A Curse Dark as Gold wins William C. Morris Award

A Curse Dark as Gold (reviewed here on October 15, 2008) has won the William C. Morris Award, a new award honoring an outstanding first novel written for teens. Also check out these Nominees here in the YA Dept:
Graceling by Kristin Cashore
Madapple by Christina Meldrum
Me, the Missing, and the Dead by Jenny Valentine

2009 Book Awards Announced

This year's Newbery Medal went to a children's book (The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman), but 2 Honors books are here in the YA Dept:
The Surrender Tree by Margarita Engle (also the winner of the Pura Belpre Award) and After Tupac & D Foster by Jacqueline Woodson







Also check out the 4 Honors books for the Michael L. Printz Award:
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Volume II by M.T. Anderson
The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart
Nation by Terry Pratchett (recently knighted by the Queen!)
Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan

Review of Gone by Michael Grant

One minute, everything is normal, and the next, no adults in sight. All adults and kids over the age of fifteen are “poofed” or “disappeared.” Has it got something to do with the nuclear power station in Perdido Beach? Nobody can figure out what is happening, not even Astrid, the genius. Kids are beginning to get anxious and to look for some direction; Sam is an obvious, but reluctant leader. He is afraid his strange powers may have started all of this. Astrid is aware that her autistic brother, Little Pete, also has special powers, but she is reluctant to let Sam know. Astrid, little Pete, Quinn (Sam’s surfing buddy) and Edilio form the faction for good. Orc and his followers challenge Sam for leadership and are the bullies. Coates Academy, the School on the Hill for “troubled” kids, has many kids who also have varied special powers... Caine, their ringleader, comes down to the town with a handful of his followers and sets himself up as a leader. At first he pretends to have everyone's best interest at heart, but it is soon obvious that this is not the case. The elements of surprise are many and varied. Will Sam get “poofed" on his fifteenth birthday? Will he take the fight to Caine, and if so, who will win? Gone is a very fast-paced read with many twists and turns in the plot and is, I feel, an obvious book for a sequel with many of the plot elements already set in motion. Review by Teresa Kerrigan

More New Anime DVD's!

Naruto, The Movie: Guardians of the Crescent Moon
The third feature film from the Naruto anime series, in which Naruto, Kakashi, Sakura, and Rock Lee are tasked with protecting Michiru, prince of the Land of the Moon, from Shabadaba, a noble who has taken over the land.






Escaflowne: The Movie
A bored high school girl named Hitomi ( who is really the fabled Wing Goddess of Prophecy) finds herself whisked away from her mundane life in Tokyo to a war-torn parallel world called Gaia lorded over by a feudal clan.






Bleach 13: The Rescue
Ichigo and some of the soul reapers try and break Chad, Ganju, and Uryu out of prison

Review of Shift by Jennifer Bradbury

Win and Chris have been best friends for so long that they’ve become known in town simply as “WinandChris”. However, their post-high school plans entail attendance at different colleges, forcing them to forge separate paths in life. The boys decide to spend the last summer before college traveling out west together on a coast-to-coast bike trek, camping under the stars along the way. Camera in hand, they capture memories of all that they experience as they journey across the country. But the camera can’t quite capture all the dark secrets that Win is hiding from Chris. When Chris discovers a large wad of money concealed in Win’s bag, he becomes suspicious. Win begins acting strangely, but even Chris is unprepared for Win’s final actions. A few days short of reaching their west-coast goal, Win disappears, leaving Chris to struggle through the last miles alone. Chris returns home and heads to college, assuming that Win has done the same. Shockingly, Win never returns. What follows is a fast-paced mystery, as the FBI becomes involved, and Win’s power-hungry father begins making serious threats towards Chris’s family. Chris was the last person to see Win alive, but he doesn’t have a clue where Win might be now. Or does he? Review by Ellen Parkinson

Review of Paper Towns by John Green

John Green definitely has a way with words. I think his real strength is in the cleverness of his dialogue, and some really well-crafted individual sentences: "The longest night of my life began tardily." I loved his first book, Looking for Alaska, and liked An Abundance of Katherines, but the theme of the earnest but boring boy trying to understand the quirky but troubled woman (women) in his life has worn a little thin for me.The Prologue is beautifully done --the back story of Q and Margo finding a dead body in the park when they were nine is a great set-up to the rest of the book. The night they discovered the body, Margo showed up at Q's bedroom window after he went to bed. As the current story gets going, "Margo Roth Spiegelman slid open my screenless bedroom window for the first time since telling me to close it nine years before.” This begins what I think of as "The Night of Mayhem" where Margo wreaks revenge on her enemies and former friends using: 1 whole catfish, Veet, Vaseline, Mountain Dew, one dozen tulips, one bottle of water, tissues, one can of blue spray paint, The Club (car steering wheel lock), and an air horn. The next day Margo has gone missing. The middle part of the book is actually my favorite. Q tries to solve the mystery of Margo's disappearance (which involves a deep analysis of the Whitman poem The Leaves of Grass), keep his own life going, and convince his friends that they should help him search for Margo. There are some great characters: Q's friends Radar, who spends inordinate amounts of time correcting entries in Omnictionary, a Wikipedia-like online resource, and whose parents own the world's largest collection of black Santas; the bully Chuck Parsons, who "did not participate in organized sports, because to do so would distract from the larger goal of his life: to one day be convicted of homicide." The road trip to rescue Margo is actually my least favorite part of the book, but I know that opinion is not shared by many readers. One final thing I like about this book. It's the first time I’ve read a book that included hanging around the band room, which, being a band geek, is what I spent most of my high school career doing. It was a great place to hide out from the rest of the school (kids and teachers) and it had it’s own parking lot which wasn’t guarded like the main parking lot, making it convenient for sneaking out to McDonald’s for lunch. Review by Stacy