Black Swan Green, David Mitchell

This is one of my favorites of 2007, for sure. It is probably one of my top favorite books of the last few years as well (one of these days I might narrow that down to something more specific, but I do tend to have a wishy washy sense of favorites).

What makes Black Swan Green so wonderful, so enjoyable, is the richness of the language, the literary quality of the writing. The moment I was done reading, I wanted to start over again with pencil and post-its to copy down some of the many many many wonderful passages. If you enjoy language for itself, and enjoy brilliant use of language, you will also love this book.

The plot is highly appealing as well - boy growing up in somewhat rural England, being a boy that is a very particular, thoughtful type of boy. He's struggling with a stutter, which he personifies and names "hangman". He's got names for other aspects of his personality as well, in that sort of way in which we all recognize when the best and worst parts of ourselves show their faces but can't really do much about it anyway.

I could go on, I really could - but it would be much much more fun to talk it over with someone who has also read it. I'd say this is the kind of book thoughtful teens and adults alike will enjoy together.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie

I am a loooooong time fan of Sherman Alexie - his Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is a favorite of mine. Any new Sherman Alexie book is worth a celebration, one billed specifically as ya only makes the party bigger.

Loosely based on Alexie's own life, this fictional account of a piece of Junior's life growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation is funny, sad, intelligent, and most of all telling. Telling of being a teen, of being a teen with dreams (cartoons included, yay!), of being a teen with dreams in a place that isn't so great for the fulfillment of dreams.

American Indian issues are not always at the forefront of our minds - there's so much other god-awful stuff going on and its hard to keep all of it going all the time if you want to live a generally optimistic life - but this book put the questions back in mine while in no way being didactic or depressing. And I felt, afterward, I had a much better emotional sense of what is going down on reservations.

Saints of Augustine, P.E. Ryan

This is a great read about something that often happens when you're in high school - friendships falling apart. When Sam called Charlie up to tell them they just couldn't be friends any more, no explanation was provided. Flash forward one year, and Sam and Charlie are both in rough shape. Sam is dealing with figuring out that he's gay and the implications for his relationships with his family, recently divorced parents, his dad being gay, and the new guy his mom is dating. Charlie's mom has died and his father is falling apart via alcohol while Charlie has gotten himself over his head in debt due to the pot he's been smoking.

When the situation reaches a crisis point for both of them, they realize they are really in need of a great friend . . . One of my favorite aspects of this book is that you get this sort of thing with girls as the protagonists all the time, but not so with boys, and it shows how guys really have strong and important friendships without being corny or fake.

All In, Pete Hautman

I read All In by Pete Hautman not realizing that it is actually a sequel to the book No Limit. I haven't read No Limit, and it didn't matter - I mean, it wasn't central to the story that I read No Limit first as everything that happened there is summarized here and it is easy enough to follow along.

All In is the story of Denn Doyle, age 17, who is a poker mastermind and apparently in No Limit discovered his talent and made a lot, I mean a lot, of money and left home for Vegas (with a fake id so he could gamble there). So in All In Denn is gambling in Vegas with big time poker players. Sometimes I catch the big poker tournaments on tv and I don't really know what's happening, but this book actually helped me understand poker better and how those tournaments are run.

Of course, it isn't a smooth road for Denn - he falls for a girl, the wrong girl of course, and gets mixed up with some people who aren't rooting for him to win. I liked this book because it was a quick, fun read, and the story wasn't as predictable as you might imagine. I also like that the narrative changes viewpoints so you get to understand what many of the major characters are thinking as it goes through. And finally, I liked that Denn is not really your typical main character - he isn't as good or as bad as you normally get in a book. In fact, he's rather average. I like that for a change.

A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini

This is the second book by The Kite Runner author, Khaled Hosseini. Where the first book followed a male story line, this one follows the lives of two Afghani women, Marian and Leila, whose lives are initially drastically different until they are brought together in a life that most Americans find hard to understand because it is just so unfamiliar, so different, from our recent history.

While I thought the Kite Runner was a more potent book, a more powerful and moving story, I still loved this book and perhaps learned more about Afghani history from this one. Hosseini frequently included dates in the chapter headings and in the text, and throughout the arc of the book included both personal and national history. In fact, I loved the literary aspect of how the lives of the women related fairly directly to what was going on politically in the country.

Overall, an amazing book.

The Rules for Hearts, Sara Ryan

This is the looooooooooong anticipated sequel to Empress of the World, also by Sara Ryan. But in reality, this is a solid book in its own right and I think it is probably more enjoyable to just think of it like that, instead of as a sequel.

Here we follow Battle to Seattle, where she is about to start college, away from her parents and to her black sheep of a brother, to live in a crazy house with some fun and crazy people (reminded me a wee bit of Broken for You, but just a wee bit).

A quick read, a sweet read, and an emotional one for anyone who has had a sibling who is maybe not so . . . ermmm . . . well, normal. I mean, Battle isn't the most "normal" person herself, either, but she's got it together in comparison to her older brother. And it's hard when your older sibling needs as much help as Battle's brother needs. Very hard.

Maximum Ride, James Patterson

Holy Crow! (heh . . . sort of a pun . . . )

I am two books through this trilogy and am dying to get my hands on the third. They are fast-paced, edge-of-your-seat interesting. I actually waited until all three books were published and I am so glad I did because I have no idea how I'd handle it if I couldn't fly through (heh heh . . .more puns) all of them.

Maximum Ride and 5 other mutant freak bird kids (their way of describing themselves, not mine) escaped from "The School" a scary place where they were bred and raised as animals in dog crates with all sorts of scary experiments done on them. Fortunately, we only find out about those things through flash backs - most of the first two books is about them on the lam, running and flying away from the Erasers (mutant freak wolf kids) who are trying to re-capture them for The School.

