teen fiction

Love Letters to the Dead by Ava Dellaira

love letters to the dead

So obviously a book titled Love Letters to the Dead is going to be a pretty emotional one, but I don’t think I was quite prepared for all there is to find in here.

Through a series of letters written to dead people ranging from Kurt Cobain to Amelia Earhart to Elizabeth Bennet written over the course of a school year, Laurel explores some seriously heavy topics. Her parents divorced, her sister May died, her mom moved away, she switched schools… and that all happened before the book actually picks up. As Laurel writes these letters, working through the decomposition of her family, May’s death, and revealing snippets of the circumstances surrounding her death, she begins to heal and come through as herself rather than just a shell of May. She also experiences her first love, and I really appreciated Sky’s character for his role in Laurel’s healing process. He’s honest and caring and doesn’t try to take advantage of Laurel in her fragile state. He’s there when she needs him.

There were a few times I almost stopped reading. Too much sadness, too much belittling of the religious aunt, too much teen drinking, too much stuff. But I have to admit that I’m so glad I didn’t stop. Laurel is a very realistic teenage girl wrestling with things that most teenagers have to deal with in some way or another, and while she makes some decisions I wouldn’t want my students making, she definitely learns from her mistakes. She comes out a better person than she was going in. I admire Laurel – especially who Laurel becomes by the end of the book – for how she deals with things that have happened to her and makes a conscious choice to change the trajectory of her life.

By the time I was two-thirds done with Love Letters to the Dead, I liked it. When I finished it, I really liked it. After it had a few hours to settle and sink in, I loved it. In the vein of The Fault in Our Stars, it’s not a frilly, finish in a day and smile the whole way through kind of book, but it is a stick with you and make your heart feel full kind of a book. I have a feeling that Laurel and Sky will be with me for a while.

Love Letters to the Dead comes out this Tuesday, April 1st. Find it here on Amazon or at your favorite bookseller!

#ThrowbackThursday: Louise Rennison’s Georgia Nicholson series

This recommendation originally posted on Pimples, Popularity, and Protagonists in September 2010. My love of this series is still firmly in place!!!

A few years ago, I read Louise Rennison’s Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but I didn’t realize it was part of a ten book series. Then, this summer, I happened to notice a film version of it available for rent on Netflix. I put it in my queue and prepared myself for yet another disappointing book-inpired movie. I was pleasantly surprised by how good the movie version was, and it inspired me to check into Rennison’s other books. Imagine my surprise when I found another nine books featuring the Angus protagonist, Georgia Nicolson! It was pretty exciting. (I know I’m a book nerd, ok?)

I put all of the books on hold at my local library and waited until I had them all to start reading. Then, when they were all finally in, I tore through all nine books following Angus… in a matter of ONE WEEK. Several times, as I was reading in the evenings while my husband was watching TV, I would seriously laugh out loud at the sheer hilarity of the books. I’m seriously considering buying all of the books so I can reread them whenever I need to have a good laugh.

A note about content – some of the titles sound a bit risque sexually… but the content is not. Though all of Georgia’s friends are preoccupied with boys and the constantly rate themselves on a “Snogging Scale” (snogging is British for kissing), the girls never do anything beyond kissing with their boyfriends, and there’s very little inappropriate language in the books. Out of all the young adult series I’ve read, this one is pretty clean.

Basically, in the series, (don’t worry – no spoilers – this is VERY general) Georgia Nicolson and her group of friends navigate their way through a year or so of school at Stalag 14, an all-girls high school. The group calls themselves the Ace Gang, and they are absolutely hilarious together – constantly trying to pull little pranks, getting in trouble, and torturing the school’s staff. Georgia’s family is crazy (maybe certifiably) and full of funny situations, and Georgia’s love life is, well, complicated but constantly interesting and exciting.

I’d recommend this series to teenagers… mature upper grade middle school girls through high school and adult readers (especially if you work with or have teenage girls). Here are all ten books of the series, in order:

1. Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging

2. On the Bright Side, I’m Now the Girlfriend of a Sex god

3. Knocked Out By My Nunga-Nungas

4. Away Laughing on a Fast Camel

5. Dancing in My Nuddy-Pants

6. The He Ate My Boy Entrancers

7. Startled By His Furry Shorts

8. Love Is a Many Trousered Thing

9. Stop In The Name Of Pants!

10. Are These My Basoomas I See Before Me?

The Giver trailer is out today!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJNNugNe0Wo

I’m so impressed, which is surprising because The Giver is one of my all-time favorite books. I’ve been nervous about the movie just because I know how near and dear it is to my heart – I don’t think I could handle a low-budget cheesefest reminiscent of the first Twilight movie. It looks like I had nothing to worry about, though. What a relief!

AND there’s a super cool new website for the movie: receiveyourdestiny.org

Find out more about The World of The Giver and my love of Jonas as a heroic protagonist through my past posts!

