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Criss Cross
Lynne Rae Perkins
Synopsis:

Debbie is wishing something would happen. Something good. To her. Soon. In the meantime, Debbie loses a necklace and finds a necklace (and boy does the necklace have a story to tell), she goes jeans shopping with her mother (an accomplishment in diplomacy), she learns to drive shift in a truck (illegally), she saves a life (directly connected to being able to drive, thus proving something), she takes a bus ride to another town (in order to understand what it feels like to be from "elsewhere"), she meets a boy (who truly is from "elsewhere"), but mostly she hangs out with her friends: Patty, Hector, Lenny, and Phil. Their paths cross. Their stories crisscross. And in Lynne Rae Perkins's remarkable book, a girl and her wish grow up. Illustrated throughout with black–and–white pictures, comics, and photographs by the author.

Ages 10+

Publication Date: 08/30/05
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Fiction
Capt. Hook : The Adventures of a Notorious Youth
Synopsis:

With his long black curls, a shadowy family tree, and an affinity for pet spiders, James Matthew bears little resemblance to his starched-collar, blue-blooded peers at Eton. Dubbed King Jas., he stops at nothing to become the most notorious underclassman in the prestigious school's history. For James, sword fighting, falling in love with an Ottoman Sultana, and challenging the Queen of England are all in a day's skullduggery. But when he sets sail on a ship with a mysterious mission, King Jas.' dream of discovering a magical island quickly turns into an unimaginable nightmare.

Screenwriter J. V. Hart traces the evolution of J. M. Barrie's classic villain from an eccentric outcast to the scourge of Neverland.

Publication Date: 08/23/05
Age Level: Any Age
Genre: Fiction
Friends and Enemies
David Field
Synopsis: Momentous events await fifteen-year-old Tommy when he goes on holiday to a chateau in the south of France near Toulouse. He sees a strange picture of an unknown and beautiful young woman and is magnetically drawn to her image. Suddenly, he's 400 years back in the past, in the France of 1599. In that faraway time he finds the living likeness of the picture in the form of Eloise. They run off for a series of hair-raising adventures together, falling in love in the process. Dynastic struggles, power-hungry bishops, outlaws living in the marshes, demonic caves, murderous clergymen and strolling players form the stock-in-trade of this wonderful historical romance. Its swift action and bubbling humour are matched by the author's canny portrayal of two teenagers meeting across four centuries. And how does Tommy resolve the culture clash? With his mobile phone, of course - another hero of the tale! Read on, and look out for more adventures from the masterful pen of David Field as the story of Tommy and Eloise spills over into the twenty-first century in a volume to follow. David Field lives with his wife and two children in Aarhus, Denmark.
Publication Date: 08/23/05
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Fiction
Autobiography of my Dead Brother
Christopher Myers, Walter Dean Myers
Synopsis:

The thing was that me and Rise were blood brothers, but sometimes I really didn't know him. . . .

And so Jesse fills his sketchbook with drawings and portraits of his blood brother, Rise, and his comic strip, Spodi Roti and Wise, as he makes sense of the complexities of friendship, loyalty, and loss in a neighborhood where drive–bys, vicious gangs, and abusive cops are everyday realities.

Printz Award winner Walter Dean Myers delivers an unforgettable novel about life's hardest lessons, illustrated by Caldecott Honor artist Christopher Myers.

Publication Date: 08/16/05
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Fiction
Tackling Dad
Elizabeth Levy
Synopsis:

From the author of Frankenstein Moved in on the Fourth Floor, Tackling Dad is the story of 13-year-old Cassie's struggle to make her father understand that even though she's a girl, she can still play football -- just as he did.

Publication Date: 08/02/05
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Fiction
Native Son
Richard Wright
Synopsis:

Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America.

Publication Date: 08/02/05
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Fiction
Warriors: The New Prophecy #2: Moonrise
Dave Stevenson, Erin Hunter
Synopsis:

Erin Hunter’s #1 nationally bestselling Warriors series continues with the second book in the New Prophecy series!

