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Showing posts with label teen fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teen fiction. Show all posts

May 23, 2018

From the YA Bookshelf - In Sight of Stars by Gae Polisner (sponsored by @JB_Lynn_author)

This post is sponsored by JB Lynn, author of The Hitwoman in a Pickle.

by Kathleen Barker

Life's wounds come at us from many directions.  They are William Shakespeare's "slings and arrows of outrageous fate".  Sometimes they are delivered by those closest to us.  Sometimes they aren't even true.  The wound is real, but not the perceived hurt behind the arrow.

March 28, 2018

From the YA Bookshelf: Along for the Ride - A Review

by Kathleen Barker

Spring break signals the coming end of the school year as well as time off from classes.  Not every family has the resources to fly away for a mini-vacay, so I wanted to find a top-notch read for the teen reader.  My choice?  New York Times bestselling author Sarah Dessen's Along for the Ride.

September 27, 2017

Screening the Young Teen's Reads

by Kathleen Barker

Choosing books for the budding teenage reader is like stepping gingerly through a minefield.  How can we tell when raw language and inappropriate sexual content will appear?  And what "clean" stories will lure the reluctant reader from relentless social media to discover the joys of literature?

Amazon affiliate links are used on this site.

The Beginning of Everything
I've spent the last year on a reading rampage - a quest for the holy grail of YA novels to entice my granddaughter to read more.  It hasn't been easy to alternate between my own perusals to those that might lure this typical just-turning thirteen year old.

My latest "find" on her behalf is Robyn Schneider's The Beginning of Everything.

Life was on target for popular athlete Ezra Faulkner as he finished his junior year in high school.  His coming senior year held such delicious promise for the guy who reigned supreme at the most popular kids' lunch table.  Then tragedy struck - a horrific car accident that left him in the hospital and rehab for the majority of the summer and ended his legendary tennis prowess.  Both physically and emotionally, Ezra limps through senior year.  He abandons and is abandoned by his school's "in" crowd.  Then he meets Cassidy Thorpe, a beautiful and strange girl who has just transferred from a boarding school to Eastwood High.

Ezra reconnects with his rather nerdy childhood friends, yet feels like he doesn't belong in their group either.  He struggles with his attraction for this oddly secretive girl, unable to understand her often inexplicable behavior.  It isn't until their relationship shatters that he learns that she too has experienced a personal disaster, the kind that either destroys or frees someone.  The central lesson for Ezra is that tragedy can allow him to choose a path that lets him live, not just exist.

Author Schneider's understanding of the teen psyche produces sharp, spot-on situations and conversations that are funny, acidic and bitingly real.

I enjoyed The Beginning of Everything and  hope my granddaughter will give it two thumbs up as well.

Buy The Beginning of Everything at Amazon

Kathleen Barker was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. A graduate of Blessed Sacrament, the Institute of Notre Dame and Towson University, she spent twenty years as the much-traveled wife of a Navy pilot and has three children. While working for a Fortune 500 insurance company in New Orleans, she wrote feature and human interest articles for their magazine and received the Field Reporter of the Year award. After Hurricane Katrina, she returned to her beloved state of Maryland where she started work on "The Charm City Chronicles". All four volumes, "Ednor Scardens", "The Body War", "The Hurting Year", and "On Gabriel's Wings" are available in Amazon's Kindle store.

     

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June 29, 2016

6 Newly Released Entertaining Young Adult Novels



Do you have a teen at home that is complaining about being bored? Or perhaps you are like me and enjoy theses tales as much as the younger generation. Either way, you won't want to miss these newly released young adult novels that will be sure to entertain.


My Lady Jane
The comical, fantastical, romantical, (not) entirely true story of Lady Jane Grey. In My Lady Jane, coauthors Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows have created a one-of-a-kind fantasy in the tradition of The Princess Bride, featuring a reluctant king, an even more reluctant queen, a noble steed, and only a passing resemblance to actual history—because sometimes history needs a little help.

At sixteen, Lady Jane Grey is about to be married off to a stranger and caught up in a conspiracy to rob her cousin, King Edward, of his throne. But those trifling problems aren’t for Jane to worry about. Jane gets to be Queen of England.

Buy My Lady Jane at Amazon





Ivory and Bone
A prehistoric fantasy—with allusions to Pride and Prejudice.

Hunting, gathering, and keeping his family safe—that’s the life seventeen-year-old Kol knows. Then bold, enigmatic Mya arrives from the south with her family, and Kol is captivated. He wants her to like and trust him, but any hopes of impressing her are ruined when he makes a careless—and nearly grave—mistake. However, there’s something more to Mya’s cool disdain…a history wrought with loss that comes to light when another clan arrives. With them is Lo, an enemy from Mya’s past who Mya swears has ulterior motives.

As Kol gets to know Lo, tensions between Mya and Lo escalate until violence erupts. Faced with shattering losses, Kol is forced to question every person he’s trusted. One thing is for sure: this was a war that Mya or Lo—Kol doesn’t know which—had been planning all along.

Buy Ivory and Bone at Amazon


The Museum of Heartbreak
In this ode to all the things we gain and lose and gain again, seventeen-year-old Penelope Marx curates her own mini-museum to deal with all the heartbreaks of love, friendship, and growing up.

Welcome to the Museum of Heartbreak.

Well, actually, to Penelope Marx’s personal museum. The one she creates after coming face to face with the devastating, lonely-making butt-kicking phenomenon known as heartbreak.