The Giver Movie

Giver Movie

2014 is definitely the year for book movies! Go follow @thegivermovie for updates and images leading up to the release of The Giver, which is absolutely one of my favorite books ever.

Cover Reveal: Don’t Fall by Rachel Schieffelbein

Don’t Fall by Rachel Schieffelbein

Summary from Goodreads:
In which a teenage girl endures the over-protective love of her adoptive mother until she falls for a boy who has her wanting to spread her wings, pitched as a contemporary retelling of RAPUNZEL.

Seventeen-year-old Anya leads a very secluded life in a house on the edge of town with her adopted mother. She doesn’t go to school, but instead has a private tutor. Her over-protective mom keeps her so sheltered that she doesn’t even have a best friend. But Anya doesn’t seem to mind. She has her books, her photography, and her daydreams, and would do anything to please her mom. Until one day at the library, the only place she’s allowed to go, she takes a picture of a beautiful boy.

Before long she’s lying to her mom, and sneaking out late at night to meet Zander. But Zander wants more than a secret romance. If Anya wants to be with the boy of her dreams, she will have to risk her relationship with the only other person she’s ever cared about.

Swoon Romance wants you to help them decide the cover for Don’t Fall! 
They have three lovely cover options for you to choose from.  Please vote below on your favorite cover!
Which cover do you like better?
Option #1
Option #2
Option #3

Poll Maker

Option #1: Designed by Taylor.ink, photograph by Beth Mitchell
Option #2: Photographed and designed by Laura Lanning
Option #3: Designed by Anna Zaffke, photo from Shutterstock.by  Aleshyn_Andrei

About the Author:
Rachel grew up in a tiny town in Minnesota. She still lives there, with her husband and their four kids. She coaches high school speech and theater, rides Arabian horses, reads as much as she can, and writes stories.
Author Links:
   

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Just For Fun…

In honor of my latest YA review on She Reads, here’s a cool quote graphic I found featuring Elizabeth Eulberg’s Better Off Friends. Also, Amazon has the hardcover on sale right now. Happy Tuesday, everybody!

better off friends

Veronica Mars – HOW DID I MISS THIS?

veronica mars

Somehow I missed watching ANY Veronica Mars when it actually aired on TV, and it was only after being told last week that I should watch it as research for my book (thanks, Jen) that I signed up for my 30-day free trial of Amazon Prime so I could stream it.

It only took a few minutes of the first episode to reel me in – a smart, witty, gorgeous high school girl working with her PI father to solve both major and minor crimes? Beautiful Southern California setting with clashes between the haves and have-nots? Great supporting characters, including plenty of swoony guys? Perfect. It’s like everything I’d ever want in a YA book series.

The only question now is this: will I be able to finish the series before the movie actually comes out? Let’s hope.

Don’t Even Think About It by Sarah Mlynowski

dont even think about it

Don’t Even Think About It is a quirky new YA title from Sarah Mlynowski in which almost an entire homeroom of fancy New York tenth graders is given a flawed batch of the flu vaccine, giving twenty-two students the power of telepathy within 24 hours after the shot. As you would expect, there are serious ups and downs to this new ability, and the group of students come together to figure out what to do about it.

Because there’s a whole group of twenty-two students that share this flu-vaccine induced ability to hear people’s thoughts, we really get to know more than just one protagonist. At first this threw me off – I like hearing and connecting to one character’s voice at a time. I do enjoy alternate POV books, but this was like an alternate POV to the extreme. By the time I got used to it, though, I actually enjoyed hearing everybody’s honest thoughts and opinions.

It would be impossible to read this book without thinking about what it would be like to have this ESP power. Would you even want to hear people’s thoughts about you? I’m thinking no… Especially as a teacher of 8th graders. I don’t want to know everything my students are thinking, whether it’s about me or not! But what if you couldn’t choose not to hear people’s thoughts? Your parents, classmates, boyfriend/girlfriend, random people you walk by… So many opportunities to hear things you don’t want to hear.

Of course, because our thoughts tend to be way more filtered than what comes out of our mouths, there was some language and content in this that I don’t normally choose to read and recommend, but honestly it was probably pretty tame in comparison to the actual thoughts of teenagers (and adults). Despite that, though, by the end of the books I found that I really cared about each of these characters and how this worked out for them. It was also really neat to see how hearing each other’s thoughts at first drove them further apart and highlighted their differences, but then brought them closer together as they began to understand each other better.

Overall, Don’t Even Think About It was definitely interesting and at times really funny, but I don’t think it’s one that I’ll want to reread. While the group protagonist thing was interesting, it did keep me from being able to really connect with one single character that would stick with me beyond the experience of reading it for the first time.

You can find it here on Amazon or at your favorite local bookseller after it releases on March 11!