In My Mailbox (52)

In My Mailbox is an Internet meme hosted by The Story Siren to share new books received, purchased, or borrowed.   


So here's what I got this week!

Purchased:

• As I Wake by Elizabeth Scott (Squee! You all know how I feel about Ms. Scott, right? And how excited was I to get this in the mail a full day before its official release date LOL)
• Inconvenient by Margie Gelbwasser (I've read and reviewed Inconvenient and interviewed Margie, but she'll be at the Collingswood Book Festival and I definitely can't wait to *meet* her in person!)

Won from Mundie Moms: an ARC of Wildefire by Karsten Knight (thanks, Katie!):

Borrowed from the library:

• All These Things I've Done by Gabrielle Zevin (woo-hoo! Been waiting for this one forever!)
• Every You, Every Me by David Levithan (yay!)
• Isle of Blood: Monstrumologist #3 by Rick Yancey (double yay!)
• Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich (adult nonfiction and my choice for Banned Books Week!)

What did you get?

Enjoy your reading!

Christi

Rival by Sara Bennett Wealer

Rival by Sara Bennett Wealer

HarperTeen, February 11, 2011

Read for 2011 Debut Author Challenge, YA Contemps Challenge AND A-Z Challenge

Summary from Goodreads:

What if your worst enemy turned out to be the best friend you ever had?
Meet Brooke: Popular, powerful and hating every minute of it, she’s the “It” girl at Douglas High in Lake Champion, Minnesota. Her real ambition? Using her operatic mezzo as a ticket back to NYC, where her family lived before her dad ran off with an up and coming male movie star. 
Now meet Kathryn: An overachieving soprano with an underachieving savings account, she’s been a leper ever since Brooke punched her at a party junior year. For Kath, music is the key to a much-needed college scholarship. 
The stage is set for a high-stakes duet between the two seniors as they prepare for the prestigious Blackmore competition. Brooke and Kathryn work toward the Blackmore with eyes not just on first prize but on one another, each still stinging from a past that started with friendship and ended in betrayal. With competition day nearing, Brooke dreams of escaping the in-crowd for life as a professional singer, but her scheming BFF Chloe has other plans. And when Kathryn gets an unlikely invitation to Homecoming, she suspects Brooke of trying to sabotage her with one last public humiliation. 
As pressures mount, Brooke starts to sense that the person she hates most might just be the best friend she ever had. But Kathryn has a decision to make. Can she forgive? Or are some rivalries for life?

I finally got around to reading this book--it's been on my nook since it was released in February. Another one of those books that I knew I'd enjoy, so I waited to read it. Rival is a very quick and enjoyable debut. It's not your typical popular girl versus loner chick book, although this is the underlying theme, of course. With the chapters alternating points of view, readers are able to glimpse events as they're observed by both Brooke and Kathryn, and we quickly realize that what each girl recognizes as the truth might be anything but.

I appreciated that we were able to see Brooke's side of the story, too, so we could realize that she wasn't really the bitch she first appeared. I seem to be on a "books-about-girls-whose-fathers-want-nothing-to-do-with-them" kick lately. I wasn't too sure about the ending--I mean, it worked, but I think I might have liked a different outcome. Still, Rival was an impressive debut and I look forward to reading more from Sara!

Own book.

Enjoy your reading!
Christi

Between by Jessica Warman

Between by Jessica Warman

Walker & Co., August 2, 2011

Summary from Goodreads:

Elizabeth Valchar --- pretty, popular and rich --- wakes up the morning after her 18th birthday on the yacht where she’d been celebrating with her closest friends. A persistent thumping noise has roused her. When she goes to investigate, she finds her own drowned body is hitting the side of the boat. Liz is dead. She has no memory of what happened to her, and can only observe in horror the fallout of her death.  

She’s also soon joined by Alex Berg, a quiet boy from her high school who was killed by a hit-and-run driver. The two keep each other company, floating in and out of memories and trying to piece together the details of what happened to each of them.  

In her regular life, Liz was a runner. It wasn’t abnormal for her to run 8-10 miles per day. But as memories from closer to her death begin to surface, Liz finds that she’d been running much more than normal, and that she’d all but stopped eating. Liz’s mother, who died when Liz was nine, had battled with anorexia as well, and those around her worried that Liz was following in her mother’s footsteps. But something more sinister was consuming Liz from the inside out...