Heartbreak comes in all forms: There’s Keats, the charmingly handsome new guy who couldn’t be more perfect for her. There’s possibly the worst person in the world, Cherisse, whose mission in life is to make Penelope miserable. There’s Penelope’s increasingly distant best friend Audrey. And then there’s Penelope’s other best friend, the equal-parts-infuriating-and-yet-somehow-amazing Eph, who has been all kinds of confusing lately.

But sometimes the biggest heartbreak of all is learning to let go of that wondrous time before you ever knew things could be broken.

Buy The Museum of Heartbreak at Amazon


How it Feels to Fly
The movement is all that matters.

For as long as Samantha can remember, she’s wanted to be a professional ballerina. She’s lived for perfect pirouettes, sky-high extensions, and soaring leaps across the stage. Then her body betrayed her.

The change was gradual. Stealthy.

Failed diets. Disapproving looks. Whispers behind her back. The result: crippling anxiety about her appearance, which threatens to crush her dancing dreams entirely. On her dance teacher’s recommendation, Sam is sent to a summer treatment camp for teen artists and athletes who are struggling with mental and emotional obstacles. If she can make progress, she’ll be allowed to attend a crucial ballet intensive. But when asked to open up about her deepest insecurities, secret behaviors, and paralyzing fears to complete strangers, Sam can’t cope.

What I really need is a whole new body.

Sam forms an unlikely bond with Andrew, a former college football player who’s one of her camp counselors. As they grow closer, Andrew helps Sam see herself as he does—beautiful. But just as she starts to believe that there’s more between them than friendship, disappointing news from home sends her into a tailspin. With her future uncertain and her body against her, will Sam give in to the anxiety that imprisons her?

Buy How it Feels to Fly at Amazon


How to Disappear
This electric cross-country thriller follows the game of cat and mouse between a girl on the run from a murder she witnessed—or committed?—and the boy who’s sent to kill her.

Nicolette Holland is the girl everyone likes. Up for adventure. Loyal to a fault. And she’s pretty sure she can get away with anything...until a young woman is brutally murdered in the woods near Nicolette’s house. Which is why she has to disappear.

Jack Manx has always been the stand-up guy with the killer last name. But straight A’s and athletic trophies can’t make people forget that his father was a hit man and his brother is doing time for armed assault. Just when Jack is about to graduate from his Las Vegas high school and head east for college, his brother pulls him into the family business with inescapable instructions: find this ruthless Nicolette Holland and get rid of her. Or else Jack and everyone he loves will pay the price.

As Nicolette and Jack race to outsmart each other, tensions—and attractions—run high. Told in alternating voices, this tightly plotted mystery and tense love story challenges our assumptions about right and wrong, guilt and innocence, truth and lies.
Buy How to Disappear at Amazon


Cure for the Common Universe
Sixteen-year-old Jaxon is being committed to video game rehab ...

ten minutes after he met a girl. A living, breathing girl named Serena, who not only laughed at his jokes but actually kinda sorta seemed excited when she agreed to go out with him.

Jaxon's first date. Ever.

In rehab, he can't blast his way through galaxies to reach her. He can't slash through armies to kiss her sweet lips. Instead, he has just four days to earn one million points by learning real-life skills. And he'll do whatever it takes—lie, cheat, steal, even learn how to cross-stitch—in order to make it to his date.

If all else fails, Jaxon will have to bare his soul to the other teens in treatment, confront his mother's absence, and maybe admit that it's more than video games that stand in the way of a real connection.

Prepare to be cured.

Buy Cure for the Common Universe at Amazon



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January 27, 2016

The Summer of Letting Go by Gae Polisner - A Review

by Kathleen Barker


cover The Summer of Letting Go


Navigating the murky waters of adolescence is difficult enough, but when your little brother drowns on your watch, your best friend transmutes into someone else's girlfriend and your father appears to be having an affair with a neighbor...

Life for Frankie (Francesca) Schnell is spinning out of control.  Choking on the guilt of her brother Simon's death, she feels invisible.  Her mother's grief drives her to devote her time to a drowning prevention foundation, while Frankie's best friend has acquired a swoon-worthy boyfriend. An unexpected summer job offer lands her face to face with a little boy who is the same age as Simon was before he died, a boy who unnervingly resembles him and says things that shake Frankie to her core.  Is she losing her mind, or is this boy a reincarnation of Simon?

Her father's friendship with a pretty neighbor across the street from her house begins to make Frankie suspicious.  And when her best friend goes out of town, she finds her self the knee-quaking object of her absent-friend's boyfriend.  Should she stay true to her best friend and resist or give in to his spectacular kiss?  Should she confront someone about her father's perceived infidelity?  Confront who...her father, the neighbor, her mother?

As much as I loved her previous book, The Pull of Gravity,  author Gae Polisner scores a home run with The Summer of Letting Go as she lovingly peels back the layers of a young teen's fears and vulnerabilities. Polisner allows Frankie to work through her multiple dilemmas without resorting to an unrealistic sitcom resolution.  As in real life, not every question is answered.

I read this book to screen it before gifting to my granddaughter, but found myself falling in love with the characters as well.  Polisner's understanding of the fragile young heart and mind is a gift that resonates, weaving a bond between the reader and the characters she has so lovingly created.        


Girl Who Reads is an Amazon advertising affiliate; a small commission is earned when purchases are made at Amazon using any Amazon links on this site. Thank you for supporting Girl Who Reads.

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