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Blood Red Road   by  Moira Young

Saba, Lugh and their younger sister Emmi live with their pa in Silverlake.  Their mother died while giving birth to Emmi and Saba has never been able to forgive her sister.  Tensions mount between Lugh and their pa as the family struggles to find enough water and food. 

Then one day four men come on horseback, kill their father, and kidnap Lugh.  Saba chases after them, but can't save her brother.  She yells to him that she won't stop until she finds him.  Now with only Saba and Emmi left, Saba must take over and watch out for her little sister.  They head out to find Mercy, a family friend who their father said to go to if something happened to him.  By the time they arrive they're exhausted, hungry, and thirsty.

Mercy agrees to take care of Emmi while Saba goes in search of her brother.  Soon after Saba heads out Emmi finds her and insists on tagging along.  The trail proves to be just as dangerous as Saba feared when they're both captured by some slave traders.

Saba is forced to be a cage fighter in Hopetown's arena.  If any cage fighter loses three fights they have to walk the gauntlet and get beaten to death by the crowd.  Determined to find her brother Saba stays alive and wins all of her fights.  She becomes known as "The Angel of Death".

Meanwhile she makes allies among the other cage fighters and hatches a plan to escape.  One of the friends she makes is a male cage fighter, Jack.  The heartstone Mercy gave her to wear heats up whenever she's close to him.  Even though Saba's plan for escape is pretty risky, she knows she has to get to Lugh, but can she do it, meet up with Emmi, and not get caught?

A Posse of Princesses

Sherwood Smith

Isn't it always the case: all the really popular e-books by the big name authors are checked out. So why not try something a little off the beaten path?

Rhis, princess of an incredibly small, completely isolated, but fabulously rich (jewel mines!) mountain kingdom has been invited to the ultimate month-long house party. Actually, make that a palace party: She and princesses from kingdoms far and wide will be hosted by the Royal Family of Vesarja in the hopes of finding a suitable wife for the handsome young crown prince.

Of course, Rhis isn't particularly interested in getting married off. What she really wants is a break from her family role as the Perpetual Disappointment. Is it really so terrible that a girl would rather go to parties, read romantic adventure stories, and have friends rather than studying hard and preparing to Do Her Royal Duty?

Her older sister tries to convince her to get her head out of the clouds: Real life isn't like the songs!

Rhis knows that: She doesn't want real adventure which usually involves hardship, terror, suffering, and things like war and revolution. She just wants, oh, to fall in love, or have a wonderful prince fall in love with her. And just a little bit of fighting, like a duel or two (not to the death) and some exciting chases, where nobody really gets hurt.

The only fly in the ointment of potential fun is that her family insists she travel and room with her perfect cousin Shera, the one Rhis is continually being compared to (and not favorably). But when she meets her cousin for the first time, she discovers Shera is just as frivolous, and the lonely teenager has her first real friend. And just in time! Rhis and Shera are immediately thrust into a whirlwind of parties, fancy clothes and social intrigue at Vesarja Palace. 

Are there realistic teenage girls complete with gossip, sniping, bonding and commiserating? How about deeply satisfying come-uppances for the insufferable, snobby, popular girls? Perhaps even more satisfying coming-into-their-own for the plain, shy, or awkward ones? What about truly, madly, deeply attractive princes, with plenty of opportunities for romance?

Yes to everything. And just to make matters more exciting, before the story is done there's a kidnapping and a royal plot, which only the posse of princesses can foil.

Take Georgette Heyer, cross her with Gail Carson Levine, add a dollop (just a smidge) of high adventure and you get a great read for anyone whose inner-13-year-old is alive and well. This small press gem is possibly one of the best unsung princess book ever.

For the E-book, visit www.kcls.org/downloads and follow the directions for Overdrive Media to get a copy for your e-book reader. For the-book-on-dead-tree, click on the links for A Posse of Princesses embedded in this blog.

 

 

The Statistical Probablity of Love at First Sight by Jennifer Smith

Is it really possible to fall in love at first sight?  How long does it take to fall in love?  For Hadley and Oliver it seems to be about ten hours, the length of their flight together.

Hadley isn't happy about attending her father's wedding.  When he went to England to work he fell in love and never returned to her family.  Her mother cried for days.  Now she's furious at both her mother and father for pushing her to attend his wedding with the woman he left her mother for.

In fact she's so upset she forgets some things and gets in an argument with her mother.  All of this adds up to causing her to miss her flight.  Fortunately she gets on the next flight, but she'll be lucky to make the wedding on time much less to get dressed up for it.

