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September 2009

September’s roundup of Cool New Books includes CATCHING FIRE, the powerful second installment in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games Trilogy, which continues the amazing story of Katniss Everdeen; GOING BOVINE by Libba Bray, in which a 16-year-old who just wants to get through high school finds out he’s dying of mad cow disease; THE MONSTRUMOLOGIST, a gothic tour de force from critically acclaimed author Rick Yancey that explores the darkest heart of man and monster and asks the question: When does a man become the very thing he hunts?; FOREST BORN, the fourth title in Shannon Hale’s The Books of Bayern series, an emotionally wrenching journey of self-discovery set in the magical and alluring world first encountered in THE GOOSE GIRL; and VIOLA IN REEL LIFE, Adriana Trigiani’s novel about a group of boarding school friends navigating the ups and downs of living together, falling in love, and following their dreams.


Stand-Alone Titles

Book Cover Art ASH
Malinda Lo
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 9780316040099
Ages 15-up
272 pages

In the wake of her father's death, Ash is left at the mercy of her cruel stepmother. Consumed with grief, her only joy comes by the light of the dying hearth fire, re-reading the fairy tales her mother once told her. In her dreams, someday the fairies will steal her away, as they are said to do. When she meets the dark and dangerous fairy Sidhean, she believes that her wish may be granted.

The day that Ash meets Kaisa, the King's Huntress, her heart begins to change. Instead of chasing fairies, Ash learns to hunt with Kaisa. Though their friendship is as delicate as a new bloom, it reawakens Ash's capacity for love --- and her desire to live. But Sidhean has already claimed Ash for his own, and she must make a choice between fairy tale dreams and true love.

Book Cover Art ELI THE GOOD
Silas House
Candlewick Press
ISBN: 9780763643416
Ages 12-up
304 pages

Bicentennial fireworks burn the sky. Bob Seger growls from a transistor radio. And down by the river, girls line up on lawn chairs in pursuit of the perfect tan. Yet for 10-year-old Eli Book, the summer of 1976 is the one that threatened to tear his family apart. There is his distant mother; his traumatized Vietnam vet dad; his wild sister; his former war protester aunt; and his tough yet troubled best friend, Edie, the only person with whom he can be himself. As tempers flare and his father’s nightmares rage, Eli watches from the sidelines, but soon even he cannot escape the current of conflict.

Book Cover Art THE GEORGES AND THE JEWELS
Jane Smiley
Knopf Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 9780375862274
Ages 10-up
240 pages

Jane Smiley makes her debut for young readers in this stirring novel set on a California horse ranch in the 1960s. Seventh-grader Abby Lovitt has always been more at ease with horses than with people. Her father insists they call all the mares “Jewel” and all the geldings “George” and warns Abby not to get attached: the horses are there to be sold. But with all the stress at school and home, Abby seeks refuge with the Georges and the Jewels. But there’s one gelding on her family’s farm that gives her no end of trouble: the horse who won’t meet her gaze, the horse who bucks her right off every chance he gets, the horse her father makes her ride and train, every day. She calls him the Ornery George.

Book Cover Art GOING BOVINE
Libba Bray
Delacorte Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 9780385733977
Ages 14-up
496 pages

All 16-year-old Cameron wants is to get through high school --- and life in general --- with a minimum of effort. It’s not a lot to ask. But that’s before he’s given some bad news: he’s sick and he’s going to die. Hope arrives in the winged form of Dulcie, a loopy punk angel/possible hallucination with a bad sugar habit. She tells Cam there is a cure --- if he’s willing to go in search of it. With the help of a death-obsessed, video-gaming dwarf and a yard gnome, Cam sets off on the mother of all road trips through a twisted America into the heart of what matters most.

Book Cover Art LEIGH ANN’S CIVIL WAR
Ann Rinaldi
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780152065133
Ages 12-up
320 pages

Leigh Ann Conners is spunky and determined. Although she often finds herself in trouble, she loves her two older brothers dearly and would do anything to make them proud.
When the Yankees arrive in Roswell, Georgia, Leigh Ann places a French flag upon the family’s mill. She hopes the Yankees will then spare the mill from destruction, but her actions have disastrous results. Sent north with the women and children who worked in the mill --- all branded traitors for making fabric for Confederate uniforms --- Leigh Ann embarks on a journey that requires her to find her own inner strength. Only then will she be able to rise above the war raging around her.

