Making Latin Translation Sexy & Scary Again: The Book of Blood & Shadow by Robin Wasserman

"I should probably start with the blood." After all, there was so much blood on the night that Nora's suddenly perfect life crumbled and twisted into a nightmare.  Before that night, Nora had two best friends.  She had a fresh new storybook romance of her own.  She was working on a senior year independent Latin project at the local college with a quirky professor and one of her best friends, Chris, now a college freshmen.  Everything in Nora's life was finally falling into place.  Now Chris is dead and  his girlfriend and Nora's other best friend Adrienne has withdrawn into a state of catatonic shock.  Max, Chris'  sweet and nerdy roommate and Nora's new boyfriend, has disappeared and the police are convinced that he's the killer.

Determined to prove that Max is innocent, Nora begin to immerse herself in the strange occurrences and cryptic clues surrounding the Book of Blood and Shadow--the mysterious manuscript at the center of their shared research project.  Nora's search for the truth leads her deep into a dark world of ancient secrets spanning centuries of bloodshed and terror as she traces the clues hidden in another desperate young woman's centuries old letters across the ocean and into the twisting street of Prague.

This new novel has been described as the YA Da Vinci Code and rightfully so.  Full of mysterious documents, hidden history, elaborate codes, secret societies, and thrills & chills galore, The Book of Blood and Shadow has all the necessary pieces for an excellent intellectual thriller.  However, Wasserman goes several steps further than just gathering all the pieces;  she's combined those pieces with interesting characters, rich description, and elegantly built suspense.  It has all the compulsive readability of The Da Vinci Code but with better writing and more sexy, on the spot Latin translation.  Nora is a smart, sarcastic, and fierce narrator.  Her relationships with Chris, Adrienne, and Max are complex; she consistently keeps an emotional distance from both Chris and Adrienne yet remains intensely loyal and somewhat dependent on their threesome's stability--especially after Chris' murder.  Her romance with Max is sweet and thrilling, which makes the confusing web of revelations about him and his potential involvement in the Book's mysteries even more emotionally fraught. Elizabeth Weston, the stepdaughter of a medieval alchemist who devoted his life to decoded the mysteries within the Book, emerges as an equally fascinating character through Nora's revelatory translation of her letters.

I was immediately drawn into the story, both by the appealingly human characters and the ever increasing mystery.  The plot was full of twists and turns that kept me guessing right up to the final page.  I would heartily recommend The Book of Blood and Shadow to readers of intellectual thrillers and mysteries (such as The Da Vinci Code), especially Latin students and Indiana Jones fans.  

4/5 STARS

*review written based on an advanced e-galley obtained from the publisher via Netgalley

Booktalk Breakdown: Secrets, Lies, and Spies

So when I'm not wandering around the internet, reading young adult books, or indulging in my many random t.v. obsessions, I'm a librarian working with 7-12 grade students at an independent all girls school.  As part of my job, I visit both the 7th and 8th grade classes during their weekly grade-level meetings approximately once every three or four weeks with a booktalk.  As I say in my little bio in the sidebar here, I am a rookie librarian; I finished my graduate program in August and started my job a few weeks later.  Booktalking, when librarians or teachers use their creativity and wits to tease and sell books to students, is a standard tool in the youth services librarian's tool belt.  So I was fairly nervous for my first booktalks this fall.  However, I've been pleasantly surprised at how well most of my booktalks have gone so far this year.  Now that I've settled in a little bit, I wanted to try and change up my pretty basic booktalking methods.  Ally Carter's fabulous and fun novels are incredibly popular with our 7th and 8th graders; her newest Gallagher Girls novel comes out in March so it seemed like perfect opportunity to try out a more ambitious booktalk.  Since I'd like to include more library programming posts here, it also seemed like a great opportunity to try out a new occasional blog feature, breaking down my process of developing, creating, and implementing a booktalk.

The Gallagher Girls series, for those who might not spend lots of time with 12 and 13 year old girls, is about an elite school for young women with unique gifts--specifically, gifts for international intrigue. Cammie "The Chameleon" Morgan, our protagonist and narrator, is the headmistress' daughter, a CIA legacy, and a specialist in disappearing into the crowd--hence, her nickname.  So, first I gathered together other fun novels with spies, mystery, and intrigue.

I settled on three novels, all of which are the first in series.

