Teen Books.

Love You Hate You Miss You is the newest book from Elizabeth Scott. 

Amy was the only one to survive the car crash. She was the one who made them leave the party. She was the one who told Julia to drive. Amy feels responsible for killing her best friend.

Amy and Julia were inseparable. Julia was one of those amazing people. She had the best attitude, the coolest outfits and knew of all the great parties. They were a perfectly matched team and no one will ever be able to replace her.

Amy's parents made her go to rehab to deal with her alcohol problems. Her perfect parents are trying to be loving and encouraging, but Amy is frustrated by their attentive support.

Surviving high school without Julia is going to be impossible. Everyone knows about her drinking problems and what she did to her best friend.

How can you apologize to someone when they're no longer here?

Karl Shoemaker, the protagonist at the center of Tales of the Madman Underground: An Historical Romance 1973, has one goal for his senior year of high school: be normal.  Karl is attempting to break away from the affectionately-dubbed Madman Underground - the school therapy group he's been stuck in since fourth grade - make new friends, and survive high school so that he can enlist in the military.  But how can Karl be normal when his life is completely chaotic?  His father, the town's beloved former mayor, passed away four years ago, and his mother is a hippie alcoholic who steals Karl's money and spends it on benders, justifying her excesses by saying things like, "I really needed some freedom last night."  The books' cast of characters also includes the other "Madmen" in the therapy group, some not-so-smart high school bullies and the umpteen cats - with names like Prettyangel and SkyMusic - that share the house with Karl.

Karl's acerbic, profanity-spewing voice is painfully truthful and recalls Holden Caulfield, and I loved his descriptions of small-town life.  There's plenty of pathos in this novel - most of the parents of the Madmen are either drunk, emotionally distant, or entirely absent, and the teens certainly suffer for it - but Karl's sarcastic wit keeps the story moving without wallowing in woe-is-me self-pity.  Readers of a certain age will appreciate Karl's journey to adulthood in the freewheeling 1970s.

Charles Darwin was not given to rash decisions. When he was nearly thirty and needed to decide whether to marry, he sat down, drew a line down the middle of a piece of paper and made a list of pros and cons. On the plus side, marriage would offer the benefit of children ("if it Please God") and an object of affection, "better than a dog anyhow." On the minus side, he would miss the "conservation of clever men at clubs" and might not be able to read in the evenings.

His decision to take the leap and marry his cousin Emma Wedgwood is the subject of Deborah Heiligman's 2009 National Books Award finalist  Charles and Emma: the Darwin's Leap of Faith..

Darwin was a pragmatist, an agnostic, and a scientist. Emma was his intellectual match and yet devoutly religious. Theirs was a true love story--a match of wits and wills, of science and religion. Despite her reservations about Darwin's theories, Emma helped edit her husband's work. She honestly feared for his soul and at the same time bore him ten children, three of whom died before the age of ten.

Heiligman is a skilled nonfiction writer. The Victorian Era is brought to vivid life through the couple's letters and other primary sources. This setting is the backdrop for one of the great marriages of history. Although originally published for the teen market, Charles and Emma will equally engage adult readers, who will know something more about the ups-and-downs of married life than its intended audience.  

It is a story that might have turned out quite differently if Darwin had decided to settle for the company of that dog after all.

Mission Control, This is Apollo: the story of the first voyages to the Moon
by Andrew Chaikin and Alan Bean

Chaikin, an NPR Morning Edition commentator and the author of A Man on the Moon, profiles each of the Apollo Missions, including the legendary Apollo 11 Mission which celebrated its 40th Anniversary this year. Each chapter briefly outlines the mission (dates, commanders, pilots, objectives, mission patches, etc), but also includes stories about the people involved. Armstrong, for instance, didn't spend a lot of time pondering his historic words; he was too busy avoiding craters! Of course, not all missions were so successful, as discussed in the chapter on the infamous Apollo Thirteen. Vintage photos show the jury-rigged filter that helped save the astronauts lives and another grainy photo shows the crippled module. Brief sections explore the finer points of space travel, from the rather discomforting physical side-effects as described in "The Dark Side of Zero-G" and "When You Gotta Go, You Gotta Go" to technical details like those in "The Moon Rocket" and "Clothes Make the Moonwalker". The brief introduction outlines the preceding Mercury and Gemini programs.

