Teen Fiction
Jars of Glass by Brad Barkley
Two Parties, One Tux, and a Very Short Film About the Grapes of Wrath by Steven Goldman
Here Lies Arthur by Philip Reeve
Starred Review. The last word is Hope, yet Reeve (Mortal Engines) injects deep cynicism into every other phrase of this Arthurian fable. As he tells it, Myrddin the enchanter is a charlatan of high degree, possessing no magic but a mastery of storytelling and fraud. Gwyna, the narrator, is perhaps nine years old when Myrddin sees her swim down a river to escape a house set afire by callous, marauding warlord Arthur. Myrddin promptly disguises her first as the Lady of the Lake and then as a boy apprentice. Gwyna soon learns to trust no one, doubt everything and scorn both male and female roles. She even becomes skeptical of the empire-building ambition behind Myrddin's efforts to recast Arthur's unremarkable exploits as the stuff of legend. Nodding to canon and history while not particularly following either (Lancelot and Morgan le Fay are notably absent), Reeve, like Myrddin, turns hallowed myth and supple prose to political purposes, neatly skewering the modern-day cult of spin and the age-old trickery behind it. Smart teens will love this. Ages 12 up. (Nov.) Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Disney at Dawn by Ridley Pearson
Brisingr by Christopher Paolini
March Toward the Thunder by Joseph Bruchac
Black Rabbit Summer by Kevin Brooks
Starred Review. Sinister yet seductive, this brooding thriller bears all the Brooks (Lucas) hallmarks, chiefly the British author's painful awareness of teenage alienation, made urgent by violent events; and a marked taste for ambiguity. Five teens precede a trip to a carnival with a visit to their long-abandoned hideout; as the narrator, Pete, explains, all five used to be friends, now they see one another as people you used to know. The next morning, one of them is missing Raymond, a borderline type who believes his black rabbit can talk to him as is a local girl turned wild-child celebrity, seen taunting Raymond the previous evening. As the police hunt for the starlet, Pete alone worries about Raymond and begins trying to track him. Brooks calibrates the relationships among these characters with such subtlety that readers get swept up even by the MacGuffins, and it's in the characters' hidden histories that Pete finds his clues. A running motif about the relationship between close observation and intuition might encourage readers to pay unusually strict attention; it will equip them for the semi-open ending. Ages 12 up. (July) Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Nation by Terry Pratchett
Starred Review. In Carnegie Medalist Pratchett's (the Discworld novels; A Hat Full of Sky) superb mix of alternate history and fantasy, the king of England, along with the next 137 people in line to the throne, has just succumbed to the plague; the era might be akin to the 1860s or '70s. As the heir apparent is being fetched from his new post as governor of an island chain in the South Pelagic Ocean, his daughter, the redoubtable Ermintrude, still en route to join him in the South Pelagic, has been shipwrecked by a tsunami. She meets Mau, whose entire people have been wiped out by the great wave (he escaped their fate only because he was undergoing an initiation rite on another island). She and Mau each suffer profound crises of faith, and together they re-establish Mau's nation from other survivors who gradually wash up on shore and rediscover (with guidance from spirits) its remarkable lost heritage. Neatly balancing the somber and the wildly humorous in a riveting tale of discovery, Pratchett shows himself at the height of his powers. Ages 12 up. (Oct.) Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
Antsy Does Time by Neal Shusterman
