BOOKTALK

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BOOKTALK 2 FORHIGH SCHOOL READERS

• DECEMBER 2007

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Untitled Inheritance 3

• Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers to
  publish book three of Christopher Paolini's 1
  bestselling Inheritance series September 23,
  2008. Series will be expanded to include a fourth
  full-length novel.
• Christopher Paolini, the 1 New York Times
  bestselling author of Eragon and Eldest, the
  first two books in his Inheritance series, will
  write an additional, fourth novel about his hero
  Eragon, it was announced today by Nancy Hinkel,
  Publishing Director of Alfred A. Knopf Books for
  Young Readers, an imprint of Random House
  Children's Books. Originally planned as a
  trilogy, Inheritance will now include four
  complete novels written by Paolini and be named
  the Inheritance Cycle.

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I just read
Lauren Myracle
Stephenie Meyer
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National Book Award 2007

• Young people's literature Sherman Alexie's
  semi-autobiographical novel, The Absolutely True
  Diary of a Part-Time Indian, about a young
  Spokane Indian who abandons his impoverished
  reservation. The judges called it "disturbing,
  uplifting, tragic, and laugh-out funny."

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NEW BOOKS FOR YOU!!!!

• BOOK SELECTIONS FROM LITERARY GUILD
• MAY JUNE JULY 2007
• http//www.juniorlibraryguild.com/books.htm

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RESURRECTION MEN
Victor and his fellow beggars may be worth more
dead than alive. It is 1830s London, and a
booming underground trade has emerged-in bodies.
"Resurrection men" rob graves and supply doctors
with fresh corpses for medical research, no
questions asked. Lately, however, Victor's
friends-still very much alive-have been
disappearing from the streets. Victor must find
out what's going on before it's too late.
Ask for "HOLD"
7
SAMURAI NEVER FEARS DEATH

• For the first time since becoming a
  samurai, Seikei, a sixteen-year-old living in
  eighteenth-century Japan, is heading home to
  Osaka. His reunion with his family is interrupted
  by two murders at the puppet theater. When the
  lazy magistrate arrests an innocent man, Seikei
  vows to find the real killer, questioning the
  puppeteers and chasing down a group of
  charismatic smugglers. As he digs deeper into the
  mystery, Seikei begins to suspect that his own
  brother and sister may be involved.

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SKYSCRAPER
Since they first began to rise overhead,
skyscrapers have risen ever higher. Aided by the
advent of steel-frame construction and the
invention of the passenger elevator, cities and
developers have competed to create the world's
tallest building. Skyscrapers such as the Empire
State Building in New York City and the Petronas
Towers in Kuala Lumpur have come to be as famous
as the pyramids. This beautifully illustrated
history explains the developments in art and
science that make these modern marvels possible.
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SUMMER BALL
"Danny Walker, alone with a basketball and a
secret. The secret being this He was scared."
Danny's always been the smallest kid on the
court, but that's never stopped him. Last year,
he took his travel team of seventh graders all
the way to a national championship. Now he's off
to a prestigious summer basketball camp, facing
better-and bigger-competition than ever before.
And this time, Danny's not so sure that he
belongs.
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WILDLY ROMANTIC

• The Romantic poets transgressed
  traditional boundaries in life and art, rousing
  suspicion in conservative nineteenth-century
  Britain. Revolutionaries, addicts, and
  philanderers, these remarkable writers forged one
  of the most important movements in Western
  literature. From the friendship between
  Wordsworth and Coleridge to the short, brilliant
  life of John Keats to the exploits of Byron and
  the Shelleys, this group biography follows both
  the poets' individual stories and the story of
  their relationships.

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DEEP IN THE MOUNTAINS
Tony is the only Chinese boy in his Bronx
neighborhood. If that weren't enough to get the
local bullies' attention, he also has a weight
problem. He gets back at his tormentors by
caricaturing them in a graffiti mural, but Tony's
revenge only brings him more trouble His parents
decide to send him to Shanghai for the summer to
work for his uncle. While there, Tony meets a
mysterious old artist, the painter Zhu Qizhan.
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DREAM FACTORY

• When the actors who play the characters at Disney
  World go on strike, the park hires a group of
  high school students to fill in. Itsounds like
  the best summer job ever, but Ella soon discovers
  that her Prince Charming is a dud and that she's
  much more interested in Luke, who spends his days
  dressed up as Dale the Chipmunk. Luke can't stop
  thinking about Ella either and wonders why she
  often seems so sad. The problem? Luke already has
  the perfect girlfriend.