In addition to the wonderful photographs, Alan Bean contributes his amazing paintings to the book. Bean, who landed on the moon with Apollo Twelve and knows what he paints, brings a unique perspective to the book. An entrancing mix of color, light and texture, these paintings bring the lunar landscapes alive. A chapter at the end of the book explains how Bean paints, a process that includes small models astronauts, replica moon-boots and even fragments of capsule heat shields and foil insulation. Informational, but also celebratory, Mission Control, This is Apollo, is a treat for history and space buffs of any age.

Who is the Master of the Horror Genre? Edgar Allan Poe. Nearly 165 years after he wrote his final tale, he is still loved--in fact, he is more popular than when he was alive. Nobody does tales of darkness, mystery, and the macabre like Poe. Nobody.

Edgar Allan Poe's Tales Of Death And Dementia is a graphic novel illustrated by Gris Grimly. It is the second Poe collection Grimly has done: the first, Edgar Allan Poe's Tales Of Mystery And Murder, is also awesome. I am looking forward to his third, and I hope more. His illustrations are just as creepy and understated as Poe's tone which adds a beautiful unique dimension to the tales. The tales have been slightly "nipped and tucked" from their original text, but nothing is lost. The tales are just as wonderfully creepy as they were when written.

"The Tell-Tale Heart" has to be one of the creepiest tales ever written. Written from the perspective of a deranged, cold-blooded killer, it will creep you out. As a child, this tale absolutely terrified me; as an adult, it still gets me, even though I have read it many, many times. The rest of the collection includes the scary yet humorous "The System Of Dr. Tarr And Professor Fether," the tragic "The Oblong Box,", and the weird and disgusting "The Facts In The Case Of M. Valdemar."

A wonderful set of classic tales to revisit next the fireplace on a cold night or maybe all alone in your room on a windy night. The wonderful illustrations make this collection of Poe's dark tales even darker. A book that anyone young or young at heart will enjoy...tick tock, tick tock....

Daniel "Sprout" Bradford has a secret, but it isn't what you think.  Sprout's secret has nothing to do with his green hair, his romantic relationship, his mother's death, or his father's drinking.  After his mother died four years ago, Sprout's father packed him in the car and drove from Long Island to the middle of nowhere - in this case, Buhler, Kansas - where he and Sprout live in a trailer covered in vines and surrounded by a collection of upside-down tree stumps. 

Tapped by his hard-drinking but no-nonsense English teacher to compete in the statewide Kansas essay contest, Sprout spends the summer before his junior year under her tutelage.  Mrs. Miller urges Sprout to divulge his secrets, both public and private. 

Sprout is an intelligent and wisecracking narrator, and the novel is full of wordplay.  But until Sprout begins talking about his first relationships, we really don't know much about him.  From his purely physical relationship with jock Ian to his feelings for the new kid Ty, Sprout's romantic entanglements force him explore his own motivations and desires.  But will this self-examination come too late?  Sprout: Or My Salad Days, When I was Green in Judgment is a poignant, entertaining look at growing up gay in small-town America.

There are a few events in US history that are so complex, tragic or emotional that they are still compelling to readers, even decades afterwords.

The Civil War is a good example--new books on Abraham Lincoln and the war seem to come out every month and still make the Best Sellers list.  The sinking of the Titanic is another event that still fascinates readers. One event about which I've read voraciously is the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911.

One hundred forty six workers died in a fire that was under control in less than an hour. Situated on the 8th, 9th and 10th floors of a new "skyscraper" in New York City, the Triangle Factory made ladies' shirtwaists which were all the rage at the time. Like the Titanic tragedy, there are many "if onlys" in the Triangle story that would have meant many lives being spared: proper fire escapes, doors that were not locked by factory bosses, fire hoses that actually worked, enforcement of the non-smoking rule.

In Margaret Peterson Haddix's book Uprising, she brings to life not only the facts of the story, but three young girls who lived them. Yetta from Russia and Bella from Italy both came to the US looking for a better life and hoping to save enough money to bring their families from their homelands.

