a little more anthropomorphized than it should. The emotions are big, with a fun illustration style that really puts a lot of emphasis on the eyes for this. It goes through a lot of common middle school tropes, particularly finding and maintaining friendships, plus questions of identity and the pull-and-tug of boundaries with parents. I could definitely see this appealing to fans of the Making Friends graphic novel series, which has a similar quirky style to it.… (meer)

Informative, well organized take on the Japanese nuclear disaster that suffers from apparently being aimed at a younger audience. Shrinks back when it could more fully describe the human disaster and comes up short discussing the more technical aspects of the meltdown. Considering I won it as a Goodreads giveaway, I’m certainly not complaining. Likely would satisfy the appetites of most readers but I’m now looking for something morn in-depth. To it’s credit, this was interesting enough to spur me on.… (meer)