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.

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.

Pima County Public Library Ultimate Staff Picks 2012

Library folk love to read, they read terrific books, and they  love to talk about the books they think are terrific. So the Ravenous Readers got to thinking: wouldn't it make a great reading list if we asked library staff from all over the Pima County Public Library system to tell us the name of the single most terrific book they read in 2012?

So that's what we did --  and we gathered the results into the First Annual Pima County Public Library Ultimate Staff Picks List, which we present here, to help you find a good title to start the new year right. Happy New Year, and Happy Reading!

Children's

When Charlie McButton Lost Power
Suzanne Collins (author of The Hunger Games), illustrated by Mike Lester (Children’s Picture Book) A great rhyming story with fantastic illustrations about a boy suffering from electronic toy withdrawal during a power outage. After an episode spent in time-out (tackling his sister’s toys for their batteries), Charlie realizes how much fun he can have--without electricity.  
Elizabeth, Collection Development Office

Fiction
                         

The Age of Miracles 

Karen Thompson Walker

An apocalyptic coming-of-age story: when the earth's rotation slows, day and night are thrown off track and crops start to fail...

Cindy, Nanini Library

Best Books of 2012 Galore!

This is the time of year when I am out in the book stores picking out great reads for my family and friends, especially my nieces and nephews. But which ones? I confess I love love love the "best books of the year" lists that I find all over the internet.

In case you enjoy them too, here is a collection for your perusal. P.S. Unlike the other titles we talk about here, these books aren't necessarily in our catalog.

Here goes:

All Ages
Book Riot's Best Books of 2012
Best Books 2012 (Publisher's Weekly)
Goodreads Choice Awards 2012
Southwest Books of the Year (Pima County Public Library)
25 of the Most Wonderful Book Covers of the Year (Atlantic Wire)

Adults
10 Best Books of 2012 (New York Times Sunday Book Review)
100 Notable Books of 2012 (New York Times Sunday Book Review)
What To Read Awards: The Salon Book Critics’ Poll (Salon Magazine) just added
Notable Books for Adults (ALA/RUSA)
Best Books 2012: Top Ten (Library Journal) just added
Best Books 2012: More of the Best (Library Journal) just added
Librarian Nancy Pearl's Picks For The Omnivorous Reader (NPR Books)
Great Reads In Store: Indie Booksellers Pick 2012's Best (NPR Books) just added
Our Editors Select The Best Books Of 2012 (Huffington Books)
The Slate Book Review Top 10 of 2012 (Slate Magazine)
2012 Books: Slate Staff Picks (Slate Magazine)
Overlooked Books of 2012 (Slate Magazine)
Nerdfighter Book Recommendations (author John Green) just added
The 10 Best Books of 2012 (And 5 Almost Worth Burning) (Hollywood.com)
The Listen List: Outstanding Audiobook Narration (ALA/RUSA)
Best Art Books of 2012 (Brain Pickings)
Best Design Books of 2012 (Brain Pickings)
Best Science Books of 2012 (Brain Pickings)
Best Psychology and Philosophy Books of 2012 (Brain Pickings)
Going Vegan: 5 Favorite Cookbooks from 2012 (Oregon Live)
Favourite Comics, Art Books & More (Drawn blog)

Children and Teens
Best Books 2012 (School Library Journal)
Notable Children’s Books of 2012 (New York Times)
Best Children's Books of 2012 to Give as Gifts (Parenting Magazine)
Children's Books 2012: 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing (NYPL)
Cybils Award Finalists for 2012
The Best Illustrated Children’s Books and Picturebooks of 2012 (Brain Pickings)
My Favorite Nonfiction Books of 2012 (so far) (Abby the Librarian)
Best Young Adult Books of 2012 (Goodreads)
Judy B.'s 2012 Top Teen Fiction Reads (Tattered Cover)
Judy B.'s Favorite 2012 Non-Fiction Teen Reads (Tattered Cover)
Christmas Book Ideas for Teens (YA Nerd blog)
Top 10 Science and Health Books for Youth (Booklist)
Outstanding Science Books for Students K–12 (National Science Teachers Assn)
Children's Books (NPR Books)
Your Favorites: 100 Best-Ever Teen Novels (NPR Books)

--Lisa, your Facebook Librarian

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.

Ender's Game

Have you ever gone back and read something you loved as a younger person, only to find that your memory of it was much better than the real thing? Well, I recently reread one of my all-time favorite books out of sheer curiosity, and I thought it was just as great as the first time I read it, back in the mid-80s. I actually might like it more now!

That book is Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. It is a science fiction novel that appeals to both teens and adults and it is awesome. The book is about a very young boy named Andrew Wiggin ("Ender") who is taken from his family and sent off to a school out in space.

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.

Time, Still Wrinkling, 50 Years Later

Quick, identify this first line: "It was a dark and stormy night."

Several of you probably said, "Oh! Snoopy's never-finished novel!" Some of you really brainy types might have said, "Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford!" But if you were a book lover growing up anytime in the past fifty years, you thought of Madeleine L'Engle's Newbery Award winner, A Wrinkle in Time.

