FOOB

You may well ask: dear Liz, have you lost your mind? What is FOOB?

FOOB has had many incarnations on MFB blo and on many other site - it is basically a link-up of other cool blogs out there, at present.

So the name FOOB* = Focus On Other Blogs (*credit is due to chicklish for this!)

Today's FOOB is me focussing on young adult and children's book blogs - in pure celebration of the lovely books a) Mark and I are giving away on the blog at present and b) because there are just so many cool books going around at present, being reviewed by such a wide variety of readers.

Firstly, the other blog I discovered, purely by chance: Chicklish - it is run by Luisa and she has a bevy of youngsters reading some excellent books and taking the time to review them. I am dead jealous about one that they're currently reviewing, The Henderson Boys by Robert Muchamore (he of CHERUB fame) - check out the link. Luisa and her team are also running a competition for a book that sounds such fun. Linkage here!

There is also Wondrous Books run by Jenny who works at a branch of Borders. In other words, Jenny (apologies for this) is as much a book-geek as I am! She does these funky posts about UK/US book covers and it is interesting to see how different / similar some of them are.

The stylish Sophie runs the So Many Books, So Little Time blog and although it is new, it is promising to be a force to be reckoned with!

H reviews over at About Books and is a clever girl - she's struck the idea of doing reviews of all books that are part of a series (now why didn't I think of that?) . She is doing a good job reviewing and I'm really liking her review of Shannon Hale's books - looks like we have a lot in common!

Sara's Dragonfly Book Reviews is off to a flying start - also one to watch, like the others mentioned on this blog. In fact, she does something my friend Karen keeps telling me to do: mark the books out of five! That way, readers on the blog immediately can tell if the gushing is warranted.

For the books aimed at younger readers, visit Chris and Tim's site Cool Reads . The boys started this site when they were 11 and 13 but have since grown up and have roped in some young reviewers to help out on the site. This is an excellent site with a LOT of reviews but as Luisa pointed out, it is a bit of a "historic" site as it has not been updated for ages!

Please, if you know of any other UK based children and YA book review sites, do get in touch! I am keen to set up a listing on the site dedicated to this.

Happy reading!

Edited: the above have now been amended thanks to Luisa and Jenny stopping by with pointers!