Vol. 12 #4
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Just a reminder, the books reviewed here are recommended. I can't see wasting time reading a book I don't like when there are so many fabulous reads out there. Every book here kept me reading instead of dropping it and going on to the next book.
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Contemporary Romance/ |
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When her plus size modeling career goes south, Leena returns to Rock Creek, the dinky dumpy town she had fled when she was eighteen. Needing a job she stops at the local veterinary hospital because it has a help wanted sign and immediately turns chaos into order and gets quite a rise out of hunky vet Cole. All the delightfully quirky characters from Good Girls Do and Bad Girls Don’t are back but the focus is on Leena who has body image issues and Cole, on of the sexiest bachelors in PA who is also a really nice guy. Linz writes books that are dangerous to read in public because people always look askance at readers who giggle and guffaw as they turn the pages but a book that makes me fall that far into the story is definitely one for the keeper shelf.
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Teen/ Issues
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Sofi decides to defy her overly protective parents and go to Mexico for a house party just before prom and graduation in the hopes of snaring her crush. When he turns out to be a jerk she and her two friends head back for San Innocente, California but at the border she is turned back for having a fake green card. Sofi has lived in California since she was four. Now her parents are going to find out that she didn’t go where she was supposed to be. Fortunately she has an aunt she has never met who lives in Tijuana along with her family that consists of a disabled husband, two young sons, and a daughter Sofi’s age. As Sofi waits for resolution and a way home she learns to live with no internet access, no telephone, and an outdoor bathroom. Two young men she met while partying in the tourist area with her friends are encountered again. On is a good looking vato loco with a hot car who provides her with free tickets to a concert. The other is a rather pudgy cabana boy who threw her and her friends off a private hotel beach but who helps her immensely. As Sofi tries to figure out if she is Mexican, American, or just what she discovers her own ties to her family roots and finds love. Without one iota of preachiness, Alegria conveys the gist of the illegal immigration issue and the tragedy it causes. I would love to see this book along with Will Hobbs’ Crossing the Wire in every public library and high school library in America.
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Teen Paranormal & Horror Literature/ Vampire Stories |
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Beth Frasier desperately wants to find the vamp who made her so she can kill him and get back to normal high school life. Having to get to school before the sun comes up is wearing on her. Enlisting the help of a friend to try to find out which teachers have never been seen in the sun she tries to track down her maker while working on the formula that will let vampires venture out in day light. This light humorous take on a teen age vampire is a great combination of Buffy and chick lit. Beth Frasier is who Betsy Taylor from MaryJanice Davidson’s Undead series would have been if she had been bitten at age 15 than 29.
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Teen/ Issues /Multicultural
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Sophie’s life has been ruled by fear and insecurity. She lives in Tucson with her English mother, Mexican step-father, Bosnian refugee great-aunt Dika, and Pedro, a six-year old foster brother who came into their lives when his parents and the party they crossed the border with all died in the desert. After eight months of living with the family Pedro has finally begun talking and they find his relatives in a small Oaxaca town. With her parents unable to make a trip to Mexico, Sophie is to take Pedro to visit his grandparents and extended family accompanied by Dika, Dika’s boyfriend Mr. Lorenzo, and his teen son Angel. During the week-long drive to Pedro’s village and the week they spend visiting the entire party forms bond with each other and with Pedro’s family but then Mr. Lorenzo and Angel head off to Guatemala to retrieve Angel’s mother’s jewels. When they don’t return Sophie starts on a perilous journey that will prove who she really is to herself. The details of life in a Mexican village and Sophie’s journey from Tucson to Guatemala are vivid and memorable. Great characterization, good plot, and a unique setting spiced with love make this a winner.
| Teen Fantasy/ Alternate & Parallel Worlds General Winston's Daughter Shinn, Sharon Viking Juvenile 9780670062485 2007 - October |
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When eighteen-year-old Averie Winston goes to Chiarrin to meet her father the commanding officer and her fiance she falls in love with the brilliant colors and fascinating people of the recently conquered land. When dissidents bomb the market place she takes Jalessa, an injured fabric seller home and hires her as her personal maid. This thoughtful look at colonialism, national identity, and war is memorable and very well done.
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Teen/ Teen Historical Fiction/ |
Set in the 1970s, twelve-year-old Joan has just moved to California with her family. Her parents frequently fight and she really doesn’t want to go out and make friends in the neighborhood. Going through the wild area behind her subdivision she finds a creek, a chair, some shelves, and a most unusual girl. Fox, the Queen of the Foxes, is called Sarah at school. She lived in a small dilapidated house in the woods with her science fiction author father who looks like an outlaw biker with long hair and tattoos. Fox and Joan, who takes Newt as her wild girl name, both love story and use it in their imaginative play. In school they enter a writing contest together and win which requires them to read on stage. This leads into them being recruited for a summer writing workshop at the university. This powerful story may have been written for readers who are nine, ten, or eleven years old but imaginative readers of any age, especially those who were once wild girls themselves will revel in the joy of story.
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Romance/ Paranormal Romance/ Fantasy
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This entertaining romantic romp is set in small town Big Knob, Indiana where hunky carpenter Sean Madigan is besieged by women who want to get into his pants. His salvation comes in the form of middle aged magical matchmakers Dorcas and Ambrose Lowell who have been exiled to the mundane world. He convinces them he wants his sex appeal to disappear and it does. Unfortunately the timing is terrible because the local real estate agent has finally found out who now owns the abandoned home of his childhood that he has wanted to buy forever but Maggie Grady who acquires land for a big box discount store wants the same property. Normally he could turn on the charm and get whatever he wanted. Now he doesn’t have the sex appeal to make Maggie, the woman of his dreams, want to back out of the deal. This sexy entertainment is a perfect antidote to gloomy autumn days.