The second book in this second series, Warriors: The New Prophecy #2: Moonrise, brings more adventure, intrigue, and thrilling battles to the epic world of the warrior Clans.

Moons have passed since six cats set out on a journey to save their Clans. Now they are traveling home again, but on their way through the mountains, they meet a tribe of wild cats with a secret…and their own mysterious prophecy to fulfill.

In the forest, Firestar and Leafpaw watch ThunderClan’s world crumbling around them. Will the questing cats make it back in time to save the Clans, or will they be too late?

Publication Date: 08/02/05
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Fiction
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Mary GrandPré, J. K. Rowling
Synopsis: As the Harry Potter sequence draws to a close, Harry's most dangerous adventure yet is just beginning . . . and it starts July 16, 2005.

We could tell you, but then we'd have to Obliviate your memory.
Publication Date: 08/01/05
Age Level: Any Age
Genre: Fiction
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Synopsis: Selling more than 300,000 copies the first year it was published, Stowe's powerful abolitionist novel fueled the fire of the human rights debate in 1852. Denouncing the institution of slavery in dramatic terms, the incendiary novel quickly draws the reader into the world of slaves and their masters.
Stowe's characters are powerfully and humanly realized in Uncle Tom, a majestic and heroic slave whose faith and dignity are never corrupted; Eliza and her husband, George, who elude slave catchers and eventually flee a country that condones slavery; Simon Legree, a brutal plantation owner; Little Eva, who suffers emotionally and physically from the suffering of slaves; and fun-loving Topsy, Eva's slave playmate.
Critics, scholars, and students are today revisiting this monumental work with a new objectivity, focusing on Stowe's compelling portrayal of women and the novel's theological underpinnings.
Publication Date: 08/01/05
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Fiction
Dragon Blade:The Book of the Rowan
Sasha Miller, Andre Norton
Synopsis: Over a year has passed since the defeat of the Great Foulness, and the ravaged earth has begun to heal. Lost for generations, the signet rings of the Four Great Houses---Oak, Yew, Ash, and Rowan---have been restored to their rightful heirs. And Ashen NordornQueen, mistress of the Land of Ever Snow, looks forward to a life of peace and happiness with her beloved husband and their newborn son---only to learn that an ancient evil still threatens all that she holds dear.

The Mother Ice Dragon, the fearsome progenitor of her deadly breed, has awakened from slumber to menace the world anew. Legend holds that only the Dragon Blade, forged from the scales of her vanquished mate, can slay the deadly female dragon, but the Dragon Blade has been lost for ages.

As Ashen embarks on a perilous quest to find the mystic sword, she leaves her castle and homeland in the care of her closest friends, including Rannore, Lady of the Rowan, who soon faces danger of a different sort....

Dragon Blade continues the saga begun in To the King a Daughter and continued in Knight or Knave and A Crown Disowned.
Publication Date: 08/01/05
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Fiction
Poppy's Return
Brian Floca, Avi
Synopsis:

Poppy returns ... with big trouble. Family trouble.

Poppy and Rye don't know what to do about their son Ragweed Junior's attitude. He is rude, he is crude, and he has dyed his fur to look like Mephitis, his skunk friend. In short, Ragweed Junior is very much a teenager. Even Ereth, the cantankerous porcupine, with his salty swearing, can't straighten him out. Then Poppy gets an urgent request to return to her old home, Gray House, where her aging parents, Sweet Cicely and Lungwort, are in difficulties. Not only does she agree to go back, she decides to take Junior, in hopes traveling together will bring them together. But when Junior's skunk pal and Ereth join the party, the trip doesn't quite go as expected. And when Poppy recalls she did not get along with her parents, things become even more complicated.

Poppy's Return is a hilarious adventure tale about family: the gleeful joys, the farcical sorrows, the high emotions, and the low comedy of living with and without relations. It's also about bears, bulldozers, and the boisterous antics of young mice doing the stinky red. And sugared slug soup, there's always Ereth to stir the stew of Poppy’s rich and rewarding life.

