SKINNED
by Robin Wasserman

For readers of Scott Westerfeld's Uglies series, the cover of this book may look familiar, and it would be tempting to assume that the storyline is similar.   Lia Kahn's physical body is really the main character in this book, and there the similarities end.  Skinned takes place in a future, post-nuclear accident America, where the rich have every possible advantage and the poor live in unhealthy squalor.  Medical science has advanced to the point that a person's mind can be downloaded into a beautiful mechanical body, but those who have had the procedure done, either by choice or because their bodies have become so damaged that they had no choice, if they wanted to continue to exist, are looked at as inhuman, souless machines.  They are the outcasts of society.  After a horrifying accident, Lia's father decides to save her by giving her a mechanical body. She is then faced with not only adjusting to the physical changes, the change in her social status, but much more importantly, dealing with who and what she has become emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually.  This book poses all the difficult questions about what it means to be human, whether there is a god and spiritual life, and what the responsibility is of those who are virtually indestructible to those who aren't.  None of these problems are solved, but at the end, Lia is at last ready to consider the questions.  Skinned is Book One in a trilogy which promises to be full of action and thought-provoking angst.  ~reviewed by Dail Sams

the summer i turned pretty
by Jennifer Han

Belly (a nickname for Isabel) lived for the summers--the long summers in Susannah's beach house, with her mother, Laurel, and brother Steven and Susannah and her boys, Jeremiah and Conrad.  Susannah and Laurel had been best friends forever, so they blended their families every summer.  Jeremiah and Conrad seemed as much Belly's brothers as Steven did, except she had always had a crush on Conrad. If Conrad noticed it, he never gave any indication.  This summer, the summer of Belly's sixteenth birthday, everything seemed different.  Steven was only there for a couple of weeks because he was leaving to visit colleges with his dad, Belly was dating a local boy, which didn't seem to make Jeremiah and Conrad very happy, Conrad was aloof and angry all the time, and Susannah spent a lot of time in her bedroom.  The tension was thick, but Belly didn't know what was wrong.  She only knew that for the first time ever, she was being noticed, and she liked it.  When Susannah's illness finally comes out, Belly realizes what has been wrong with Conrad all summer, and she also realizes nothing can be the same again.  An appealing coming of age story with an ending that didn't quite add up.            ~reviewed by Mrs. Sams