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Steel Magic
Andre Norton
Synopsis:

A final stand for Avalon...
Sara, Greg, and Eric Lowry are exploring the woods near their uncle's Hudson Valley estate when they are magically transported to the land of Avalon. There they meet Huon, Warden of the West. When he tells them that the forces of darkness have stolen the three talismans that protect Avalon-King Arthur's sword, Excalibur; Merlin's ring; and Huon's horn-the children set off on a quest to find the three tokens of power. For Avalon stands as a wall between the Dark and the mortal world. And if Avalon falls, so does Earth....

Publication Date: 06/13/05
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Series
Peaches
Jodi Lynn Anderson
Synopsis:

The New York Times bestselling debut novel from critically acclaimed author Jodi Lynn Anderson follows three very different girls as they discover the secret to finding the right boy, making the truest of friends, and picking the perfect Georgia peach.

Murphy McGowen has bright green eyes, a reputation as the wildest girl in Bridgewater, and a way of getting out of all the trouble she gets into. But when she's caught stealing from the Darlington Orchard, she's forced to repay her debt picking peaches in the hot Georgia sun.

Leeda Cawley-Smith has professionally whitened teeth and the softest skin her boyfriend has ever touched. Unfortunately, Leeda's parents aren't too keen on her being touched anymore. Now Leeda's country-club summer is out the window—she'll be getting a serious sock tan working at her uncle's peach orchard instead.

Birdie Darlington used to dance around her family's orchard picking peaches for fun. But now that her parents are getting divorced, Birdie would rather spend the summer in the A/C eating Thin Mints than pick another peach—too bad she doesn't have a choice.

Thrown together at Darlington Orchard, Murphy, Leeda, and Birdie discover what it means to find a real soul mate, and that sometimes cute boys know a lot about peach cider. And, of course, they learn the trick to picking a perfect peach. One thing's for sure—it's going to be a juicy summer.

Publication Date: 06/07/05
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Chick Lit
Soul Stealer
Martin Booth
Synopsis: When an enemy of Sebastian’s father reappears in order to find the ancient book of spells in the hopes of stealing millions of souls, it is up to Pip and Tim to help their friend find the disguised evil-doer and botch his plans before it's too late.
Publication Date: 06/01/05
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Fantasy
Freddy and the French Fries
Rudy Baldacci, David Baldacci
Synopsis: Wanting to help draw new customers to the family business, Freddy Funkhauser uses his knowledge of science to make incredible French fries for the restaurant, but when the fries suddenly come to life and wreak havoc on the town, Freddy must find a way to put a stop to his tasty creations!
Publication Date: 06/01/05
Age Level: 8 - 12
Genre: Fantasy
John Muir
Rod Miller
Synopsis: In 1849, 11-year-old John Muir immigrated from Scotland to America. Here, he rose from farmer and sawmill worker to become a noted authority on the botany, glaciers, and forestry of the nation's wilderness. Best known for his long association with the Yosemite Valley and Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, Muir also explored, mostly afoot, the southern States, Alaska, the Great Basin, and the Mojave Desert. His studies of nature took him around the world and generated volumes of poetic, evocative writings.
As America expanded relentlessly westward, Muir witnessed the plunder and exploitation of the land and became a driving force in efforts to protect the natural world. A modest and private man, married and father of two doting daughters, his conservationist views forced him into battle with powerful political and industrial interests. Some battles he won, influencing four US Presidents to sponsor legislation that protected forests and established or expanded America's national parks.
Muir lost his last, and perhaps most personal battle. He fought until near the end of his life to prevent the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park from becoming a reservoir for the city of San Francisco. Some of his conservationsist friends believed the conflict so sapped his physical, emotional, and spiritual strength that it contributed to his death.
Remembered as the founder of the Sierra Club, father of America's conservation movement, and architect of a still growing wilderness ethic, Muir set an example many still follow, fighting today's threats to the environment.
Publication Date: 06/01/05
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Nonfiction
Mary Edwards Walker
Dale L. Walker
Synopsis: Mary Edwards Walker (1832-1919) defied the conventions of her era. Born and raised on a farm in Oswego, New York, Walker became one of a handful of female physicians in the nation-and became a passionate believer in the rights of women.
Despite the derision of her contemporaries, Walker championed freedom of dress. She wore slacks-or "bloomers" as they were popularly known-rather than the corsets and voluminous ground-dragging petticoats and dresses she believed were unhygenic and injurious to health. She lectured and campaigned for woman's suffrage and for prohibition, and against tobacco, traditional male-dominated marriage vows, and any issue involving the sublimation of her sex.
From the outset of the Civil War, Walker volunteered her services as a physician. Despite almost universal opposition from army commanders and field surgeons, Walker served at Manassas, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Chickamauga, and other bloody theaters of the war. She ministered to wounded and maimed soldiers and civilians on both sides of the conflict. Captured by Confederates near Chattanooga in 1864, she served four months in a Southern prison hellhole where she nursed and tended to wounded prisoners of war.
For her services in the war, in 1865 Mary Edwards Walker was awarded the Medal of Honor, becoming the only woman in American history to receive the nation's highest award for military valor.
Publication Date: 06/01/05
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Nonfiction
Your Name in Print
Timothy Harper, Elizabeth Harper
Synopsis:

