Quote of the Week: August 18, 2017

“When the moment comes to stop running from your past, to turn around and face the thing you thought you could not face--the moment when your life teeters between giving up and getting up--when that moment comes, and it always comes, if you can't get up and you can't give up either, here's what you …

Maus by Art Spiegelman

        In the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father's story, Maus approaches the unspeakable through the diminutive. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), shocks us out of any lingering sense of familiarity and …

Quote of the Week: August 11, 2017

"We writers - and especially writers for children, but all writers - have an obligation to our readers: it's the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were - to understand that truth is not in what happens but what …

Abby Carnelia’s One & Only Magical Power by David Pogue

What wold you do if you discovered you had a magical power? What if it was completely and utterly useless? Abby Carnelia is an average sixth grader. She gets along okay with her parents, does pretty well in school, and has an annoying littler brother. And then, her ordinary life turns extraordinary when she happens …

Girl Without a Face by Medeia Sharif

Destiny awakes with amnesia. She'd been driving on a wet road, about to leave flowers at a memorial marker of a deceased classmate, when she almost met that same fate.  Her mother, Mildred, is beyond restrictive, and she doesn't want Destiny to have her cellphone back. A nurse sneaks it into her room, but it's …

Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor

In post-apocalyptic Africa, the world has changed in many ways, yet in one region genocide between tribes still bloodies the land. A woman who has survived the annihilation of her village and a terrible rape by an enemy general wanders into the desert hoping to die. Instead, she gives birth to an angry baby girl …

The Hunt: A Novella by Jeremiah Donaldson

Young wakes up in a hospital room, turning into the same thing that killed his wife: a vampire. It's a notion that he ceased laughing at as he set out in pursuit of his wife's murderer and the defiler of his body. Roek finds himself in London, Ky after escaping the mess he'd created at …

Countryside (#1): The Book of the Wise by J. T. Cope IV

"You have a power within you, one that is within everyone...It's the same power that fills that building, that keeps that tree alive...and the same power that has attracted your attention...I know it's all a bit strange to you, but I assure you it is quite real..." Eleven-year-old Luke Rayburn has never seen a skyline …

The Sun is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon

The story of a girl, a boy, and the universe.  Natasha: I'm a girl who believes in science and facts. Not fate. Not destiny. Or dreams that will never come true. I'm definitely not the kind of girl who meets a cute boy on a crowded New York City street and falls in love with …

And We Stay by Jenny Hubbard

Senior Paul Wagoner walks into his school with a stolen gun, threatens his girlfriend, Emily Beam, and then takes his own life. Soon after, angry and guilt-ridden Emily is sent to boarding school in Amherst, Massachusetts, where two quirky fellow students and the spirit of Emily Dickinson offer helping hands. But it is up to …