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PEAK

• The Woolworth Building isn't the first skyscraper
  fourteen-year-old Peak Marcello has climbed, but
  this time he's caught and arrested. Now his
  father-who has always been more interested in
  climbing than in his son- suddenly arrives in New
  York and bargains with the judge to take Peak out
  of the country until the publicity dies down.
  Before long, Peak is at base camp on Mt. Everest,
  where his father is leading an expedition. Of
  course, Peak is interested in climbing to the
  summit, but what's in it for his father?

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THE RULES OF THE HEART

• Battle Hall Davies moves into an artsy Portland
  co-op for the summer before she starts college.
  Her housemates include several actors, a bike
  messenger, a set designer, and a swimming
  instructor. But there's one person living in
  Forest House whom Battle is particularly anxious
  to spend time with her charming older brother,
  Nick, whom she hasn't seen since he ran away from
  home years ago.

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RUNNER

• Charlie Feehan began running the frigid Melbourne
  streets at night simply to keep warm. Soon,
  however, "the sleazy streets seduced me, and,
  like a moth to the flame I gladly surrendered."
  Now Charlie is an errand runner for notorious
  bootlegger Squizzy Taylor. The pay is good and
  the job is a thrill, but Charlie yearns to put
  his running skills to a different use He wants
  to leave the criminal world behind and enter the
  prestigious Ballarat Mile race.

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WALKER EVANS PHOTOGRAPHER

• Determined to see what was in front of him
  without sentimentality or judgment, Walker Evans
  found beauty in the ordinary. Whether
  photographing buildings and workers in New York
  City or documenting the lives of tenant families
  in Alabama for the book Let Us Now Praise Famous
  Men, he let the character of his subjects come to
  the fore. Evans gave people a unique and lasting
  picture of America and forever changed the art of
  photography.

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THE ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN

• The Wellpinit reservation is a rough place to
  grow up, but to Arnold, it's home. So he feels
  torn when he begins attending an affluent high
  school off the reservation. Things only get worse
  when Arnold's new basketball team returns to play
  the team from Wellpinit, and he must face his
  best friend and all his former teammates on the
  court. Could the crowd really be booing him? "I
  felt like one of those Indian scouts who led the
  U.S. Cavalry against other Indians."

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DARKWING

• In the waning days of the dinosaurs, a new world
  emerges. Dusk is different from the other
  chiropters in his colony. While they glide to get
  from tree to tree, Dusk has the urge-and, he
  soondiscovers, the ability-to actually fly. As
  the leader's son, he is protected for a time, but
  his father asks him to suppress his unusual
  talent to avoid being shunned-or worse. Then a
  new threat emerges, when a group of felids, led
  by Carnassial, stops eating only fruit, roots,
  and grubs to become predators.

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DIAMOND IN THE SHADOW

• The last thing Jared wants is a family of
  refugees living in his house, but his do-gooder
  mother has made up her mind to host a family from
  Africa. When the family arrives, they are not
  what anyone expects the father has had his hands
  amputated, and the daughter is so traumatized by
  her experiences that she can't speak. Jared
  senses something else suspicious-these people do
  not seem to know each other very well. He has no
  idea that both their family and his are in
  terrible danger.

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FIRST SHOT

• David Crandall was destined to attend The
  Arsenal, a strict private school. His father is
  the headmaster, and a long, successful line of
  David's relatives have graduated from the school.
  With his grades David is unlikely to follow their
  examples, but that's not his only problem. He's
  an outcast at school, he loses his spot on the
  rifle team to a girl, and he has barely spoken to
  his father since his mother died. Worst of all,
  David suspects his father of her murder.

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LAST KNIGHT

• Michael wants nothing more than to be Sirital
  Sir Michael. But the knighthood has been dead
  for two hundred years, his squire is a rogue
  named Fisk, and his damsel in distress turns out
  to be an escaped murderess. As Michael says, "The
  life of a knight errant wasn't quite what I had
  expected." However, when Michael and Fisk set out
  on quest involving angry sheriffs,
  cudgel-crewers, and magical beasts, the knight
  and his squire could finally live out their own
  legendary adventure-or die trying.

