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Told in five parts accompanied by maps and full-page art by Tony Piedra, Endling: The Last by Newbery medal-winning author Katherine Applegate opens with a quote from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, reminding readers that we are all part of the great web of life.  The first in a series that promises adventure, action, and mystery, Endling features well-developed and creatively imagined characters to whom the reader quickly becomes attached and invested. Khara is fourteen years old, frugal with words, and a talented fighter who has discovered the power in disguising herself as a boy.  On her personal quest, she encounters Byx, a dairne who considersRead More →

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Dana L. Davis is an actress, a classical violinist, and now an author.  Her debut novel, Tiffany Sly Lives Here Now is a remarkable book about a sixteen-year-old young woman who has found herself in a tsunami of change after her mother dies from Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Because Grams is an elderly resident in an assisted living facility, suddenly Tiffany is flying from low-income housing in Chicago to a mansion in Los Angeles to live with the doctor dad she didn’t even know existed.  Uprooted from her familiar neighborhood, school, and friends and suffering from anxiety disorder, Tiffany must find comfort with a stepmother, four sisters,Read More →

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Readers of Tamora Pierce (Song of the Lioness series) and Leigh Bardugo (Six of Crows) will likely find Amanda Foody’s new novel, Ace of Shades to be an equally dark and thrilling fantasy-mystery.  This first book in the Shadow Game trilogy features seventeen-year-old Enne Salta, whose only known mother-figure has gone missing. Determined to find Lourdes Alfero—the one person who has listened and advised and cared—Enne leaves her lady-in-training finishing school and her familiar life in Bellamy to cross the seas to New Reynes.  The solitary lead Enne has is a name, that of Levi Glaisyer, and when she arrives in the City of Sin,Read More →

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Misunderstood and somewhat disengaged from her sophomore classmates, Jess Cutter lives in a fictional town in Montana called Birdton, where not much happens and where “unwritten sock protocols” often marginalize her.  When her identical twin sister Anna—creative writer and out-going socializer—dies mysteriously, grief consumes Jess, but she’s afraid that if she begins to cry, she will “dissolve, leaving only a ring of salt behind” (22). Because her sister’s death leaves Jess feeling like a part of her is missing, she gives her life purpose by working to reconstruct the events of her sister’s death so that she can understand not only Anna’s motivations but the secretsRead More →

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Readers of epic medieval fantasies and fans of the Game of Thrones will likely revel in The Smoke Thieves, the inaugural book in a new trilogy by Sally Green whose signature style features vivid action and unflinching violence.  Her characters are also well-drawn, with each chapter being designated to an individual character’s life and perspectives.  As the web of fate would have it, their five lives intersect, despite the differences in their statuses. In the novel’s imagined world with its unique geography, customs, and languages, no one is safe from exploitation or execution.  Green seems acutely aware that people in positions of political power don’tRead More →

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Just as Rick Riordan in his Percy Jackson series employs allusions to Greek mythology, Roshani Chokshi takes her readers on a journey with twelve-year-old Aru Shah, who grew up to her mother’s story-telling with characters from Hindu mythology. Dr. Krithika Shah is an archaeologist and museum curator for the Museum of Ancient Indian Art and Culture.  She and her daughter have living quarters on site, and Aru’s favorite exhibit is the Hall of the Gods, filled with a hundred statues of various Hindu deities. In the first of a Pandava Novel series, Aru Shah and the End of Time, readers meet Aru, who wishes to vanquishRead More →

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At seventeen years old, the protagonist in The Fall of Grace by Amy Fellner Dominy, Grace Marie Pierce, is living the life of a privileged girl, the pure embodiment of the American dream with money, security, friends, and hope for a golden future.  Hardly ever angry, Grace has been sheltered by wealth and fame as the daughter of Janelle Pierce, an investment broker who swaddles herself in luxury: exotic travel, expensive clothes, and other unlimited material comforts.  Janelle occasionally escapes the heat of Phoenix, Arizona, and the stress of the financial world by visiting her favorite place, Blue Lakes in Ridgway, Colorado, where the serenity and theRead More →

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Sci-Fi Junior High: Crash Landing by John Martin and Scott Seegert is the second book in a series presented by James Patterson’s new children’s imprint.  This illustrated space adventure, told by blending the graphic novel genre with a narrative format, features eight days in the life of Kelvin Klosmo, an average human with a tendency to find trouble.  Kelvin and his family have come from Earth, where his parents were the top two scientists, to conduct research 329 quadrillion miles away.   Because Kelvin doesn’t share Klyde and Klara Klosmo’s brain power and because he is tired of being known at the space station as the guy whoRead More →

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With his debut novel, Tyler Johnson Was Here, Jay Coles tells the story of Tyler and Marvin Johnson, twin teenage boys living in Sterling Point, Alabama.  In their neighborhood, they worry often about police visits, gang-infested streets, robberies, vandalism, and gun violence.  For eight years, their father has been in Montgomery Correctional Facility for a crime he did not commit, and Marvin would “kill to have him back” (19). Because he hung around men who committed crimes, Jamal Johnson received his sentence from a corrupt system.  To cope with his dad’s absence and to see past the shame, Marvin writes letters to his absent father,Read More →