Books 2008

"Half of our family, the better-looking half, is missing," Nomi tells us at the beginning of A Complicated Kindness. Left alone with her sad, peculiar father, her days are spent piecing together why her mother and sister have disappeared and contemplating her inevitable career at Happy Family Farms, a chicken slaughterhouse on the outskirts of East Village — not the East Village in New York City where Nomi would prefer to live, but a dull, oppressive town founded by Mennonites on the cold, flat plains of Manitoba, Canada.

This moving, darkly funny novel is the world according to Nomi Nickel, a bewildered and wry sixteen-year-old trapped in a town governed by fundamentalist religion. In Nomi's droll, refreshing voice, we're told the story of her eccentric, touching family as it falls apart, each member on a collision course with the only community they have ever known.

This absorbing account by a young man who, as a boy of 12, gets swept up in Sierra Leone's civil war goes beyond even the best journalistic efforts in revealing the life and mind of a child abducted into the horrors of warfare. Beah's harrowing journey transforms him overnight from a child enthralled by American hip-hop music and dance to an internal refugee bereft of family, wandering from village to village in a country grown deeply divided by the indiscriminate atrocities of unruly, sociopathic rebel and army forces. Beah then finds himself in the army—in a drug-filled life of casual mass slaughter that lasts until he is 15, when he's brought to a rehabilitation center sponsored by UNICEF and partnering NGOs. The process marks out Beah as a gifted spokesman for the center's work after his "repatriation" to civilian life in the capital, where he lives with his family and a distant uncle. When the war finally engulfs the capital, it sends 17-year-old Beah fleeing again, this time to the U.S., where he now lives. 

Airborn is set in an alternative world where the similarities to our own are every bit as fascinating as the differences. In this case, what if some of the early 20th century's more bizarre experiments in aviation had actually worked? In Oppel's imaginary, not-so-distant past, giant luxury airships ply the air like ocean liners (thanks to a miraculous mango-scented gas called hydrium), while flying contraptions with feathered mechanical wings taxi people about--and everything else is slightly altered as a result.

In its story of a charming, flight-struck 15-year-old cabin boy named Matt Cruse, Airborn combines elements of Treasure Island (a dramatic shipwreck, flying pirates, and a mysterious tropical isle) with an upper-deck/lower-deck romance reminiscent of Titanic. When Matt rescues an old man from his punctured balloon, he dismisses the balloonist's tales of beautiful winged cougars as delirium. But with the arrival aboard ship of the free-spirited Kate de Vries, the fatherless boy finds himself caught up in a scientific quest that reveals as much about his own fear of being land-locked as it does about these elusive "cloud cats.

 Other books by this author in the school library:

DEAD WATER ZONE; FIREWING; SILVERWING; SUNWING; SKYBREAKER

When Santiago, a young shepherd boy from the Spanish countryside of Andalusia , has a dream that reveals the location of a hidden treasure buried at the Egyptian Pyramids his simple life is suddenly torn in two. Part of him wants to take the chance to go searching for it and the other part of him wants to continue his easy life as a shepherd.

A mysterious king named the king of Salem in Tarifa convinces Santiago that he has succeeded in discovering his Personal Legend. The old king tells Santiago that following his Personal Legend to its conclusion is a persons only real obligation in life.

Guy Montag is a book-burning fireman undergoing a crisis of faith. His wife spends all day with her television "family," imploring Montag to work harder so that they can afford a fourth TV wall. Their dull, empty life sharply contrasts with that of his next-door neighbor Clarisse, a young girl thrilled by the ideas in books, and more interested in what she can see in the world around her than in the mindless chatter of the tube. When Clarisse disappears mysteriously, Montag is moved to make some changes, and starts hiding books in his home. Eventually, his wife turns him in, and he must answer the call to burn his secret cache of books. After fleeing to avoid arrest, Montag winds up joining an outlaw band of scholars who keep the contents of books in their heads, waiting for the time society will once again need the wisdom of literature.

Other books by this author in the school library:

SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES; ILLUSTRATED MAN; MARTIAN CHRONICLES; OCTOBER COUNTRY

Neverwhere is the story of an ordinary London man named Richard Mayhew, and his bizarre journeys through the dangerous London "underworld". At the start of the story, he is a young businessman, with a dull job and a fiancée, Jessica, who seems to view him as a fashion accessory more than as a person. All this changes, however, when he stops to help a mysterious young girl who appears before him, bleeding and weakened, as he walks with his fiancée to a dinner with her influential boss. This one action sets his life on an unstoppable path of danger, mystery, betrayal, and learning.