Book Cover Art LIAR
Justine Larbalestier
Bloomsbury USA Children’s Books
ISBN: 9781599903057
Ages 14-up
384 pages

Micah will freely admit that she’s a compulsive liar, but that may be the one honest thing she’ll ever tell you. Over the years she’s duped her classmates, her teachers and even her parents, and she’s always managed to stay one step ahead of her lies. That is, until her boyfriend dies under brutal circumstances and her dishonesty begins to catch up with her. But is it possible to tell the truth when lying comes as naturally as breathing?

Taking readers deep into the psyche of a young woman who will say just about anything to convince them --- and herself --- that she’s finally come clean, LIARis a bone-chilling thriller that will have readers see-sawing between truths and lies right up to the end. Honestly.

Book Cover Art THE MILES BETWEEN
Mary E. Pearson
Henry Holt Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 9780805088281
Ages 14-up
272 pages

Destiny Faraday makes a point of keeping her distance from her classmates at Hedgebrook Academy. Her number-one rule: Don’t get attached. But one day, unexpectedly finding a car at their disposal, Destiny and three of her classmates embark on an unauthorized road trip.

They’re searching for one fair day --- a day where the good guy wins and everything adds up to something just and right. Their destination: Langdon, a town that Destiny’s unsuspecting companions hope will hold simply a day of fun. But, as Destiny says, “Things are not always what they seem.” Only she knows that Langdon holds far more than that --- a deep secret she has never shared with anyone.

Book Cover Art MURDER AT MIDNIGHT
Avi
Scholastic Press
ISBN: 9780545080903
Ages 8-12
272 pages

A plot to overthrow King Claudio is brewing in the Kingdom of Pergamontio, Italy. Mangus the Magician has been marked as an easy scapegoat for the traitor lurking within the king’s court. Against all odds, his faithful new servant boy, Fabrizio, sets out to solve the mystery and prove his master’s innocence before the stroke of midnight…in order to save him from certain death!

Book Cover Art PRETTY DEAD
Francesca Lia Block
HarperTeen
ISBN: 9780061547850
Ages 14-up
208 pages

The object of envy and desire, Charlotte Emerson seems to have the perfect life...but she’s been dead for almost a century. When a new romance converges with the return of her first love, Charlotte becomes the subject of a dark bargain that might give her the only thing she’s ever coveted --- the chance to be human again.

Critically acclaimed writer Francesca Lia Block gives the undead a second chance at life in PRETTY DEAD.

Book Cover Art RAGE: A Love Story
Julie Anne Peters
Knopf Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 9780375852091
Ages 14-up
304 pages

Johanna is steadfast, patient, reliable; the go-to girl, the one everyone can count on. But always being there for others can’t give Johanna everything she needs --- it can’t give her Reeve Hartt.

Reeve is fierce, beautiful, wounded, elusive; a flame that draws Johanna’s fluttering moth. Johanna is determined to get her, against all advice, and to help her, against all reason. But love isn’t always reasonable, right?

In the precarious place where attraction and need collide, a teenager experiences the dark side of a first love, and struggles to find her way into a new light.


Series Books/Sequels

The Books of Bayern

Book Cover Art FOREST BORN: The Books of Bayern, Book 4
Shannon Hale
Bloomsbury USA Children’s Books
ISBN: 9781599901671
Ages 12-up
400 pages

Rin is sure that something is wrong with her…something really bad. Something that is keeping her from feeling at home in the Forest homestead where she’s lived all her life. Something that is keeping her from trusting herself with anyone at all. When her brother Razo returns from the city for a visit, she accompanies him to the palace, hoping that she can find peace away from home. But war has come to Bayern again, and Rin is compelled to join the queen and her closest allies --- magical girls Rin thinks of as the Fire Sisters --- as they venture into the Forest toward Kel, the land where someone seems to want them all dead.

Many beloved Bayern characters reappear in this story, but it is Rin’s own journey of discovering how to balance the good and the bad in herself that drives this compelling adventure.

Daughters of the Sea

Book Cover Art DAUGHTERS OF THE SEA: HANNAH
Kathryn Lasky
Scholastic Press
ISBN: 9780439783101
Ages 12-up
176 pages

Hannah Albury is not like other girls in the turn-of-the-century Boston orphanage where she grew up. Instead of seasickness, she gets land-sickness. Billowing waves exhilarate her, but flat plains away from the ocean leave her dried out, parched and ill. She leaves a ring of salt in the tub when she bathes, and sometimes she sees a faint tracing of scales on her delicate feet. It’s freakish, horrifying…and deeply thrilling.
 