While waiting for her flight she runs into Oliver who is hot, British, and offers to assist her with her luggage.  Then they end up being seated in the same row on the plane.  An observant, kind older lady switches seats with them so they can talk.

Besides freaking out over going to the wedding and meeting her stepmom, Hadley has claustrophobia and hates being cooped up in a plane.  Oliver teases her which calms her down.  Meanwhile she talks about her anxiety over meeting her father's new lady and the wedding she's attending.

Oliver shares a little about himself, but not a lot.  When the plane lands Hadley worries about getting to the wedding on time, but also tries to keep track of Oliver so maybe they can connect one more time.  Then she loses track of him and is crestfallen.  But maybe she's got enough information to find him again.   This sweet love story shows how fate might possibly bring people together through a series of events.   

Sophie receives a journal for her sixteenth birthday, and begins chronicling her life as one of the four remaining FitzOsbornes, the royal family of Montmaray.  It's 1936, and they live in a crumbling castle on a tiny island kingdom off the coast of England.  Their subjects can be counted on the fingers of one hand, unless you
include Carlos, the family dog.  Sophie's parents are dead, her brother is off at school, their tomboy of a little sister runs wild, and Uncle John (the King) is mad, leaving her
cousin,17-year-old Veronica, with the responsibility of keeping the household running on a pittance.  But they rub along on the edge of poverty.  Sophie and Veronica's aunt, who married well and lives on the mainland, has
offered to sponsor the girls' coming out into society.  The problem is, Sophie knows Veronica won't leave Montmaray and her father.  But things are changing, and when the
Nazis show up on the island, their choices narrow.  Politics are all very well in the abstract, but much more uncomfortable when they invade your home.  A Brief History of Montmaray isn't a barn-burner straight out of the box, but give it a chance to grow on you.  You'll want to read the sequel, The FitzOsbornes in Exile.

Foundling (Monster Blood Tattoo Book 1) by D.M. Cornish

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After a bit of supplemental reading, I learned that the New Zealand author/illustrator¹ has been working on this story upwards of ten years. When it comes to the world building, it shows. At the end of the story, the author gives us an Explicarium, an an appendix that is less pure glossary and more mini-story-lets. There is even a hidden joke for the reader who gets that far (I suspect most will.)

And what a world Cornish has invented! There are competing Naval forces that fund their own recruitment-centers-cum-orphanages. (Our young hero's is Madam Opera's Estimable Marine Society for Foundling Boys and Girls). There's high turnover for seafarers: the sea is caustic and filled with monsters. So are the lands: Hence we meet the specialized lightning-throwing monster hunters who tattoo themselves with the equally caustic blood of their kills, as well as the sleazy smugglers who make a killing (sometimes literally) selling forbidden monster-parts to reanimators.

Although book one of a series, the title stands alone well enough as the story of an orphan boy (Rossamund²) who must leave his Dickensian-but-familiar orphanage, venture out into the wild world coping with misadventures galore, until he finds his way to a new place in society. To the familiar bildungsroman, Cornish adds the monster-filled Half Continent in which human civilization holds merely a tentative, and quite possibly failing, place.

And yet what constitutes a monster is just as likely to be problematic: The fully human smuggler who waylays Rossamund en route to his first job, is exceedingly, (inhumanly?) vile. The off-handedly kind Brandon Rose, who befriends the boy, has bio-engineered her own body with forbidden medicines and strange surgeries. She seems at times closer to the monsters she hunts than to the humans she protects. And of course, what makes someone human, may apply (at least in character) to monsters like a friendly boggle: or possibly to Rossamund himself, whose origin is mysterious and suspect. 

One never knows from one moment to the next who is human and who isn't. Who's a villain, and who wears a white hat. Is it magic? Or other-worldly science? All the while, a strange new world is unfolding around the reader. D.M. Cornish's black-and-white illustrations of the characters and monsters Rossamund encounters in the course of his adventures only add to the charm of the tale.

Happily for KCLS readers, the complete series is now out, and all of D.M. Cornish's books can be ordered from the library as books, e-books, and recorded books on CD. Book two is Lamplighter; book 3: Factotum.

 

[1] What are they putting in the Antipodean waters? There's a fantastic crop of Science Fiction and Fantasy from Australia and New Zealand these days.

[2] And yes, the poor guy gets beat up just about as often as you might expect, growing up with that name.

 

 

Guy Langman, Crime Scene Procastinator by Josh Berk

Guy Langman isn't a joiner.  In fact he prefers to come home and just play video games after school.  He actually works pretty hard at doing as little as possible.  The one thing that motivates him is getting the attention of Raquel who he's liked for a long time.

