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Readers who enjoyed King of the Screwups by K.L. Going (Harcourt, 2009) will find a similar theme and characters in Kody Keplinger’s A Midsummer’s Nightmare, which features a female protagonist.  On her first night in Hamilton, Kentucky, recent Indiana high school graduate Whitley Johnson argues fashion choices with fashionista, Harrison Carlyle, who offers to be her best friend, but Whitley doesn’t “do” friends.  In her experience “friends turn on you, abandon you, and lie about you” (61).  Because Whitley sees friends as a waste of time, selfish and fake, she decides she’s better off being a loner, with tequila as a best friend to makeRead More →

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Will and the other 6 teens who were cured of their debilitating phobias in Patrick Carman’s Dark Eden have been reunited in the sequel, Dark Eden 2: Eve of Destruction.  Will and Marisa convince Ben, Kate, Alex, and Connor, who are all now suffering from “elderly” ailments like arthritis, dementia, and hearing loss, to join them in a trip back to Fort Eden after Will receives a letter from the hated Mrs. Goring.  Ostensibly offering them a new “cure”, this time for the problems ravaging their bodies, Mrs. Goring convinces the teens to descend into an abandoned missile silo below Fort Eden in search ofRead More →

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 Michelle Gagnon’s first novel for young adults, Don’t Turn Around is unquestionably a thriller, certain to resonate with social activist readers and those who know the power of computers to perform invasive functions.  With echoes of the hacktivism but not the dystopian angle from Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, Gagnon takes on shady big business, the issue of government cover-ups, and the very real plight of children in the foster care system. Gagnon tells her story primarily through the parallel threads of two adolescent lives whose paths cross and eerily connect.  Sixteen-year-old Noa Torson, who lost her parents when she was just an infant, spent severalRead More →

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Jake and Lily are twins.  Sure, they are a little different – Lily’s got a temper, Jake’s always calm – but in many ways, they feel like two halves of the same person.  When one of them is in trouble or in pain, the other one just knows it; they can communicate without words; it’s a secret “power” they call the goombla and sharing it means everything. But the summer they turn 11, things change.  Their parents decide it’s time for them to have separate rooms.  Jake starts hanging out with a group of guys from down the street, and Lily, well, Lily feels lostRead More →

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Everyone has secrets. Some are small and innocuous “I am going to surprise my friend with a special lunch”  but others carry much more weight “I am betraying my best friend in a terrible way.”  We carry these secrets, large and small, light and heavy, around with us every day. But when the burden of these secrets, hopes, and fears becomes to much, we have to find ways to lighten the load.  In the woods behind 10 year old Minty Mortimer’s house, there’s a big old oak tree with a gaping hole in the center, and as she discovers one summer afternoon, it’s the tree where peopleRead More →

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The notion of a “bleached” culture or absence of culture among white people looms large, and young adult authors are working to dispel that belief as they explore the diversity of what it means to be white. Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s book Faith, Hope, and Ivy June (Delacorte, 2009) and now Child of the Mountains by Marilyn Sue Shank are appropriate for performing some myth-busting as well as providing a door for cultural discussions with a focus on diverse lifestyles, especially those conditions imposed by class differences and geographical circumstances. Set in 1954 in the mountains of West Virginia, Shank’s book features eleven-year-old Lydia Hawkins whoRead More →

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By 2050, global warming has turned the climate into mankind’s enemy: once “normal” weather systems like hurricanes and tornadoes are now monster storms that ravage the world with their intensity and frequency.  Life has become a dual existence of living indoors: above ground anxiously waiting for the next storm system and then spending a good deal of time in underground storm shelters wondering if your home has been annihilated.  Playgrounds are built in cavernous underground shelters, no one rides bikes, goes on picnics or travels far.  The food supply is all grown in special DNA-ture farms secure from the uncontrollable weather.  Amid this dire climate,Read More →

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Sinister, blood-thirsty ghosts in fog-filled cemeteries, a Medieval cathedral and castle-turned boarding school, and an angry 11 year old boy sent away from home when his widowed mother becomes engaged to a new man.    A story spun with all the cinematic detail, coming-of-age life lessons, and supernatural qualities of her other works, Cornelia Funke‘s newest book, Ghost Knight, is a tale full of danger, bravery, and friendship. Jon Whitcroft tells us the story of his first year at an English boarding school, where he was sent after some very terrible behavior towards his mother’s fiance.  Jon had expected to be miserable in Salisbury and forRead More →

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*Welcome to the Town of Remarkable Where Every Day in this Remarkable Place filled with Remarkable People is Positively Remarkable for Absolutely Everyone Except Jane I don’t think I’d like to live in a town like Remarkable, where everyone is expertly talented in something, everyone is positively happy, and every sentence uttered ends in an exclamation point!  I think 10 year old Jane Doe, unnoticed, untalented, and completely unremarkable, would be only person worth knowing.  For Jane, the middle child in a remarkable family – her mother is a world renowned architect, her father a prize winning novelist, her gorgeous brother an ultra talented painter and herRead More →