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Fiction | Page 311 | LitPick Book Reviews
Fiction
Emil and Karl
Emil and Karl
Jeffrey Shandler, Yankev Glatshteyn
Written in the form of a suspense novel, Emil & Karl draws readers into the dilemma faced by two young boys--one Jewish, the other not--when they suddenly find themselves without homes or families in Vienna on the eve of World War II. A taut, gripping page-turner, it offers a picture of life during the period and the moral challenges faced under Nazism--and a prescient glimpse of the early days of the Holocaust. Written in Yiddish, it is here translated into English for the first time.

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La Linea: A Novel
La Linea
Ann Jaramillo
Miguel's life is just beginning. Or so he thinks. Fifteen-year-old Miguel leaves his rancho deep in Mexico to migrate to California across la linea, the border, in a debut novel from Ann Jaramillo of life-changing, cliff-hanging moments. But Miguel's carefully laid plans change suddenly when his younger sister Elena stows away and follows him. Together, Miguel and Elena endure hardships and danger on their journey of desperation and desire, loyalty and betrayal. An epilogue, set ten years after the events of the story, shows that you can't always count on dreams--even the ones that come true.Latino Interest.

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Fingers
Fingers
William Sleator
Eighteen-year-old Sam has always been jealous of his younger brother, Humphrey, the famous "wonder child" pianist. But now that Humphrey is fifteen, the one-time child prodigy isn't able to get any more bookings. Sam's mother refuses to accept that Humphrey's career is over and devises a scheme to recapture his fame: Sam will compose "new works" by a long dead gypsy composer, and they will tell the world that the composer is dictating the music to Humphrey from the grave. The scheme is a wild success--until some ghostly occurrences convince Sam that the spirit of the dead composer has actually taken over Humphrey's fingers. Have Sam and his family unleashed a force from beyond the grave?

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Borrowed Light
Borrowed Light
Anna Fienberg
Sixteen-year-old Callisto May feels a deep connection to astronomy. She can name all the moons of Jupiter and even tell you the dimensions of the Great Red Spot. But she feels completely alone on planet Earth. And now that she’s pregnant, her loneliness is acute. She can’t turn to her mother, who’s always been too consumed with unspoken grief to care for her children; she can’t turn to her father, who buries himself in work and pretends that life at home is normal; and her surfer boyfriend wants freedom to catch the perfect wave more than he wants to hang around Callisto. Only Callisto’s little brother loves her unfailingly, but she can’t be there for him right now. She’s got to make a huge decision—and, for a change, that means thinking of herself first. Somehow, though, as her world orbits out of control, Callisto finds the courage to fight through the secrecy and silence that are suffocating her family, along with the strength to decide what’s best for her future.

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Finding Grace
Finding Grace
Alyssa Brugman
RACHEL HAS JUST graduated from high school and thinks she knows everything. Well, maybe not quite everything. Then she meets the mysterious Mr. Preston, who offers her a live-in job looking after Grace—a brain injured woman with a lovely house, grasping sisters, feral neighbors, and a box full of unfinished business. As Rachel tries to cope with the demands of her employment and the start of college, she’s also determined to fit together the pieces that were Grace’s former life. The more she finds out about the woman in her care, the more Rachel finds herself.Children’s Book Council of Australia Awards’ Shortlist for YA

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Stealing Henry
Stealing Henry
Carolyn MacCullough
"The night Savannah brains her stepfather with the frying pan is the night she decides to leave home for good."Fleeing from her stepfather's wrath, Savannah and her half brother, Henry, travel north toward their mother Alice's childhood home. As the runaways embark upon their journey, another story begins to unfold: glimpses of Alice as a teenager, caught in poignant first love and completely anaware of all the consequences love can carry.

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A Room on Lorelei Street (Golden Kite Awards (Awards))
A Room on Lorelai Street
Mary E. Pearson
Zoe's arms prickle. She turns, trying to take it all in. The ache inside returns. It is not for her. It is too much. A real room with real floors and walls. A room for sleeping, and reading and dancing and . . . in her imagination she has pictured the room, but she has never pictured herself in it.Can seventeen-year-old Zoe make it on her own?A room is not much. It is not arms holding you. Not a kiss on the forehead. Not a packed lunch or a remembered birthday. Just a room. But for seventeen-year-old Zoe, struggling to shed the suffocating responsibility of her alcoholic mother and the controlling guilt of her grandmother, a rented room on Lorelei Street is a fierce grab for control of her own future.Zoe rents a small room from Opal Keats, an eccentric old lady who has a difficult past of her own, but who chooses to live in the possibility of the future. Zoe tries to find that same possibility in her own future, promising that she will never go crawling back. But with all odds against her, can a seventeen-year-old who only slings hash to make ends meet make it on her own? Zoe struggles with this worry and the guilt of abandoning her mother as she goes to lengths that even she never dreamed she would in order to keep the room on Lorelei Street.

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The Myth Hunters (The Veil, Book 1)
The Myth Hunters
Christopher Golden
In this enthralling new tale from bestselling author Christopher Golden, one man is drawn into a realm just across the veil from our own, where every captivating myth and fairy tale is true, the vanished exist–and every fear is founded….Yielding to his father's wishes, Oliver Bascombe abandoned his dream of being an actor and joined the family law firm. Now he will marry a lovely young woman bearing the Bascombe stamp of approval. But on the eve of his wedding, a blizzard sweeps in–bringing with it an icy legend who calls into question everything Oliver believes about the world and his place in it…. Pursued by a murderous creature who heeds no boundaries, Jack Frost needs Oliver's help to save both himself and his world–an alternate reality slowly being displaced by our own. To help him, Oliver Bascombe, attorney-at-law, will have to become Oliver Bascombe, adventurer, hero–and hunted. So begins a magnificent journey where he straddles two realities…and where, even amid danger, Oliver finds freedom for the very first time.

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Rules
Rules
Cynthia Lord
Twelve-year-old Catherine just wants a normal life. Which is near impossible when you have a brother with autism and a family that revolves around his disability. She's spent years trying to teach David the rules-from "a peach is not a funny-looking apple" to "keep your pants on in public"-in order to stop his embarrassing behaviors. But the summer Catherine meets Jason, a paraplegic boy, and Kristi, the next-door friend she's always wished for, it's her own shocking behavior that turns everything upside down and forces her to ask: What is normal?

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Follow the Blue: A Novel
Follow the Blue
Brigid Lowry
Life isn't neat and tidy. It's like a whole lot of balls of brightly colored wool thrown in a basket, with stray beginnings and endings and possibilities everywhere. Let's follow the blue.Fifteen-year-old Bec has always been the good girl. Growing up with an eccentric celebrity chef mother and a father who suffers from depression, Bec is used to taking care of her two younger siblings and being labeled "the sensible one." But when Bec's parents decide to take a six-week tour of the U.S., she decides that she is sick of being responsible and is ready for some adventures of her own. She meets a new friend named Jaz, dyes her hair, wins money, throws her first party, and then there's the boy thing... In this intoxicating novel by award-winning author and poet Brigid Lowry, Bec realizes that maybe she isn't so ordinary after all―and that sometimes it doesn't hurt to, as her mother would say, "lighten up and enjoy the ride."

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