Book talk: Choker by Elizabeth Woods (Virginia Readers' Choice, 2013-2014)

What would you do if the best friend you ever had – whom you hadn’t seen in years – showed up in your bedroom, sitting on your bed, and asked you if she could stay with you (unbeknownst to any parents) to escape an abusive home situation?

If you were Cara, you’d let her stay. Zoe was Cara’s best friend when they were younger, and now Cara’s a teenager who struggles with the social situation at her high school. Cara doesn’t have any real friends at school, and she just got the nickname “Choker” from an embarrassing incident in which she almost choked to death on a carrot in the school cafeteria. The cool kids witnessed it, and they won’t let Cara forget it.

So Zoe hides out in Cara’s bedroom while Cara’s at school, and Cara’s parents are too busy with their important legal careers even to notice. At first it’s fun – like a slumber party that never ends – but Zoe’s strange and difficult moods – and her disappearances - get harder and harder for Cara to handle. Cara has told Zoe about the mean popular kids and knows that Zoe hates them. Zoe might be strange, but she’s loyal to Cara, and perhaps too loyal.

But something nags at Cara. One of the girls in the popular crowd is found dead and another goes missing. Does Zoe have anything to do with this?

Choker by Elizabeth Woods. 233 pages. Booktalk to high school. Virginia Readers’ Choice, 2013-2014.

Choker

Book talk: The Red Pyramid by Rick Riordan

If you’ve read any of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, you’ll know that the author, Rick Riordan, tells a great story.

In his new series, The Kane Chronicles, he once again sets us on a strange journey. The Red Pyramid features two new main characters, Carter and Sadie, who are brother and sister but who haven’t lived together for years. In fact, the last time they lived together, a birthday cake exploded at a party, and their parents decided they’d live apart - in separate countries. It’s a long story.

            Carter and Sadie have an odd, complicated family history of which they know very little when the story begins. Their father is a brilliant Egyptologist who moves around a lot and seems paranoid. At one point, their father seemed to attack the world famous Rosetta Stone, which really backfired, and released some ticked off Egyptian gods. Do not tick off an Egyptian god. They are extremely vengeful, whether they’re male, or female, or…animal.

Of course, now that their father is gone, Carter and Sadie have to fight back, and they gain some interesting allies along the way. One of their allies is a cat named Muffin [awww!] and a basketball-playing baboon named Khufu who only eats food ending in the letter O. Strange friends? Don’t get me started about their enemies, who are even weirder. The Red Pyramid is one strange and wonderful journey.

The Red Pyramid

Booktalk: Inside Out & Back Again (2011 National Book Award for Young People's Literature winner)

The winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature is Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out & Back Again. I’m going to interrupt my “Virginia Readers’ Choice” titles to booktalk it instead. I really liked it and it would work well for intermediate grades and middle school.

Ha is a young girl from Vietnam whose father is missing and whose family needs to flee their country in order to escape the wartime violence. She’s a normal girl who will miss the country she loves so much: the papaya trees, the food, her friends, the open market, and the beautiful flowers. Vietnam has been her only home for ten years, and now she and her mother and older brothers have to get on a crowded ship to sail to America on short notice, probably never to return.

Imagine leaving behind everything you ever owned. Ha’s brother loves his baby chick and tries to bring it along, even though he wasn’t supposed to.  You can’t keep a baby chick alive on a crowded ship. It’s just one more loss on top of the many others they’ve suffered.

Once they arrive in the U.S., everything is strange and confusing, like the man with the cowboy hat who takes them in but whose wife hates them and makes them stay in the basement. Ha’s family made it to America, but they don’t feel welcome here.

Ha is a smart girl, and she’s especially good at math, but the children at her school are mean to her. One boy in particular hates her and calls her “Pancake Face.” Believe it or not, there are times when Ha wishes she were back in war-torn Vietnam. No one was cruel to her there. But there are things – and people – who keep Ha going in Inside Out & Back Again.

Inside Out & Back Again by Thanhha Lai. 262 p. Harper: 2001. Booktalk to intermediate grades and to middle school.