The Liar Society by Lisa and Laura Roecker


As I noted in my review a few months ago, this debut is a fun if imperfect mystery that combines elements from E. Lockhart's The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks (elite private school with secret societies) and Veronica Mars (angry outcast teen sleuth searching for the truth about her dead best friend).  It opens with a great hook--a cryptic email from the protagonist's dead best friend.  I typed up the email on my own account and took a screenshot, which I placed into the Power Point slideshow that I used with the booktalk.  A little set up, flash the email up on the screen, and then a final hook sentence and this book was sold!

Inside The Shadow City (Kiki Strike #1) by Kristen Miller

Ananka Fishbein lives a very ordinary life--until one day she sees someone or something creeping out of a sinkhole across the street from her family's New York City apartment.  Ananka decides to investigate and discovers a hidden city underneath Manhattan's streets, an awful lot of rats, a group of renegade girl scouts, and the mysterious Kiki Strike.  Suddenly Ananka's life has been transformed from ordinary to extraordinary.  I did a second person sell with this novel, starting: "You have lived an very un-extraordinary life..."  It certainly helped that as soon as I held the novel up and clicked my slideshow to the cover image, a student yelled out: " Oh my God, I read that--it's soo good!"   

A Spy in the House (The Agency #1) by Y.S. Lee

After a sudden rescue from the gallows, young orphan Mary Quinn is surprised when she's offered an unusual opportunity: an education at Miss. Scrimshaw's Academy for Girls.  Now seventeen years old, Mary learns that her education has prepared for more than a career as a mere governess.  The Academy is actually a cover for The Agency, an independent group of female investigators who take advantage of the Victorian assumptions about women to solve cases when the police can't.  For Mary's first case, she must infiltrate the household of a wealthy merchant suspected of international smuggling and dig through his family's many dangerous--and deadly--secrets.  I was a little unsure about the reception I would get for this novel; historical fiction is frequently a bit of a gamble with a mixed group of middle schoolers.  But I was happily proved wrong and this one sold quite well!


Once I had selected these readalikes, I began working on the other portion of my booktalk.  Recently, I've been working on creating my own book trailers using iMovie.  This booktalk proved the ideal opportunity to try and work in one of my experiments.  I didn't want to do a traditional booktalk for the Gallagher Girls books because so many of the students have already read at least the first novel in the series.  So instead I made this little trailer that acts as a introduction to the premise of the whole series, with a hook at the end for the new title coming out in March.

I then embedded the Youtube version of this trailer into a Power Point presentation.  I decided to add slides with the cover images of each book as well, a practice that I might try to use in many of my future booktalks since it allows more students to see the cover and cover images are key selling point with my students.  The room used for the seventh grade class meetings has a Smart Board and I just hooked my laptop up, tested everything out beforehand, and got the presentation cued up for the start of the meeting.  Considering this booktalk was my first with any kind of media other than my own voice, I was more nervous than usual.  However, it went incredibly well and I had even more trouble than usual deciding how to distribute the one or two copies of each book among the ten to twenty kids who wanted it.

So there's my first Booktalk Breakdown!  I'm beginning to work on another slightly more adventurous booktalk on dystopian fiction for my Hunger Games-obsessed eighth graders and if it comes together, then I'll post another breakdown!

  

The Kick-Butt Girl Sleuth in 2011: A Rare Fictional Creature

I'm a huge fan of mystery novels.  I read my first Nancy Drew in 4th grade; once I had exhausted that all local libraries' supplies of that eternal series, I moved on to Agatha Christie and Martha Grimes.  But while I love these more complex mysteries (with murder and mayhem included), I missed seeing a teenage girl as the investigator.  There were a few short-lived possibilities on television (anyone remember The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo?) but nothing really caught on.  Then Veronica Mars was born.  Although the show struggled to last even three seasons (and the last two seasons hit some bumps), Veronica Mars stands out as one of the few recent attempts to create a true teen girl sleuth for the 21st century.  And I for one was absolutely thrilled.  I loved the show and love Veronica even more.  She was a great female protagonist, complex, conflicted, angry, vulnerable, brave, sexy, and flawed.  And she was a great detective.

In my library's most recent book orders, there have been a few young adult novels that heavily incorporate a mystery and an investigation of that mystery by the female protagonist.  In my constant search for the next literary Veronica Mars, I read each of them--but was generally a little disappointed.