Publication Date: 08/01/05
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Fiction
The Lambkins
Jonathan Keegan, Eve Bunting
Synopsis:

Kidnapped.
Injected with a shrinking formula.
Held prisoner in a bizarre dollhouse.

Kyle Wilson, once a regular kid, is now the size of a doll, but still alive. He is the fourth Lambkin in crazy Mrs. Shepherd's collection. She'll keep them safe, she says. She loves them like her own children, she says. She would never harm them ... as long as they don't make her angry.

John made her angry.

Look what happened to him.

One thing is certain. Kyle and the others must figure out how to escape, and fast. Otherwise they'll end up as Lambkins forever ... or worse.

Publication Date: 08/01/05
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Fiction
Ready or Not : An All-American Girl Novel
Synopsis:

Top ten things Samantha Madison isn't ready for:

10. Spending Thanksgiving at Camp David

9. With her boyfriend, the president's son

8. Who appears to want to take their relationship to the Next Level

7. Which Sam inadvertently and shockingly announces live on MTV

6. While appearing to support the president's dubious policies on families, morals, and yes, sex

5. Juggling her new after-school job at Potomac Video

4. Even though she already has a job as teen ambassador to the UN (that she doesn't get paid for)

3. Riding the Metro and getting accosted because she's "the redheaded girl who saved the president's life," in spite of her new, semipermanent Midnight Ebony tresses

2. Experiencing total role reversal with her popular sister Lucy, who for once can't get the guy she wants and the number-one thing Sam isn't ready for?

1. Finding out the hard way that in art class, "life drawing" means "naked people."

Publication Date: 08/01/05
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Fiction
Chopstick
Sandra, Byrd
Synopsis: Thirteen-year-olds Paige and Kate find themselves competing for the same worship-music contest and the same $500 prize. Each girl is so sure she will win that each has already promised the prize money to a favorite worthy cause. Via the contest's Web site, Paige and Kate meet and begin a friendship that will make both girls examine their ideas about their faith and what worship really is. They realize that, like a single chopstick, the body of Christ cannot work well alone. Each girl decides to share a bit of her strongest gift with the other, thereby increasing the chances that one of them--but only one of them--will win. Friends For a Season Book 2.
Publication Date: 08/01/05
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Fiction
The Sea Singer
Craig Moodie
Synopsis: Craig Moodie's finely crafted adventure novel tells the story of twelve-year-old Finn, who stows away to search for his lost father and brothers. It's a journey that brings storms, shipwreck, tense encounters with the inhabitants of an unexplored continent -- and a coming of age for Finn, who will in the end, face his father as a young man and a Viking. Dramatic and beautifully told, The Sea Singer is a first-rate literary sea story.

Publication Date: 08/01/05
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Fiction
Heart's Desire
Laura Pedersen
Synopsis: Card sharp and former wild child Hallie Palmer is in college now–and Bernard Stockton, her legal guardian, has suddenly appeared during final exams. He’s hysterical about his recent breakup with his longtime boyfriend, Gil, and wants to enlist Hallie in a scheme to win Gil back. So Hallie returns to Cosgrove County, Ohio, for the summer, to her job as live-in yard person for Bernard and his delightfully oddball mother, Olivia. Also present are Ottavio, Olivia’s hot-tempered Italian lover, who’s desperate for a wedding; Rocky, a chimpanzee who’s one Singapore Sling away from an AA meeting for primates; and Hallie’s own ever-expanding family, which she fled as soon as she could slide down the drainpipe.

Around town, folks assume that since Hallie isn’t in jail, she clearly has no problems of her own and can therefore tackle theirs. But Hallie has plenty of troubles–a looming tuition bill, gambling temptations, and an ex-boyfriend who’s back in town for the summer to upset any potential if highly unlikely (a girl can dream!) romantic flings.

Yet as Hallie and company navigate life’s unexpected paths of games lost and love found, the real truth begins to emerge: With friends, family, and a place to call home, your heart’s desire is always within reach.
Publication Date: 07/26/05
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Fiction

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