Walter Dean Myers: 1937-2014

Last week, the YA world lost one of its greats, Walter Dean Myers. He wrote poetry and prose. he wrote books about war, about love, about drugs, about growing up African-American in America. Most of all, he wrote books that didn't shy away from difficult or harrowing topics.

Just a few of his over 100 books:
Monster - about a 16-year-old boy on trial for murder
Fallen Angels - Ricky signs up for the Army because he can't afford college. Little does he know that the Vietnam War is ramping up.
Sunrise Over Fallujah - explores the invasion of Iraq from the perspective of another young Army private, Robin, who is the nephew of Ricky from Fallen Angels
What They Found: Love on 145th St - Short stories in verse format pull you into the world of Harlem and all the complex family, friend, and lovers' relationships there.

Myers started publishing in 1968 and was still writing at the time of his death. We will miss him, but we still have his books.

The Chaos of Stars by Kiersten White

Think you've got a difficult relationship with your mother? What if your mother was an immortal goddess, and you weren't? That's the situation facing Isadora, the daughter of Isis and Osiris, in Kiersten White's entertaining and fast-paced The Chaos of Stars.

It's rough on Isadora, living with her parents. They're thousands of years old, and she's sixteen. They have world-creating powers, and she's really good at . . . decorating her bedroom. They'll live forever, and she won't. When her mother announces her pregnancy, it's the last straw. Isadora flees to San Diego and her older brother's house and sets about trying to create a normal life for herself, like she's seen on TV and in magazines. But it's not so easy to fit in with other mortals when you've only known gods and goddesses your whole life.

And if you know your mythology, you know that there are always plots afoot, as the immortals scheme and backstab. But the plotting is darker this time. Someone actually wants to kill Isis, and they might be able to do it. This time, Isadora--mortal, weak, powerless--might be the only one who can stop it and save her mother's life.

--Maureen K.

Death is Only the Beginning

What better month than October to consider books where death isn't the end of anybody's story? In these three wildly different books, it's only the beginning.

Croak - Gina D'Amico
Wild child Lex is the despair of her family. She doesn't know why she acts so bad, just that she does. Then her Uncle Mort turns up and explains that her nature is to be a Grim Reaper, and she's scheduled to start right now. Swept away to a town full of Grim Reapers, Lex is just starting to settle in when everything starts to go wrong, and she gets blamed. The story continues in Scorch and concludes in Rogue.

Putting Makeup on Dead People - Jen Violi
Her father has been dead for four years, yet Donna still feels as if it happened yesterday. As her senior year comes to an end, she's floundering around, trying to decide what she wants to do with her life. To her surprise, and the consternation of her family, she decides to go to school to become a mortician. Is she spiraling into a pit of morbid depression, or has she found her true calling?

Nightspell - Leah Cypess
When her sister was sent away to marry a foreign king, Darri vowed to rescue her. But when she arrives in the aptly-named Ghostland, she discovers that the baby sister she remembers has grown into a stranger. In this land populated with the living and the dead, it's not always obvious who's on your side.

Leverage by Joshua Cohen

In Leverage, by Joshua Cohen, everybody knows that the football players at Oregrove High are like gods. They can get away with any amount of bullying, hazing, and pranking, and nobody will say anything as long as they keep winning games. Well, Danny Meehan is tired of it. He and the rest of the men’s gymnastics team are going to take a stand and fight back.

But fighting back just escalates the football team’s rage. When an innocent gets caught in the crossfire, with terrible consequences, Danny realizes that he needs a man on the inside. He might just have what he needs in Kurt, the new guy on the team who’s disgusted with his teammates’ behavior. But can two boys with a tentative friendship really take on undisputed gods?

Cohen takes on a sensational, current topic and shows how it comes to pass. Who has given these boys the carte blanche to act as they do? What effect does it have on a community, and on an individual? And most importantly, what does it take to bring the bullying to an end? Disturbing, raw, and terribly real, this book will stick with you.

Imaginary Friends and Enemies

Most kids had imaginary friends when they were little. Most kids grow out of it. In the creepy and witty Unspoken by Sarah Rees Brennan, Kami Glass never did.

At sixteen, she's learned not to talk to other people about Jared, or to talk out loud to him. But she always knew he was there, the invisible friend in her head. They share everything with each other, joys and sorrows, frustrations and triumphs. But it's not as if she's ever seen him. He is imaginary, after all.

