I know this is a somewhat older title with a copyright of 2006, but I missed it back then and every year since. Why? Why did I wait SO long to read it? And why can I only give it five stars? I want to give it ten on scale of one to five!
Combining world travel, video games, puzzles, archaeology, advanced technology, mysterious parents, growing danger, and a group of ambitious teenagers, this is quite the adventure.
Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys is the home to Ariel and Max for the summer. Six weeks without technology, living in the Jupiter cabin (all the cabins are named for planets) they quickly realize they are different from everyone else at camp. Sent there not to overcome their addiction to technology (the advertise goal of the camp) Max and Ariel are there because their father works for Merrie-Seymour and camp tuition is free for employees. The only ones not obsessed with getting a sweet taste of the internet, the boys of Jupiter quickly begin to win the cabin competition.
There is no delicate way to tell a person that he is holding a container full of the incinerated remains of his own body.
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"Grow apart." So often, when two people are asked to explain why their relationship has changed and isn't working out, at least one of them will say that they have simply grown apart. They have grown in different ways so that they have less connection and less in common than they once did. Sometimes it's not so much a matter of growing in different directions as growing at different rates.
Eighty years after German super-soldiers crushed the Allied forces in World War II, Zara works as a maid at a Nazi cadet academy in the Easter American Territories. Zara can't escape the Nazi's constant obsession with the Aryan ideal, with a Japanese father and American mother she doesn't fit in with the occupying forces. Although she can't hide her lineage she can hide another genetic gift from her father, the ability to control wind. If the Fuhrer knew about her ability, she would be eradicated.
Now Charlie’s dead and I’m here in the kitchen—on my way to school, and then to work. It’s my senior year and I still have no idea what I want to do with my life. I am motherless, and in the last year, I lost my best friend twice, fell in love with a guy I shouldn’t have (twice), got beat up by a skinhead Nazi, and had things thrown at me, including beer cans, money, and dog shit.
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I quietly hoped it would all go away and sent my old PLEASE IGNORE VERA DIETZ signals into the atmosphere.
Quietly understated, leaving much unsaid under the surface, yet visceral, tangible, and intense--Smith’s storytelling in Ghost Medicine is like his characters.
Jude and Noah are twins who share more than just the same birthday, they share the world. The two are incredibly close and share their secrets, friends, talents and more. A novel told from two perspectives, in two different times in the twins' lives, I'll Give You The Sun shows the rift that came between the twins, then shows the reader the trauma that began their separation.
In her debut novel, Natalie C. Parker brings together a unique southern gothic mystery in the thrilling Beware the Wild. One day, after a particularly awful fight, Sterling's brother Phin runs into the mysterious swamp outside their home and never returns.
Hazel lives in an out-of-the-way town where faeries are real. The locals know enough lore to stay safe and be respectful, so for the most part the magical creatures leave them alone. Not so much with the tourists, who come because of the stories and to see the horned boy who has been sleeping, unchanged, in a glass coffin in the forest for generations and who sometimes end up dead.
