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The wait was long; the wait was painful; but today the mystery was solved!  In Ghost in the Machine, Patrick Carman concludes his highly suspenseful, fast-paced, and tech-savvy thriller duo that started in last year’s Skeleton Creek.  When we left high school best friends Ryan and Sarah at the nail-biting end of Skeleton Creek, they were trapped in the defunct,  surface-mining gold dredge outside their tiny, isolated home town.  Forbidden to have contact with each other, yet bent on solving the sinister mysteries surrounding the dredge’s death-laden past, Ryan and Sarah snuck into the dredge late at night to find a secret room when they wereRead More →

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When Abbey’s best friend Kristen vanishes at the bridge near Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, she refuses to accept that Kristen is dead. As rumors fly that her death was no accident, Abbey goes through the motions of grief, including attending her best friend’s funeral, where she meets Caspian, a mysterious and handsome stranger that keeps popping into her life. As the story unfolds, Abbey quickly realizes that the truth can be a fickle friend, challenging everything she thought she knew about her best friend, the boy she is quickly falling for, and even herself. One of the most unique features of Jessica Verday’s The Hollow isRead More →

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One thing that I like about the Peter Abrahams’ mysteries I’ve read, Reality Check included, is that it’s regular people noticing things  who solve the mysteries around them; they’re not detectives, they aren’t Nancy Drew types; they just start paying attention and piecing both obvious and not-so-obvious things together until they figure it all out. The every-day guy in Reality Check (April 2009), is 17 year old Cody. He has 2 passions in life: being the QB for his high school football team and his smart, beautiful girlfriend Clea.  But as junior year starts, he loses both: football to a torn ACL and Clea toRead More →

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Edward Bloor’s Crusader is the kind of book I love: engaging plot; exquisitely drawn, realistic characters; and a thought-provoking story where both the characters and a patient reader grow and come to new realizations by the end of the book. When we first meet Roberta Ritter, a 15-year old girl who works, for free, in her family’s virtual reality mall arcade, she’s not much more than a oddball doormat. She’s observant and thoughtful, but also very naive and young for her age.  She tells everyone (and believes) that her mother died 7 years before of a heart attack and since then, Roberta really hasn’t grown up much. Read More →

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What happens when your truth is so unbelievable, so horrifying, so awful that you can’t bear it? And you can’t ever trust anyone with this truth? You become a liar.  Micah tells us that right up front that she’s a liar, and then in the next breath, promises to tell the reader the whole truth, because she’s tired of living under the burden of all of her lies.  But when you’ve become addicted to something, you can’t just quit cold turkey (and when someone promises finally to tell the full truth, chances are more lies are what you’ll be hearing). Throughout Liar, the forthcoming book fromRead More →

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“Vampires are meant to be glamorous and powerful, but I’m here to inform you that being a vampire is nothing like that. Not one bit. On the contrary, it’s like being stuck indoors with the flu watching daytime television, forever and ever.  If being a vampire were easy, there wouldn’t be a Reformed Vampire Support Group.  …God I’m sick of it.” And so we meet Nina; a fifty-one year old vampire who’s had a chip on her shoulder since she was infected at the age of 15.  Tired of a listless, sickly  life stuck in her mother’s house, Nina writes a vampire adventure series with aRead 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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 John Green amazes me with each new book – the way he captures the humor, insecurities, friendships, and emotions of his characters  is so enjoyable I find myself laughing and aching for them with every turn of the page. Paper Towns, Green’s latest trip back to high school, is smart, witty, and sharply human.  Q has loved Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar for years. Never one of the more popular kids, he’s made his way through school with some steady friendships and subdued existence.  But one night, Margo chooses him to help her carry out her greatest series of pranks yet and Q can’t believeRead More →

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Madapple, the debut novel by Christina Meldrum, is a spellbinding exploration of the correlations among nature, religion, mythology and the human condition.  Meldrum weaves a complex story, full of mystery, about a sixteen-year-old girl, Aslaug. Raised in an isolated and restrictive environment by her eccentric Danish mother, Aslaug learns languages, botany, mythology and science, but very little about the outside world. When her mother dies suddenly under mysterious circumstances, Aslaug leaves home in search of her absent father, but instead finds her estranged aunt and cousins, who run a Pentecostal church in a nearby town. As dark family secrets are revealed, including the mystery of Aslaug’s birth, the tension inRead More →