Make Your Mark

Looking for a way to express yourself? Need some extra spending money? Do you want to beef up that college application package? Look no further than this book.
With advice on how to write newspaper and magazine features, Web blogs, music and movie reviews, novels, graphic novels, short stories, and more, the father-daughter team of Timothy and Elizabeth Harper shows that it's possible for anyone who writes well to get published.
Topics include:

· How to find subjects to write about
· Learning productive research and writing habits
· Identifying the best market for your work
· Managing your career
· And so much more

With practical information on every step of the writing process, writing samples, personal anecdotes, tips from the pros, profiles on young authors such as Christopher Paolini and Zoe Trope, and a resource section, Your Name in Print has all the tools and advice young writers need to break into the writing world.

Publication Date: 06/01/05
Age Level: Any Age
Genre: Educational
Worlds of the Golden Queen
Synopsis: Originally published as two books, Worlds of the Golden Queen is a stellar tale of love, adventure, sacrifice, and war set in a fantastic future.

In the first novel, The Golden Queen, the insectoid Dronons have slain the human queen Semarritte, thowing into chaos the ten thousand worlds over which she reigned. Desperate to save mankind, Lord Veriasse, her near-immortal consort, has created a new queen: Everynne, cloned from the dead original. Hotly pursued, Everynne falls in with cocky bodyguard Gallen O'Day; the pious Orick, an intelligent black bear; and the beautiful orphan Maggie Flynn.
With Gallen and the others newly sworn to her service, the young queen begins the great struggle against the aliens. Leaping from world to world via an ancient system of instantaneous transport gates, the heroes face terrible dangers and great wonders as they seek the heart of the dronon worlds, carrying the battle straight to the enemy.
In the second novel, Beyond the Gate, Maggie Flynn has become, by test of combat, the new Golden Queen. Gallen, Maggie, and Orick face an attack by Dronons on a planet where humans have achieved the pinnacle of genetic engineering. They must stop them while guarding the secret of Maggie's whereabouts, for she is only the Golden Queen until her champion, Gallen, is defeated by a Dronon challenger. In the midst of a slam-bang story, Farland raises and examines deep questions of humanity's definition and identity.
Publication Date: 06/01/05
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Science Fiction
I Am Alive and You Are Dead
Timothy Bent, Emmanuel Carrère
Synopsis: For his many devoted readers, Philip K. Dick is not only one of the "one of the most valiant psychological explorers of the 20th century" (The New York Times) but a source of divine revelation. In the riveting style that won accolades for The Adversary, Emmanuel Carrère's I Am Alive and You Are Dead, follows Dick's strange odyssey from his traumatic beginnings in 1928, when his twin sister died in infancy, to his lonely end in 1982, beset by mystical visions of swirling pink light, three-eyed invaders, and messages from the Roman Empire. Drawing on interviews as well as unpublished sources, he vividly conjures the spirit of this restless observer of American postwar malaise who subverted the materials of science fiction--parallel universes, intricate time loops, collective delusions--to create classic works of contemporary anxiety.
Publication Date: 06/01/05
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Fiction
A Room on Lorelai Street
Mary E. Pearson
Synopsis: 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.
Publication Date: 06/01/05
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Fiction
Raven's Gate
Anthony Horowitz
Synopsis: The internationally bestselling author of STORMBREAKER and EAGLE STRIKE plunges strikingly into Stephen King territory in this chilling first installment in a powerful new series.