Then the mysterious Lynburns return to her small English village, and she meets the black sheep of the family. A boy who knows an awful lot about her. A boy who seems awfully familiar. A boy named Jared.

As Kami and her friends try to uncover the dark secret of the Lynburns, she also tries to work out what, if anything, she has to fear from Jared. What do you do when your imaginary friend suddenly comes to life . . . and just might be evil?

- Maureen K.

Angel of Death

This is a book about an assassin nun.

Oh, yes, you read that right.

Assassin. Nun.

That's the character at the heart of the romantic, complex, and action-packed novel Grave Mercy, by Robin LaFevers. Ismae had a fairly bad early life. Born in 15th century Brittany (a tiny European country, now part of France) to an abusive father and a mother who never wanted her, she was married very young to an equally abusive husband. When she ran away, she discovered the convent of Saint Mortain, where nuns live in service to their patron saint and, by the way, also learn the arts of murder. That's because Saint Mortain is the new name for the old god of death, and he helpfully marks the people that he wants his nuns to kill.

Old Wine, New Bottles

Like many longtime readers, I remember devouring fairy tales as a kid. Now that I've gotten older, I've discovered the literary phenomenon of the retold fairy tale. This is where an author takes a familiar tale and spins it out into a full-length novel. Sometimes they uphold the characters and events, sometimes they upend them. But it's always an interesting read.

Margo Lanagan's Tender Morsels is a harrowing version of "Snow White and Rose Red." After a childhood filled with sexual abuse, Liga escapes to a safe dream world with her two daughters, Urdda and Branza. But when they're almost grown, the walls between the world she lives in now and the world she left behind are breached, and her daughters must learn to live with pain as well as joy.

Ice by Sarah Beth Durst is based on "East of the Sun, West of the Moon." It's sort of a Beauty and the Beast tale, except the castle is made of ice and the beast is a giant polar bear. In Durst's version, eighteen-year-old Cassie is kidnapped from her father's Arctic research station by a giant polar bear, who holds out the promise of helping her find her long-missing mother.

Family Matters

On the first page of Split, by Swati Avasthi, sixteen-year-old Jace Witherspoon stands on his older brother's doorstep. He has $3.84 in his pocket, a broken face, and not much else. And after that last blowup with his dad, he can't go back home.

His brother Christian, who left the family when he couldn't deal with their abusive father anymore, immediately takes him in. Jace wants to build a new life for himself, but he can't stop thinking about his mom, now her husband's only punching bag.

He also can't stop thinking about what he did to his own girlfriend before he left.

We've all read the novels about abusive families, and we've all heard the statistics about abused children growing up to become abusers. In this powerful first novel, Avasthi pulls us into the head of a young man who's struggling with the question: can you ever really escape the person your family has made you into?

I Am Serious. And Don't Call Me Shirley.

Lately I've been in a rut of very serious books. They're all about the fate of the world, and death and love and other serious matters. They were good, by and large, but I seriously needed a change.

Luckily, the next book in M.T. Anderson's Pals in Peril series came my way. This is an homage to, and send-up of, all those kids' adventure tales of the 40s and 50s. Every time I read one, the sheer madcap fun of it all leaves me smiling. I dare you to keep a straight face when reading even the titles:

Whales on Stilts!
The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen
Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware
Agent Q, or the Smell of Danger!
Zombie Mommy

Feels Like Home

"I like it. I'm not sure why, but I like it here."

"Do you? . . . You must have guessed that I love the desert. This desert. Even in winter, and the three weeks of jungle after the rains stop and before the sun gets a good hold again."

I first read The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley when I was about twelve. At the time, I was living in the green, humid, flat Midwest. The mountainous desert setting of this novel seemed as exotic as the face of the moon. Now, Tucson is my home, and McKinley's Damar feels intimately familiar. The heat, the dust, and the barren landscape all feel just like the Sonoran desert.

In the novel, Harry Crewe goes from the cool, green land of her birth to hot and dusty Damar. To her surprise, she falls in love with her new home.

Love in Writing

Can you fall in love with a person without ever seeing them? Dash and Lily are starting to think so, with the help of Dash and Lily's Book of Dares, by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan.

