Saint Iggy

by K.L. Going

Sixteen-year-old Iggy Corso is a projects kid who never caught a break in his whole life. Both parents are drug addicts who owe their souls to their dealer, Freddie, and hardly remember Iggy is alive.  In fact, Iggy's mom went "visiting" weeks ago and hasn't been seen since.  Iggy gets kicked out of school for doing something stupid, and it's basically his last chance.  Iggy never intends to do bad things, but he just seems to fall into situations no matter how hard he tries to stay out of trouble.  He has a hearing with the school superintendant in three days, and he decides he will figure out some way to contribute to society, so that he can convince the school authorities to let him back into school.  When he needs some help and comfort, he goes to his friend Mo's apartment, but Mo is not in a good place himself.  One thing leads to another and soon Iggy finds himself with Mo in Freddie, the drug dealer's apartment, the last place on earth Iggy wants to be.  Mo leaves the place with an assortment of drugs and a $2000 bill to Freddie that he has to pay within a few days.  No one knows better than Iggy that debts to Freddie never get paid, but he goes with Mo to his rich mother's place where Mo is sure he can get the money, and Iggy sees a life he never knew existed.  Mo's mom takes Iggy under her wing, but refuses to give Mo the money.  Iggy knows that Mo is in deep trouble, and he finally realizes what he has to do to contribute to society.  Iggy is a character that it's hard not to like, and who doesn't deserve all he gets.    Saint Iggy is an intense story of drug addiction and poverty, and how one boy chooses to deal with it.  ~reviewed by Dail Sams

Hate List
by Jennifer Brown

Ever since that terrible day last May when her boyfriend, Nick, opened fire on students in their school commons, Valerie has tried understand how she couldn't have seen what was coming. How could something like their hate list just be a way of blowing off steam for her, but deadly serious to Nick, and she never realized it?  Shot while she tried to stop Nick from targeting the people on the list, Valerie is caught between those who believe she is just as guilty as Nick, and those who think she is a hero for saving another student.  All she knows is that the hate list was her idea, and she lost the best friend she ever had when Nick turned the gun on himself.  In the months following the shootings, Valerie alternates between total self-absorption, and surprising sympathy for others. This amazing first novel by Jennifer Brown, tells the story of a girl who slowly crawls back to health from a black hole, and the unexpected compassion she receives along the way.  Highly recommended!    ~reviewed by Dail Sams

The New Policeman

by Kate Thompson

      J.J. and his family live on a farm outside the small Irish village of Kinvara.  Musicians all, the four family members struggle to keep up with everything in their lives.  There's never enough time to do it all--chores, school work, house work, fiddle-playing and dancing. It almost seems like the days get shorter and shorter all the time.  J.J.'s mom Helen has a birthday coming up.  All she wants is more time.  J.J. doesn't know how he's going to do it, but he's determined to get more time for his mom.  A chance meeting with a neighbor lady sends J.J. exploring the underground rooms of an ancient fort ruins, and there Anne Korff shows him the passageway into another world, the world of the faeries, where time is supposed to stand still.  Together they hope to discover where the time leak from one world to the other is, and plug up the hole.  The problem with traveling between the two worlds is that it's hard to remember why you've come once you cross over.  J.J. struggles to stay focused on his purpose of finding the time leak.  Meanwhile, the new policeman in Kinvara is really a faerie who entered from the faerie world to search for the leak from this side.  Only he just can't remember why he became a policeman.  Interwoven with ancient Irish legends and the traditional dance music of generations ago, this quiet and magical tale charms and seduces the reader and draws him back to a time in history when fairies and leprechans were as real as a next door neighbor.  A lovely story.

         ~reviewed by Mrs. Sams

Getting the Girl:  A Guide to Private Investigation, Surveillance, and Cookery.

by Susan Juby

Getting the Girl has both of the things I love and the things I hate about young adult novels.  I enjoyed the interesting plotline and appealing main character/narrator.  Sherman Mack is a quirkly ninth grader with a fairly irresponsible mother.  To say that he is often unsupervised, is a gigantic understatement.  Sherm attends a high school where some secret group or person "defiles" a fellow classmate for very obscure reasons.  Being defiled is pretty much the worst thing that can happen to a person, because it's equivalent to being a leper in Biblical times or an "untouchable" in India.  In one nanosecond, the entire student body turns against a student in very cruel, nasty ways.  Did I mention that the defiled are always girls?   When one of  Sherman's friends is defiled, he decides enough is enough, and begins his own entertaining and mostly ineffective "investigation" into possible suspects.  This is a fun read, but here comes the thing I hate most about young adult novels.  When authors feel the need to include multiple crudities and unending suggestive language and situations, I just get frustrated.  It seems to take the fun out of the story for me.   I would recommend this book with warnings.                  ~reviewed by Mrs. Sams

                                                                                                                                                                                

