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One of the things I love most about reading is the chance to get completely caught up in a world that is alien to me – whether it’s another country, another world, or just another kind of life.  I really enjoy getting lost in a character’s life, enjoying (and sometimes being pained by) his or her experiences, realizations, and ultimate passage beyond wherever they were on page 1.  When reading Mark Huntley Parsons‘ Road Rash, I got to be, at least for a little while, “in the pocket”, completely consumed by, and totally rocked out as I shared the summer with a gifted, but somewhatRead More →

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  Luc, orphaned when his mother dies from HIV, is in debt to Monsieur Tatagani, a moneylender and crook in Franceville, Gabon, who paid his mother’s medical bills.  For the tips and wages to repay Tatagani, Luc works at a hotel bar in the city, but he is always certain to be “home” before dark, recalling the days when his mother would tell tales of the “mock men,” chimpanzees whose screams foreshadowed violence in depths of the jungle, the “Inside.” These are the conditions and the setting as Eliot Schrefer’s book Threatened opens, and so it goes until Professor Abdul Mohammed arrives.  The Prof, who wishes to be Africa’s Jane Goodall, is anRead More →

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Half Native and half White, seventeen-year-old Trent doesn’t understand his native language, Hitchiti, nor how to play stickball.  He did not go through a naming ceremony and receive an Indian name from his Miccosukee tribe in Florida.  As he tries to figure out where he belongs, he drinks to turn down the volume in his brain and to escape the dark energy that he allows to identify himself.  School has become meaningless to him—more a place for robotic behavior.  Like a metaphor for his life, his skateboard deck is chipped and the bearings caked with dirt.  Even blasting tunes on his Gibson guitar stops workingRead 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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With The Hit, Melvin Burgess takes on several key social and philosophical issues: political corruption, drug abuse/use, social class and power disparities, and measuring life’s value.  When the world begins to spin out of control and all hope seems lost, we look for an escape.  For seventeen-year-old Adam, who can only see hard work ahead and never earning enough to do what he wants, that escape is the drug called Death.  Death started out as a euthanasia drug, one that would give the terminally ill a week of bliss.  But when the young began to look at it as “the biggest high”—a way to improveRead 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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Having spent grades 7-11 in the cab of a semi-truck, home-schooled on the road by her father, Hayley Rose Kincain doesn’t know the rules for high school, where flaunts, taunts, and poses are all part of what she calls the zombie life.  Refusing to be colonized by the hive at Belmont High, Hayley spends a good part of her senior year in detention for correcting teachers’ mistakes and for committing other rule infractions.   Quiet, gawky, awkward, strangely smart, and “adorkable”—according to her friend Gracie Rappaport—Hayley wants to have a good time and make the world a better place. Those aspirations are nearly impossible, though, forRead More →

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Written as letters from a sixteen-year-old girl to an inmate, Ketchup Clouds by Annabel Pitcher tells the story of Zoe.  This British girl, who dreams someday of becoming an author of children’s books, has killed someone she was supposed to love.  With the guilt weighing heavily on her, Zoe locates a man on death row in Texas, guilty of his own crime of passion, and adopts him as her pen pal—a kindred spirit who might understand “the pain and the fear and the sadness and the guilt and the hundred other feelings that don’t even have a name in all of the English language” (7). Read More →