Godless by Pete Hautman

If you are going to read one book this year about teens worshipping a water tower, then I suggest you read Pete Hautman’s novel Godless. This unique book follows Jason Bock. He is not particularly happy about having to attend a church group called Teen Power Outreach.  At one meeting he announces that he’s a member of the Church of the Ten-Legged One, mostly to mess with Just Al, the group’s leader. What starts off as a joke about worshipping the local water tower soon gains a following, including Jason’s obsessive friend Shin, a girl named Magda who Jason has a crush on, and Henry Stagg, the town’s leading juvenile delinquent.

Keeping the events contained within the characters’ town rather than having them explode into a nationwide sensation helps the book’s believability. In addition, Godless is the rare book that explores heavy subject matter without ever feeling heavy. In an entertaining and often humorous way, Hautman explores how people come to have or not have faith and how one’s faith can change over time. Highly recommended.

John

Son by Lois Lowry

***SPOILER ALERT***

If you have not read The Giver, Gathering Blue, and The Messenger - do not continue to read this. You will not understand anything I have to say, plus it will spoil the first three if you read Son first.

Based on the title, you can probably guess what this book is all about. This is Claire's story, the biological mother of Gabriel, who in the first book, The Giver, is saved from "release" by 12-year-old Jonas. At the end of the first book, you are left wondering. You learn a little more in the next two books, and finally in Son, it all comes together.

Lois Lowry is an awesome author, and Son is being marketed as the conclusion to the quartet. However, I was left a little disappointed. After all this time (remember that The Giver was first published in 1993) I wanted more. Even though Claire is an interesting character that we knew nothing about in the first book, there was little to explain why the society did what they did to her son. Conclusion generally means "the end" so I guess we will never know. Even after 20 years of waiting...

Karen

Have Book - Will Travel!

One YA book for each state in the US. Will you read your way across the country this summer?

Kimberly

 

Winter Town by Stephen Emond

Stephen Emond’s novel Winter Town explores what it’s like when someone you think you know everything about becomes a mystery to you. Evan and Lucy have been friends since childhood. Since moving to Georgia after her parent’s divorce, Lucy has continued to visit every winter to see her dad and hang out with Evan. He looks forward to these visits but during one of them the usually upbeat Lucy shows up with a goth look and a dark and aloof personality. Evan figures that something must have happened to Lucy in the preceding year but can’t get her to tell him what.

Emond does a stellar job developing Lucy and Evan as well Winter Town’s many supporting characters. Evan starts to question his goal-oriented life and Lucy eventually opens up about what she has been through in the past year. The book also includes drawings by the author including excerpts from "Aelysthia," a comic Evan and Lucy work on in the book. 

John

Blizzard of Glass: The Halifax Explosion of 1917 by Sally Walker

December 6, 1917: A seemingly typical morning in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Families were getting ready to go to work and school; businesses were opening. But just before 9:00 a.m. there was activity in Halifax's harbor that were anything but typical. A munitions ship was getting ready to leave the dock as another ship was coming in the opposite direction in the area known as The Narrows. And this area is called that for a reason. Very difficult to navigate, with only captains with many years of experience are allowed to handle. But somehow, this was overlooked. And just after 9:00 a.m., the unthinkable happened - the two ships collided. And what happened next was one of the worst disasters known to man.

With a cargo full of TNT, the explosion that occurred was as strong as that of an atom bomb. It destroyed the town in an instant, as well as taking almost 2,000 lives. The devastation was extraordinary. And, as if this was not enough, a blizzard fell on the town the following day.

But Blizzard of Glass is much more than just a tale of destruction, it is a tale of hope. Through relief efforts from other provinces and the Untied States, the people of Halifax that survived this event were able to go on.

Reading more like a novel then non-fiction, readers can really feel what it might be like to be caught in such a horrific event.

Karen

Burning Blue by Paul Griffin

In this psychological thriller, Nicole Castro, the pretty, wealthy, most popular girl in the school is attacked and half her face ends up burnt by acid. The narrator of this story is Jay Nazzaro, an accomplished computer hacker who has been an outcast himself ever since a seizure left him with wet pants in front of the entire school. Jay, rather than starting gossip or making fun of Nicole like everyone else, decides to use his hacking skills to figure out who it was that attacked Nicole.