Your mind immediately went to a prickly and bad-tempered thirteen-year-old girl with glasses and braces, and to all that lies ahead of her. She's about to leave her attic bedroom and go downstairs to sit with her genius little brother, Charles Wallace. She's about to meet Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which, three mysterious old ladies who are far more than old ladies. She's about to discover a new side to classmate Calvin O'Keefe. She's about to undertake a harrowing journey across the universe and into her own heart to find her long-lost father.

And if that's not what you thought of, well, brace yourself. You're about to meet Meg Murray.

- Maureen K.

GLBT Favorites

Our GLBT Services Committee is hosting a great author event in April, so I thought I'd take this opportunity to talk it up and recommend some other favorite books, too! Sister Spit is a dynamic audio/visual performance headlined by Dorothy Allison and Michelle Tea, plus other special guests. They will be performing with two free shows at Fluxx Gallery, 414 E. 9th St., on Saturday, April 7th, at 4 and 9pm. (Dorothy Allison will be at the first show only.) Read on for more GLBT books...

My favorites of 2011

For past three months, I've been reading science fiction and fantasy books for teens. A lot of them. Wizards, dystopias, magic, quests - they're coming out my ears, I tell you. These are my top four.

Ashes by Ilsa J. Bick - When a powerful electromagnetic pulse kills off two-thirds of the human race and knocks the rest back to the Stone Age, it's every man, woman, and child for himself. 17-year-old Alex was already living on borrowed time, what with the brain tumor and all, so she thought she knew about living life one day at a time. Along with Afghanistan vet Tom and eight-year-old Ellie, she discovers that it's a little more difficult when you have to fight wild animals and teen cannibal zombies for the privilege.

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.

Reading Across the Pond

Lately, I've been reading a lot of kid's books that were originally published in other countries. These are always interesting because the slang, the traditions, the geography, and the history are all different. Here are a few I really enjoy.

Raider's Ransom by Emily Diamand
This book takes place in a post-apocalyptic future, when the oceans have risen, drowning most of the United Kingdom and hurtling humanity back into a more medieval society where only hints and scraps of high technology remain. It follows Lilly, on a quest to rescue the daughter of the prime minister from the Viking-like Raiders, and Zeph, the son and heir to the Raiders' leader. Exciting, fast-paced, and a little haunting when you recognize pieces of our world in the wreck of theirs.

Summer Reading Is Here!

It's that time of year again, when school lets out, vacation begins, and readers across the country crack open their books to get through the long hot months.

This year, as you're thinking about summer reading, remember that it's not just for kids and teens. We're encouraging adults to participate as well - keep an eye out on our public homepage for our summer reading sign up, or ask your local friendly librarian for details.

Without further ado, here are three titles to start out your summer reading.

Welcome to the Future. It Stinks.

Recently, the New York Times ran an article about the "new" trend in YA fiction, novels set in a grim and terrible near future, otherwise known as dystopias. I'm sure they're good at any number of things, but the Times is a little late to the game on this one. In the past few years, dystopian fiction for teens has grown from a few books into darn near its own subgenre. Here, have a few of my favorites.

Delirium by Lauren Oliver - Ever had a bad breakup and wished you could just remove all those awful feelings forever? In Lena's world, they have. Everyone over 18 has been surgically relieved of their ability to love, and doesn't that make life just peachy? Strangely enough, no. (Psst! The library owns it in e-book format as well!)

Rash by Pete Hautman - Welcome to the United Safer States of America, where road rage is a criminal offense and helmets are the most popular fashion accessory. Unfortunately, our protagonist, Bo Marsten, has a little bit of an anger-management issue. What happens to a decidedly unsafe kid in this super-safe world?

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins - This one's had a lot of press lately, what with the rumored movie adaptation and its steady presence on the bestseller lists. In the first book of a trilogy, sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen must compete in the Hunger Games. If she wins, she gets prizes, cash, and food to take back to her starving district. If she loses . . . well, let's just put it like this. The way she wins is to outlive every other competitor.

And of course, the classic dystopian novels, like George Orwell's 1984 and Lois Lowry's The Giver still have a strong presence. What are some of your favorites?

- Maureen K.

Troubled Waters

Troubled Waters by Sharon Shinn

Zoe's father was an advisor to the king, but he fell out of favor and was exiled from court. Zoe has lived with him in a small village for years. After a long illness, her father passes away. A few days later a man from the capital arrives. He says the king has chosen Zoe to be his fifth wife. Lost in grief, Zoe goes with the man. Once they arrive in the capital, Zoe runs away. She starts living along the river's edge where a community of squatters camp. Slowly she begins to recover from her grief. As she adapts to her new circumstances she begins to learn that her father kept many secrets from her. As she uncovers the truth, she will gain a place in society and discover her own unique powers.

One of the things I love about Sharon Shinn is how fully developed her worlds and characters are. Troubled Waters is no exception. The culture is rich and vibrant, the characters are complex, and the story is fascinating. The political intrigue is masterfully done. There are layers and layers of secrets and motivations that kept me engrossed. All in all, another fantastic story by Sharon Shinn.

~Grace