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UP CLOSE FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

• Considered by many to be America's greatest
  architect, Frank Lloyd Wright was certainly its
  most notorious. While his innovative buildings
  appeared on magazine covers, newspaper headlines
  followed the tragic series of fires, violent
  crimes, and romantic intrigues that beset Wright.
  This biography tells the story of Frank Lloyd
  Wright's life and traces the development of his
  work from his apprenticeship during the 1893
  Chicago World's Fair to the creation of his
  homes. It also considers the effect of Wright's
  work on the way Americans live today.

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SOMETHING ROTTEN

• Denmark, Tennessee, stank. Bad. Like dead fish
  fricasseed in sewer water." Horatio Wilkesis
  visiting his friend Hamilton Prince in Denmark,
  but the sulfurous air created by the Elsinore
  Paper Plant isn't the only thing that smells
  fishy. Hamilton's father is dead, and Hamilton's
  mother just married Hamilton's uncle. Horatio
  detects murder, but the killer is harder to
  determine when there are several possible
  suspects and motives. Can Horatio figure out
  whodunit before anyone else falls prey to rotten
  deeds?

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REVOLUTION

• China, 1972. Since Comrade Li moved into the
  house, life has been very different for Ling. She
  used to laugh and play with her father in the
  evenings. Now, her parents whisper and worry.
  Though Ling is taught that Chairman Mao works for
  her happiness, food is rationed her father, a
  skilled surgeon, is ordered to give up doctoring
  to mop floors and scrub bathrooms at the
  hospital and a dear friend has been declared an
  enemy of the state. This novel about the Cultural
  Revolution is based on the author's childhood.

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ELEPHANT RUN

• 1942 Fourteen-year-old Nick Freestone is glad to
  leave war-torn London behind and return to his
  father's teak plantation in Burma, where he lived
  as a small child. There he meets Mya, an aspiring
  mahoutital mahout whose family tends the
  plantation's elephants, and Hilltop, a mysterious
  monk. Then the Japanese army arrives. Nick
  becomes a prisoner in his own room, and his
  father is sent to a labor camp. With the help of
  Hilltop and a rogue elephant named Hannibal, Nick
  and Mya must escape and rescue their families.

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CASSANDRAS SISTER

• Eighteen-year-old Jenny Austen considers herself
  very lucky. She has a loving family, a home in
  beautiful southern England, and time to write her
  novels. But Jenny, with her "head full of
  questions no one seemed able to answer," also
  feels peculiar, especially compared to her "calm
  and practical" older sister, Cassandra. Jenny is
  exasperated with ballroom arrangements and begins
  to think she'll never be lucky enough to make a
  true love match. As she grows older and becomes
  simply "Jane," will a captivating young man named
  Tom Lefroy change her views on life and love?

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WHAT THEY FOUND

• "Ain't it funny how we understand each other?" a
  customer asks Mama Evans, owner of the Curl-E-Que
  hair salon in Harlem, New York. These moving,
  intertwined stories demonstrate the many ways
  that the neighbors on 145th Street truly do
  understand one another. From the story of a dying
  father's last loving gesture to that of a young
  girl who doesn't realize how beautiful she is
  until a neighbor paints her portrait, this
  collection, full of individuals searching for and
  finding love, is also the story of their
  community.

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WHO WAS FIRST?

• While it is commonly believed that Christopher
  Columbus was the first to make a successful
  round-trip voyage to the Americas, in recent
  years, new evidence has cast this idea into
  doubt. It suggests that there may have been
  Chinese and Viking "discoveries" of the New World
  that predate Columbus's arrival. This book
  considers these possibilities and describes the
  complex societies explorers would have found,
  built by the tens of millions of people native to
  North and South America.

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YELLOW FLAG

• For generations, the Hildebrands have been racing
  legends. But Kyle Hildebrand prefers playing in
  his high school jazz quintet and hanging out with
  his sort-of girlfriend Nicole to working at the
  track. Then his older brother is seriously
  injured during a race and Kyle has to fill the
  empty driver's seat for the good of the family.
  Now Kyle's caught between what he wants and what
  his family wants. And after he meets pretty pit
  girl Jimmie, Kyle isn't even sure what he wants
  anymore.