Teen Pick of the Week: Boy 21

Boy 21 by Matthew Quirk
Basketball has always been an escape for Finley. He lives in broken-down Bellmont, a town ruled by the Irish mob, drugs, violence, and racially charged rivalries. At home, his dad works nights, and Finley is left to take care of his disabled grandfather alone. He's always dreamed of somehow getting out, but until he can, putting on that number 21 jersey makes everything seem okay. Russ has just moved to the neighborhood, and the life of this teen basketball phenom has been turned upside down by tragedy. Cut off from everyone he knows, he won't pick up a basketball, but answers only to the name Boy21--taken from his former jersey number. As their final year of high school brings these two boys together, "Boy21" may turn out to be the answer they both need.

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Treasure Island, H.G. Wells, and Tammyland

Silver: Return to Treasure Island by Andrew Motion
It's almost forty years after the events of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. Jim Hawkins now runs an inn called Hispaniola on the English coast with his son, Jim, and Long John Silver has returned to England to live in obscurity with his daughter, Natty. Their lives are quiet and unremarkable; their adventures have seemingly ended. But for Jim and Natty, the adventure is just beginning. One night, Natty approaches young Jim with a proposition: return to Treasure Island and find the remaining treasure that their fathers left behind so many years before.

The Map of the Sky by Felix Palma
1898. New York socialite Emma Harlow agrees to marry well-to-do Montgomery Gilmore, but only if he accepts her audacious challenge: to reproduce the Martian invasion featured in H.G. Well's popular novel The War of the Worlds. Meanwhile in London, Wells is unexpectedly made privy to certain objects, apparently of extraterrestrial origin, that were discovered decades earlier on an ill-fated expedition to the Antarctic. On that same expedition was an American crew member named Edgar Allan Poe, whose inexplicable experiences in the frozen wasteland would ultimately inspire him to create one of his most enduring works of literature. When eerie, alien-looking cylinders begin appearing on the outskirts of London, Wells is certain it is all part of an elaborate hoax. But soon, to his great horror, he realizes that a true invasion of the earth has indeed begun.

Miss Me When I'm Gone by Emily Arsenault
Author Gretchen Waters made a name for herself with her bestseller Tammyland--a memoir about her divorce and her admiration for country music icons Tammy Wynette, Loretta Lynn, and Dolly Parton that was praised as a "honky-tonk Eat, Pray, Love." But her writing career is cut abruptly short when she dies from a fall down a set of stone library steps. It is a tragic accident and no suspects foul play, certainly not Gretchen's best friend from college, Jamie, who's been named the late author's literary executor. But there's an unfinished manuscript Gretchen left behind that is much darker than Tammyland: a book ostensibly about male country musicians yet centered on a murder in Gretchen's family that haunted her childhood. In its pages, Gretchen seems to be speaking to Jamie from beyond the grave--suggesting her death was no accident and that Jamie must piece together the story someone would kill to keep untold.

Teen Pick of the Week: The Serpent's Shadow

The Serpent's Shadow by Rick Riordan
When young magicians Carter and Sadie Kane learned how to follow the path of the Ancient Egyptian gods, they knew they would have to play an important role in restoring Ma'at--order--to the world. What they didn't know is how chaotic the world would become. The Chaos snake Apophis is loose and threatening to destroy the earth in three days' time. The magicians are divided. The gods are disappearing, and those who remain are weak. Walt, one of Carter and Sadie's most gifted initiates, is doomed and can already feel his life force ebbing. Zia is too busy babysitting the senile sun god, Ra, to be of much help. What are a couple of teenagers and a handful of young trainees to do?

Click on the title to place it on hold at the Ventress Memorial Library!

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Teen Pick of the Week: Ruby Red

Ruby Red by Kerstin Gier
Sixteen-year-old Gwen lives with extended--and rather eccentric--family in an exclusive London neighborhood. In spite of her ancestors' peculiar history, she's had a relatively normal life so far. The time traveling gene that runs like a secret thread through the female half of the family is supposed to have skipped over Gwen, so she hasn't been introduced to "the mysteries," and can spend her time hanging out with her best friend, Lesley. It comes as an unwelcome surprise when she starts taking uncontrolled leaps into the past. She's totally unprepared for time travel, not to mention all that comes with it: fancy clothes, archaic manners, a mysterious secret society, and Gideon, her time-traveling counterpart. He's obnoxious, a know-it-all, and possibly the best-looking guy she's seen in any century.

