At fifteen years old, narrator Christopher Boone may be pushing the boundaries of childhood. But Christopher is also autistic, which means he’s even more socially awkward and emotionally distant than the average kid on the verge of adolescence. Christopher screams when he’s touched, refuses to eat brown or yellow foods, and takes everything at its face value. But he also copes extremely well (usually by doing math problems to relax) and when he is falsely accused of murdering his neighbor’s dog, Christopher’s supposed disability proves to be the best deductive tool of all. Armed with his innate (and at times obsessive) sense of logic, Christopher writes a book in order to solve the case. The result is a sparkling clear account of Christopher’s life, from his parents’ failed marriage to his own compulsions to the mysteries of his neighborhood to real insights into this boy’s unusual and unique view of the world. Christopher may not be able to understand anyone else’s emotions, but readers will feel very strongly about this truly authentic, even ground-breaking child narrator and his story.   posted Nov 20, 2009 at 5:27PM

In his bestselling debut novel Everything is Illuminated, author Jonathon Safran Foer told a tragic-comic tale about a dark period—World War II and the Holocaust. In his follow-up bestseller Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Foer does the same with a tragedy from the more recent past. His new hero, Oskar Schell, is the nine-year-old son of a man who died in the September 11th attacks at the World Trade Center. Struggling with his loss, Oskar maintains an offbeat sense of humor and an insatiable curiosity. When he finds a mysterious key in an envelope labeled “Black” in his father’s closet, Oskar sets out on a journey through New York City to interview every person with that last name—all 262 of them. As Oskar meets quirky character after quirky character, his story merges with those of his grandparents—his clinging, hoping grandmother who lives across the street and his long-absent, mute grandfather who survived a tragic event of his own. Oskar is aided on his journey by his many hobbies, including inventing, starring in Shakespearean plays, and letter-writing. He’s a brainy, daydreaming, worrywart whose story is scattered with black and white photographs, slangy kid-speak, and inventive uses of text like a two-page apology typed in numerical code. Jonathon Safran Foer is an extremely inventive and incredibly original writer, and sad though his story is at times (and there’s beauty there too), young Oskar is an irresistible narrator.   posted Nov 20, 2009 at 5:27PM

Young Craig and his kid brother share a bed in their attic bedroom. Sometimes their battle over who gets the biggest share of bed and blankets brings the wrath of their strict father down upon them. Fear of punishment is usually enough to end the sibling rivalry (though it’s always ignited again later; boys being boys and brothers being brothers), and the siblings are often united by their mutual love of drawing and the attacks by bullies that plague them both at school. Still, this is no charmed family portrait. Craig’s parents are conservative Christians who believe that their son’s penchant for art will lead him down the road to hell. The boys are brought up to fear God and to feel guilt over even the smallest and most common of boyish sins. Craig is the designated high school outcast and (lucky boy) he gets to maintain that role at summer church camp too—until he meets Raina, beautiful, spiritual, kind, and complicated. The two strike up a relationship, a romance for the ages that has clearly haunted the artist Craig Thompson well into his adult life. Thompson relives his first love in poignant and painful detail accompanied by crisp, clear black-and-white drawings that are wonderfully expressive and dramatic, but never overly sentimental. The clash between what you’re brought up to believe and what you come to believe on your own, through your own experiences, is dealt with sensitively, realistically, and with the kind of emotion that every reader can relate to.   posted Nov 13, 2009 at 2:32PM

David B. was born Pierre-François. He grew up in France in the 1960s and 70s with his mother, father, older brother Jean-Cristophe and little sister Florence. The siblings played in the alleys and streets with the neighborhood kids; life was normal. Then, one day when Pierre-François is nine years old, eleven-year-old Jean-Cristophe suffers a grand mal epileptic seizure in the street. The family is changed forever, and together they set out on an endless search for something—anything—that will cure Jean-Cristophe. The journey is not pretty. Not only are Jean-Cristophe’s seizures debilitating and awful to behold, but the possibilities of a genuine cure are slim. A horrific surgery is rejected for a stint with an extreme macrobiotic cult; spiritualists consult with the dead, who are supposed to deliver a miracle cure; doctors, philosophers, psychiatrists, intellectuals, and religious leaders are consulted as a last resort that can never really be the final attempt. The family is often treated with cruelty; time and time again they are filled with false hopes by quacks and charlatans who take advantage of their desperation. Ultimately nothing works, but the years of hoping and trying take their toll. Young Pierre-François protects himself from the chaos of his brother’s condition with homemade suits of armor, books about long-ago heroes of war, imaginary friends and ghosts, and epic drawings that depict scenes of ferocious and violent battles. Pierre-François’ artistic outlet becomes David B.’s masterpiece. The book is brilliantly drawn in heavy blacks and whites that go beyond mere representation to show thoughts, dreams, even metaphors. The characters are fully-fleshed out and true (subplots involve both sets of grandparents and their involvements in both World Wars) and the story is sophisticated and intense, making Epileptic a real work of art.   posted Nov 13, 2009 at 2:30PM

