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18 years after a seemingly harmless virus was introduced at a theme park, all that remains of the United States east of the Mississippi River is a desolate, abandoned wasteland know as The Feral Zone.  No one knows what happened to anyone who was unlucky enough to have either been infected by the Ferae virus or left behind in the mass exodus West since a great wall separates The West from the Feral Zone, although rumors do circulate about exiled criminals, hideous man-beasts, and other nightmarish creatures. 17 year old Lane, who has lived her entire life in the West, is mildly curious about what’sRead More →

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Recently graduated from high school and hoping to pursue a career in landscape architecture, Elizabeth Owens can’t wait to leave New Jersey for college at Berkeley.  Lauren Collins, who already lives in San Francisco, wants escape, too, and has requested a single room for the privacy, solitude, and novelty of no longer having to share space with anyone, especially her five siblings, six and under.  So, when Lauren learns her request has been denied and receives a “Hi, Roomie” email from EB inquiring about microwaves and mini-fridges, her reply is cool and somewhat curt.  A bit certain about EB’s warm overtures, Lauren aspires to work inRead More →

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Then: 14 year old Becca’s father, her hero, was convicted of embezzlement in one of the most high-publicized, scandalous trials of the decade.  The depth and breadth of his crimes, from raiding people’s online profiles, to blackmail, to pyramid schemes, and his unrepentant gall in the face of his guilt, made Becca’s father into a monster that everyone loved to hate.  Reviled in their home town of Atlanta, Becca and her mom have fled north, hiding the details of their past, changing their names, and doing their best to leave behind their shame and notoriety. Now:  Becca, a senior in high school, has created asRead More →

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With Elizabeth Eulberg’s recent release, Better off Friends, readers will follow Macallan Dietz and Levi Rodgers as the author asks the question, Can a guy and a girl be legitimately best friends and only friends without the complications of romance? The novel begins when Macallan is just eleven years old and follows her through her senior year in high school.  With Macallan, who craves the discipline and distractions of school, loyalties run deep.  However, “beneath her sweet exterior is a snarky center with quick wit and even quicker rebounds” (116).  She staunchly supports her uncle Adam who was born with a birth defect which affectsRead More →

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That Jennifer Lynn Barnes has advanced degrees in psychology, psychiatry, and cognitive science is obvious in her new book, The Naturals, a book sure to appeal to readers like me who enjoy television programs like Criminal Minds and Cold Case. The book stars seventeen-year-old Cassie Hobbes, who describes herself as odd: “odd-looking, oddly quite, always the odd one out” (17).  While “other kids spent their preschool years singing their way through the ABC’s” (9), Cassie was learning a different alphabet: the BPE’s, tricks of her psychic mother’s trade: behavior, personality, environment.  When her mother is murdered, Cassie ends up in Colorado with her loud extendedRead More →

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With The Hit, Melvin Burgess takes on several key social and philosophical issues: political corruption, drug abuse/use, social class and power disparities, and measuring life’s value.  When the world begins to spin out of control and all hope seems lost, we look for an escape.  For seventeen-year-old Adam, who can only see hard work ahead and never earning enough to do what he wants, that escape is the drug called Death.  Death started out as a euthanasia drug, one that would give the terminally ill a week of bliss.  But when the young began to look at it as “the biggest high”—a way to improveRead More →

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When eighth graders Andrej Tschichatschow and Mike Klingenberg don’t receive invitations to the popular Tatiana Cosic’s birthday party, they set off to make their own fun on an epic adventure across Germany in a stolen Lada.  Bound for Wallachia without a map, the boys experience “the feeling of invincibility. No accident, no authority, no law of nature could stop us” (209).  As they travel, they discuss life, death, love, and sexuality.  They also encounter Isa Schmidt, who lives in the dump and shows them how to siphon gasoline; Horst Fricke, a former military sharpshooter who shoots at them and then offers them an orange soda andRead More →

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Having spent grades 7-11 in the cab of a semi-truck, home-schooled on the road by her father, Hayley Rose Kincain doesn’t know the rules for high school, where flaunts, taunts, and poses are all part of what she calls the zombie life.  Refusing to be colonized by the hive at Belmont High, Hayley spends a good part of her senior year in detention for correcting teachers’ mistakes and for committing other rule infractions.   Quiet, gawky, awkward, strangely smart, and “adorkable”—according to her friend Gracie Rappaport—Hayley wants to have a good time and make the world a better place. Those aspirations are nearly impossible, though, forRead More →

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Written as letters from a sixteen-year-old girl to an inmate, Ketchup Clouds by Annabel Pitcher tells the story of Zoe.  This British girl, who dreams someday of becoming an author of children’s books, has killed someone she was supposed to love.  With the guilt weighing heavily on her, Zoe locates a man on death row in Texas, guilty of his own crime of passion, and adopts him as her pen pal—a kindred spirit who might understand “the pain and the fear and the sadness and the guilt and the hundred other feelings that don’t even have a name in all of the English language” (7). Read More →