The first mystery that I snagged after cataloguing was Rosebush by Michele Jaffe.  As it's striking cover demonstrates, this particular novel kicks off with a dramatic and mystery image: a few blocks away from a big Memorial Weekend party, popular and pretty Jane is found tangled and unconscious in a rosebush, the apparently the victim of hit and run.  As Jane, lying paralyzed in the hospital, attempts to regain her memories of the accident, she begins to understand that the truth--about that night, her friends, her boyfriend, and her past--is much more complicated than she thought.  And soon it appears that Jane's accident wasn't an accident at all and everyone in her life is a suspect.  Now Jane must unravel the mysteries surrounding her before the killer strikes again.  While this novel had a promising premise and great opening image, it was a disappointing reading experience for me.  The slow revelations of complexities through flashbacks and the inside view of the pretty, popular clique of girls reminded me a bit of Lauren Oliver's Before I Fall and the setting among the seamy underside of the rich and privileged was reminiscent of Veronica Mars. But frankly, Jane is a less interesting character than either Sam or Veronica and the mystery here has almost too many twists and turns to remain believable.  So while I think that Rosebush might be a hit with some of my younger teens who like mysteries featuring the dark side of rich, pretty, and popular cliques, I was left unsatisfied in my quest for a solid teen girl detective.

Next, I snagged our new copy of The Liar Society, a debut novel written by Lisa and Laura Roecker.  When Kate gets an email from her best friend Grace, she's shocked and deeply confused--because Grace died a few months ago in a mysterious fire.  But when the messages begin to imply that Grace's death was not merely a tragic accident but the result of the tangled conspiracy of secrets filling the hallowed halls of their elite private school, Kate plunges into a dangerous investigation with the help of two new allies: her nerdy neighbor and the cute bad boy from school.  Firstly, this novel came much closer to the kind of teen mystery novel I was craving.  Kate is much more likable protagonist than Jane and a more effective detective.  The mystery was exciting and built well as more and more secrets and clues were revealed as the plot progressed.  I'm also a big sucker for secret society tales and this novel fits that bill very nicely.  Overall, it was a well-paced and fun mystery; The Liar Society reminded me a bit of both Veronica Mars and The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, although it didn't quite reach the level of complexity of either.

The last recently release young adult mystery featuring a teen girl sleuth I read this fall was my favorite, although it might be the most challenging to sell initially to teen readers.  The Girl Is Murder is delightful historical mystery by Kathryn Haines Miller set in 1942 New York City featuring plenty of juicy historical details, a solid mystery, and a determined young female detective.  15 year old Iris Anderson never used to lie--not about big things anyway.  Then her mother's suicide and her father's return from war missing a leg changed everything.  Suddenly, Iris has left her comfortable private school life far behind and entered the very different world of the Lower East Side, where she starts at a public school while her Pop struggles to get his private investigation business going again.  Money is tight and Iris knows that Pop could use her help--even if he doesn't know it yet.  So when his newest case involves a boy from Iris's school, she decides to do some investigating of her own.  Suddenly Iris is lying all the time, inventing identities and excuses as she tails her former private school classmates and sneaks out to Harlem club to dance until 3am.  Iris is a stubborn and smart young detective; she makes mistakes of inexperience and arrogance but overall she proves her skills as an beginning investigator.   The historical setting is solidly fleshed out with everything from slang to fashion to cultural tensions.  However, while both the mystery and the characters' developments are clearly tied to the time period, they remain interesting for a modern audience.  Iris is a great candidate to join the ranks of Nancy and Veronica and I hope Kathryn Miller Haines brings her back in at least one sequel so we can watch her investigative skills grow.

Here's hoping that 2012 brings us a new crop of teen mysteries and kick-butt girl sleuths!

Thrills and Chills: A Review of The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson

I love mysteries.  I am an unapologetic mystery fiend.  Since my first Nancy Drew in fourth grade, I have been a bit addicted to mystery stories. But I usually find my mystery reading from outside my preferred shelves of the young adult section.  So when I heard that one of my favorite YA authors, the brilliant Maureen Johnson, was publishing a murder mystery with a supernatural twist, I pretty much threw a party in excitement.  One of my favorite writers writing in one of my favorite genres? A dream come true! 


