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Dylan, a junior at a rough, south-side Oklahoma City high school, who doesn’t figure he’ll amount to much, is the butt of jokes at school because of his weight, and with only a couple friends and no hopes of getting a girlfriend, seems an unlikely hero, even in his own life.  When he discovers the body of a classmate in a dumpster behind the school, Dylan gets a taste of popularity; too bad it only lasts a day or two.  Realizing that his life is nothing more than “a zero in the scheme of the universe” (28), Dylan decides that what he needs is toRead More →

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Georgie Burkhardt is a feisty, smart, and headstrong girl.  She speaks her mind plainly, will not abide nonsense and foolishness, and has the truest aim with her rifle that anyone has ever seen.  Georgie is certain about most things in her life: the fact that she and her older sister Agatha will one day run their grandfather’s general store in their small prairie-edge town of Placid, Wisconsin; that gold has more value than paper; and that “living with uncertainty is like having a rock in your shoe.  If you can’t remove the rock, you have to figure out how to walk despite it.  There isRead More →

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“Forgetting who you are is so much more complicated that simply forgetting your name. It’s also forgetting your dreams. Your aspirations. What makes you happy. What you pray you’ll never have to live without. It’s meeting yourself for the first time, and not being sure of your first impressions.” (8)  There’s only one thing you can count on in a world without memories, and that’s your heart.  The feelings that flood you, the warmth or the chill that envelopes you, that’s the only barometer you have when nothing else makes sense. Learning that you must let it guide you to those you can trust andRead More →

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“Altering identity, altering reality” – in general, we believe that a few times in life a person is given the chance to do just that: moving to a new town where no one knows you; going off to college, especially if you choose a school where few (if any) of your high school friends are going; when you start a new job; or when you travel.  And the transformative power of travel is at the core of Gayle Forman’s latest, Just One Day.  As Gayle herself wrote in the letter to booksellers that accompanied the ARC: “sometimes on the road, the most amazing, frustrating, eye-opening, terrifying, bewilderingRead More →

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High above the dense Central American rain forests, Mad and her younger sister Roo fly in a tiny plane towards a massive volcano.  Roo is barely able to contain her excitement while Mad’s hanging on for dear life as the little plane shifts this way and that.  They’re on the way, with their mom and Ken/Neth (an annoying “friend of the family”) to meet Mad’s dad, “The Bird Guy” – a world renowned ornithologist – who’s been holed up at an exclusive resort at the base of the volcano for more than 7 months.   Mad’s dad would go anywhere to study rare birds, and when heRead More →

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Delightfully blending mystery, fantasy, and adventure, Mark Steensland’s Behind the Bookcase is chock full of everything there is to love about scary stories.  From a creepy “haunted” house, to hidden passages that lead to a sinister shadow world populated by creatures straight from nightmares, to a race against time to save our world from being overrun by evil, once you go behind the bookcase, you won’t want to venture out. Soon-to-be twelve year old Sarah does not want to spend her summer living in and fixing up her recently deceased grandmother’s run-down, spooky old house far away from her home and friends in Southern California.Read More →

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Readers who enjoy dystopian literature, especially the variety presented in books like The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins or 1984 by George Orwell, will likely take pleasure in book one of The Torch Keeper series by Steven Dos Santos.  In this new world, benign terms like incentives, recruits, and shelved mask unspeakable malignancy for an Establishment that is focused on genetic engineering and on manufacturing biological weapons. The Culling features Lucian Spark, a sixteen-year-old boy who lives in The Parish, a community formed after Earth was destroyed by the Ash Wars.  Life in The Parish is ruled by The Establishment, which has very strictRead More →

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Come join us Wednesday March 27, 2013 from 5pm-8pm for a Pie Social with author Jessica Brody. Books will be available to purchase or you can bring your own for her to sign. Plus, she’ll give a short talk at 6:30pm about her newest book, Unremembered. Please RSVP on facebook. We can’t wait to see you there!Read More →