Review of The Dark Days of Hamburger Halpin by Josh Berk

This is the funniest book I have read in quite a while, and I just couldn’t put it down.  Will Halpin is deaf.  He has finagled his way out of the “deaf school” and into the local high school, even though he will have to completely rely on his lip-reading skills.  The public high school doesn’t have a closed-captioning system, or interpreters like the fancy private schools.  He bumbled his way through a hearing test by guessing, lip-reading and promising to wear his hearing aids, which he usually just carries in his pocket.  On the bus, he learns that if he sits in the seat behind the bus driver, he can watch the other kids in the bus driver’s mirror and read their lips to see what they’re talking about.  People mostly ignore him, even though in every class he gets seated in the front corner of the room so that he can read the teacher’s lips, if they keep facing him, that is.  His math teacher, the sexy Miss Prefontaine, turns her back on him so she can make snide comments about him when she catches him reading his history textbook in math class (other bad things come out about her later in the story).  There’s the usual pecking order, and the only kid who befriends Will is the second-least-popular student, Devon, who knows very basic sign language.  Later in the book, he gives Will a PDA so they can text each other, even when they’re together, which I thought was brilliant.  During a class field trip to a coal mine, the most popular kid disappears, and then is found dead at the bottom of a mine shaft.  Is it murder?  Will and Devon decide to team up like the Hardy Boys to try and solve the murder, but when they break into the school to look at the footage of the police interrogations, Devon has them fast-forward through his.  Is he somehow involved?  Some funny things from the book: Will calls the school bell a sound-impairment discriminator; instead of et cetera, Will says et crapera; when his mom signs to him during dinner, he tells her not to talk with her hands full; once when his mom asks him, “What’s that noise?” he says, “You’re asking the wrong guy.”  Review by Stacy Church

Review of Watching Jimmy by Nancy Hartry

I love Carolyn, the main character of Watching Jimmy. She feels a lot of regret about what happened to her best friend Jimmy. She thinks she should have yelled at her Aunt Jean not to leave them alone with her brother, Uncle Ted, or that she could have run faster when Uncle Ted went zooming off down the street with Jimmy sprawled out across the trunk of his fancy car, or maybe if she had screamed, someone would have come and stopped the awful thing that happened next. The worst thing is that Uncle Ted told everyone Jimmy fell off a swing at the park and that he tried to wake him up and then carried him to his car to get help. Carolyn knows it won’t do any good to tell, so she tries to protect Jimmy as best she can after he comes home from the hospital. She never leaves him alone with Uncle Ted, and she coerces Uncle Ted into helping Aunt Jean by threatening him in a way that only he will understand. Carolyn has her own troubles, but she knows they’re nothing compared to Aunt Jean’s: Ted claims ownership of her house and says she’ll have to move out; Jimmy could have surgery to help with his brain injury but there’s no money to pay for it; and she has the great sadness of having lost her older son in the war. Carolyn has a couple of talents. She has a beautiful singing voice (but she’s careful not to let anyone hear her), and she’s a moving public speaker (which she’s not shy about showing off at all). This is a story where good triumphs in the end, even though things can never go back to the way they used to be. Review by Stacy Church

New Books!

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Mystery

The Amanda Project: invisible i  by Stella Lennon

When new and unconventional high school student Amanda Valentino disappears, her three closest friends, who are all from vastly different circles, band together and, using enigmatic clues that seem to come from Amanda herself, try to find her.

Realistic Fiction

The Vast Fields of Ordinary by Nick Burd

It's Dade's last summer at home. He has a crappy job at Food World, a "boyfriend" who won't publicly acknowledge his existence (maybe because Pablo also has a girlfriend), and parents on the verge of a divorce. College is Dade's shining beacon of possibility, a horizon to keep him from floating away. Then he meets the mysterious Alex Kincaid. Falling in real love finally lets Dade come out of the closet—and, ironically, ignites a ruthless passion in Pablo. But just when true happiness has set in, tragedy shatters the dreamy curtain of summer, and Dade will use every ounce of strength he's gained to break from his past and start fresh with the future.

Vampires!

The Van Alen Legacy: A Blue Bloods Novel by Melissa De la Cruz

Once left to live the glamorous life in New York City, the Blue Bloods--an ancient group of vampires--now find themselves in an epic battle for survival following the stunning revelation of a young socialite's true identity and the growing threat of the sinister Silver Bloods.

Fairy Tale

The Princess and the Hound by Mette Ivie Harrison

George has always felt burdened by his princely duties, and even more by the need to hide the magic through which he speaks with animals, but when he is betrothed to the strange princess of a neighboring kingdom, his secret, and the persecution of people like himself, must come to an end.

