The Graces by Laure Eve Booktalk

River is a lonely 15-year-old who has just moved to a small, old coastal town with her mother. She's not popular and she's picked on by mean girls. She becomes fascinated with this family whose children go to her school, and they're called the Graces, because that's their last name. Summer Grace is her age, and the twins, Thalia and Fenrin, are a few years older. They're beautiful and intriguing and popular, and their family is wealthy but is rumored to be witches.

If you liked Twilight (or Mean Girls), try this.

River develops a huge crush on the boy, Fenrin: he's got a lot of girlfriends and is one of the most popular boys in school, so when he shows an interest in her, she's flattered. Summer Grace starts befriending her, too - this uptick in River's popularity is great, and for the first time, she feels happy.

But River starts flirting with the supernatural: she visits an old, obscure bookstore to buy books on magic, and she practices spells. Yet there's another loner, Marcus, who warns her very strongly against associating with the Graces. He seems to have dated Thalia, and he warns that the Graces will use River and then discard her.

The Graces by Laure Eve. 336 p. Amulet Books, 2016. Booktalk to high school.

Book talk: 45 Pounds (More or Less) by K. A. Barson

It is hard to lose weight, especially when you love lasagna, you don’t like to work out, your mother is super thin and only eats salads, and you have a part-time job selling hot pretzels. So what’s your motivation going to be? Being able to shop in “regular” clothing stores? Attracting the glance of a cute boy? Wearing a nice dress to an important family wedding? Or just…not being the target of mean girls’ comments?

For Ann it’s all of the above. She desperately wants to lose 45 pounds for her aunt Jackie’s wedding in which she’ll be the bridesmaid. And yes, she has done Weight Watchers in the past. It works, but it’s not her style.

So Ann watches an infomercial and orders this diet plan which includes supplements which make her shaky. Not good. Luckily, Ann’s smart enough to know that you don’t take those things. But calorie restriction is so….painful. Let’s not even talk about exercise. The tape that came with her diet plan is ridiculously impossible. Thank God no one is watching her attempt to do it. No…people are only watching when you accidentally get drunk at a party and puke all over the shoes of the cute boy whom you like and who surprisingly seems to like you back. And it gets posted all over Facebook. There’s no motivation like humiliation, you know?

45 Pounds (More or Less) by K. A. Barson. 264 p. Viking: 2013. Booktalk to 7th - 12th grades.

Book talk: Ship Breaker (Virginia Readers' Choice, 2012-2013)

 

Nailer Lopez is a teen with a full-time, grueling, and potentially lethal job, a job which requires him to have facial tattoos which mark him as part of a work crew and also requires him to be fairly small and lightweight. What is he? He’s a ship breaker: he scavenges wrecked, beached ships for their metal. Nailer has to crawl through tight, mazelike ducts inside the ship, usually in utter darkness, and cut away copper wire, aluminum, nickel, and steel clips. It’s really, really scary inside those dark, airless, dead ships and tankers. Kids have gotten lost and trapped and died inside of them. You crawl through tunnels over dead rats’ bodies. You pray to the Scavenge God that you’ll get out alive, and that you’ll scavenge enough metal to stay on your work crew. In this world you’re loyal only to your closest friends. So what would Nailer do if he found a girl, barely alive yet clearly very rich, on a beached ship containing both wealth and dead bodies?

Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi. Little, Brown: 2010. 326 p. Virginia Reader’s Choice for high school: 2012-2013.

Ship Breaker