Don't think or judge. Just Listen.

Annabel Greene begins her Junior year of high school ostracized by her peers and hated by her friends. She is haunted by the unthinkable events of a party that took place at the beginning of the summer, which she has kept secret from friends and family. This is one secret among many that she keeps from the world. She also suffers silently from the pressure from her mother and her fear for her oldest sister's health. In a time when she needs a friend more than ever, she meets Owen Armstrong, a music-obsessed classmate with anger management issues who is as ignored by the rest of the school as she is. In a "right place, right time" situation, he instantly goes from someone she watches from a distance to her only friend, saving her from lunch hours spent in isolation and teaching her the value of speaking up and making herself heard.

Just Listen is a story which induces both laughter and tears, and is highly recommended for anyone who has ever feared voicing their own feelings. Sarah Dessen is also the author of other popular young adult books such as The Truth About Forever, This Lullaby, and Lock & Key.

-Micheala

I am large, I contain multitudes

It's hard to describe Marcus Sedgwick's "Midwinterblood" in any other terms other than possibly one of the most amazing books I've read in a long time. Pardon me for being blunt. I tried coming up with some sort of cute/interesting intro to lead up to my review but nothing seemed to fit. There is absolutely no way to introduce it outside of it being amazing. At this point I'm not even sure how to describe the plot of the book and what happens without spoiling massive quantities of it; everything is connected to everything else in some deep way. The best way to describe it would be with a small quote from the book:

It cannot be... that when our life is run, we are done. There must be more to man than that, surely? That we are not just one, but a multitude. (p. 250)

So it is that on a small Scandavian island where the mythical Dracula orchid grows, Eric and Merle, two souls in love, find then lose each other over and over and over again. Seven different stories weave together their tale of love surviving through the ages, through vampires and magic and war, going back to a time unrecorded by history. Only at the very end does the whole story become completely clear.  Only then do you see the end that is really the beginning.

~The Stacked Librarian

P.S. The title of the blog post is a Walt Whitman quote. It's from "Song of Myself." If you like Whitman, definitely read this book!

Tucson Festival of Books Author Spotlight: Jacqueline Woodson

If you like realistic fiction about teenagers with problems, like Crank by Ellen Hopkins or Monster by Walter Dean Myers, you should pick up something by Jacqueline Woodson. You're in for a treat. She'll be a guest speaker at the Tucson Festival of Books this year, which is a huge gathering on the U of A campus to celebrate books, authors, and reading. Here's their page for teens.              

The first book I read by her was If You Come Softly. It's a sad, kind of Romeo and Juliet-esque story. Jeremiah's black, and Ellie's white. They meet at a private school and fall in love without being prepared for how society views their relationship. On her website, she writes that it was inspired by a poem by Audre Lord, which begins:

If you come softly  

as the wind within the trees

you may hear what I hear 

         see what sorrow sees.

Waiting for the World to End: Armageddon Summer

We're running out of time, if the world's going to end in 2012, as a few people are insisting. In this book, meet two ordinary teenagers like you, who both have parents who share a belief that the world's going to end, and drag them off to a remote mountain to greet the end of the world with their cult. I won't tell you if the world ends or not, but either way, you'll be in suspense about how Armageddon Summer ends!

Three quarters dead, 100 percent CREEPY

It's almost Halloween so that means I get to talk about a pretty chilling ghost story I just read called Three Quarters Dead.  Although the author Richard Peck writes about all kinds of things, his other supernatural stories--Ghosts I Have Been, Are You in the House Alone? and The Ghost Belonged to Me--are also fast and frightening reads.  Despite having a Gossip Girl cover, it is so much more than a novel about popularity, peer pressure, and the desire to be part of a powerful clique, although these issues set up the supernatural part beautifully! 

Just Another Story About a Girl and Her Dragons

Menolly doesn't just love to play music -- she's really good at it. But on her world, only men are allowed to be musicians. Menolly's not good at things that are "women's work," but she's way better at playing the harp than most men. She hardly ever got to play, and at the beginning of the book, even that was taken away from her and she was forbidden from ever playing music again. Ever. I don't know about you, but I wasn't at all surprised when she ran away. I was surprised at what she found, though...Dragons!