Caught up in the workers' strike that predated the fire, Yetta and Bella befriend Jane, a lonely society girl who becomes involved in their crusade. Their friendship is a big part of the story, as is the plight of many other girls newly arrived in the States and held at the mercy of greedy factory owners.

Haddix, who is the author of the popular Shadow Children  series for kids and teens, has a talent for mixing history and fiction and the ability to write about tragedies like the Triangle fire without making them maudlin. Even though we know how these sad stories end, in the hands of a skilled author, they are worth the read.

Maybe it's kind of gruesome, but I always like a good archaeology book with lots of pictures of skeletons and bodies. It's fascinating what the combination of archaeology, forensics and cultural anthropology can tell us about people and cultures that lived hundreds or even thousands of years ago. And, as science and technology continue to advance, we get to learn even more about the people who came before us. Two books I always pull from the shelves for those who share my love of preserved people are Bodies From the Ash: Life and Death in Ancient Pompeii and Written in Bone: Buried Lives of Jamestown and Colonial Maryland.

Bodies from the Ash is always a hit with kids and adults alike. After a brief introduction about the eruption of Vesuvius, the author really starts digging into the good stuff like how, exactly, archaeologists made all those incredible plaster casts of the volcano's victims in Pompeii. Details from jewelry and clothing provide all sorts of clues into the identity of some of the people who were excavated and, because the disaster happened so quickly, we have learned quite a bit about the daily life of people living in Pompeii.

Written in Bone is an incredibly fascinating read that will appeal to both fans of archaeology and early American history. Through careful and extensive excavation of cemeteries, homes and other sites throughout the James Fort area in Jamestown, Virginia, readers get a very intimate glimpse into the lives of some of the people who lived in the Chesapeake Bay area in the 1600s and 1700s. Clues such as copper pins and coffin materials provide insight into whose remains have been found buried in grave sites. When excavations are compared to various journals and logs from the era, it is possible to pinpoint exactly who many of these people were. Not all of the excavations were so benign, however. One skeleton was found under a hearth, and scientists were able to determine from the arrangement of the bones that he was hastily buried, and they even found evidence of the digging tools!

For many years, each fall - The King County Library System has offered a Book Group Gathering and invited members of book groups to get together and learn about the resources the library system can offer to help organize, support, and energize book groups. 

On Saturday, September 26, over 130 people gathered, (mostly women) at the KCLS Service Center for this year's program. With Nancy Pearl offering wonderful ideas for organizing, sustaining and controlling book groups, refreshments and prizes donated by the North Bend, Snoqualmie and Fall City Friends of the Library, and a busy morning of programs, it was huge success.

One of the most interesting items not on the agenda was an opportunity for spontaneous book sharing when one of the speakers had an emergency and couldn't make it. People raised their hand, stood up and gave a title their book group had read, and a very brief book talk.

 

The most wonderful part of this experience was the passion that surged through the room, as someone suggested a title, if others had read it, there was an audible sigh, nods and once in a while, even a shake of the head. The point wasn't to convince others that this was THE book their group should read, but to offer suggestions, endorsements and above all, to share a love of books, stories and literature.

 

We agreed to compile the list of suggestions and post it to our blog.

 

The Color of Lightning - Jiles, Paulette

Fieldwork - Berlinski, Mischa

Little Bee - Cleave, Chris

Mountains Beyond Mountains - Kidder, Tracy

A Far Cry from Kensington - Spark, Muriel

The Poisonwood Bible - Kingsolver, Barbara

 

Music is everywhere in Mia's life. Her parents were rockers. She's an accomplished cellist. Her boyfriend Adam has his own punk band. She's applied to Julliard and life after high school is finally showing more potential.

But one snowy morning everything changes. Mia and her family are driving along the highway when a semi-truck collides with their car, instantly killing Mia's parents and her younger brother. Mia finds herself outside her own body, not dead, not alive, and not knowing what to do. As a ghost-like spirit, Mia spends time at the hospital, observing her own coma state. Limbo is confusing....should she join her family in the afterlife, or return to her human body? Is this even Mia's decision to make?

Life without her parents and brother would be devastating. But, at 17 years old, is she ready to give up on what the future may hold?

This is a beautifully written book, full of grace and possibilities. It's a quick read, wonderful for fans of The Lovely Bones or Elsewhere.