 We are lucky enough to not only have this novel in the traditional format but to also be able to offer it in Graphic Novel format.  A graphic novel is much like a comic book.

Another book by this author in the school library:

ANASI BOYS

A sleepy native reservation. A troubled teen girl. A vampire returns home.

Nothing ever happens on the Otter Lake reservation. But when 16-year-old Tiffany discovers her father is renting out her room, she's deeply upset. Sure, their guest is polite and keeps to himself. But he's also a little creepy.

Little do Tiffany, her father or even her astute Granny Ruth suspect the truth. The mysterious Pierre L'Errant is actually a vampire, returning to his tribal home after centuries spent in Europe. But Tiffany has other things on her mind: her new boyfriend is acting weird, disputes with her father are escalating, and her estranged mother is starting a new life with somebody else.

Fed up and heartsick, Tiffany threatens drastic measures and flees into the bush. There, in the midnight woods, a chilling encounter with L'Errant changes everything... for both of them.

A mesmerizing blend of Gothic thriller and modern coming-of-age novel, The Night Wanderer is unlike any other vampire story.

The Road follows a man and a boy, father and son, journeying together for many months across a post-apocalyptic landscape, several years after a great cataclysm has destroyed civilization and most life on earth. What is left of humanity now consists largely of bands of cannibals and their prey, refugees who scavenge for canned food or other surviving foodstuffs. In the novel, ash covers the surface of the earth; in the atmosphere, it obscures the sun and moon, and the two travelers breathe through improvised masks to filter it out. Plants and animals are apparently all dead (dead wood for fuel is plentiful), and the rivers and oceans are seemingly empty of life.

"Softly he brushed my cheek, then held my face between his marble hands. 'Be very still,' he whispered, as if I wasn't already frozen. Slowly, never moving his eyes from mine, he leaned toward me. Then abruptly, but very gently, he rested his cold cheek against the hollow at the base of my throat."

As Shakespeare knew, love burns high when thwarted by obstacles. In Twilight, an exquisite fantasy by Stephenie Meyer, readers discover a pair of lovers who are supremely star-crossed. Bella adores beautiful Edward, and he returns her love. But Edward is having a hard time controlling the blood lust she arouses in him, because--he's a vampire. At any moment, the intensity of their passion could drive him to kill her, and he agonizes over the danger. But, Bella would rather be dead than part from Edward, so she risks her life to stay near him, and the novel burns with the erotic tension of their dangerous and necessarily chaste relationship.

Playing on every teen’s passionate desire to look as good as everybody else, Scott Westerfeld (Midnighters) projects a future world in which a compulsory operation at sixteen wipes out physical differences and makes everyone pretty by conforming to an ideal standard of beauty. The "New Pretties" are then free to play and party, while the younger "Uglies" look on enviously and spend the time before their own transformations in plotting mischievous tricks against their elders. Tally Youngblood is one of the most daring of the Uglies, and her imaginative tricks have gotten her in trouble with the menacing department of Special Circumstances. She has yearned to be pretty, but since her best friend Shay ran away to the rumored rebel settlement of recalcitrant Uglies called The Smoke, Tally has been troubled. The authorities give her an impossible choice: either she follows Shay’s cryptic directions to The Smoke with the purpose of betraying the rebels, or she will never be allowed to become pretty. Hoping to rescue Shay, Tally sets off on the dangerous journey as a spy. But after finally reaching The Smoke she has a change of heart when her new lover David reveals to her the sinister secret behind becoming pretty. The fast-moving story is enlivened by many action sequences in the style of videogames, using intriguing inventions like hoverboards that use the rider’s skateboard skills to skim through the air, and bungee jackets that make wild downward plunges survivable -- and fun. Behind all the commotion is the disturbing vision of our own society -- the Rusties -- visible only in rusting ruins after a virus destroyed all petroleum. Teens will be entranced, and the cliffhanger ending will leave them gasping for the sequel.  The two sequels - SPECIALS and PRETTIES. are available as part of the MOSCROP READS event.

Other books by this author available in the school library:

PEEPS; SO YESTERDAY; SPECIALS; PRETTIES