Middle School Mayhem

I read so many books that sometimes it's really hard to think about what to write about for this blog; other times, the universe just seems to pull out a topic and advertise it in neon lights. With arrows. And a fog horn. I was talking with a middle school teacher the other day and she was saying how there are so few good books for middle school students. My library is also currently working on a program called Middle School Mayhem. So obviously my post needs to be some of my TOP middle school reads. Without further ado, my fave middle school reads:

It's summertime and the reading is easy...and kinda sleazy

I have no problem admitting this--when the temperature reached 84 degrees inside my house, I put down the William Faulkner book I was dutifully trying to reread for the sake of my brain and reached for my latest fluff pick, Vixen by Jillian Larkin.  This book puts "historical fiction" in the camp of hot summer read!  The time is 1923, Chicago, land of flappers and mobsters, lavish parties and serious segregation, complete with flasks of whiskey in your garter and guns in your trunk.  Each chapter tells the story through alternating viewpoints of three young women; there's Gloria, the naive heiress engaged to the most sought after guy in the city, her jealous friend Lorraine, whose goal is to become the fiercest flapper around, and  "country cousin" Clara, who covers up a past more shocking than anyone could imagine.

Eve, Terrified of Adam

Okay, I just finished Eve by Anna Carey, and I don't know WHAT to think. It started out like such a happy, idealistic book about the future. Eve was the happiest girl at her compound, accomplished in many languages, subjects, and surrounded by beloved friends. But then, when she was about to give her valedictorian speech and head off to a bright future learning a trade and having a glamorous life in the city, she found out that the future she was looking forward to was a lie.

Everything Old is New Again

It's always fun to see a classic story play out in a modern setting.  Briar Rose, by Jane Yolen, offers an unconventional interpretation of the Sleeping Beauty myth that combines chilling Holocaust history with a modern search for identity.  After her beloved byt mysterious grandmother's death, Becca, a serene young journalist, is drawn into a seemingly inconclusive hunt for her family history.  To go on, she has only a few documents and the almost-fairy tales her grandmother told her constantly. 

Flights of Fantasy

The best part about anthologies and short story collections is finding an author you wouldn't have encountered otherwise.  And then devouring everything else that author or artist has ever written.  So pick up a copy of Flight, any of the volumes, and dive in.  There's something for everyone in this collection of indie comics edited by Kazu Kibuishi. 

The library has several comics by artists who've contributed short stories to Flight.

Death: What Comes Next?

Have you ever used those funny-looking binocular machines on an observation deck, maybe on top of a mountain or bridge, where you can put in a quarter and peek at the landscape below? Well, imagine a sad teenage girl standing on an observation deck, a girl who will never get her driver's license, or go to prom, or college. Instead, she keeps peering through that machine to look down at the world she left behind when she died. She might be dead, but her life's not really over. In fact, it's just about the opposite of what you might expect. Meet that girl, Liz, and follow her to the end of a surprisingly uplifting story in Elsewhere, by Gabrielle Zevin.

-Jenny

Speed Reading

You know what I hate? Lengthy tomes that actually take the full three weeks to read. I'll admit to having the general attention span of a sugar-high chipmunk & I want books that are either 1) so interesting & awesome that I finish it in a week or 2) so short it would be impossible to NOT finish it in a week. Stickman Odyssey, an Epic Doodle: Book One, Chopsticks," & Tina's Mouth: An Existential Comic Diary all took an hour each to read. No joke. Three books in three hours. Why are they such quick reads? Cause thanks to the brilliance of creative authors these books mix multimedia, drawings, comics, poetry, and photography to tell a story rather than just words

It is a truth universally acknowledged...

...That the month which contains so much love-themed commercialism leaves book lovers in want of Pride and Prejudice. One of my favorite light reads last year was Prom and Prejudice, which our Book Lady blogged about here. It's a modern-day update set in a prep school, with way more coffee.

