Adios, Nirvana
By Conrad Wesselhoeft Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Pages: 240 Lexile: HL550L Age Range: 14 Years ABOUT When you piss off a bridge into a snowstorm, it feels like you’re connecting with eternal things. Paying homage to something or someone. But who? The Druids? Walt Whitman? No, I pay homage to one person only, my brother, my twin. In life. In death. Telemachus. Since the death of his brother, Jonathan’s been losing his grip on reality. Last year’s Best Young Poet and gifted guitarist is now Taft High School’s resident tortured artist, when he bothers to show up. He’s on track...
Read MoreTyger Tyger: A Goblin Wars Book
By Kersten Hamilton Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Pages: 336 Lexile: HL590L Age Range: 12 – 17 Years ABOUT What would you do if the stories of your childhood suddenly began coming to life? Teagan Wylltson’s best friend, Abby, dreams that horrifying creatures—goblins, shapeshifters, and beings of unearthly beauty but terrible cruelty—are hunting Teagan. Abby is always coming up with crazy stuff, though, so Teagan isn’t worried. Until Finn Mac Cumhaill arrives, with his killer accent and a knee-weakening smile. Either he’s crazy or he’s been haunting Abby’s dreams, because he’s...
Read MoreTheodosia and the Serpents of Chaos
By R. L. LaFevers Illustrated by Yoko Tanaka Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Pages: 352 Lexile: 780L Age Range: 9 – 12 Years ABOUT Theodosia Throckmorton has her hands full at the Museum of Legends and Antiquities in London. Her father may be head curator, but it is Theo—and only Theo—who is able to see all the black magic and ancient curses that still cling to the artifacts in the museum. Sneaking behind her father’s back, Theo uses old, nearly forgotten Egyptian magic to remove the curses and protect her father and the rest of the museum employees from the ancient, sinister...
Read MoreScreaming at the Ump
By Audrey Vernick Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Pages: 272 Age Range: 10 – 14 Years ABOUT Twelve-year-old Casey Snowden knows everything about being an umpire. His dad and grandfather run a New Jersey umpire school, Behind the Plate, and Casey lives and breathes baseball. Casey’s dream, however, is to be a reporter—objective, impartial, and fair, just like an ump. But when he stumbles upon a sensational story involving a former major league player in exile, he finds that the ethics of publishing it are cloudy at best. This emotionally charged coming-of-age novel about baseball,...
Read MoreFlight of the Phoenix (Nathaniel Fludd, Beastologist, Book I)
By R. LaFevers Illustrated by Kelly Murphy Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Pages: 137 Lexile: 640L Age Range: 6 – 9 Years ABOUT Ten-year-old Nathaniel Fludd is the reluctant hero of Flight of the Phoenix (2009), the madcap debut of the American author R. L. LaFevers’s Nathaniel Fludd, Beastologist series and a Junior Library Guild selection. The year is 1928, the setting England, and Nate’s wayward parents have just been reported lost at sea. Nate is sent that very day to his Aunt Phil’s house in Batting-at-the-Flies, but not for long . . . The morning after he arrives at the...
Read MoreDragon’s Keep
By Janet Lee Carey Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Pages: 302 Age Range: 12 – 17 Years ABOUT By learning to accept the dragon claw that mars her hand, a princess fulfills her destiny and saves her country from war. REVIEWS *”Stunning, lyrical prose . . . Carey smoothly blends many traditional fantasy tropes here, but her telling is fresh as well as thoroughly compelling.” —Booklist, starred review “Carey (Wenny Has Wings) has written a romantic fantasy steeped in the Arthurian tradition of knights, dragons and lost kingdoms. After eloping with an outlaw, King...
Read More