Review of Salt by Maurice Gee

It’s been a while since I’ve read a fantasy I liked as much as this one. The opening scene where Hari’s father, Tarl, is being taken away to be a slave could be straight out of a historical fiction, except for the part where the guards use “their electric hands” to shoot “fizzing bolts” into the air. Is this science fiction? Then comes the part where Harl “sent a questing thread out from his mind to the horses, found them and whispered silently: Brother horse, sister horse, the black fly stings your rump,” causing the horses to lurch forward. Harl has been learning from Lo, an ancient prisoner, how to communicate with animals without using words and although he is unable to prevent his father being taken away, he does manage to escape himself. Another story is unfolding at the same time: Pearl, the daughter of a privileged family runs away to escape an arranged marriage, taking with her Tealeaf, the maid who has been teaching her to communicate wordlessly. It is inevitable (for the story, anyway) that two young people fleeing the same city should meet up in the countryside; what isn’t so obvious is that they would meet when Hari kills Pearl’s brother (who is seeking Pearl, but is only too happy to be sidetracked by hunting and killing a Burrows boy). And so the great adventure begins. Tealeaf knows that the children need each other, but she won’t tell them why. Tarl’s father has been taken to the most dangerous of the mines, Deep Salt, from which no one has ever returned. The quest to save Tarl turns into a race to save mankind from itself. In this first book of The Salt Trilogy there’s plenty of adventure, suspense, fighting and romance to keep most readers happy. Review by Stacy Church

It’s summer in Australia, you know!

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Come check out these books set in Australia:

Genius Squad and Evil Genius by Jinks

Jellicoe Road and Looking for Alibrandi by Marchetta

The Wolf by Herrick

The Sweet, Terrible, Glorious Year I Truly, Completely Lost It by Shanahan

Magic or Madness, Magic Lesson, Magic’s Child by Larbalestier

Things You Either Hate or Love and Follow the Blue by Lowry

The Murder of Bindy MacKenzie, The Spell Book of Listen Taylor, The Year of Secret Assignments by Moriarty

Undine by Russon

all of John Marsden’s books

After Summer by Earls

Saving Francesca by Marchetta

Fifteen Love by Corbet

The Divine Wind: A Love Story by Disher

Walkabout by Marshall

It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me…

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Come in to the Young Adult Dept. and check out some books about music:

Beige by Castellucci

LBD: It’s a Girl Thing by Dent

Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist by Cohn & Levithan

Diva by Flinn

Born to Rock by Korman

Guitar Girl by Manning

Garage Band by Gipi (Graphic Novel)

Avril Lavigne's Make 5 Wishes (Graphic Novel)

New Books!!

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Check out the latest vampire books:

Vampire Kisses 4: Dance with a Vampire by Ellen Schreiber

When 11-year-old Valentine, younger brother of vampires Jagger and Luna, comes to Dullsville looking for them, he threatens goth-girl Raven's younger brother, Billy Boy, as well as her relationship with her vampire boyfriend, Alexander.

Vampire Kisses 6: Royal Blood by Ellen Schreiber

While fending off Trevor, her nemesis at school with whom she must work on an important project, sixteen-year-old Raven is distracted by finally meeting her vampire-boyfriend Alexander's parents and trying to foil their plan that could jeopardize her future with him.

Interested in the supernatural?  Take a look at these:

Sorceress by Celia Rees

In this sequel to Witch Child, 18-year-old Agnes, a Mohawk Indian who is descended from a line of shamanic healers, uses her own newly-discovered powers to uncover the story of her ancestor, a 17-century New England English healer who fled charges of witchcraft to make her life with the local Indians.

Devil’s Kiss by Sarwat Chadda

15-year-old Billi SanGreal has grown up knowing that being a member of the Knights Templar puts her in danger, but if she is to save London from catastrophe she must make sacrifices greater than she imagined.

Or how about a fairy tale?

Ash by Malinda Lo

In this variation on the Cinderella story, Ash grows up believing in the fairy realm that the king and his philosophers have sought to suppress, until one day she must choose between a handsome fairy cursed to love her and the King's Huntress whom she loves

Here’s a new science fiction:

The Maze Runner by James Dashner

Sixteen-year-old Thomas wakes up with no memory in the middle of a maze and realizes he must work with the community in which he finds himself if he is to escape.

And lastly, a spy novel:

Don’t Judge a Girl by Her Cover by Sally Carter

When Cammie Morgan arrives at her friend Macey's five-star hotel for the Democratic National Convention, where Macey's father is about to receive the vice presidential nomination, she thinks she's in for an exciting end to her summer break. But if you're a Gallagher Girl, 'exciting' and 'deadly' are never far apart.