The holidays were generous to me in general and especially book-wise. This is going to be a longish post since I got a lot of books over the holidays and quite a few from the library.
The Here and Now by Ann Brashares
Publication:
April 8th 2014
by Delacorte Press
ISBN13: 9780385736800
Follow the rules. Remember what happened. Never fall in love.
Thrilling, exhilarating, haunting, and heartbreaking, The Here and Now is a twenty-first-century take on an impossible romance. Ann Brashares’ first novel for teens since The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is
about a girl from the future who might be able to save the world . . .
if she lets go of the one thing she’s found to hold on to.
Meet seventeen-year-old
Prenna James, who immigrated to New York when she was twelve. Except
Prenna didn’t come from a different country. She came from a different
time—a future where a mosquito-borne illness has mutated into a
pandemic, killing millions and leaving the world in ruins.
Prenna
and the others who escaped to the present day must follow a strict set
of rules: never reveal where they’re from, never interfere with history,
and never, ever be intimate with anyone outside their community. Prenna
does as she’s told, believing she can help prevent the plague that will
one day ravage the earth. But everything changes when she falls for
Ethan Jarves.
We Were Liars by E. Lockhart
Publication:
May 13th 2014
by Delacorte Press
ISBN13: 9780385741262
A beautiful and distinguished family.
A private island.
A brilliant, damaged girl; a passionate, political boy.
A group of four friends—the Liars—whose friendship turns destructive.
A revolution. An accident. A secret.
Lies upon lies.
True love.
The truth.
We Were Liars is a modern, sophisticated suspense novel from National Book Award finalist and Printz Award honoree E. Lockhart.
Read it.
And if anyone asks you how it ends, just LIE.
Publication:
February 18th 2014
by Walker Childrens
ISBN13: 9780802735003
When Jonah
is forced to move from Hamilton to Cross Pointe for the second half of
his senior year, "miserable" doesn't even begin to cover it. He feels
like the doggy-bag from his mother's first marriage and everything else
about her new life—with a new husband, new home and a new baby—is an
upgrade. The people at Cross Pointe High School are pretentious and
privileged—and worst of all is Brighton Waterford, the embodiment of all
things superficial and popular. Jonah’s girlfriend, Carly, is his last
tie to what feels real... until she breaks up with him.
For Brighton,
every day is a gauntlet of demands and expectations. Since her father
died, she’s relied on one coping method: smile big and pretend to be
fine. It may have kept her family together, but she has no clue how to
handle how she's really feeling. Today is the anniversary of his death
and cracks are beginning to show. The last thing she needs is the new
kid telling her how much he dislikes her for no reason she can
understand. She's determined to change his mind, and when they're stuck
together for the night, she finally gets her chance.
Jonah hates her at 3p.m., but how will he feel at 3 a.m.?
One night can change how you see the world. One night can change how you see yourself.
Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened
by
Allie Brosh
"This is a book I wrote.
Because I wrote it, I had to figure out what to put on the back cover to
explain what it is. I tried to write a long, third-person summary that
would imply how great the book is and also sound vaguely
authoritative--like maybe someone who isn’t me wrote it--but I soon
discovered that I’m not sneaky enough to pull it off convincingly. So I
decided to just make a list of things that are in the book:
Pictures
Words
Stories about things that happened to me
Stories about things that happened to other people because of me
Eight billion dollars*
Stories about dogs
The secret to eternal happiness*
*These are lies. Perhaps I have underestimated my sneakiness!"
Gwen has a destiny to fulfill, but no one will tell her what it is.
She’s
only recently learned that she is the Ruby, the final member of the
time-traveling Circle of Twelve, and since then nothing has been going
right. She suspects the founder of the Circle, Count Saint-German, is up
to something nefarious, but nobody will believe her. And she’s just
learned that her charming time-traveling partner, Gideon, has probably
been using her all along.
This stunning conclusion picks up where
Sapphire Blue left off, reaching new heights of intrigue and romance as
Gwen finally uncovers the secrets of the time-traveling society and
learns her fate.
All These Things I’ve Done,
the first novel in the Birthright series, introduced us to timeless
heroine Anya Balanchine, a plucky sixteen year old with the heart of a
girl and the responsibilities of a grown woman. Now eighteen, life has
been more bitter than sweet for Anya. She has lost her parents and her
grandmother, and has spent the better part of her high school years in
trouble with the law. Perhaps hardest of all, her decision to open a
nightclub with her old nemesis Charles Delacroix has cost Anya her
relationship with Win.
Still, it is Anya’s nature to soldier on.
She puts the loss of Win behind her and focuses on her work. Against the
odds, the nightclub becomes an enormous success, and Anya feels like
she is on her way and that nothing will ever go wrong for her again. But
after a terrible misjudgment leaves Anya fighting for her life, she is
forced to reckon with her choices and to let people help her for the
first time in her life.
Rosebush by Michele Jaffe
Instead of celebrating
Memorial Day weekend on the Jersey Shore, Jane is in the hospital
surrounded by teddy bears, trying to piece together what happened last
night. One minute she was at a party, wearing fairy wings and cuddling
with her boyfriend. The next, she was lying near-dead in a rosebush
after a hit-and-run. Everyone believes it was an accident, despite the
phone threats Jane swears were real. But the truth is a thorny thing. As
Jane's boyfriend, friends, and admirers come to visit, more memories
surface-not just from the party, but from deeper in her past . . .
including the night her best friend Bonnie died.
With nearly
everyone in her life a suspect now, Jane must unravel the mystery before
her killer attacks again. Along the way, she's forced to examine the
consequences of her life choices in this compulsively readable thriller.
Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell (audio, read by Rebecca Lowman and Maxwell Caulfield. 12 hours, 82 minutes )
Cath is a Simon Snow
fan. Okay, the whole world is a Simon Snow fan, but for Cath, being a
fan is her life—and she’s really good at it. She and her twin sister,
Wren, ensconced themselves in the Simon Snow series when they were just
kids; it’s what got them through their mother leaving.
Reading.
Rereading. Hanging out in Simon Snow forums, writing Simon Snow fan
fiction, dressing up like the characters for every movie premiere.
Cath’s sister has mostly grown away from fandom, but Cath can’t let go. She doesn’t want to.
Now
that they’re going to college, Wren has told Cath she doesn’t want to
be roommates. Cath is on her own, completely outside of her comfort
zone. She’s got a surly roommate with a charming, always-around
boyfriend, a fiction-writing professor who thinks fan fiction is the end
of the civilized world, a handsome classmate who only wants to talk
about words . . . And she can’t stop worrying about her dad, who’s
loving and fragile and has never really been alone.
For Cath, the
question is: Can she do this? Can she make it without Wren holding her
hand? Is she ready to start living her own life? Writing her own
stories? Open her heart to someone? Or will she just go on living inside
somebody else’s fiction?
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman (audio, read by author. 5 hours, 45 minutes)
Sussex, England. A
middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral.
Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at
the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most
remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He
hasn't thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a
pond that she'd claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old
farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past
too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone,
let alone a small boy.
Forty years earlier, a man committed
suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse
on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable
ways. The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly
incomprehensible to a little boy. And Lettie—magical, comforting, wise
beyond her years—promised to protect him, no matter what.