It is always a highly anticipated event for a bookworm when an author writes a book that seems very different that previous novels.  It's sort of a gamble: will it be brilliant or will it flop?  While I was at ALA this June I was lucky enough to be at the YALSA Young Adult Authors' Coffee Klatch.  So I got the opportunity to hear Maureen answer the question that she has likely already grown sick of hearing: why write a murder mystery about Jack the Ripper and a secret London police force? She said that she had always wanted to write a mystery.  Well, I for one am very glad that she has finally been able to pursue that interest! 


Maureen's other novels (which include The Bermudez Triangle, Suite Scarlett, 13 Little Blue Envelopes) usually fit very clearly into the sub-category of young adult realistic fiction; the delightfully supernatural Devilish is an exception to this statement.  The Name of the Star seems, initially, quite different from these other novels. It begins like many of the best mysteries: with an intriguing murder.  Then we meet Rory Deveaux, a native of Louisana whose arrival in London coincides with a brutal murder that appears to mimic  the first of Jack the Ripper's famous crimes.  Starting senior year of high school in a foreign country is already pretty terrifying and confusing but soon it appears that Rory is going to have to worry about something much scarier than British slang and unfamiliar classes as the murders continue and she finds herself caught up right in the middle.  


Rory is what I like to think of as a classic Maureen Johnson heroine: smart and spunky with a solid sense of humor.  She is likable, admirable, and realistic.  As usual, I completely adore her.  She is a great narrator, interspersing her narration with sharp and often self-deprecating observations about the world and stories about her kooky but beloved Southern family.  The novel is spot on in its descriptions of the wonders and confusions that come with studying abroad (especially in England) as well as the more universal experiences of being a teen (kissing, high school politics).  But amidst her signature elements, Maureen Johnson slowly sneaks in not only a compelling mystery but also a great supernatural twist.  By the last page, I was simultaneously thrilled and furious to remember that this book is the first in a series; it left me eager for more but frustrated that I now need to wait to get it! 


So definitely be watching the shelves of your local libraries and bookstores this September for the release of Maureen Johnson's newest, The Name of the Star!


5/5 STARS


* The copy of The Name of the Star I read and based this review on was a free (and signed!) ARC I received from the publisher at ALA Annual 2011.  
  

In My Mailbox #3

  I'm back! Somehow I've managed to plow through a few more of my books for review in between grad school work, interning, and my small attempts at a social life and so I allowed myself to grab a few more on a recent library visit. So I am able to once again join in the In My Mailbox party!  IMM is a fantastic meme in which bloggers list the books that they received over the last week via mail/bookstore/library.  It's hosted by the lovely Story Siren over at her awesome blog. For more info, look here. So this week in my "mailbox," I got:

All of my IMM picks this week come from one of my lovely local libraries. 


 Bliss by Lauren Myracle


 Rampant by Diana Peterfreund


 Ash by Malinda Lo


I'm very excited about these books; they've all been on my radar for a while now and it's great to get my hands on them at last! Look out this week for reviews for a few of my past IMM books, such as The God Box and Forget-Her-Nots.  What was in your mailbox this week?

Paper Towns by John Green

Paper Towns

John Green

SUMMARY: Quentin Jacobsen has spent the majority of his life in love with the brilliantly mysterious and adventure-addicted girl next door, Margo Roth Speigelman. When Q and Margo were nine, they discovered a dead body together. However, since then their interactions have been limited and vaguely friendly at best. While Margo is well-known and admired for her exploits both small and large at Winter Park High, Q is content with his safe and generally anonymous life of school days spent hanging out near the band room between classes with his closest friends Radar and Ben and weekends spent playing videogames. But Q’s comfortably predictable life is suddenly interrupted when Margo appears outside his window for the first time in about nine years. And what follows is a bizarre and thrilling night that Q hopes will be the beginning of a whole new life in which he becomes Margo’s new partner in her glamorous escapades. But when the sun rises, Margo has disappeared and gone from merely being mysterious to becoming a mystery herself. But when Q explores further, trying to understand their night together, he realizes that Margo is a mystery meant to be solved—by him. As he follows the strange, seemingly disconnected clues from Walt Whitman to abandoned trailers, Q begins to question whether he ever really knew the girl he adored for so long.

ONESMARTCUPCAKE SAYS: John Green strikes again with another smart, funny, and emotionally resonant novel. Before I fully explain why I so thoroughly enjoyed this book, I want to address some critiques of the novel.