At first things do not go well between him and Nicole. Obviously, he was not in her circle prior to the incident. But as time goes on and he gets to know her better he realizes that she is not the snob he once thought she was and that she even has some issues of her own. Jay is more determined than ever to help her.

As he digs deeper into finding out what happened, there are many twists and turns along the way. And many, many complications. Jay knows he must find the answers before the acid thrower strikes again. And what he discovers not only shocks him, but may put him at risk as well.

Burning Blue is both a mystery and a love story, as well as a tale of desperation and healing.

Karen

Mysteries

Looking for a little intrigue or hoping to perfect your sleuthing skills? Read one of these great mystery and suspense novels!

 Guy Langman, Crime Scene Procrastinator by Josh Berk
Guy Langman can't be bothered with much. But when his friend Anoop wants Guy to join the forensics club with him in the hopes of impressing some girls, Guy thinks why not. They certainly aren't expecting to find a real dead body on the simulated crime scene they're assigned to collect evidence from but, after some undignified screaming, the two realize they have stumbled across a real, dead murder victim. Meanwhile, Guy has been looking into the past of his father who recently passed away. He apparently had a whole past Guy never even knew about. Could his father's past and the dead body be linked? Does Guy want to know? He's going to need all his new forensics skills to find out.

The Girl in the Park by Mariah Fredericks
When Wendy Geller's body is found in Central Park after the night of a rager, newspaper headlines scream,"Death in the Park: Party Girl Found Strangled." But shy Rain, once Wendy's best friend, knows there was more to Wendy than just "party girl." As she struggles to separate the friend she knew from the tangle of gossip and headlines, Rain becomes determined to discover the truth about the murder.

Social Suicide by Gemma Halliday
Twittercide: the killing of one human being by another while the victim is in the act of tweeting. Hartley figured writing for the Herbert Hoover High Homepage would be a pretty sweet gig. Pad the resume for college applications, get a first look at the gossip column, spend some time ogling the paper's brooding bad-boy editor, Chase Erikson. But on her first big story, Hartley discovers Sydney Sanders, a homecoming queen--hopeful, dead in her pool. Electrocuted while Tweeting. Now, in addition to developing a reputation as HHH's resident body finder, Hartley is stuck trying to prove that Sydney's death wasn't suicide.

The Night She Disappeared by April Henry
Gabie drives a Mini Cooper. She also works part time as a delivery girl at Pete's Pizza. One night, Kayla - another delivery girl - goes missing. To her horror, Gabie learns that the supposed kidnapper had asked if the girl in the Mini Cooper was working that night. Gabie can't move beyond the fact that Kayla's fate was really meant for her, and she becomes obsessed with finding Kayla. She teams up with Drew - who also works at Pete's - and, together, they set out to prove that Kayla isn't dead - and to find her before she is.

I Hunt Killers by Barry Lyga
Jazz is a likable teenager. A charmer, some might say. But he's also the son of the world's most infamous serial killer, and for Dear Old Dad, "Take Your Son to Work Day" was year-round. Jazz has witnessed crime scenes the way cops wish they could--from the criminals' point of view. And now, even though Dad has been in jail for years, bodies are piling up in the sleepy town of Lobo's Nod. Again. In an effort to prove murder doesn't run in the family, Jazz joins the police in the hunt for this new serial killer. But Jazz has a secret--could he be more like his father than anyone knows?

A Girl Named Digit by Annabel Monaghan
Farrah "Digit" Higgins has left her geek self behind in another school district so she can blend in with the popular crowd at Santa Monica High and actually enjoy her senior year. But when Farrah, the daughter of a UCLA math professor, unknowingly cracks a terrorist group's number sequence, her laid-back senior year gets a lot more interesting. Soon she is personally investigating the case, on the run from terrorists, and faking her own kidnapping--all while trying to convince a young, hot FBI agent to take her seriously.

Amelia Anne is Dead and Gone by Kat Rosenfield
Becca has always longed to break free. Free from her backwater hometown. Free from its small-town gossip and dead-end lives. But the horrifying discovery of a dead body--an outsider, Amelia Anne--on the morning after graduation sends Becca into an unexpected tailspin. As the violence of the real world creeps close to home, Becca retreats, paralyzed from moving forward for the first time in her life. The details of Amelia Anne's final, harrowing moments play out against Becca's own out-of-control summer as Becca's and Amelia's parallel stories twist the reader closer and closer to the horrifying truth.

Kimberly