Booktalk: Out of My Mind (Virginia Readers' Choice)

Melody has been forced to be silent her entire life. She's 11 years and in 5th grade, but she has never spoken a single word ever. She's got a condition called cerebral palsy, and this means she can't control her body, can't walk, and can't talk. Her brain is fine, though, and she's very smart. Melody is a cool, witty, and normal kid in so many ways. She laughs when she reads Garfield, loves animals, and craves McDonalds milkshakes.
   Finally, her parents agree to buy her a high-tech machine that "talks" for her as she types. It's incredibly expensive and complicated, but as she gets better at "talking" via the computer, her classmates and teachers realize how very smart she really is. For example, she knows all the U.S. presidents and vice presidents inside out. She has a massive vocabulary and a brilliant memory for facts.
   Melody is so smart and starts doing so well in her classes that she wins a place on her school's competitive academic travel team. The team is going to travel to Washington, D.C. for a big competition. Melody is studying so hard at home: she's spending hours and hours memorizing more facts, learning newer and harder subjects, and even inventing her own games so that she'll be able to compete better. For the competition, though, Melody will be out of her element, and travel is really hard on you when you have cerebral palsy. There's also the question of how well her team mates will treat her. Will Melody have both the academic skills and the social skills to endure this competition? Out of My Mind by Sharon Draper.

Out of My Mind by Sharon Draper. 295 p. New York: Atheneum Books, 2010. Booktalk to intermediate grades, middle school, lower high school. Virginia Readers' Choice for 2011-2012.

Booktalk: The Leanin' Dog (Virginia Readers' Choice)

Desssa Dean has an unusual life. She lives in a cabin in the deep woods with her father, who must hunt or find all their food. Their neighbors are coyotes, birds, and squirrels. Her mother died, and Dessa Dean is pretty lonely. She also has daymares, which are sort of like nightmares, only she’s wide awake, and re-living the time in which her mom died. If anyone needs a friend, it’s Dessa Dean. It’s pretty normal for her to be completely by herself in the cabin while her dad goes hunting. There are no people nearby, either. If a bear comes along, Dessa Dean has got to fend for herself. But there’s a dog who shows up scratching at her door one day. It wants to make friends with her, but it’s too frightened to stay. She chases after the dog but can’t get him to come back. Dessa Dean can’t forget this dog, but she hatches a plan, which involves a delicious meat stew offered as bait. That looked like one hungry, lonely dog. The Leanin’ Dog by K. A. Nuzum.

The Leanin’ Dog by K. A. Nuzum. 250 p. Joanna Cotler Books, 2008. Booktalk to middle school. Virginia Readers’ Choice 2011-2012.

Booktalk: Reality Check by Jen Calonita [Teen Chick Lit; 3]

You know how you act differently if you think a lot of people are watching you, and scrutinizing your actions? Try having the whole country watching you. That’s the case with Charlie. When we first meet her, she’s the ringleader of a group of very tight high school girls. They live in a small town and do small-town stuff. Charlie, for example, works at a coffeehouse called Milk and Sugar. Pretty normal. But there’s a woman who keeps coming in to Milk and Sugar every day, from out of town, asking Charlie a lot of questions, admiring her spirit and personality, and supposedly catching up on some reading. She even wants to meet Charlie’s friends and learn as much as she can about them. There’s Brooke, with red hair and a very direct manner; Hallie, with long curly brown hair, the daughter of local restaurant owners; and Keiran, Charlie’s oldest friend, who is blonde and super pretty and spends a lot of her free time babysitting her younger siblings. The girls are a team, and a very attractive one. The woman, as it turns out, is from the Fire and Ice Network, sort of like MTV, which produces teen reality shows. She offers the girl a contract, with mega-bucks and glamorous parties attached. The show is going to be called “The Cliffs,” after Cliffside, the name of their small beach community town. But there’s a real danger to exposing your private life and your friendships and your feelings to the whole world. Can these close friends stay true to each other and expose themselves to the whole country? Reality Check by Jen Calonita.

Reality Check by Jen Calonita. 277 p. Poppy/Little, Brown: 2010. Booktalk to high school, possibly adults who like chick lit.