Dash and Lily are two New York City teenagers, who've never met and aren't likely to. Both are on their own and at loose ends for Christmas. Then Dash finds Lily's notebook in the Strand bookshop, and what follows is a whirlwind romance on paper, as they dare each other to take on new and frightening experiences.

Sorta Like a Rock Star

Give it up for the Princess of Hope, the last of the crazy optimists, Amber Appleton! From teaching English to Korean immigrants via R&B lyrics, to her weekly battle of words with a determined nihilist for the entertainment of lonely nursing-home residents, to her regular haiku exchanges with a Vietnam vet, this teenager does her best to shine a little joy into the lives of the people she encounters on a daily basis, in Sorta Like a Rock Star by Matthew Quick.

Except that her own life isn't so miraculous. Unbeknownst to anyone, Amber, her mom, and her beloved dog, Bobby Big Boy, are living on a school bus in the middle of winter and scraping by on the wages of one part-time job.

All Tied Up

This week's SummerQuest challenge is to make a craft from a pattern. With so many great crafts out there, I thought I'd share mine.

I learned to knit in high school, and even whipped up some scarves and baby blankets, but dropped it somewhere around the end of college. About eighteen months ago, I picked up the craft again, and now I can't remember why I ever stopped in the first place. The patterns feed my precise librarian's soul, the colors and textures of the yarn nurture my artistic side, and when I just need to zone out, there's nothing like a long stretch of repetitive stockinette stitch to soothe me.

One of my favorite knitting writers is Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, or as she calls herself on her blog, The Yarn Harlot. She has one how-to book, but in general, she writes essays and reflections on life, knitting, and the intersection of the two. She's hilarious, she's down-to-earth, and she acknowledges two very important things about knitters.

A Book to Luv Bunches

Sometimes it's hard to find a book that really nails the intricacies of budding and changing friendship among tweens. Lucky for us, Lauren Myracle's Luv Ya Bunches is that book.

For quite some time, eleven-year-old Camilla has been struggling to break away from the "friendship" of nasty Modessa and her bullying henchgirl, Quin. She'd rather hang out with Katie-Rose, the quirky budding filmmaker, Yasaman, the quiet and observant web designer, and Violet, the brave and secretive new girl. But people like Modessa and Quin tend to drag you back in.

In the first week of fifth grade, it's going to take a lost (stolen?) turtle toy, a home-grown social website, a sleight of hand with Hershey's syrup, and the courage of true friends to finally set Camilla free.

A Pair of Time-Travel Novels

Generally, I like to read things with straightforward plots, clear and understandable. But then there are days that I just want my brain to be twisted into a pretzel, and that's when I pick up books like Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis, which won the prestigious Hugo Award earlier this year.


Set in . . . well, it's hard to say when this is set, because that's the plot, you see. In 2060, humanity has perfected the art of time travel. At Oxford, historians don't just read old diaries and peruse photographs, they go back in time to observe history as it happens. They do their best not to affect events, but they're secure in the knowledge that history is self-correcting and nothing they do can alter its course. Not really, anyway.

The Walking Dead, at Your Library

No question about it, zombies are hot right now. Here are a few notable zombie books I've read recently.

Ever since the first teenager walked the earth, adults have been the enemy. Now it's even more literally true, when a strange virus has turned everyone over sixteen into mindless cannibal monsters, leaving kids and young teenagers to fend for themselves in an increasingly desperate fight. It's not for the faint of stomach, but for those that like their zombie movies both gory and thought-provoking, The Enemy by Charlie Higson is a sure bet.

Newes from the Dead

What if you woke up in the middle of your own autopsy? That's the provocative premise behind Mary Hooper's Newes from the Dead, based on a true story. In 1650, a British servant girl named Anne Green was wrongfully sentenced to death, but the hanging didn't completely kill her. Instead, she lies in her coffin, barely alive, and drifts back through the events that brought her to her present condition. At the same time, a young medical student prepares for the dissection of a convict's corpse - Anne Green.

The Brothers Torres by Coert Voorhees

Fourteen-year-old Francisco Towers has always idolized his big brother. But lately, Steve is going farther and farther trying to fit into the dangerous gang culture in their small New Mexico town. Now, it's time for Frankie to make his own decision about where he stands.

This is a powerful story about a boy caught between not just one rock and a hard place, but several. Frankie is caught between white and Latino, between idealism and hard economic realities, between his brother's example and his own definition of himself.

Find it at a library!