In developing this review, I glanced around the online book world to feel out some other reactions to the novel. Paper Towns has been criticized by some readers as being too similar to Green’s earlier novels, especially in terms of characterization. Is it true that Q shares certain qualities of intellectualism and geekiness with Miles and Colin? Yes. Does this nerdy and quirky hero have an intense infatuation with a brilliant but unreachable girl? Yes, he does. However, I argue that despite such similarities, Paper Towns stands out as its own work with its own separate (albeit connected) sets of questions and themes. As in his earlier novels, Green explores the difficulty in truly knowing and understanding another human being. He continues to delve into our constant tendency to perceive others through the window of our own needs, desires, and interests and so creating images of people that usually turn out to be much further from reality than we would like to admit. But while Looking for Alaska dealt with these themes in the larger context of dealing with death and grief and An Abundance of Katherines worked with them in context of the unpredictability of life, Paper Towns examines them head-on, utilizing a detective story format to explore the big mystery of human interaction and relationships.

As usual, Green’s characters are intelligent and quirky and his novel is interwoven with a diversity of seeming unrelated but interesting topics ranging this time from music to cartography to Walt Whitman. The text also manages to capture that strange time at the end of high school when everyone is on the verge of entering a new world and a new life separated from the familiar people and places and when the resulting uncertainty can force unprecedented reactions out of a variety of people.

I really enjoyed the detective story/mystery aspect of this novel. I’m an avid mystery reader and here, Green takes the predictable structure of a traditional detective story and uses it to follow Q’s simultaneous search for Margo and for more honest relationships. I also thoroughly enjoyed the humor embedded into the narrative, especially through Margo’s ingenious plots and Q and his gang’s final, epic road trip. Green also manages to achieve some truly lovely emotional moments between his characters, especially the unsure but determined Q and the fascinating (and somewhat selfish) Margo. Overall, John Green continues to produce witty YA fiction and accordingly my massive literary crush on him continues to grow.

4 ½ / 5 STARS

The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson

The Adoration of Jenna Fox

Mary E. Pearson

SUMMARY: A seventeen-year-old girl has just woken up from a yearlong coma, the result of a horrific accident from which she is still recuperating. At least this is what she been told. Jenna Fox woke without remembering her life or her name; there are strange gaps in her vocabulary yet her knowledge of history, literature, and science seems unnaturally detailed. Jenna’s only connection to her mysterious past is the series of home videos recording the first sixteen years of her life that her tense mother and absent father have instructed her to watch. But soon Jenna’s memories begin to resurface and she starts to ask questions no one seems willing to answer. Can she really be the same person as the carefree girl in the videos? What actually happened after the accident? Why will no one speak about the important event itself? What have her parents risked to save their precious child?

ONESMARTCUPCAKE THINKS: I need to make a confession. You know the whole ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ thing? I totally ignore that rule in many situations. While I will never give up on a book because it has an uninteresting cover, I will consistently at least pick up a book based on my interest in its cover or title. The Adoration of Jenna Fox first caught my eye in this precise fashion. I had seen the title somewhere and then saw the cover and was totally caught by the neat cover art. But it was the addictive mystery that kept me reading once I opened the cover.

I liked The Adoration of Jenna Fox. The suspense and slow revelation of the primary mystery kept me turning the pages. The premise allows Pearson to provoke fascinating and frighteningly current questions about the technological rush to beat death, scientific and medical ethics, and the definitions of humanity. Additionally, I quite like Jenna. Her struggle to understand herself is filled with an earnestness, fear, and uncertainty that would seem familiar to any teenager and anyone who remembers being one; while most seventeen-year-olds’ search for identity takes place in less extreme circumstances, the emotions remain universal.

However, upon completing the novel my final impression was of enjoyment with slight disappointment. The ride had been thrilling but at times, a little hazy. While I found most of the secondary characters interesting, some (such as Dane or even Allys and Ethan) were underdeveloped in comparison with Jenna or her grandmother. Also, there were occasional events or plot points that lacked full explanation or connection to the larger narrative. However, I enjoyed The Adoration of Jenna Fox; it’s a sci-fi thriller with a touch of romance and medical ethics thrown in and the unique combination results in an addictive and thought provoking novel.

3/5 STARS