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City of Screams
John Brindley
Life already hangs in precarious balance for Phoenix and her family and friends as rebellion bubbles beneath every surface, but when the Adults return, offering desperate acts of salvation, they seem to forget that nature itself is calling the shots. By the author of The Rule of Claw.
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The Twilight Companion
Lois H. Gresh
Everyone's in love with vampires, and if the vampire's name happens to be Edward Cullen, then readers of the wildly popular Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer can't help but be crazy about him. For all those who adore Bella Swan, Edward, and the rest of the Cullen family and can't get enough, this companion guide is a must. The Twilight series follows an unlikely couple: Bella, a teenager, and her boyfriend, Edward, a vampire who has sworn off human blood. Added to the mix is Jacob Black, a werewolf who also loves Bella. Seductive and compelling, the four-book series has become a worldwide phenomenon. With legends and lore about vampires and werewolves throughout history, insight into the series, quizzes, and heaps of fascinating facts, this companion guide will give millions of readers the information they've been hungering for since book one! As a special bonus, the companion guide helps readers determine if they are compatible with a guy like Edward!
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The Night Watchman
J. L. Manning
This story takes place in any city where there is street crime, street racing, and underground fighting. There is a young man that was in a car accident as a child and was left with physical limitations. Over these years a speech impairment and self-doubt because of how people now saw him left him lonely. A technology that he found did help him gain abilities that he never had and he wanted to use these abilities to help out his city. The abilities that he gained improved and the side effects gave him abilities that he was learning to take advantage of. He started to investigate a criminal that he had found that got him involved in some tight spots. He gained the most unlikely of friends that got him involved with underground activities. His confidence grew, but when the time comes will he do the right thing?
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Dodger For President
Jordan Sonnenblick
What would you do if your best friend was:1. Still imaginary (and still an oversize blue chimp with major junk-food issues)?2. Nominating you to run for class president - against the most popular kid in your grade?3. In charge of your campaign posters…all blue, of course, including your face!?4. Planning a magical secret weapon to help you win (not fair and square, right?)?5. Driving you crazy?!?! Now you have an idea of what Willie Ryan's life is like as his adventures with Dodger continue. The last thing Willie wants to do is run for class president, but both his running mate, Lizzie, and Dodger won't let him quit - and have their own ideas of how to run a campaign, especially against James Beeks, Mr. Popularity. In this second installment of the Dodger and Me series, the humor runs high, the friendships run deep, and Dodger continues to run on French fries and good intentions.
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Constellation Chronicles
Vincent Lowry
A blinding fireball rips across the night sky and slams into a field in the remote town of Rigel, New Mexico. Glenn Sawyer, a broke and disillusioned 18-year-old, witnesses and investigates the crash, finding a surreal craft and an even stranger monkey-like creature named Paako, who secretly follows him home and stirs trouble. As Glenn captures Paako and attempts to return her to the crash site, he discovers unexpected company, and learns that his remarkable journey -- filled with adventure, evil, and a cast of captivating characters -- has only just begun. Thus starts the first book in Vincent Lowry's unforgettable epic "Constellation Chronicles." Both visionary and gripping, "The Lost Civilization of Aries" will sweep you away to an extraordinary world of mystery, fantasy, and science fiction.