As Hannah becomes a young woman, she can sense that a powerful change is coming. A choice lies ahead, and Hannah must discover if she is a creature of the land --- or of the sea.

The Devouring

Book Cover Art SOULSTICE: The Devouring, Book 2
Simon Holt
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 9780316035712
Ages 12-up
272 pages

It's been six months since Reggie first discovered and fought against the Vours, malicious and demonic beings that inhabit human bodies on the eve of the Winter Solstice. The Vours still haunt Reggie, but only in her dreams --- until one night, when an unexpected visitor turns her nightmares into reality.

The battle against evil continues in SOULSTICE, the second book in the thrilling The Devouring series.

The Hunger Games Trilogy

Book Cover Art CATCHING FIRE
Suzanne Collins
Scholastic Press
ISBN: 9780439023498
Ages 12-up
400 pages


Against all odds, Katniss Everdeen has won the annual Hunger Games with fellow district tribute Peeta Mellark. But it was a victory won by defiance of the Capitol and their harsh rules. Katniss and Peeta should be happy. After all, they have just won for themselves and their families a life of safety and plenty. But there are rumors of rebellion among the subjects, and Katniss and Peeta, to their horror, are the faces of that rebellion. The Capitol is angry. The Capitol wants revenge.

The Monstrumologist

Book Cover Art THE MONSTRUMOLOGIST
Rick Yancey
Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing
ISBN: 9781416984481
Ages 14-up
448 pages

“These are the secrets I have kept. This is the trust I never betrayed.

But he is dead now and has been for more than 40 years, the one who gave me his trust, the one for whom I kept these secrets.

The one who saved me...and the one who cursed me.”

So begins the journal of Will Henry, orphaned assistant to Dr. Pellinore Warthrop, a man with a most unusual specialty: monstrumology, the study of monsters. In his time with the doctor, Will has met many a mysterious late-night visitor, and seen things he never imagined were real. But when a grave robber comes calling in the middle of the night with a gruesome find, he brings with him their most deadly case yet.

Critically acclaimed author Rick Yancey has written a gothic tour de force that explores the darkest heart of man and monster and asks the question: When does a man become the very thing he hunts?

Night Runner

Book Cover Art NIGHT RUNNER
Max Turner
St. Martin's Griffin
ISBN: 9780312592288
Ages 12-up
272 pages

For Zack Thomson, living in the Nicholls Ward isn't so bad. After his parents died, he developed strange and severe allergies, and the mental institution was the only place where he could be properly looked after. As strange as it was, it was home. He could watch as much television as he wanted; his best friend Charlie visited him often enough; and Nurse Ophelia --- prettiest no-nonsense nurse ever --- sometimes took him bowling. Of course, that didn't mean he had it easy. His allergies restricted his diet to strawberry smoothies, and being the only kid at the hospital could get lonely. But it never once crossed Zack's mind to leave...until the night someone crashed through the front doors and told him to run. Now he's on a race for answers --- about his past, his parents, and his strange sickness --- even as every step takes him closer to the darkest of truths.

Viola

Book Cover Art VIOLA IN REEL LIFE
Adriana Trigiani
HarperTeen
ISBN: 9780061451027
Ages 12-up
288 pages

Three reasons why Viola Chesterton knows she’ll never survive her first year at boarding school:

1. She has to leave behind her best friend, Andrew

2. and replace him with three new roommates who, disturbingly, actually seem to like it there

3. "There" is South Bend, Indiana, which feels about as far away from her hometown of Brooklyn, New York, as you can get

Boarding school, though, is nothing like she thought it would be, and soon Viola realizes she's in for the most incredible year of her life. But first, she has to put the camera down, and let the world in.

Sequel to THE RED NECKLACE

Book Cover Art THE SILVER BLADE
Sally Gardner
Dial Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 9780803733770
Ages 12-up
368 pages

The year is 1794. With his beloved Sido safely in England and the Reign of Terror at its height, mysterious Yann returns to revolutionary France to smuggle out aristocratic refugees who will otherwise face the guillotine. But while the two are apart, Yann’s Gypsy origins prejudice Sido’s guardian against their marriage, thwarting their longed-for reunion. When Sido is kidnapped under strange circumstances, however, Yann must use all his strength and courage to outwit the evil Count Kalliovski, rescue Sido and help save all of France.


    --- Compiled by Allie Bodack and written by Tom Donadio

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