Edgy Reads

I was going to do a best-of-the-year post, but when I looked back at the teen books I read in 2011, I realized that most had something in common: they were pretty dark and disturbing. Dark content in YA literature got a lot of press this year, but in the end, it's a personal decision. If you're searching for books that push the envelope and give you that unsettled, is-this-really-okay-to-read feeling, give these a shot!

• After by Amy Efaw is the raw, unflinching story of the person behind the headlines:  Devon did something terrible, something so bad she can't even quite remember or believe it, even in her cell in juvie, where she has all the time in the world to reflect.

Start at the beginning...

Steampunk and post-apocalyptic books may have only just starting getting popular but I think Alan Moore proved that heroines with shaved heads are awesome a long time ago. Thankfully Philip Reeve is rocking all three elements with "Fever Crumb,"the prequal to his Mortal Engines Quartet. If you aren't familiar with that series it is basically a post-apocalyptic steampunk rollercoaster of adventure awesomeness. After almost total destruction of the world from nuclear war, cities roll around on giant machines to escape the natural disasters that ensue. While rolling around the cities eat each other. Seriously. Big cities devour tiny cities, bigger cities devour big cites, and so on and so on. At the same time the cities are fighting a rebel group looking to get cities to finally stay put.

Young Adult to Adult and back again...

I was one of those kids who was always in the wrong section of the library. At eight, you are not supposed to be asking for a book on botany from the adult reference librarian, and at twelve, you get strange looks browsing Stephen King in adult fiction! I guess that is why I find the line between adult and young adult books very fluid--who's to say what appeals to people of any age?

Here are two recent adult books that I recommend for teens; the first is for lovers of suspense and mystery and the second is a most unusual blend of science fiction and fantasy. The Lock Artist, by Steve Hamilton, is the story of Michael, an 18 year old lock-picking whiz kid with a crazy past and a criminally certain future. The chapters alternate between glimpses of a bizarre childhood trauma and his present-day life as an increasingly skilled criminal "boxman", one of many slang terms you learn for a safecracker! Toss in a decent romance and plenty of unforeseen plot turns and you have a great read for any age. Among Others by Jo Walton is the story of Morwenna, a 15 year old lonely, disabled student in an English boarding school (but this is NOT a girl version of HP). Like the first pick, this author weaves together the past and the present, revealing dark memories of Mori's childhood with present day journal entries of great sci-fi and fantasy books that sustain her. Her journey includes new friends and old enemies, but I won't give away the details of the final confrontation with her ambitious, black magic obsessed mother. You will have to go there yourself!

LD

Project Costume Designer

Now that zombie season has officially ended I can actually start reading books that don't give me dreams involving being trapped in libraries & eating brains. Interestingly enough, I suddenly discovered I had started reading the girliest books possible: ones where fashion is practically it's own seperate character. I'm chalking this up to some sort of mild post-zombie apocalypse shock. The cool thing about these three books -- "Freak Show," "Lola and the Boy Next Door," and "Hollywood Nobody" -- is that the fashion isn't some magazine's idea of what'll be cool next year. Instead, it's all about declaring yourself awesome and wearing whatever makes you happiest, even if it's a mermaid outfit complete with Cheerio suction cups on your face.

Life on the Refrigerator Door

Imagine this. You're Claire, an only child who's not a child, almost an adult, almost able to take care of yourself. Not that you have a choice about taking care of yourself, anyway. Your dad's not in the picture, and your mom's a big-shot doctor.

Banned Books Week... continued

It's banned books week, and I love looking to see which books have hit the top ten banned lists of the year, as well as what authors have been challenged. You can find a lot of that information on the ALA website.

This year, I was surprised to learn that Cinderella has been among the banned. One of my favorite Cinderella stories is Ash by Malinda Lo. Ash is our Cinderella, and she grows up intrigued by the fairy realm and the handsome prince who is cursed to love her. But fate has other plans for Ash, in the form of the King's huntress...