This is one of those books that you really can't say that much about, without giving too much away. As a huge fan of If I Stay and Before I Fall, I was very much looking forward to reading this when I picked it up at BEA. So, following that logic, I proceeded to put it aside until August. :)


I. Loved. This. Book. I think the size was a little daunting--it's a thick book! But once you get into it, man, you cannot turn the pages fast enough! From the beginning we know that Dead Liz is not nearly the same as Live Liz, but we're so intrigued to learn how she got from there to here.


I love Jessica Warman's take on afterlife--Liz is stuck between life and death, but she doesn't know why. She can go back to certain memories, but she has to figure out why those memories are important. And, oh yeah, Alex is there to help her. Alex was killed a year earlier in an as-yet-unsolved hit and run accident. And Alex was definitely not part of the upper crust of society, like Liz was. Neither one knows why they were paired up in this in-between stage, and I loved the tension between the two.


I fluctuated between love and hate for Liz. She was an awfully spoiled little princess, and a lot of what she says to Alex is just downright mean. However, she starts to grow in the in-between, and begins to realize WHY she acted that way--and discovers the ramifications of her actions. 


The actual mystery that Liz is trying to solve seemed pretty obvious to me, as an outsider, but it was still quite interesting both to watch Liz make that realization and see if the living would come to the same conclusion. I highly recommend this book--it's got romance, it's got mystery, and it's an excellent read.


ARC picked up at BEA.


Enjoy your reading!
Christi

Nonfiction Help!

I'm desperately asking any or all of you for help! It's time to replenish my collections, and I have until next Friday to come up with a list. My fiction section is pretty awesome (if I do say so myself), but I weeded the hell out of my nonfiction section this summer, and would like to restock it with some new, current, incredible titles. I'm scouring the Internet and the resources I have available but I'm not a big reader of nonfiction so I don't really know what's hot. If any of you have any suggestions for must-have YA nonfiction, I would be greatly appreciative!

The titles have to be YA, not adult-with-YA-appeal. I know I weeded a lot in these categories:

• Computers/Technology
• Sex/Puberty/Coming of Age
• Jobs/Careers/College
• I'm also interested in books dealing with true crime and/or kids in juvenile detention/prison (prison memoirs always go over big at the local juvenile center I visit)
• I don't think I'm too concerned with history right now--our YA nonfic is interfiled with adult nonfic, and their history collection is pretty tight.

I know there are the nonfiction series (like FAQ, Opposing Viewpoints, etc.), but...eh. I'd rather find some incredible standalones. I did find a bunch of titles that caught my eye and that I think would circ well at my library, but unfortunately they're not in the categories I mentioned above LOL

It's funny how I always say I wish I could pick my own stuff, but when given such a broad assignment, I'm coming up blank! Have any awesome suggestions for me?

Enjoy your reading!
Christi

Sweetly by Jackson Pearce

Sweetly by Jackson Pearce

August 23, 2011, Little, Brown

Summary from Goodreads:

SWEETLY is a modernization of Hansel and Gretel and a companion book to SISTERS RED.  

Twelve years ago, Gretchen, her twin sister, and her brother went looking for a witch in the forest. They found something. Maybe it was a witch, maybe a monster, they aren’t sure—they were running too fast to tell. Either way, Gretchen’s twin sister was never seen again.  

Years later, after being thrown out of their house, Gretchen and Ansel find themselves in Live Oak, South Carolina, a place on the verge of becoming a ghost town. They move in with Sophia Kelly, a young and beautiful chocolatier owner who opens not only her home, but her heart to Gretchen and Ansel. 
Yet the witch isn’t gone—it’s here, lurking in the forests of Live Oak, preying on Live Oak girls every year after Sophia Kelly’s infamous chocolate festival. But Gretchen is determined to stop running from witches in the forest, and start fighting back. Alongside Samuel Reynolds, a boy as quick with a gun as he is a sarcastic remark, Gretchen digs deeper into the mystery of not only what the witch is, but how it chooses its victims. Yet the further she investigates, the more she finds herself wondering who the real monster is, and if love can be as deadly as it is beautiful.