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Teen/ Contemporary/ Issues/ Environment
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Before he ever knew his parents, they were killed in an explosion caused by a faulty valve manufactured by the NECorp who subsequently adopted him. So Jaiden has grown up in the corporate offices with a manager instead of parents. Now at fourteen he is attending public high school, at his request, and is teamed up with the girl of his dreams for a science project. Not wanting her to know he lives in an office building and takes his meals in the company canteen, he obtains the Saturday use of a subdivision house used to lodge visiting executives and the cooperation of his manager to stand in as a mom so Jenny can come over to work on the science project but company lawyers blow his cover. Jenny’s activist father has problems with NECorp’s disposable of hazardous waste and Jaiden, who thinks of NECorp as his family, is conflicted. Dirty dealings of a corporate villain send Jaiden and Jenny into danger as they try to expose the problem. A cinematic climax will keep readers turning pages.
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Teen Paranormal & Horror Literature/ Fantasy featuring Psionic Powers |
This page-turner set in a small mountain town above the California desert is about Dylan who can see dead people. More specifically she can see the last moments in the lives of children who are kidnapped and murdered but never in time to save them. Her ability has been kept secret from all but the sheriff and his deputy. They depend on her ever since she found the body of a kindergarten classmate and her ability freaked her dad out so much that he left, never to be seen again. Now, ten years later with more young children going missing, rumor has it that the Drifter has returned. The tight knit group of teens who have been friends forever face a challenge when a new girl starts in at their school and relationships change as she picks away at the scab that is the tale of the Drifter.
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Teen Speculative Fiction/ Science Fiction/ Action-Adventure
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If you haven’t read Scott Westerfeld yet now is the time to start. Even though Extras is billed as the fourth in his series that is made up of Uglies, Pretties, and Specials, it actually stands alone quite well. It follows the story of a new character in a different country where face rank is everything. The higher your rank, the better all your stuff including housing. Aya is a kicker, she films stories with Moggle her highly modified AI self propelled camera. When she finds the Shy Girls, a group of thrill seekers who surf the tops of the maglev trains she joins them hoping to find a story to kick that will ignite movement in her face rank but instead finds a story that is much, much more than she ever imagined. The fame based economy is fascinating as is the Japanese-like future culture.
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Teen Science Fiction
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America’s second civil war, The Heartland War, was ended with the “The Bill of Life” which states “that human life may not be touched from the moment of conception until a child reaches thirteen. However, between the ages of thirteen and eighteen a parent may choose to retroactively “abort” a child...” Unwinds have all their parts harvested to live on in others. Connor is in enough fights that his parents decide to have him unwound. Orphaned Risa doesn’t have any exceptional talent that will keep the state home where she was raised from having her unwound to make room for more abandoned babies. Lev, the tenth child in a religious family was raised as a tithe, to be sacrificed when he hit thirteen. The adventures of these three teens as they attempt to change their fates is a riveting, thought provoking page turner.
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Teen/ Contemporary
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Bliss Cavender it way too with it for her small Texas hometown where she has one friend, Pash, who will be the valedictorian, a job at a cheesy barbecue joint, and a pageant obsessed mother who wants Bliss to be next winner of the Miss Bluebonnet pageant following in a family tradition of Miss Bluebonnet winners. School shopping in Austin one day Bliss picks up a flyer for the Roller Derby and she and Pash go hoping to find some cute guys but Bliss is totally blown away by the derby skaters and the outlaw coolness of the game. Going to tryouts in her old, too small, Barbie skates she makes the Hurl Scouts team and becomes Babe Ruthless. A hottie boy friend and issues with the ‘rents and Pash provide typical conflicts but set against the backdrop of roller derby Bliss’s story really stands out. This is an other very strong book in a year that has seen many, many outstanding teen novels.
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Teen/ Historical Fiction/ American History/ 20th Century
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Thirteen-year-old Louise Collins helps her drunken mother run a boarding house in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. When the courts order the local school to be integrated her mother pulls her out of school and becomes one of the protesters called “the cheerleaders” by the Northern press. Louise ends up doing most of the work around the house including taking care of their one long term boarder who is bedridden. When Morgan Miller, a man from New York comes to stay, Louise finds new ways to look at the world around her. This ugly episode in American history is skillfully brought home through the eyes of Louise who grows and evolves in the beautifully rendered novel.
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Teen/ Speculative Fiction/ Science Fiction
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What if? What if Kathleen hadn’t gone to the party with her best friend? What if her brother hadn’t been killed coming to pick her up? What if she wasn’t afraid to drive? Could every “what if?” actually cause a new universe to form? What if one could move from one world to the next and the next and the next? Luke, who Kathleen meets at her brother’s funeral also has the ability to shift from one reality to another but he has a secret that may alienate her forever. This great fast-paced story will have broad appeal but teens who liked the Aldous Lexicon trilogy by Michael Lawrence and other books that involve quantum physics will be thrilled to find it.
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Teen/ Issues/
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Fifteen-year-old David is different. He is strange looking and lives in foster care. He also has unusual webbing of skin that goes from his rib cage to his arms that enables him to glide down from great heights. When he jumps off a bluff after meeting a high school jock for a fight he starts going to an alternative school where he meets Cheetah, a girl who has seizures. Since this is set in Minnesota they end up at the Mayo clinic where Cheetah is in an experimental program. One night when he is flying he hits a cold pocket and ends up tumbling from the sky through a tree and his secret gets out when he is hospitalized. Great book. The cover asks "monster or miracle?" And that is what David must figure out for himself.
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