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Love and Loneliness

Every Day Every Hour by Natasa Dragnic
In a small seaside town in Croatia, on the first day of kindergarten, shy Luka faints and bold Dora wakes him with a kiss. The two become inseparable, wandering the beach, lying on their special rock, and watching clouds. But when Dora and her parents move to Paris, the two lose touch. Luka grows up into a lonely painter, prey to the needs of his family and a local woman with whom he is not in love but who loves him. Dora blossoms in Paris, where she becomes an actress and ingenue. Now adults, the two meet by chance when Luka comes to Paris for his art show and they fall in love again. But fate conspires to keep them apart, and the novel weaves back and forth in time over the next few decades as these star-crossed lovers must confront unlucky timing and the reality of love in the face of everyday obligations.

One Last Thing Before I Go by Jonathan Tropper
You don't have to look very hard at Drew Silver to see that mistakes have been made. His fleeting fame as the drummer for a one-hit-wonder rock band is nearly a decade behind him. He lives in the Versailles, an apartment building filled almost exclusively with divorced men like him, and makes a living playing in wedding bands. His ex-wife, Denise, is about to marry a guy Silver can't quite bring himself to hate. And his Princeton-bound teenage daughter, Casey, has just confiding in him that she's pregnant--because Silver is the one she cares least about letting down. So when he learns that his heart requires emergency, lifesaving surgery, Silver makes the radical decision to refuse the operation, choosing instead to use what little time he has left to repair his relationship with Casey, become a better man, and live in the moment, even if that moment isn't destined to last very long.

Teen Pick of the Week: Dark Eyes

Dark Eyes by William Richter
Wallis Stoneman was born in Russia and adopted by a wealthy family in New York City. Beautiful and rebellious, she trades a life of privilege for the gritty streets of Manhattan. She knows nothing of her childhood in Russia. Those years are lost forever. Now Wally is sixteen and hardened, and she has just stumbled across a harrowing secret that will changer her life forever: Wally's roots are deadly. She's the daughter of the Klesko, a notorious Russian gangster who's just broken out of prison. Klesko is searching for the fortune Wally's mother stole from him long ago, and he'll stop at nothing to find it. Can Wally find--and save--her mother before Klesko kills them both?

Click on the title to place it on hold at the Ventress Memorial Library!

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New Young Adult this week!

Virals by Kathy Reichs
Adventure has always been in fourteen-year-old Tory Brennan's blood. After all, she is the niece of the world-famous forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan. So when she moves to middle of nowhere Morris Island, South Carolina, to live with a marine biologist she's never known, Tory does the best she can to adjust to her new life. There she meets a group of local kids who are just as "Sci-Phile" as she is--science geeks who've grown up exploring the backwoods marshlands of nearby Loggerhead Island. But there's something strange going on at the Loggerhead Research Institute...maybe even something deadly. After rescuing a stray wolfdog pup from a top-secret lab, Tory and her friends are exposed to a rare strain of canine parvovirus, changing them--and their DNA--forever.

Beauty Queens by Libba Bray
The fifty contestants in the Miss Teen Dream Pageant thought this was going to be a fun trip to the beach, where they could parade in their state-appropriate costumes and compete in front of the cameras. But sadly, their airplane had another idea, crashing on a desert island and leaving the survivors stranded with little food, little water, and practically no eyeliner. What's a beauty queen to do? Continue to practice for the talent portion of the program--or wrestle snakes to the ground? Get a perfect tan--or learn to run wild? And what should happen when the sexy pirates show up?

Fire by Kristin Cashore
It is not a peaceful time in the Dells. Young King Nash clings to the throne, while rebel lords, in the north and south, build armies to unseat him. War is coming. The mountains and forests are filled with spies and thieves. This is where Fire lives, a girl whose startling appearance is impossibly irresistible and who can control the minds of everyone around her. Everyone...except Prince Brigan.