Kids Book Reviews

(Note: The Internet is a dynamic place and web sites can come and go quite quickly. This is one of my older and some of the links may not work anymore. If you find that this is the case I invite you to look at some of my more recent articles. My links section has my favorite links from past articles and is checked regularly for non working links. Wayne)

This week I'm going to feature some sites that offer book reviews for kids. Some of these sites are reviews by adults, others present reviews by kids, and finally, there are review sites run by kids. A couple of them allow kids to submit their own reviews so if you have any budding critics in your family this may be their chance to make their mark on the world of literature.

The first site is Notes from the Windowsill. This site is a compilation of monthly reviews that are housed on a gopher server (if you don't know what that is, don't worry, your web browser does. Notes also has a web page with a link to the pick of the month. The Internet Public library has a section called A World of Readers with reviews submitted by kids divided by theme. The Munroe County Public library has a group of reviews called Read A Kids Review. They also encourage kids to submit their own reviews.

Lauren's Reviews for Kids is a site published by a third-grader who reviews books that interest her. Just for Kids - Reviews has reviews for books that they will also sell you. I wouldn't expect to find any bad reviews on this site; a description of the story might be a more realistic expectation.

For a little bit of a change of pace Cyberkids.com offers a serial with a new chapter released every Thursday and also has a teen movie reviewer who tells it as she sees it. If you're looking for a teenage perspective on a movie, this is the place to go.

Finally, I ran across movie reviews by Steve Rhodes on misc.kids. The nice thing about his reviews are that he gives his opinion as to whether a movie would be both of interest and appropriate for kids. His reviews are archived in the Internet Movie Database under http://www.imdb.com/M/reviews_by/Steve+Rhodes.

That's it for now, see you next week.