At the risk of being shunned, I did not love this novel. To be fair, I am not the biggest fan of fairy tale retellings to begin with (although I think Alex Flinn has done some awesome ones), and I suspect that's the reason why I hesitated to read this book for so long. BUT, my teens at the library have been pestering me for this book, and I do love the cover, so I finally decided to give it a whirl.


It felt like everything was dragged out for SOOOO long, and then bam! Everything comes to a quick conclusion. Ansel and Gretchen are supposed to be so in tune with each other, but she can't share what's really going on with Sophia because he loves her. OK, I get that--BUT 
YOU'RE IN FREAKING DANGER. Grow a set and tell him, already.


Fans of Sisters Red (which I'll admit I haven't read) and of fairy tale retellings in general will, obvs., love this novel. It just wasn't for me. 


Another thing that bothered me (and it must be just me, because I've yet to read a negative review of this book), will follow below. It might be kind of spoilery, so I'll leave some space.


























You've been warned....


























Werewolves. I am so over werewolves. I'm just sayin'.
























ARC received from publisher.


Enjoy your reading!
Christi

Library Program: 9/11 Documentary & Discussion

I hosted a 9/11 documentary viewing and discussion last Thursday at the library. I selected a documentary from our branch's collection called 102 Minutes That Changed America. It was a television special that aired, commercial-free, on the History Channel on September 11, 2008.

This film is a compilation of amateur and professional video taken during the harrowing 102 minutes where the Twin Towers were struck and ultimately collapsed. These are videos that I, at least, have never seen before and the reactions captured are all raw and real in their own right. There are videos from college students in an NYU dorm, people watching from Times Square, across the river, a block away, a mile away. The documentary is shown in real time with no narration--just titles of where the video was shot. It's definitely a harrowing documentary. You can learn more about it here, if you'd like.

On the evening of the program I welcomed my teens to the library and gave a little introduction to the film. My regular teens at the library are young--between 13 and 16 years old. None of them had any recollection of 9/11, although some said they've been told they watched it happen on TV. I explained my personal connection to the events--my husband, at the time a bridge painter in NY, watched the towers fall on his birthday. Two days later, his crew showed up at Ground Zero to offer their services with the search and rescue. I was at work at the time--teaching kindergarten in a day care in central NJ. Many of our parents worked in NY; one of our after-care students lost her dad that day.

I wanted to make the events real for my teens. I know they'd spent time in school this week learning about the events, but I wanted them to know this was something real that happened. I think this documentary captured that reality. I think my teens definitely took something away from this program, especially because so much of this footage is so raw. 

While a few of my teens were less than interested (and one actually asked if we could put another movie in),  I think it was because their level of comfort that was being tested. The movie ran over our typical 8:30pm end time, so I lost a great number of teens at that time, but several did stay until the conclusion. Next week we'll be back to our regular teen advisory board meetings, planning upcoming programs (and actually, this program was suggested by the very same teen advisory board!), but hopefully tonight's program will make the events of 9/11 real to these teens who have no memories of it.

Enjoy your reading!

Christi

In My Mailbox (51)

In My Mailbox is an Internet meme hosted by The Story Siren to share new books received, purchased, or borrowed.


So here's what I got this week!


I'd pre-ordered Ashes by Ilsa Bick on my nook, and Tuesday morning it was there! Cannot wait to start this one, I've heard nothing but great things about it!



And because I pre-ordered Ashes, I got these nifty gifts from Jen over at Literaticat (thank you!):

• I had won a signed copy of Divergent in a TLC Auction a while back, and it finally came! Woo hoo!

Received from publisher (thank you, Little, Brown!):

• How to Save a Life by Sara Zarr 

From NetGalley:

• If I Tell by Janet Gurtler
• You Are My Only by Beth Kephart

Borrowed from the library:

• Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
• I'm Not Her by Janet Gurtler (huh, 2 books by her in 1 week!)
• Norweigan Wood by Haruki Murakami (this book was pulled off a summer reading list in NJ recently & I wanted to see what all the hubbub was about)
• Never Have I Ever (Lying Game #2) by Sara Shepard
• Kill Me If You Can by James Patterson (adult fic)

So what did you get?
Enjoy your reading!
Christi