Jessica's Guide to Dating on the Dark Side

by Beth Fantaskey

     Jessica's Guide is yet another in the huge glut of vampire books following the popularity of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series.  In it, Jessica is a normal teen, adopted by her parents from Eastern Europe when she was a small child. When Lucius Vladescu, a vampire prince, arrives to claim Jessica as his vampire princess bride and carry out the pact made years before, Jessica realizes her senior year is not likely to go as planned.  Lucius is quite handsome, but completely arrogant and overbearing.  And he finds Jessica common and unappealing.  Although the plot premise has potential, I found it just didn't quite live up to the promise.  The book has a bantering tone some of the time that indicates the author was after a light-hearted comedy.  But as the story progresses, it gets darker and more intense.  The reader is left with ambiguous feelings.  Jessica is no Bella and Lucius is no Edward, but still this is a mostly entertaining read for those who can't get enough of vampires.

            ~reviewed by Mrs. Sams

Into the Wild
by Jon Krakauer

"In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do East Coast family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt McKinley.  Four months later his decomposed body was found by a party of moose hunters."  So begins the Author's Note of Into the Wild, an account of the events leading up to the tragic death of Chris McCandless.  Krakauer began his research into this harrowing true tale for the purpose of writing an article which was published in Outside Magazine in early 1993.  The article received so much attention that Krakauer decided to do further research and expand the piece into a book.  Meticulously and sympathetically, Jon Krakauer retraces Chris's steps following his graduation from Emory University in 1990, when he disappeared into the West and discontinued all contact with his family.  Though estranged from his parents, Chris was no hermit.  He made friends and influenced people along the way.  In addition to revealing the passionate and intense personality of McCandless, Krakauer also includes stories of other adventurers who ended much as Chris did, and devotes a chapter to his own life when he was near Chris's age, all for the purpose of shedding light on the person Chris McCandless was.  A fascinating and engrossing read, Into the Wild is a cautionary tale against the pride of youth.  I'd recommend this book to anyone who loves a good adventure story, but especially to young men with itchy feet and the intense desire to experience nature to the fullest. 
      --reviewed by Dail Sams

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

The Ask and the Answer
by Patrick Ness

After running for weeks to reach Haven and escape Mayor Prentiss and his men, Todd carries the wounded Viola into the town square of Haven, only to find the Mayor waiting there for them. So ends Book One of the Chaos Walking trilogy.  The intensity never lets up in Book Two, The Ask and the Answer, as Todd and Viola are separated, manipulated, and deceived by the Mayor and others with their own agendas.  Viola finds herself aligned with a rebel group of women called the Answer, led by Mistress Coyle, a healer and adept strategist for planning terrorist attacks on the city.  Meanwhile, Todd is a virtual prisoner of Mayor Prentiss, and is made to do increasingly cruel and immoral acts.  He doesn't have the will to resist because he believes Viola has left him alone on purpose.  His means of enduring is to turn off his emotions entirely and refuse to think about the pain he is inflicting on women of the city and the Spackle, natives of the planet.  As the Answer steps up their terrorist attacks, Mayor Prentiss responds with his own brand of evil cruelty in the Office of the Ask.  Both groups are trying to solidify their own power before the arrival of Viola's people in their space ship.  The final agonizing scene of this powerful story finds the Ask and the Answer racing toward a final battle on the outskirts of the city, the spaceship nearing arrival, and Todd finally gaining a tenuous control over the Mayor inside the now destroyed cathedral, when out of the hills a totally unexpected conquering force marches toward the city.  This is the epitome of a "cliff hanger."  As with the first in this trilogy, The Knife of Never Letting Go, I found this story incredibly painful to read, but once begun, there's no stopping. This saga is so much more than science fiction.  --reviewed by Mrs. Sams

the red necklace

by Sally Gardner

I find it really too bad that the cover of this book is so "girly."  That probably will keep many guys from checking it out, which is a shame, because the main character of this book is Yann Margoza, an appealing orphan Gypsy boy who has been reared by Tetu, a dwarf with powers of the mind.  They make their living by performing in a magic show in a Paris theater.  Yann himself has limited powers which he uses in the show, but these powers seem to desert him one night when he meets Count Kalliovski, a creepy and intimidating man of the upper class, and Sido, despised daughter of the selfish and silly Marquis de Villeduval.  Set against the backdrop of the turmoil and bloodbath of the French Revolution, this story is full of intrigue and interesting historical facts.  To avoid being captured and killed by the evil count, Yann is forced to flee to London, where he is cared for by a well-to-do couple, and educated as a gentleman.  When he learns that Sido and her father are in danger, he realizes that he must return to Paris and rescue them.  In his quest to recapture his former powers and learn new ones, Yann also seeks out the Gypsy community near Paris and comes to grip with his own heritage.  I really liked this story.  It's much more than a historical novel, and Yann and Sido's story is compelling.  I'm not sure if a sequel is forthcoming, but it's possible since Gardner left plenty of loose ends.    ~reviewed by Dail Sams