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The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet
Reif Larsen
Book DescriptionA brilliant, boundary-leaping debut novel tracing twelve-year-old genius map maker T.S. Spivet's attempts to understand the ways of the worldWhen twelve-year-old genius cartographer T.S. Spivet receives an unexpected phone call from the Smithsonian announcing he has won the prestigious Baird Award, life as normal—if you consider mapping family dinner table conversation normal—is interrupted and a wild cross-country adventure begins, taking T.S. from his family ranch just north of Divide, Montana, to the museum’s hallowed halls. T.S. sets out alone, leaving before dawn with a plan to hop a freight train and hobo east. Once aboard, his adventures step into high gear and he meticulously maps, charts, and illustrates his exploits, documenting mythical wormholes in the Midwest, the urban phenomenon of "rims," and the pleasures of McDonald’s, among other things. We come to see the world through T.S.'s eyes and in his thorough investigation of the outside world he also reveals himself. As he travels away from the ranch and his family we learn how the journey also brings him closer to home. A secret family history found within his luggage tells the story of T.S.'s ancestors and their long-ago passage west, offering profound insight into the family he left behind and his role within it. As T.S. reads he discovers the sometimes shadowy boundary between fact and fiction and realizes that, for all his analytical rigor, the world around him is a mystery. All that he has learned is tested when he arrives at the capital to claim his prize and is welcomed into science’s inner circle. For all its shine, fame seems more highly valued than ideas in this new world and friends are hard to find. T.S.'s trip begins at the Copper Top Ranch and the last known place he stands is Washington, D.C., but his journey's movement is far harder to track: How do you map the delicate lessons learned about family and self? How do you depict how it feels to first venture out on your own? Is there a definitive way to communicate the ebbs and tides of heartbreak, loss, loneliness, love? These are the questions that strike at the core of this very special debut. The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet: The Lost Images by Reif Larsen I initially wrote a draft of The Selected Works without any accompanying illustrations. After reaching the end, I still had that tingly feeling that usually means something is missing, and so I thought about it for awhile and realized that in order to really understand T.S., we actually need to see his drawings laid out on the page. T.S. was most comfortable in the exploding diagram or the annotation or the bitchin’ bar graph; this marginal material was where he would often let down his guard and reveal something he wouldn’t otherwise in the main text. As soon as you include that first image in the margin, however, you've positioned yourself on a slippery slope, as suddenly there's this temptation to illustrate every single detail in the novel. Particularly with a digressive character like T.S., I found that I had to be very selective about what I wanted to show. What is not shown is as important as what is shown. In addition, many of the images in this book are not direct illustrations like might you see in other books—as in, "let me tell you about x and now here is a picture of x." Instead of a direct one-to-one correspondence, there's a satellite-like relationship between the text and the image, a kind of graphical parallelism. T.S. will talk about his suspicion of the adult male and then include a chart of male-pattern baldness, and it is through these somewhat disparate leaps between text and image, between the main story and the marginalia, that we begin to soak in T.S.'s habits of mind. Sometimes I would include an image and then realize that I could now erase a piece of text, as the image was performing the work of that text, and often performing it in subtler ways. On page 67, for instance, there's a diagram of the patterns of cross–talk at the dinner table. Before this image came along, I had a whole elaborate explanation of T.S.'s difficulties talking to his Father at the head of the table, but this became redundant with the diagram; the visual shows it much more elegantly. And then there were cases where I put in an image only to figure out after awhile that it just wasn't working. In honor of T.S.'s tendency to categorize everything, I've chosen five of these "lost images," each representative of a different reason for ending up on the cutting-room floor. Reason 1: NO ROOM! Image: The Thrushing of Dr. Clair’s Hairbrush (as seen through the keyhole). This was an example of the illustration just not fitting in the margins. We thought a lot about the dimensions of the book—a size that felt novelistic but also allowed for enough width to give the margins breathing room. So a couple of images just got the axe. I like this one, though, and was sad to see it go. I now use it in one of my slideshow/readings. Reason 2: CUT THE STRING, LOSE THE KITE Image: Donkey/Dolphin/Dog In an old draft, T.S. fantasized about his impending fame as he rode the freight train out East: "I took a couple of stereoscopic photos, promising myself that when I got to Washington I would look into the possibility of arranging an exhibit on the eye and stereoscopic vision using the panoramas of the West. The West seemed a good a place as any to point out that our world was in three dimensions. For a brief moment, I was intensely excited again about the possibility of exhibitions like this one; exhibitions on x-ray vision and time travel; the sturdiness of human bones; the intelligence of dogs and dolphins and donkeys." I wanted