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Michael Harmon’s new novel is aptly titled Brutal.  Poe Holly has a razor sharp tongue, enough anger to burn down a town, and the guts to speak her mind no matter how brutal the truth may be. 16-year-old Poe’s mom has dumped her with her long-estranged father in a quiet, well-to-do California wine country town where everything is absolutely perfect on the surface.  Poe’s punk look, anti-establishment attitude and anger issues mean right away she won’t fit in to the status quo.  And she finds out quickly enough that lurking behind the perfect exterior of this town and its perfect high school is a painfulRead More →

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Phoenix Book Company is excited to schedule school appearances by The Vampire Academyseries author Richelle Mead in Phoenix on May 4, 2009. St. Vladimir’s Academy isn’t just any boarding school—it’s a hidden place where vampires are educated in the ways of magic and half-human teens train to protect them. Rose Hathaway is a Dhampir, a bodyguard for her best friend Lissa, a Moroi Vampire Princess. They’ve been on the run, but now they’re being dragged back to St. Vladimir’s—the very place where they’re most in danger. . . .Read More →

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The Forest and Hands and Teeth, Carrie Ryan’s debut novel, begins seven generations after the Return, an undead plague that has ended civilization as we know it. The novel’s heroine, Mary, lives in a village surrounded by one last vestige of industrial technology: a chain-link fence, beyond which is a vast forest full of shambling, eternally ravenous zombies –the forest of hands and teeth. No villager ever goes outside this fence, unless they want to die, or worse, be infected and become one of the undead. Mary’s world is bounded not only by the fence but by the archaic traditions of her people, which are dictated by aRead More →

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What is “home”? Is it a physical place we occupy? A memory? A group of people? A time?  In Pamela Todd’s Blind Faith Hotel, we search for home and find it in unexpected places. Fourteen-year-old Zoe feels like her whole world is going to pieces. Zoe’s mother takes her kids away from their father, a fisherman who ships out to Alaska, and moves them to a run-down farmhouse she’s inherited in the Midwest.  Surrounded by strangers and a sea of prairie grass, Zoe loses her bearings: she misses her father and the sea fiercely; she battles with her mother daily; and she’s searching for answers toRead More →

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Burn My Heart is another amazing book from Beverley Naidoo. In this story set in Kenya in 1951-1953, we meet Mathew – the white pre-teen son of a landownder and Mugo – the African son of the farm’s chief caretaker. They share a friendship that is beginning to show the strains caused by their places in the world they inhabit.  A worse threat is looming around them both however, with the growing Mau Mau rebellion led by the Kenyans to reclaim their ancestral land from the white British settlers.  Suspicion, accusations, brutality and betrayal escalate until everything in Mathew’s and Mugo’s world changes. The larger question in this bookRead More →

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Kristin Levine’s debut novel, The Best Bad Luck I Ever Had,  takes place in Moundville, AL in 1917.  12-year old Dit can’t wait for the new postmaster to arrive in his small town because he hopes the postmaster will have a son about his age.  Instead, 12-year old Emma arrives and even more of a surprise to the town is the family’s skin color.  At first Dit is disappointed and wants nothing to do with Emma, but his mama’s rule “be nice to everyone” soon helps himaccept Emma and her family, even if some in the town do not.  Their friendship makes Dit think about whyRead More →