And the winners are....

The 2012 Mock Printz discussions were held today at the Appaloosa Branch Library. 


The winner is Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Lani Taylor. 


Two Honor books were chosen: Chime by Franny Billingsley and Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley. 


Thanks to all of the librarians who participated!  See you next year!  

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

At seven minutes past midnight, thirteen-year-old Conor wakes to find a monster outside his bedroom window. But it isn’t the monster Conor’s been expecting-- he’s been expecting the one from his nightmare, the nightmare he’s had nearly every night since his mother started her treatments. The monster in his backyard is different. It’s ancient. And wild. And it wants something from Conor. Something terrible and dangerous. It wants the truth. From the final idea of award-winning author Siobhan Dowd-- whose premature death from cancer prevented her from writing it herself. 


Reviews
The Guardian
The Book Smugglers
Shelf Awareness

Tighter by Adele Griffin

When 17-year-old Jamie arrives on the idyllic New England island of Little Bly to work as a summer au pair, she is stunned to learn of the horror that precedes her. Seeking the truth surrounding a young couple's tragic deaths, Jamie discovers that she herself looks shockingly like the dead girl—and that she has a disturbing ability to sense the two ghosts. Why is Jamie's connection to the couple so intense? What really happened last summer at Little Bly? As the secrets of the house wrap tighter and tighter around her, Jamie must navigate the increasingly blurred divide between the worlds of the living and the dead. 

Reviews: 

Kirkus Reviews

Reading Rants

Teen Reads 

Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys

In 1941, fifteen-year-old Lina is preparing for art school, first dates, and all that summer has to offer. But one night, the Soviet secret police barge violently into her home, deporting her along with her mother and younger brother. They are being sent to Siberia. Lina's father has been separated from the family and sentenced to death in a prison camp. All is lost.


Lina fights for her life, fearless, vowing that if she survives she will honor her family, and the thousands like hers, by documenting their experience in her art and writing. She risks everything to use her art as messages, hoping they will make their way to her father's prison camp to let him know they are still alive.

It is a long and harrowing journey, and it is only their incredible strength, love, and hope that pull Lina and her family through each day. But will love be enough to keep them alive?

Reviews: 

Kirkus Reviews

New York Times
Publisher's Weekly

Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley

Just when seventeen-year-old Cullen Witter thinks he understands everything about his small and painfully dull Arkansas town, it all disappears. . . .

In the summer before Cullen's senior year, a nominally-depressed birdwatcher named John Barling thinks he spots a species of woodpecker thought to be extinct since the 1940s in Lily, Arkansas. His rediscovery of the so-called Lazarus Woodpecker sparks a flurry of press and woodpecker-mania. Soon all the kids are getting woodpecker haircuts and everyone's eating "Lazarus burgers." But as absurd as the town's carnival atmosphere has become, nothing is more startling than the realization that Cullen’s sensitive, gifted fifteen-year-old brother Gabriel has suddenly and inexplicably disappeared.

While Cullen navigates his way through a summer of finding and losing love, holding his fragile family together, and muddling his way into adulthood, a young missionary in Africa, who has lost his faith, is searching for any semblance of meaning wherever he can find it. As distant as the two stories seem at the start, they are woven ever closer together and brought face to face in a surprising climax.

Reviews

Reading Rants

Publisher's Weekly 

Kirkus Reviews

Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Lani Taylor

Around the world, black handprints are appearing on doorways, scorched there by winged strangers who have crept through a slit in the sky.

In a dark and dusty shop, a devil's supply of human teeth grown dangerously low.

And in the tangled lanes of Prague, a young art student is about to be caught up in a brutal otherworldly war.

Meet Karou. She fills her sketchbooks with monsters that may or may not be real; she's prone to disappearing on mysterious "errands"; she speaks many languages—not all of them human; and her bright blue hair actually grows out of her head that color. Who is she? That is the question that haunts her, and she's about to find out.

When one of the strangers—beautiful, haunted Akiva—fixes his fire-colored eyes on her in an alley in Marrakesh, the result is blood and starlight, secrets unveiled, and a star-crossed love whose roots drink deep of a violent past. But will Karou live to regret learning the truth about herself?

Reviews

Reading Rants

More reviews will be added as they are published. 

Angry Young Man by Chris Lynch

Alexander - Xan - Is a misfit: an awkward loner, too sensitive to make it in the real world and too different to find a place for himself. 


His big brother, Robert, has got his life together.  He works at a garage, he's taking classes at the community college, and he has a girlfriend.  And even though he may be first in line to tear into Xan, he also always has his back. 


But when Xan's odd behavior begins to move to a dangerous extremism, Robert may be the only one who can save him before it's too late.  The question is, can Robert save himself?  


Award-winning author Christ Lynch has written a novel than will take readers on a gripping journey to the heart of the unthinkable.  


Reviews 


Publisher's Weekly 
School Library Journal (scroll down quite a bit!) 
Walk the Walk