In Harry Potter’s world, fifteen-year-old twins Josh and Sophie Newman would be regular Muggles, just a couple of normal kids spending the summer with their aunt in San Francisco and working odd jobs to save money for a car of their own, completely oblivious to any magical occurrences. Until, that is, a creepy little man leading an army of tough guys made out of mud bursts into the bookstore where Josh works, kidnaps the bookstore owner’s wife, and makes off with one very particular book. Then Josh and Sophie are swept into a world of magic and legend because, to their surprise and awe, the bookstore owner is none other than Nicholas Flamel, amateur magician, expert alchemyst (meaning he can turns coal into silver, metal into gold, and brew a potion that results in eternal youth), and six-hundred-plus-years-old. The creepy little guy is evil Dr. John Dee and the wife is the good and lovely Perenelle Flamel, both just as long-lived and uniquely skilled as Nick Flamel. The stolen book, however, is more powerful than the three of them combined. It’s the ancient Codex, containing all the magical and scientific secrets of the ages, and in the wrong hands (like those of Dr. Dee) it’s a dangerous tool in the extreme. Josh and Sophie are more than mere witnesses to this sudden magical display in the middle of the city; the twins just might be the key to a legend that predicts the outcome of a coming battle between eons-old forces of good and evil. Time is running out and Sophie and Josh need some magical training ASAP. If more immortal potion isn’t brewed soon, Nicholas and Perenelle Flamel will die and the good guys will lose a couple of very valuable allies. Throwing everyday kids into magical happenings is a common plot device by now, but by bringing old legends to life (including many much older than the fact-based fourteenth century story of Nicholas Flamel) and letting the reader view them through the eyes of a couple of kids who are very attached to their cell phones, ipods, and Internet access, author Michael Scott succeeds in breathing new life into a familiar tale. The pace is fast, the story is action-packed, the fantasy is inventive, and it all ends on a cliffhanger. This is a series that’s still very much in the works; the third book was just released this year and the fourth installment is due in May of 2010.   posted Oct 31, 2009 at 5:47PM

Against all odds, sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen won the Hunger Games, the forced battle-to-the-death between twenty-four children from the twelve districts of Panem (the nation formerly known as the United States of America). The Capital holds the Hunger Games every year to remind its citizens of a long-ago failed rebellion, and to make sure the people know exactly who is in charge of not only their lives, but their children's lives as well. Katniss wants nothing more than to get back to ordinary life, living with her mother and sister and hunting with her stoic friend Gale, but Katniss' win was too unconventional to go unnoticed. To save herself and Peeta, the boy from her district who was also chosen to compete, Katniss pretended to fall in love with Peeta, and that lie broke all the rules. Now Katniss has the attention of the Capital officials and the long-suffering people, and both sides are waiting to see what Katniss will do next. Will she toe the Capital line to ensure the safety of her friends and family, or will she use her rebellion in the Games to spark something bigger? Katniss herself has no idea, but a heart-wrenching tour of the outlying districts and a horrific surprise from the Capital will make up her mind if nothing else does. Katniss will have to decide what the consequences of her win will be, and whether or not those consequences can change things for the better or the worse. Catching Fire is the second book in author Suzanne Collin's new trilogy. The first book, 2008's The Hunger Games, focused on Katniss' desperate and action-packed fight for survival. Catching Fire picks up where The Hunger Games left off and opens the story up from the stadium of the Games to the ins and outs of the world outside, with a detailed and suspense-filled focus on the politics of this under-the-thumb dystopian world, and with tougher choices for our intrepid young heroine. Catching Fire is just as thrilling and gripping as the Hunger Games and with even more to think about, and we can only wait with breaths held for the third book to find out how Katniss' superbly told fight turns out this time.   posted Oct 8, 2009 at 3:47PM

