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Sarah Nelson is not your typical twelve year old. While most kids her age enjoy watching action movies and playing sports, Sarah prefers to read books and write letters to Atticus Finch, a fictional character from her favorite novel. Her best friend happens to be a plant and she has never known her mother. While Sarah wants to know her mom and see her, she is unable to because Sarah’s mom is living in a mental institution. Sarah and her father have moved around Texas so many times, Sarah has never felt as if she has had a home. Once a neighbor, classmate, or co-workerRead More →

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“Everybody lies.  We all do it. Sometimes we lie because it makes us feel better and sometimes we lie because it makes others feel better.” (1)  And so begins a grown man’s retelling of the story of the most pivotal moment in his youth when he dreamt up a lie, intended to bring a sense of peace to his dying father, that instead brought him a lifetime of regret and pain. In the summer of 1947, Bilal lived in a market town on the dusty plains of Northern India.  He loved reading his father’s precious books, running wild through the streets of the village withRead More →

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Then: 14 year old Becca’s father, her hero, was convicted of embezzlement in one of the most high-publicized, scandalous trials of the decade.  The depth and breadth of his crimes, from raiding people’s online profiles, to blackmail, to pyramid schemes, and his unrepentant gall in the face of his guilt, made Becca’s father into a monster that everyone loved to hate.  Reviled in their home town of Atlanta, Becca and her mom have fled north, hiding the details of their past, changing their names, and doing their best to leave behind their shame and notoriety. Now:  Becca, a senior in high school, has created asRead More →

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With Elizabeth Eulberg’s recent release, Better off Friends, readers will follow Macallan Dietz and Levi Rodgers as the author asks the question, Can a guy and a girl be legitimately best friends and only friends without the complications of romance? The novel begins when Macallan is just eleven years old and follows her through her senior year in high school.  With Macallan, who craves the discipline and distractions of school, loyalties run deep.  However, “beneath her sweet exterior is a snarky center with quick wit and even quicker rebounds” (116).  She staunchly supports her uncle Adam who was born with a birth defect which affectsRead More →

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When eighth graders Andrej Tschichatschow and Mike Klingenberg don’t receive invitations to the popular Tatiana Cosic’s birthday party, they set off to make their own fun on an epic adventure across Germany in a stolen Lada.  Bound for Wallachia without a map, the boys experience “the feeling of invincibility. No accident, no authority, no law of nature could stop us” (209).  As they travel, they discuss life, death, love, and sexuality.  They also encounter Isa Schmidt, who lives in the dump and shows them how to siphon gasoline; Horst Fricke, a former military sharpshooter who shoots at them and then offers them an orange soda andRead More →

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As proven time and time again, Mike Lupica has the talent to get the reader right into the action: whether it’s on the court, on the diamond, or on the fifty yard line, there’s a visceral, in-the-moment, hard-hitting feeling to all of Lupica’s sports-action sequences.  The pulse-pounding, bone-crunching, split-second action on the football field in QB 1 is yet another example of how skillfully Lupica can make a reader (even a girl who’s never touched a football) feel what it’s like to be the quarterback, in the pocket, waiting for an opening, dodging a hefty tackler, hoping to make the down and move the teamRead More →

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Sonya Sones‘ latest verse novel, To Be Perfectly Honest, tells the story of 15 year old Colette’s summer in San Luis Obispo, babysitting her 7 year old brother Will, while her utterly famous mother films yet another Hollywood blockbuster.  Having been forced to give up her planned summer trip to Paris to be exiled in nowhere, California, Colette is bitter, angry, and pouting.  Life couldn’t be worse as day after day of boredom looms ahead of her with nothing to look forward to and no one her own age to hang with.  But when she and Will run into a beautiful stranger with a motorcycle,Read More →

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Being the outsider looking in is painful.  From run-of-the-mill social awkwardness, to being the new kid in school, to being from a culture/background that is misunderstood and feared, the outsider is the lonely one among us.  Funny thing is, at any given point in time, everyone is the outsider yearning for acceptance, friendship, and understanding. Seventh grader Lewis Blake has had it with being an outsider.  But his quest to fit in to his mostly white middle school is an uphill battle:  being an Indian, he will have to do more than just cut off his braid and cut back on his sarcasm to breakRead More →

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Set in the summer and fall of 1972, in the small town of Stony Gap, Virginia, Kathryn Erskine‘s latest, Seeing Red, is full to the brim with the little details of everyday life, woven together so expertly as to create a richly detailed portrait of a young man, his family, his town, and his world, that is an emotional powerhouse for readers, young and old alike.  12 year old Red Porter’s daddy, his hero, has recently died of a heart attack and Red’s entire world is reeling.  Left with doubt, debt, and nothing to keep them in Stony Gap, Red’s mama is preparing to sellRead More →