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15-year old Zeeta’s life with her free-spirited mother, Layla, is anything but normal. Every year Layla picks another country she wants to live in  – this summer they’re in Ecuador, while Zeeta longs for a “normal” life in the American suburbs. Zeeta makes friends with vendors at the town market and begs them to think of upstanding, “normal” men to set up with Layla. There, Zeeta meets Wendell who was born nearby, but adopted by an American family. His one wish is to find his birth parents, and Zeeta agrees to help him. Their quest takes them to an idealized indigenous village, through jungles, crystalRead 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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Penguin Young Readers Group has a great lineup for Fall 2009!  We’re looking forward to seeing awesome series continue, new titles from favorite authors, and some fantastic debuts.  Check it out: Arch Enemy: The Looking Glass Wars, Book Three, Frank Beddor – October 2009:   As SEEING REDD ended, King Arch had been successful in sapping Wonderland – including Alyss and Redd – of Imagination. Now the two enemy queens are forced to come together in an attempt to reclaim Wonderland and their imaginative powers. Hatter M is AWOL as he escorts his daughter, Molly, to our world, leaving her in the care of Charles DodgsonRead More →

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Best-selling author Louanne Johnson (Dangerous Minds) has a new YA book due out from Random House in September 2009, Muchacho. Eddie Corazon is an angry, but smart, guy.  Since grade school he’s been working hard to maintain his image as a juvenile delinquent, but he’s a secret reader.  He hangs out with his cousins in the rough barrios of Rosablanca, New Mexico, who always back him up (when they’re not in jail), but he won’t get himself involved in the robberies, drug deals and gang violence that surround him.  But then he meet Lupe at school and over the course of his junior year, Eddie startsRead More →

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What happens when your truth is so unbelievable, so horrifying, so awful that you can’t bear it? And you can’t ever trust anyone with this truth? You become a liar.  Micah tells us that right up front that she’s a liar, and then in the next breath, promises to tell the reader the whole truth, because she’s tired of living under the burden of all of her lies.  But when you’ve become addicted to something, you can’t just quit cold turkey (and when someone promises finally to tell the full truth, chances are more lies are what you’ll be hearing). Throughout Liar, the forthcoming book fromRead More →

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What’s the toughest part about Hunger Games? After finishing it, the next book that I read just doesn’t have as much grab for me. I wonder if that’s a problem for Suzanne Collins. As I talked with students and staff about what to expect with Catching Fire, we had no clue how the author would follow up such a great story. Now I can’t figure which one’s my favorite. We knew that there would be rebellion. There’s no way that Capitol officials would let Katniss’ act of defiance go unnoticed. In the first book it is made very clear that Panem resembles Ancient Rome, hostingRead More →

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Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing hopes to attract more teens to its books through the creation of a new Pulse It social networking site. The site is aimed at 14- to 18-year-olds and will let teens do things they can do on such places as Facebook—like create personal profiles and befriend other members—as well as read and react to S&S titles. S&S will make two books per month available to be read online for free and members can choose one of those titles and have 60 days to finish the book. Message boards will let readers discuss the book and rank it. The site willRead More →

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Brilliant!  Little, Brown’s Fall 2009 line-up includes a collection of short stories edited by Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci, Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd, and it’s freakin’ awesome. Bringing together some great voices in YA lit: John Green, Cassandra Clare, M.T. Anderson, Scott Westerfeld, David Levithan, Barry Lyga, Garth Nix, Libba Bray and more, Black & Castellucci have created a smart, wry, funny and sometimes painful look at all things geek.  Opening with a laugh-out-loud story by the editors about a hook up at a comicon gone wrong (Klingon and Jedi – no way!), through stories of geek education classes for cheerleaders, cosplayers and MMORPG enthusiasts meeting upRead More →

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From the latest issue of School Library Journal,Shonda Brisco highlights some cool online and digital resources.  Here are a couple: Animoto– create videos with sound on this site to quickly and easily mix book-cover images, photos, text and music to create 30-second online video book talks, book trailers, sneak peeks, etc.  There’s lots of potential here for both novice and tech-savvy students & educators. One More Story – an interactive instructional program that allows children to select, listen to, read along with, or read independently, over 50 award-winning childrens’ picture books.Read More →