to just gesture at one of these imaginary drawings, and I like how in this very seventh-grade bar graph there is no label on the y-axis, just a vague quantification of "intelligence." But the original line was cut... I didn't want T.S. musing about his fame just yet, and so went the vague bar graph. Cut the string, lose the kite. Reason 3: NOT DOING THE WORK Image: Newton Notwen, the Turtle In Chapter 7, T.S. turns to Newton's laws of conservation to help give him some theoretical sturdiness during his cross-country adventure. I originally had a sidebar here about Newton Notwen, T.S.’s unfortunate turtle: "I still respected Newton immensely even if he did look a little like a child pornographer in his portraits. I had even named my first pet turtle after him: Newton Notwen, a perfect palindrome, because Newton Notwen had a tiny head that looked a lot like his tail if you squinted your eyes. Perhaps because of this reciprocal anatomy, NN died after only a week of living in the kiddie pool on our deck, although it could also have been because Layton shot him." I made the tough decision to cut this because I thought it was too jokey jokey and wasn't doing enough for the scene. Reason 4: TOO ILLUSTRATIVE Image: The Valero Workstation This illustration originally opened chapter 8, but I felt like it was qualitatively different than many of the other drawings in that it was almost too illustrative. It was the kind of illustration you might find in a graphic novel, where images serve a very different purpose of representation. We get the hint of the family photo, but not much else with this, and so I swapped it with the Boredom Box, which is ultimately more engaging, I think. Reason 5: DULLS THE ACTION Image: The Dock Cleat When T.S. has his confrontation with the crazed preacher in Chicago, there’s a very tense moment of action. I originally had this diagram showing how Josiah trips over a dock cleat, but I realized the diagramming of the action actually lessened the stakes of the scene. Better to just give a couple of resonant images of the knife and the birds and then let the reader fill in the rest. The most powerful images are always those elusive mind maps that readers create in their own heads when fully immersed in a piece of literature; nothing on the page can hope to replicate their depth and intimacy. And of course there were other reasons for cutting drawings: some were just lousy. I will spare you these lost images, however, as they belong in graphical pergatory. T.S. would not have approved, and let me tell you, I've learned a thing or two from Mr. Tecumseh Sparrow.
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Magic Can Be Murder
Vivian Vande Velde
Nola's not much of a witch--she can work only a few useless spells, like the one that lets her spy on people. But there's no spell for keeping her crazy mother--who hears voices and is a magnet for witch-hunters--out of trouble. The two flee from town to town until the day Nola magically witnesses a murder. Which is bad enough, but worse is that the murderer may frame Nola and her mother for the crime. And then no amount of magic will save her. And you think your teenage years are tough. . . .
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The Embers
Hyatt Bass
A once-charmed family is forced to confront the devastating tragedy that struck it years ago in this fiercely tender tale of betrayal and reconciliation It’s the fall of 2007, and Emily Ascher should be celebrating: she just got engaged to the man she loves, her job is moving in new and fulfilling directions, and her once-rocky relationship with her mother, Laura, has finally mellowed into an easy give-and-take. But with the promise of new love Settling into old comes a difficult look at how her family has been torn apart in the many years since her brother died. Her parents have long since divorced, and her father, Joe, a famous actor and playwright who has been paralyzed with grief since the tragedy, carries the blame for his son’s death—but what really happened on that winter night? Why has he been unable to clear his name, or even discuss that evening with Laura and Emily? As spring looms—and with it Emily’s wedding in the Berkshires and an unveiling of Joe’s new play—each Ascher begins to reevaluate the events of long ago, finally facing the truth of his or her own culpability in them. Moving between past and present over the course of sixteen years, The Embers is a skillfully structured debut novel of buried secrets and deep regrets that crush a family while bonding its members irrevocably.
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Enigma
C. F. Bentley
When an alien ship crashes into the space station and diplomatic post Labyrinthe VII, the precarious balance between Harmony's High Preistess Sissy and Confederated Star System Agent Jake begins to dissolve. Suddenly they are caught in a web of deceit and intrigue as undercover agents for both the humans and the aliens vie for control not only of the space station, but of a new and unclaimed planet that may hold the answers many of them seek-or prove to be a deadly trap.
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Treason's Shore
Sherwood Smith
Fourth in "an intense fascinating epic"* of high action and fantasy adventure. Inda, fresh from his triumph on the battlefield against the Venn, takes his place beside King Evred as Harskialdna, the King's Shield. But the Venn are far from defeated and only Inda's fame is strong enough to inspire all the squabbling kingdoms to unite and raise a force mighty enough to protect the strait and repel the enemy. Evred has also ordered Inda to take over the strait once the battle is won, but Inda, a former pirate, knows that this is a very bad idea. Now Inda must choose between obeying his liege-or committing treason.