Mister Death's Blue-Eyed Girls

by Mary Downing Hahn

Nora is just your typical girl, living in a small town in 1956. She hangs out with her good friend Ellie, and has recently become friends with Cheryl and Bobbi Jo, some other neighborhood girls.Cheryl and Bobbi Jo are pretty and popular, and Nora feels almost lucky to be counted among their friends, and be invited to their parties. One day, Nora and Ellie are supposed to meet the others to walk to school together, but they wake up too late, and Cheryl and Bobbi Jo go on without them. A while later, as Nora and Ellie walk through the woods, they run into Buddy, Cheryl's ex-boyfriend, standing on the bridge. And moments later, they hear screams, and see people running from the woods. Cheryl and Bobbi Jo are dead, shot with a rifle.The entire town turns against Buddy, but we know it's not him. The real killer is no one anyone would suspect.

This book is not quite what I thought it would be. I was looking for a murder mystery, but it's really not a mystery at all. We know who the killer is, and we know why he did it, right up front. It's more of an examination of what happens in the aftermath of a crime such as this, and how people tend to see what they want to see, rather than really digging for the truth.

Interestingly enough, this is actually based on a true event. This really happened to some girls the author knew when she was a teenager. You can feel her pain, and clearly see the impact that this event left on her as a young girl.

by Lisa Graff

Graff has created a world very much like our own, but just a little bit magical. In this version of Poughkeepsie, New York, many lucky people have Talent, one skill that makes them special. Eleven-year old Cady, an orphan who lives with the kindly Miss Mallory, can look at a person and immediately know and bake their ideal cake. Miss Mallory’s talent is finding just-right parents for orphans, but so far, she hasn’t felt that perfect-parent pull for Cady. While Cady is the star of this tale, the novel integrates an expertly developed cast of supporting characters who all have their own amazing stories. Not until the very end does the reader see how their paths intertwine. The plot twists deliciously around an irresistible peanut butter factory, an evil Talent thief, a very important hair pin, and a rare powder-blue suitcase that could hold the key to everything. Sprinkled throughout is a generous helping of cake recipes, perfectly suited for each of the characters, just begging to be tried.

I love books that take life as we know it, and present it in just a slightly different way. This story has a distinctly realistic feel, but there's that little magical aspect that turns your expectation on its head. An unpredictable and unusual story that entertains AND makes you think.

The Essence

by Kimberly Derting

In this second installment of Derting’s Pledge novels, Charlie is now the unlikely queen of Ludania, but the former, evil queen Sabara is not gone. Her spirit, or essence, resides within Charlie. The new queen, while inexperienced and uncomfortable in her role, has been able to make some sweeping changes across the country, including the banning of executions, and allowing freedom of speech. She still has much to learn, and sets off to a conference where she will meet the queens of the surrounding nations. At the conference, Sabara makes her sinister presence more and more clear. Her desires for the immortal Niko cloud Charlie’s own feelings for Max, creating a strange, and extraneous, kind of love triangle. Max, her love interest in the first novel, gets little page time, except as a foil for Charlie/Sabara’s feelings for Niko. While the majority of the story is told from Charlie’s perspective, intermittent point of view changes make the narrative choppy. Pair this with an undeterminable setting, along with too many supernatural/dystopian/fantasy elements mish-mashed together, and you’ve got a book with no real sense of direction.

The Spindlers

by Lauren Oliver

When Liza wakes up one morning and sees her brother Patrick picking the letters out of his Alpha Bits cereal, she knows he's not himself. When he spells out I-H-A-T-E-Y-O-U, she realizes that the Spindlers have his soul. Their babysitter told Liza about the Spindlers years ago, and since then, she has dutifully said the protective spell with him every night before going to sleep. But not last night...

Liza must go Below to try to save Patrick's soul from the spider-like creatures.Along the way she meets Mirabella, a human-sized, lipstick-wearing rat, and other creatures too numerous to name here. Can she save Patrick, or will the Spindlers eat Liza's soul, too?

Lauren Oliver does it again. Her writing is so convincing, so engaging, so FUN! This is just the type of book I would have loved when I was younger, and I hope that you like it, too!