Although the basis of this book is sketchy genetic engineering, it is some good old-fashioned good guys against bad adventure and escape writing. With two books down and one still to go, I am unabashedly recommending this series.

Apparently, there's a movie coming someday.

Life As We Knew It, Susan Beth Pfeffer

This is one of the most compelling books I have read in a long time. And I use the word "compelling" on purpose - I read this book as fast as I could once I started, including completely ignoring my friends and staying up until 4 in the morning when I had to be awake early the next day to finish it.

Miranda is a normal 16 year old, it is the spring of her sophomore year in school. She's obsessed with a now-famous ice skater who was originally from her town. She's got an older and younger brother, and a divorced dad who has a new, pregnant wife.

And then an asteroid hits the moon. Scientists knew it was coming, it wasn't a secret or anything, but everyone thought it would just be something cool to look at. Except that the asteroid was a lot denser than anyone thought and so it pushes the moon out of its orbit and a lot closer to the Earth. This throws everything off.

Fortunately, Miranda's mom recognizes this as being the big deal that it is and immediately goes into disaster mode. She hoards tons of food and supplies.

The story is told like Miranda's diary, as so you have her trying to be normal as things slowly fall apart - tsunamis take out the coasts, electricity becomes infrequent then stops, the ground freezes over in August . . . .

You can't help but start to think of some of the parallels to this situation we have seen in real life - people experienced Hurricane Katrina from a disaster viewpoint, terrorist attacks shut down things like food deliveries and could affect things like electricity, and climate change has had/will have some of the same effects on our natural world. It was hard to stay optimistic and not get sucked into fear-thinking when reading this book.

It really was an amazing book -

more new books . . . .

Waves / Sharon Dogar.
For Hal, now, this summer is different. Sure, he's spending it, as always, with his family at their cottage on the wild west coast of England. But this summer he meets Jackie, beautiful, impetuous Jackie. Lying with her on the beach while she sculpts mermaids from wet sand -- it's paradise. Or would be, if only he didn't keep hearing the desperate pleas of his lost sister Charley in his head . . .

The fighter / Jean-Jacques Greif.
Fighting is a way of life for Moshe Wisniak. As a Jewish boy from a poor neighborhood in Warsaw, he can't run away when Polish kids attack him--his legs are too weak. So he learns to use his fists, his head, and other weapons to defend himself and his brothers. When the family moves to Paris in 1929, everyone finds work and life improves slowly. Moshe, now Maurice, takes up boxing at a Jewish sports club, and he eventually becomes an amateur flyweight. But the war comes to Paris, and in 1942, the French police round up foreign Jews and the Germans deport them. They send Maurice to the death camp at Auschwitz. In the camp, SS officers sense Maurice's strength and command him to box against a dying prisoner. Now Maurice faces an impossible moral dilemma: kill the prisoner or be killed by the SS for refusing to obey them. Is there a way out?

Rurouni Kenshin. Vol. 12, The great Kyoto fire
Kenshin, a one-time assassin turned wandering swordsman, reunites with Sano and Saito to consider what their next step should be in stopping Shishio Makoto from burning Kyoto--the opening move in his plot to conquer Japan.

Twisted / Laurie Halse Anderson.
After finally getting noticed by someone other than school bullies and his ever-angry father, seventeen-year-old Tyler enjoys his tough new reputation and the attentions of a popular girl, but when life starts to go bad again, he must choose between transforming himself or giving in to his destructive thoughts.

Naruto. Vol. 12, The great flight!!
Naruto, a ninja-in-training, faces his greatest challenge when he is pitted against Neji in the third phase of the Chunin Selection Exams, a young man considered to be the most talened ninja in the village of Konohagakure.

New Books! 3/26/07

Some of the new books in the library:

Grief girl : my true story / Erin Vincent.
Author Erin Vincent describes her life after her parents were both killed in a car accident, leaving her parentless at the age of fourteen with a seventeen-year-old sister and a three-year-old brother; and gives a description of the stages of grief she experienced.

Thirteen moons : a novel / Charles Frazier.
At the age of twelve, orphan Will Cooper is sent to work a trading post on the edge of the Cherokee Nation's land, where he spends his life learning about and defending the lives of the Native Americans and desiring the love of Claire Featherstone, the wife of a successful Cherokee landowner and patriarch.

A little piece of ground / Elizabeth Laird
Twelve-year-old Karim Aboudi and his family are trapped in their Ramallah home by a strict curfew. In response to a Palestinian suicide bombing, the Israeli miltary subjects the West Bank town to a virtual siege. Meanwhile, Karim, stuck at home with his teenage brother and fearful parents, longs to play soccer with his friends. When the curfew ends, he and his friend discover an unused patch of ground that's the perfect site for a soccer field. Nearby, an old car hidden intact under a bulldozed building makes a brilliant den. But in this city, there's constant danger, even for schoolchildren. And when Israeli soldiers find Karim outside during the next curfew, it seems impossible that he will survive.

The living is easy : a novel / by Dorothy West
Reprint of a 1948 novel which follows the attempts of Cleo Judson, the daughter of southern share-croppers, to break into Boston's elite African-American society

The killer's tears / Anne-Laure Bondoux ; translated from the French by Y. Maudet
A young boy, Paolo, and the man who murdered his parents, Angel, gradually become like father and son as they live and work together on the remote Chilean farm where Paolo was born.

Debt of bones / Terry Goodkind
A young peasant woman struggles to win the aid of the most important man alive in the hopes he can prevent a catastrophic war.