Then his father dies unexpectedly and he's trying to make sense of all the changes in his life. His mom languishes around the house, but does her best to keep things moving along as normal as possible for him.  To distract himself Guy starts a biography about his father full of the wisdoms his dad often spewed out.

Then his best friend, Anoop, encourages him to join the forensics club at school.  Anoop entices him with the promise that Raquel will be in the club.  Despite his reluctance to join anything he attends the club's first meeting and surprisingly really enjoys it.

Guy also starts learning things about his father's past he's never known and then there is a break in at Guy's home where some of his father's precious treasures are stolen.   During a competition with another forensics club he and Anoop stumble upon an actual dead body.  They discover evidence that indicates there may be is a connection between the break in and the dead body. 

Watch Guy transform from a lazy kid with little ambition to an obsessed detective gathering together multiple interrelated facts.  It appears that he could end up a hero in solving a crime and get the girl.  But will it be the girl he thinks?

In a post-apocalyptic, no-longer-United States, Mahlia and her friend Mouse survive on the fringes of the Drowned Cities war zone.  When they find and help the injured Tool, a bio-engineered part-man, part dog (plus assorted other bits), they draw the attention of the band of United Patriotic Front soldiers who are chasing him, bringing disaster down on their small community.  Mouse is drafted into the UPF and must go along with their casual violence and killing or die.  Tool was once part of a pack of engineered dog-man-soldiers; Mouse becomes a member of a type of human pack.  The UPF, Army of God, Freedom Militia and other groups all take and retake territory, claiming to be fighting for peace.  Mahlia is determined to rescue Mouse, as he once rescued her.  So she and Tool set out for The Drowned Cities, where the upper floors of old skyscrapers are mined for scrap that will be sold to buy more guns.  And around we go again.  Should she try to save him, or should she and Tool head for the border and try to escape the war zone?

Great places of history: [civilization's 100 most important sites: an illustrated journey]

You're no doubt familiar with those 'who-done-it' mysteries -- call this a 'where-done-it' -- with big glossy photos of 100 classic sites around the globe. You need no passport: just sit down and become engrossed by all these amazing places around the planet.

All the obvious choices are here, from Egypt's pyramids to Easter Island, Shakespeare's Globe theatre & China's Forbidden City, Angkor Wat to Gettysburg. But there are more unusual choices too, because, think about it: these choices are not made according to the prettiest or most amazing sites, but simply civilization's MOST Important! What sites would YOU choose?

Time magazine has, thus, picked such non-obvious sites as Jefferson's Virginia, Antarctica's McMurdo Station, the Bauhaus school in Germany and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the far northern Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, which shelters samples of seeds from plants around the world!

And these are broken down into distinctive categories, such as: Cultures, Religion, Politics, Battles, Inquiry, Innovation and Arts.

Oh, and what is the latest and last on this global list of 100?!

Why, how about Nevada's annual gathering of crazies at Burning Man?! 

Listen!

by Stephanie Tolan

Twelve year-old Charley lost a month of her life. She has no memory of the accident, or the weeks after. The doctors say that's not unusual with head injuries like hers. She's got a steel pin running through her leg from hip to knee. Walking the woods trail around the lake hurts: inside and out. It's not fair: Why can't I forget the things I want to forget? The tangled woods trail brings back her mother's voice: There's more poison ivy out here than kudzu and barbed wire vine and honeysuckle put together. Charley doesn't want that voice in her head, not any more.

Charley pulled all the photographs her mother took down from the walls of her room. She's learned to walk past the ones in the house her dad left up without seeing them. She hardly ever speaks to her dad, except when he yells at her to get out of the house: You need to get back to normal. You will start by walking. Today. Is that clear? She's supposed to find something productive to do this summer. As if.

It's on that walk that Charley sees the dog. He's half-wild, starving; but beautiful. He reminds her of a wolf--or a coyote. He won't let anyone near, not even to give him food. Almost against her will Charley decides to try to tame him, but it won't come easy. So her dad insists she find something to keep her busy this summer? Fine.

She picks the dog. And nothing will stop her. 

Learning to walk again, that was the easy part. Learning to listen again, to remember, to care...

Sometimes it takes two broken creatures to heal.

The way the author, Tolan, describes the wild patch of South Carolina where Charley lives--it reads like you're there. And Tolan really knows dogs, and the people who care about them. If you're one (too) you won't want to miss Listen!