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I may have been watching too much Buffy: The Vampire Slayer lately, but… 16 year old Nikki’s just moved to another town and unlike other schools, seems to have been able to make friends with the most popular girl in school. And, the cutest guy has just asked her to attend the winter formal dance.  But then a strange, secretive guy starts stalking her.  When Michael finally catches up to Nikki, he reveals that her long-lost father is actually a demon king, charged with protecting the Shadowlands and prohibiting the demons of Hell from reaching Earth.  Now that Nikki is 16, her powers as a Darkling, half-human, half-demon will emerge.Read More →

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The wait was long; the wait was painful; but today the mystery was solved!  In Ghost in the Machine, Patrick Carman concludes his highly suspenseful, fast-paced, and tech-savvy thriller duo that started in last year’s Skeleton Creek.  When we left high school best friends Ryan and Sarah at the nail-biting end of Skeleton Creek, they were trapped in the defunct,  surface-mining gold dredge outside their tiny, isolated home town.  Forbidden to have contact with each other, yet bent on solving the sinister mysteries surrounding the dredge’s death-laden past, Ryan and Sarah snuck into the dredge late at night to find a secret room when they wereRead More →

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The four 12-year-olds who are enrolled in the summer program at the highly secretive, highly selective School of Fear have got some real issues:Madeline lives in abject terror of spiders and bugs; Theo is petrified by the thought of either himself or anyone in his family dying; Lulu’s claustrophobia overwhelms her and everyone around her; and sports star Garrison breaks out into an uncontrollable sweat at the thought of coming in contact with water.  Their parents, at wits end, all seek help from the School of Fear, reputed to be able to cure the most overwhelming, life debilitating fears in its students. Maddie, Theo, LuluRead More →

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Ever since he was 10 years old and filled with The Holy Ghost, Little Texas has been a born-again, Evangelical preacher, doing God’s holy work on Earth, bringing souls to the Lord and healing people through his mysterious touch.  The trouble is, Ronald Earl, Little Texas that is, is now nearly 16 and starting to grapple with his own doubts, insecurities and bodily needs.  He’s still a vessel for the Lord’s power when he’s on stage testifying and preaching, but in the off hours as the ministry that’s built around him travels from one small Southern town to the next, Ronald Earl is plagued byRead More →

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In: Historical Fiction, Historical Fiction (YA), Middle Grade Reviews, Supernatural & Horror, Supernatural & Horror (YA), Young Adult Book Reviews
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In the 17th century being different from your fellow villagers, and being a woman, was a dangerous combination.  14 year old Mary Newbury lives a quiet life on the outskirts of a village in England with her healer grandmother. Until the day when the townsfolk turn against them, the witchhunters “try” her grandmother, convict her of being a witch, and hang the old woman. Mary is rescued by a cloaked woman who takes her to join a group of Puritans set to sail for the new world and the religious freedom the colonies offer. Thus opens the long lost journal of Mary Newbury and Celia Rees’ captivating and thrillingRead More →

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Leander Watts’ novel, Beautiful City of the Dead, reminds me of those amazing albums where great bands use their songs to tell a complex, multi-dimensional story.  Each classic song stands alone, brilliant and enchanting, but when interwoven with the others on the album, makes something deeper, wider and more powerful as the listener lets him/her-self be enveloped in the band’s vision. Of course this interpretation isn’t highly original, since on the surface the story is about a teenage “ghost metal” band – four friends who come together through their music and find meaning and power in their awkward teenage years.  But the way Watts weaves a supernatural, other-wordly elements into theRead More →

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Prophecy of the Sisters by Michelle Zink will release from Little, Brown in August 2009.  In it, readers are taken to late 19th-century Upstate New York where we meet wealthy heiress Lia, whose father has just died under mysterious circumstances.  16 year old Lia, along with her twin sister Alice and younger brother Henry, are left under the guardianship of their spinster Aunt in their family mansion.  Soon after her father’s death, Lia’s life takes a sharp turn for the worse as she discovers that she is caught up in a prophecy that has spanned generations of her family, and it may now be theRead More →

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In: Middle Grade Reviews, Romance (YA), Supernatural & Horror, Supernatural & Horror (YA), Young Adult Book Reviews
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Shiver is the perfect title for Maggie Stiefvater’s romance due out from Scholastic in August 2009.  In the literal sense, of course, because it’s the cold that forces Sam into wolf form and pulls him away from his one true love, Grace. But in the figurative sense as well because both Sam & Grace, and readers, will shiver throughout this book with delight, anticipation, yearning, fear and delicious sexual tension.   Grace is a 17 year old girl who yearns for something other than her middle class existence – escape; passion; an uninhibited life – something embodied in the wolves she watches every winter in the woods behindRead More →

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Chris Woodingcontinues his exploration of deep, dark, scary otherworlds in his latest book for young adults, Malice, due from Scholastic in October 2009. Like all good urban legends, it’s the thrill of the unknown that draws kids in: gather some odds & ends, chant a phrase 6 times, and then wait to see if Tall Jake comes for you.  And then there’s a creepy, hard-to-find comic called Malice that details erratically horrifying snipets of kids trapped in a dangerous underworld, most of whom meet gruesome ends. When one of their friends goes missing and then appears to die in the pages of Malice, Seth andRead More →