X in Flight

Rivers, Karen. X in Flight. Berkeley, CA: Raincoast Books, 2007. Print

Annotation
Alternating between three different narrators, X in Flight tells the story of Ruby, Cat and Xenos, caught in a love triangle and dealing with their troubles at home and at school. When Xenos grows a pair of wings, events move towards a possibly tragic end.

(This is the first in Rivers's XYZ trilogy.)

Snap n' read:
He's paying attention now, she thinks. Good. She stands there, arms above her head, thinking about what to do next. She can't tell from his tone whether he's imploring her or whether he's bored by the whole thing. Is he annoyed or afraid? She'd prefer afraid, given a choice. She wants to make him feel something.

Maybe I should run away and join the circus, she says. Only it comes out "shircus." She's drunk. She wobbles precariously...

Cat, she hears him scream, and then she's falling, backwards, falling for a long time. Hands stretched out and somehow - how? - X is holding her, somehow at floor level. They're on the castle drawbridge, the fake moat under them painted with alligators that seem to swim past her dizzy eyes. She clings to his neck and mumbles, Thanks, but she chokes on the word and it comes out as a cough.

It's only as they are driving home that she thinks, how the hell did that happen?  (p. 141-42)

This is the story of Cat, Ruby and X. As the point of view alternates between the three, we learn of Ruby's family tragedy, Cat's failure to connect with her boyfriend X, and X's secret love of Ruby. We also learn of X's secret ability to fly.

When their lives are at stake, X must make a choice, and none of their lives will be the same.

Awards
X in Flight has, unjustly, won no awards.

(Image credit: Style Feeder)

 

Foundling

Cornish, D.M. Foundling. New York: Speak, 2007. Print.

Annotation
Book One of the Monster Blood Tattoo trilogy follows a young man with no parents, on his way to start an apprenticeship in the wilderness of the Highroads. Lost in a forest full of menacing creatures, he takes up with an even more menacing monster-hunter in D.M. Cornish's striking, gruesome, endlessly inventive world.

(The book includes over 100 pages of maps, appendices, and a glossary detailing the many monsters, oddities, and baroque cultural details of the Half-Continent.)

Booktalk
"Foundling" - it's the term for a child abandoned by his parents. They're raised in institutions, housed and trained until they're old enough to be conscripted into the Imperial Navy, Army, or some other dangerous job unfit for the aristocracy.

Rossamund is a foundling. He's a boy stuck with a girl's name. He's picked to be a highway lamplighter - not the glorious job he always dreamed of. Fate, however, has other plans.

The foundling enters the monstrous world outside the city walls for the first time. It is a world of pirates and smugglers sailing organic, muscular boats; a world of leers, men with chemically altered eyes and living masks; a world of lazhars, hunters with inhuman organs implanted in their bodies to give them inhuman powers. It is a world of monsters.

When Rossamund is thrust into this big and perilous world, he must make a choice about his future. He must be brave, face his destiny, and never again be just a foundling.

The Bogle on the Road

Awards
A 2007 ALA Best Book for Young Adults
2006 Aurealis Award - YA Novel
CBCA Honour Book

(Image credits: Associated Content, D.M. Cornish)

  

Elsewhere

Zevin, Gabrielle. Elsewhere. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. Print.

Annotation
In this fascinating twist on the fantasy/coming-of-age novel, a young woman learns to make the most of her life after she's killed at age fifteen. Wanting nothing more than to get back to Earth, she meets a number of friends in the afterlife who help her accept death as a part of life, and that living is only a state of mind.

Booktalk
Elsewhere - the place you go when you die.

Fifteen year old Lizzie Hall, almost sixteen, is riding her bike to the mall, when she's hit by a car and killed. She wakes up on a cruise ship, on her way to a new land. In Elsewhere, she meets her grandmother, who died before she was born. She meets her favorite rock star, dead of an overdose. She meets all kinds of people, living dead lives in a reversal of their living years on Earth.

All Liz wants is to go back to Earth, to go back to her life. She never learned to drive, never traveled, never fell in love. She spends her days with binoculars pointed at Earth, watching her family grieve, watching her friends live their lives. Lizzie will do anything to go home, but she's stuck Elsewhere.

Awards
Kirkus Reviews Editor's Choice
Booklist Editors' Choice
A School Library Journal Best Book of the Year

A New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age

An ALA Notable Children's Book
An ALA Popular Paperback for Young Readers
An Amazon.com Top Ten Editor's Pick
...and many more

(Image credit: Iowa City High School Library)

 

Amulet

Kibuishi, Kazu. Amulet, Book One: The Stonekeeper. New York: Graphix, 2008. Print.

Annotation
After their father is killed and their mother is abducted, Emily and Navin discover a portal to a strange world called Alledia. This first volume of a three-part graphic novel is satisfying in its own right, but the surprising cliffhanger ending will send readers immediately to the library for Book Two in the series.

Booktalk
After their father was killed in a terrible accident, Emily and Navin move with their mother to an old house, deep in the woods, said to be haunted. When things go bump in the night, they go to investigate. Their mother is abducted, and deep in the basement Emily and Navin discover a portal to a strange world called Alledia.

There, they meet their long-disappeared great grandfather and his troop of robots, who show Emily and Navin the way to save their mother. Saving their mother, though, is just the beginning. The sinister son of an Elf King is hard on their heels, and he will use Emily and Navin to disrupt the fragile balance of Alledia. They have the power in a magical amulet Emily wears on her neck; but the power may bring them even greater danger than they imagined.

 

 

 

(Image credits: School Library Journal, New York Magazine, Comic Book Resources, Bolt City)