Weekly Round-Up 5/24

Weekly Round-Up is my wrap-up of last week's activities and includes what I'm reading this week, reviews I've posted, books in the mail and anything else of interest plus From the Library, my weekly listing of what I've checked out from the library.

This week I'm reading Birthmarked (O'Brien), A Love Story: Starring My Dead Best Friend (Horner), and The Clue in the Old Album (Keene). I'm still listening to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Rowling).

Since last week I've read A Golden Web (Quick), Mystery of the Tolling Bell (Keene) and finished (finally) The Knife of Never Letting Go (Ness).

Other reviews posted:
Everlasting (Frazier)
Tin Man (2008 mini-series)

Won from Goodreads
The Prophecy (The Watchers Chronicles) - Dawn Miller

(I'm very intrigued by this one.)
This intense, emotionally charged supernatural thriller is set in the dark city streets of St. Louis, where five teenagers are reunited by a reoccurring nightmare from their childhood. They soon learn that what was meant to destroy them would be the catalyst that drives them to embark on an epic journey of good versus evil—a journey that will open their eyes and hearts to the true power of God and the reality of evil determined to blind the world from that truth.




 From Traveling ARC Tours
Birthmarked - Caragh M. O'Brien

(This sounds so great!)
After climate change, on the north shore of Unlake Superior, a dystopian world is divided between those who live inside the wall, and those, like sixteen-year-old midwife Gaia Stone, who live outside. It’s Gaia’s job to “advance” a quota of infants from poverty into the walled Enclave, until the night one agonized mother objects, and Gaia’s parents are arrested.

Badly scarred since childhood, Gaia is a strong, resourceful loner who begins to question her society. As Gaia’s efforts to save her parents take her within the wall, she herself is arrested and imprisoned.

Fraught with difficult moral choices and rich with intricate layers of codes, BIRTHMARKED explores a colorful, cruel, eerily familiar world where one girl can make all the difference, and a real hero makes her own moral code.

A Love Story: Starring My Dead Best Friend - Emily Horner

 (I have high hopes for this one.)
For months, Cass Meyer has heard her best friend Julia, a wannabe Broadway composer, whispering about a top-secret project. Then Julia is killed in a sudden car accident, and while Cass is still reeling from her death, Julia’s boyfriend and her other drama friends make it their mission to bring to fruition the nearly-completed secret project: a musical about an orphaned ninja princess entitled Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad.

Cass isn’t one of the drama people. She doesn’t feel at home with Julia’s drama friends, and she doesn’t see a place for her in the play. Things only get worse when she finds out that Heather Galloway, the girl who made her miserable all through middle school, has been cast as the ninja princess.

Cass can’t take a summer of swallowing her pride and painting sets, so she decides to follow her original plan for a cross-country road trip with Julia. Even if she has a touring bicycle instead of a driver’s license, and even if Julia’s ashes are coming along in Tupperware.

Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad is a story about friendship. About love. About traveling a thousand miles just to find yourself. About making peace with the past, and making sense of it. And it’s a story about the bloodiest high school musical one quiet suburb has ever seen. 

Eight Days of Luke - Diana Wynne Jones

(I love Wynne Jones so I'm hoping to love this one too)

"Just kindle a flame and I'll be with you."

It's summer vacation, but David's miserably stuck with his unpleasant relatives. Then a strange boy named Luke turns up, charming and fun, joking that David has released him from a prison. Or is he joking? He certainly seems to have strange powers, and control over fire...
Luke has family problems of his own, and some very dark secrets. And when David agrees to a bargain with the mysterious Mr. Wedding, he finds himself in a dangerous hunt for a lost treasure, one that will determine Luke's fate!