The House of the Scorpion is a hard world of drug lords, lost boys, computer implants, and clones. Between the U.S. and the nation formerly known as Mexico lies Opium, a country covered in poppy fields and ruled by the ruthless drug lord Matteo Alacrán, better known, because of his great age and power, as El Patrón. El Patrón keeps his country, his “eejits” (servants who have microchips in their brains to keep them slaving away without question), and his extensive family well under his thumb. El Patrón also has clones. Most clones get the numbing-and-dumbing brain chip, but not El Patrón’s. The newest Matteo Alacrán—young Matt—gets to grow up with a normal intelligence, though not, he soon learns, with a normal anything else. Clones are unnatural, lower than animals, inhuman monsters. But there are people who love Matt—Celia, the maid who raises him; Tam Lin, the bodyguard appointed by El Patrón; and María, a little girl who’s too young, innocent, and stubborn to let the usual prejudices guide her. Matt is occasionally called to the side of El Patrón and showered with gifts from the old man, but he’s mostly left to face the cruelty of the Alacrán family. Even when Matt discovers the truth about the real reason for his existence, escape is no guarantee of freedom. There are more trials to face, prejudices to overcome, a past to atone for, and a future that is uncertain to say the least. A Newbery Honor book, a National Book Award winner, and a recipient of the Printz Award for Young Adult Literature, this is work of fiction that borders uneasily on fact. There’s no guarantee that author Nancy Farmer has imagined a future that couldn’t really happen, which makes The House of the Scorpion a disturbingly addictive read.   posted Oct 8, 2009 at 3:21PM

Leo Gursky is an old man waiting for the last big event of his life: his death. He’s so alone in the world that he goes out and makes a minor spectacle of himself—dropping his change, spilling his popcorn—just to make sure someone has noticed him. Alma Singer is a fourteen-year-old girl trying to find a cure for the permanent sadness her mother’s been wrapped in ever since the death of her father seven years ago. Alma thinks the answer might lie in the book her mother is translating, an obscure story called The History of Love. The narration alternates between Leo and Alma and the reader also gets glimpses of the moving, elegantly written History of Love and its mysterious author. As the threads of the storyline weave together in the most intimate ways, the novel becomes unputdownable. Leo and Alma are an unlikely pair—Leo pines for his long-lost love; Alma’s little brother thinks he’s the Messiah; Leo escaped to America from Nazi-occupied Poland; Alma’s hobby is identifying edible wild plants—but they are both survivors of great personal loss. Author Nicole Krauss writes about her characters with tenderness and real feeling, and it doesn’t take long before we’re deeply invested in their lives. So invested, in fact, that we’ll be thinking about the beautiful interlocking stories of The History of Love long after we’ve turned the last page.   posted Sep 9, 2009 at 3:25PM

This book opens by telling both you and the character of The Reader what the experience of reading If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino is like. After a few pages, however, The Reader realizes that his copy of this book has a printer’s error. He goes back to the bookstore to get a new copy, meets Another Reader who has the same problem and flirts with her, and is told that all the Calvino books are hopeless misprinted and what he’s been reading is actually a book by Polish writer. The Reader goes home with what he hopes is finally the right volume, reads for a few pages, and then discovers that no, this book is the wrong book too. Back to the bookstore, back to another tantalizing interaction with Another Reader, and back home again with a new book that’s supposed to be the book he’s been trying to read all along—but isn’t. This happens ten times (talk about novels within novels!) and we, the readers (not The Readers), are very content to go along for the ride. It may sound confusing, but the real author Italo Calvino (who died in 1985) has long been known as a master of avant-garde and experimental fiction. It’s not every writer who can begin ten separate novels that differ in tone and style and genre and still make them entertaining; it’s not every writer who can marry the solitary (and at times frustrating) act of reading with a story about a blooming romance that’s sparked by that very same solitary (and at times frustrating) act of reading. But Calvino does it—with wit, with charm, and with superior skill.   posted Sep 9, 2009 at 3:24PM

Ed Kennedy has been a loser all his life. Born on the wrong side of the tracks, an underachiever in school, in unrequited love with his best friend Audrey, Ed's only cheerleader is his ancient, stinky dog. At the tender age of nineteen, he's an underage cabdriver facing a long life of mundane routine.... until he spontaneously commits an act of bravery during a bank robbery. Then Ed begins receiving playing cards in the mail, aces with cryptic notes that direct him to certain people and places. By following these clues, Ed finds himself in a position to help--stopping crimes, uniting people, playing the hero (even if he sometimes has to play the bad guy first). And every time he chooses to care, Ed is challenged and changed. Whether those changes are for the better or for the worst is tied up in the mystery of who sends the aces, and why, and it's a mystery that's as important to the reader as it is to Ed. Author Markus Zusak invents some unique characters to wander in and out of Ed's adventures, and makes Ed himself a lovable loser, a thoughtful, honest kid with a supporting cast of smart-ass friends and an original narrative voice. First published in Australia in 2002 as The Messenger, this redemption tale won the Children's Book Council of Australia's Book of the Year Award.   posted Sep 1, 2009 at 10:37AM