Greg is a conflicted soul: he wants to do the right thing, but the constant quest for status and girls seems to undermine his every effort. His attempts to prove his worthiness in the popularity race (he estimates he's currently ranked 52nd or 53rd) are constantly foiled by well-meaning parents, a younger and older brother, and nerdy friends.
By Randa Abdel-Fattah
Synopsis
"I need to see Sitti Zeynab one last time. To know if I will have the courage to go ahead with my plan. The two nurses look frazzled and smile wearily at me. 'We must leave now,' they say in urgent tones. 'I won't be long,' I reassure them and I jump up onto the back of the ambulance.
"Fans and new readers alike will greedily devour McKinley's latest, a high fantasy as perfectly shaped and eloquently told as Beauty and The Hero and the Crown."
The nominees for the 2008-2009 Stellar Teen Book Award, British Columbia's Teen Reader's Choice Award have been announced. Among the many titles nominated are The Bonemender's Oath and Tell, both from Orca Soundings. The winner will be announced in May after teen readers across the province vote. For a complete list of nominees, visit the Stellar Award Web site. more » » »
by Tonya Hurley
Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
And if I should die before I awake,
I pray the popular attend my wake.
When life as Alex Morales had known it changed forever, he was working behind the counter at Joey's Pizza. He was worried about getting elected as senior class president and making the grades to land him in a good college. He never expected that an asteroid would hit the moon, knocking it closer in orbit to the earth and catastrophically altering the earth's climate.
He never expected to be fighting just to stay alive.
Susan Beth Pfeffer's "Life As We Knew It" enthralled and devastated readers with its brutal but hopeful look at an apocalyptic event from a small-town perspective. Now this harrowing companion novel examines the same events as they unfold in New York City, revealed through the eyes of a seventeen-year-old Puerto Rican New Yorker. When Alex's parents disappear in the aftermath of tidal waves, he must care for his two younger sisters, even as Manhattan becomes a deadly wasteland.
[via Publisher's Weekly]
Disney Book Group has signed a deal with Miley Cyrus (star of Hannah Montana) for world rights to her first book, to be published in spring 2009 by Disney-Hyperion. The book will cover Cyrus's upbringing in Tennessee, close relationship with her family and rise to fame, and will include family photos and stories. Nearly 15 million Hannah Montana-related books have sold globally to date. Jonathan Yaged,
v-p and North America publisher of Disney Book Group, negotiated the deal.
Gr 9 and up.
John Francis is the founder and director of Planetwalk, a nonprofit environmental education organization. This book is about his quest to walk across the country, and taking a vow of silence after seeing the terrible effects of a 1971 oil spill in San Francisco Bay. The cover was the first thing about the book that drew me in.
When the struggle to save oil-soaked birds and restore blackened beaches left him feeling frustrated and helpless, John Francis decided to take a more fundamental and personal stand—he stopped using all forms of motorized transportation. Soon after embarking on this quest that would span two decades and two continents, the young man took a vow of silence that endured for 17 years. It began as a silent environmental protest, but as a young African-American man, walking across the country in the early 1970s, his idea of "the environment" expanded beyond concern about pollution and loss of habitat to include how we humans treat each other and how we can better communicate and work together to benefit the earth.
Through his silence and walking, he learned to listen, and along the way, earned college and graduate degrees in science and environmental studies. The United Nations appointed him goodwill ambassador to the world’s grassroots communities and the U.S. government recruited him to help address the Exxon Valdez disaster.
Was he crazy? How did he live and earn all those degrees without talking? An amazing human-interest story, with a vital message, Planetwalker is also a deeply personal and engaging coming-of-age odyssey—the positive experiences, the challenging times, the characters encountered, and the learning gained along the way.
This article originally appeared in SLJ’s Extra Helping. Sign up now! and I am late publishing this post. It has been sitting in the "drafts" folder, unnoticed!
A Darkling Plain ("The Hungry City Chronicles," HarperCollins), Philip Reeve's dark, post-apocalyptic tale of return to a London ravaged by war and radiation, has won the Los Angeles Times' 2007 Book Prize for young adult fiction, announced late last week.
In a second just-announced literary honor, The Escape of Oney Judge: Martha Washington’s Slave Finds Freedom (Farrar), written and illustrated by Emily Arnold McCully, has taken the top prize in the 2008 Jane Addams Children's Book Awards, in the category of Books for Younger Children. We Are One: The Story of Bayard Rustin (Calkins Creek) by Larry Dane Brimner has won in the Books for Older Children category.
The Addams Awards also named an honor book in its younger children category, One Thousand Tracings: Healing the Wounds of World War II (Hyperion), written and illustrated by Lita Judge.
Honor books in the older children's category include Rickshaw Girl (Charlesbridge), by Mitali Perkins; Elijah of Buxton (Scholastic) by Christopher Paul Curtis; and Birmingham, 1963 (Wordsong) by Carole Boston Weatherford.
Oney Judge tells the story of a slave girl who flees to freedom. "Expressive watercolors within this well-researched biography portray the bravery of Ona Maria Judge, an African-American woman who claimed, and fought for, the right to have "no mistress but herself," the judges wrote.
The Story of Bayard Rustin introduces young readers to the controversial African-American pacifist and civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, a trusted adviser to Martin Luther King, Jr. and organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. "Succinct prose, powerful quotations, and fresh historical photographs place the story of Rustin’s life alongside the story of the March, revealing the breadth and depth of Rustin’s decades of commitment to confronting racism and promoting peace in the United States and in countries around the world," the judges wrote.
The Addams Awards, from the Jane Addams Peace Association, celebrate children's books published the preceding year that "effectively promote the cause of peace, social justice, world community, and the equality of the sexes and all races."
A Darkling Plain, the L.A. Times winner, is the final book in Reeve's "Hungry City" series. In a 2006 interview, Reeve told SLJ that he was aiming the “Hungry Cities” series at children 12 and upwards, "which was the age I was when I was reading grown-up science fiction.”
Walter Dean Myers.
Two-time Newbery Honor author Walter Dean Myers is no stranger to war. His father served in WWII, his brother died while fighting in the Vietnam War, his son was stationed in Qatar during the first Gulf War, and his grandson served in Iraq at the beginning of the current conflict. Understandably, the author has a deeply personal connection to the subject of his latest novel, Sunrise Over Fallujah, narrated by a teenage soldier deployed to Iraq. Next month, Scholastic will release the novel with a 50,000-copy print run, as well as a 20th anniversary paperback edition of Fallen Angels, Myers’s Coretta Scott King Award-winning novel set in the battlefield jungles of Vietnam.Myers also has firsthand experience in the military, having served in the Army for three years, after enlisting on his 17th birthday. "When I joined the Army," Myers recalls, "I had a romantic notion of war, having read World War I British poetry and watched films about World War II." That image was soon shattered. His brother’s death in Vietnam caused Myers to reflect further on war and its meaning and led him to write Fallen Angels. "I wanted to dispel the notion of war as either romantic or simplistically heroic," he explains.
