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Fred Hiatt‘s Nine Days is so much more than an action-packed thrill ride.  Don’t get me wrong, it is an action-packed thrill ride: a story that zips along at a breakneck speed, fueled by a cliff hanger at the end of every short chapter, rife with danger, and near death scrapes. But at the same time, Nine Days is also a story that explores freedom, social justice, human rights, and complex, real world problems.   I found it completely engaging and unexpectedly thought-provoking, enjoying the successfully executed thriller inspired by Ti-Anna Wang, the real daughter of a jailed Chinese dissident. 16 year old Ethan has beenRead More →

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How would you feel if you had to constantly move, change your name, appearance, and high school? Sadly, this is a feeling that Anna Boyd and her family know all too well. Anna’s parents and little sister are in Witness Protection and have had six identities in less than one year. Moving around is hard enough, but Anna has no idea why she and her family are in Witness Protection to begin with. Not only does Anna have to pick a new name and memorize her “childhood memories”, she is constantly being placed and taken out of various high schools during her senior year. HerRead More →

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Isis Ann Murray, known by her friends as Ice or Icie, loves language, Starbucks, smart-ass T-shirts, horror films, her iPhone, and Tristan.  With her best friend Lola, Icie engages in linguistic creativity, creating Ripples—words that lose their individual identities when they swirl into new forms, adding flavor to conversation.  Freaking idiot, for example, becomes fridiot, and terrifically boring becomes borrific.  Icie’s life is flowing as smoothly as life can for a seventeen-year-old whose dad is a nuclear physicist and whose mom works for the federal government, but she learns that, regardless of life’s banality or beauty, Psycho-style surprises can erupt. When Tristan—two weeks before prom—dumpsRead More →

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Readers of alien invasions, apocalyptic fiction, or exhilarating action-thrillers will not be disappointed with Rick Yancey’s latest novel, The Fifth Wave.  Reminiscent of Steven King’s The Stand , of P.D. James’ futuristic political-fable novel Children of Men, or of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, Yancey’s book is super- intense and rich with nearly nonstop action.  In grand genre-blurring fashion, Yancey writes a book that is equal parts science-fiction and thriller, the first in a trilogy that promises to rival the popular  Hunger Games series. When aliens invade earth, their presence is felt in waves: Lights Out, Surf’s Up, Pestilence, Silencer, and the Fifth Wave.  After losing the powerRead More →

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Have you ever wished the rich gave a small amount of their money to the poor? Or even to the less unfortunate…?  Ash and Benjamin do just that in the story, Money Run, by Jack Heath. When Ash’s mother leaves with most of the money, Ash and her father are struggling to make ends meet. Her father begins working multiple jobs, but the income is not enough. Trying to pay the bills each month was hard enough but when their house is burglarized  everything changes. Ash comes home from school to find that the television, couch, computer, phone, her bed, and other furniture pieces have beenRead More →

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“Forgetting who you are is so much more complicated that simply forgetting your name. It’s also forgetting your dreams. Your aspirations. What makes you happy. What you pray you’ll never have to live without. It’s meeting yourself for the first time, and not being sure of your first impressions.” (8)  There’s only one thing you can count on in a world without memories, and that’s your heart.  The feelings that flood you, the warmth or the chill that envelopes you, that’s the only barometer you have when nothing else makes sense. Learning that you must let it guide you to those you can trust andRead More →

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Readers who enjoy dystopian literature, especially the variety presented in books like The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins or 1984 by George Orwell, will likely take pleasure in book one of The Torch Keeper series by Steven Dos Santos.  In this new world, benign terms like incentives, recruits, and shelved mask unspeakable malignancy for an Establishment that is focused on genetic engineering and on manufacturing biological weapons. The Culling features Lucian Spark, a sixteen-year-old boy who lives in The Parish, a community formed after Earth was destroyed by the Ash Wars.  Life in The Parish is ruled by The Establishment, which has very strictRead More →

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I like the surprise of not reading the jacket flap before I read a book – cover, title, and maybe a familiar author – are all I know going in.  It’s a little game I like to play to let the story, whatever it may be, unfold and take me wherever it wants to go. So when I started Ned Vizzini’s The Other Normals, I expected a realistic fiction story about a possibly disaffected, alienated teen guy who liked to play role playing games.  Pretty safe bet and I was proved right – at first.  15 year old Perry Eckert is what his mother painfullyRead More →

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Christina Diaz Gonzalez‘s second novel, A Thunderous Whisper, brings us to Guernica, Spain.  Here we meet 12 year old Ani, a quiet, insignificant whisper of a girl who lives on the periphery of society, daughter of a sardine seller.  Ani’s father has gone to the front lines of the Spanish Civil War to fight against General Franco’s forces, hoping to protect the Basque homeland from impending seizure.  Left with her cold-hearted, harsh mother, Ani’s life has never felt more bleak and lonely. Then she meets a boy, Mathias, who is spirited, sure of himself, and interested in being her friend.  Mathias is new to Guernica and heRead More →