Matt is being punished for a crime he saw, but didn't commit. Instead of being locked up, he is being sent to the middle of nowhere to live with a new foster mom, as part of a government scheme called The Leaf Project. But Matt's new home provides anything but peace and quiet. His new guardian is involved in very sinister things . . . and the whole town seems to be on her side. Everybody who tries to help Matt winds up disappearing . . . or dead. The truth is much bigger than Matt or the town -- but Matt is the only person who can stop the ultimate evil from being unleashed.
Publication Date: 06/01/05
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Fiction
The Cloud Chamber
Joyce Maynard
Synopsis: When his father shoots himself and ends up blind, Nate Chance’s world is thrown into a tailspin as the members of his family retreat from reality, but not wanting to become the tragedy’s next victim, Nate sets his sights on winning the science fair by building the cloud chamber that he and his father had planned to do before everything went wrong.
Publication Date: 05/31/05
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Fiction
Far from Burden Dell
Chris Coppel
Synopsis: Amy, a pampered young Golden Retriever, is stolen by ruthless smugglers from her home in rural England and taken to a grim London prison. A bold escape with her fellow prisoners--a weepy but learned Spaniel, two stalwart Dobermans, a vain Afghan, and an ingenious Yorkshire Terrier, takes the friends through the perils of London, from crossing busy streets, escaping a vicious pack of rats in the pitch-black London Underground, rushing from Harrod's Food Court, running over London Bridge, hiding out in Hyde Park, to racing from the guards at Buckingham Palace, always pursued by their criminal captors. But can the courageous, often terrified, friends escape recapture and their grim prison, as well as capture by the police--and possibly the dog pound--to find their way home? Ages 10 and up.
Publication Date: 05/30/05
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Fiction
Sugar Rush
Julie Burchill
Synopsis:

"Oh, I,m not your friend." My savior looked surprised. "It's just that this is MY school. I'm Maria Sweet -- Sugar. If you get bullied, it'll be when I say so."

When Kim has to transfer from her posh school to Ravendene Comprehensive, the notoriously violent local school, she's scared -- but then she meets Maria Sweet, better known as Sugar. Sugar is beautiful and wild, the queen bee of Ravendene, and Kim falls under her spell.

They're gorgeous party girls, envied and admired by everyone. But as Kim leaves her good-girl past far behind, she realizes she's falling in love -- with her best friend.

Funny, sexy, and provocative, this is a compulsively readable first novel for young adults by Britain's most famous and controversial journalist.

Publication Date: 05/24/05
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Romance
Girls Dinner Club
Jessie Elliot
Synopsis:

The love of Junie's life for the past year is suddenly acting like a crazed puppy.

Celia's dad has found the most ridiculous woman in all of Manhattan—and decided, after fifteen years of being single, to date her.

Danielle's hot-guy-in-a-band ex-boyfriend is trying to convince her that he's "changed."

Sometimes living life is a recipe for disaster.

Sometimes, girls just have to make their own recipes.

Publication Date: 05/24/05
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Chick Lit
Horseman
Ford Lytle Gilmore, Christopher Golden
Synopsis:

New to Sleepy Hollow, teens Aimee and Shane Lancaster find that upon theirarrival an ancient curse has been unleashed upon the town, tracing back to the town's famous legend, which just might be more truth than myth. Now an array of evil demons is after them, with the infamous Headless Horseman leading the pack.

Publication Date: 05/19/05
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Paranormal

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