"This is my first favorite book ever. My mother bought it for me as a kid and it came with a Stellanuna plush doll. Manly, right? Mom read it to me whenever I asked until I lost Stellaluna in the first grade. (TRAGIC.) My mother, being the most awesome of mothers, put up Missing Poster signs for Stellaluna. No one ever called with information, no ransom notes were left next to my lunch box, and Stellaluna wasn't hiding inside my hamper or under my bed. Stellaluna was gone. I thought back to the book, and how the birds cared for Stellaluna while she was lost - teaching her to sit upright during the day and all that - and how her time with the birds - and me - was short-lived so she could return to a life of living in the night and sleeping upside down. I think maybe my bat went home."

"Okay, so I knew Lauren Oliver was a good writer, but damn! They weren't kidding when they compared this book to "The Tale of Desperaux" (which I also loved!) or "The Graveyard Book" (which I didn't finish, but found a scene very similar to the opening - it involved Bod Fading/Vanishing). Oliver's just a great storyteller, I had just gotten the book early morning at BEA and found that while waiting on line, I kept searching through my multiple tote bags to find this one so I can take advantage of the reading time instead of mingling with other fans on line. This hadn't happened to me for the two days I was there. My favorite characters were easily Liesl, Po, BUNDLE! and Will - who are the four obvious go-to-characters to have as your favorites, but their narratives were great. Different to Oliver's other novels, she wrote in third person and covered other characters beside her main, going so far to write about a guard named Mo (short for Molasses since he's so slow) and Mrs. Snout, owner of Snout's Inn and Restaurant. I'm excited to put this in the hands of my middle-grade peeps come this October, but any other lover of Lauren Oliver or YA will appreciate this story just as much. It has heart, deals with grief, and delivers questions about the Other Side as Oliver freshly explores it. "On the third night after the day her father died, Liesl saw the ghost." You'll ineffably thank me for recommending this. It's hands-down one of my favorite middle-grade stories and I'm already desperately eager to reread it."