Booktalk: Vintage Veronica by Erica S. Perl [Teen Chick Lit; 2]

If you saw 15-year-old Veronica walking down the street, you’d notice her clothes first. She might have on a bright pink poufy skirt from the 1950s, men’s bowling shoes, cat-eye glasses, and a vintage guayabera shirt. You’d also notice that, besides being pretty, she’s on the heavy side. At school, Veronica has been both picked on and ignored due to her weight. Let’s just say she has trust issues with other teens. But Veronica is talented, and she’s got a really cool job at this vintage clothing store called The Consignment Corner, secluded away from the public in her little corner two flights up, deciding on which clothes get sold to the public and which ones get trashed. It’s actually a really important job there. The owners noticed that she has a real eye for clothing: she knows her styles, cut, materials, and details. She’s an expert on vintage clothes, unlike the other employees. Speaking of the other employees, they’re starting to notice Veronica. The two alpha girls who work retail, Zoe and Ginger, will now actually talk to Veronica and seek her out, even though she’s a little afraid of them both. They’re charismatic, self-confident, and mean. And then there’s this boy called the Nail (real name: Lenny) . He’s a stockboy whom Zoe and Ginger make fun of. But Veronica starts to think he’s kind of cute, and he’s actually really nice to her: that’s a first, with Veronica and guys. But Zoe and Ginger hate Lenny, and he doesn’t exactly like them, either. Remember that Veronica is vulnerable – she’s got practically no dating history, and she’s hungry both for female friends and a little male attention. Whom will she chose? Or will Veronica screw it up and lose them all? Vintage Veronica by Erica S. Perl.

Vintage Veronica by Erica S. Perl. Knopf, 2010. 279 p. Booktalk to high school, adult.

Booktalk: Jane by April Lindner [Teen Chick Lit; 1]

If you've read Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, you'll remember that Jane Eyre is a young 19th-century English woman who has had a tough childhood and is an orphan. As a young woman, she goes to work as a nanny for Mr. Rochester, a brooding, handsome, temperamental, and wealthy man who seems to be single but has a mysterious past. It's part ghost story and part romance: Jane and Mr. Rochester are both intriguing, strong-willed characters. This novel, Jane by April Lindner, locates the story in modern America: the original Jane Eyre inspires the story but doesn't dictate it. Jane Moore is 19 and has dropped out of Sarah Lawrence College. Both of her parents died recently in a car crash, and she doesn't have the money to stay in college. She applies to a nanny agency, and due to complete lack of knowledge in rock music [plus her total disinterest in rock stars], she gets an interesting nanny assignment. She's to be the nanny to the daughter of the country's most famous and most influential rock star, Nico Rathburn. Nico has a past of wild living, drugs, and failed marriage. He lives on a huge, somewhat isolated estate, Thornfield Park. Jane is a good nanny to his daughter, but she's confused when she starts having feelings for Nico, and especially confused when he show genuine interest and affection for her. What would a glamorous, rich rock star see in a plain Jane like herself? And more perplexingly, who has he stashed away on the forbidden third floor of his mansion, with a ghostly, female-sounding laugh?

Jane by April Lindner. Poppy/Little, Brown: 2010. 373 p. Booktalk to older teens [be aware of adult content issues] and to adults.

Strange Journey: Booktalk 3

If you’ve read any of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, you’ll know that the author, Rick Riordan, tells a great story. In his new series, The Kane Chronicles, he once again sets us on a strange journey. The Red Pyramid features two new main characters, Carter and Sadie, who are brother and sister but who haven’t lived together for years. In fact, the last time they lived together, a birthday cake exploded at a party, and their parents decided they’d live apart - in separate countries. It’s a long story.
Carter and Sadie have an odd, complicated family history of which they know very little when the story begins. Their father is a brilliant Egyptologist who moves around a lot and seems paranoid. At one point, their father seemed to attack the world famous Rosetta Stone, which really backfired, and released some ticked off Egyptian gods. Do not tick off an Egyptian god. They are extremely vengeful, whether they’re male, or female, or…animal. Of course, now that their father is gone, Carter and Sadie have to fight back, and they gain some interesting allies along the way. One of their allies is a cat named Muffin [awww!] and a basketball-playing baboon named Khufu who only eats food ending in the letter O. Strange friends? Don’t get me started about their enemies, who are even weirder. The Red Pyramid is one strange, funny, and mesmerizing journey.