Dodger

Dodger

Terry Pratchett

Fiction P887d

A storm. Rain-lashed city streets. A flash of lightning. A scruffy lad sees a girl leap desperately from a horse-drawn carriage in a vain attempt to escape her captors. Can the lad stand by and let her be caught again? Of course not, because he's...Dodger.

Seventeen-year-old Dodger may be a street urchin, but he gleans a living from London's sewers, and he knows a jewel when he sees one. He's not about to let anything happen to the unknown girl--not even if her fate impacts some of the most powerful people in England.

From Dodger's encounter with the mad barber Sweeney Todd to his meetings with the great writer Charles Dickens and the calculating politician Benjamin Disraeli, history and fantasy intertwine in a breathtaking account of adventure and mystery.

Adaptation

Adaptation

Malinda Lo

Fiction L7804a

***2013 Rainbow List Top 10***

Across North America, flocks of birds hurl themselves into airplanes, causing at least a dozen to crash. Thousands of people die. Fearing terrorism, the United States government grounds all flights, and millions of travelers are stranded.

Among them are Reese and her debate team partner and longtime crush David, who are in Arizona when the disaster occurs. On their drive home to San Francisco, along a stretch of empty highway in the middle of the Nevada night, a bird flies into their headlights. The car flips over. When they wake up in a military hospital, the doctor won't tell them what happened, where they are-or how they've been miraculously healed.

Things become even stranger when Reese returns home. San Francisco feels like a different place with police enforcing curfew, hazmat teams collecting dead birds, and a strange presence that seems to be following her. When Reese unexpectedly collides with the beautiful Amber Gray, her search for the truth is forced in an entirely new direction-and threatens to expose a vast global conspiracy that the government has worked for decades to keep secret.

Vessel

Vessel

Sarah Beth Durst

Fiction D939v

Liyana has trained her entire life to be the vessel of a goddess. She will dance and summon her tribe's diety, who will inhabit Liyana's body and use magic to bring rain to the desert. But when the dance ends, Liyana is still there.Her goddess has not come. Abandoned by her tribe, Liyana expects to die in the desert. Until a boy walks out of the dust in search of her.

Korbyn is a god inside his vessel, and a trickster god at that. He tells Liyana that five other gods are missing, and they set off across the desert in search of the other vessels. The desert tribes cannot survive without the magic of their gods. But the journey is dangerous, even with a god’s help. And not everyone is willing to believe the trickster god’s tale.

The closer she grows to Korbyn, the less Liyana wants to disappear to make way for her goddess. But she has no choice—she must die so her tribe can live. Unless a trickster god can help her to trick fate—or a human girl can muster some magic of her own

Keyhole Factory

Keyhole Factory

William Gillepsie

Fiction G412k

From Uni Alum William Gillespie comes an imaginative free-for-all and a deeply felt examination of isolation and survival. Keyhole Factory tracks the interwoven destinies of disparate characters up to and beyond the end of the world-as-we-know-it, brought on by a global super-virus. The novel's web of stories includes a poet-astronaut in deep space, a microbiologist contemplating an exit strategy from her high-level job designing biological weapons, a sports-car-driving sociopath who murders utopian commune-dwellers, and a lone pirate radio disc jockey who believes she is the last person left alive broadcasting her story to nobody. In Keyhole Factory the individual lives shine through the chaos.

That's Not a Feeling

That's Not a Feeling

Dan Josefson

Fiction J773t

Benjamin arrives with his parents for a tour of Roaring Orchards, a therapeutic boarding school tucked away in upstate New York. Suddenly, his parents are gone and Benjamin is there to stay. At sixteen years old, with two failed suicide attempts, Benjamin must navigate his way through a new world of morning meds, popped privileges, candor meetings and cartoon brunches--all run by adults with questionable methods, during a year in which the school and its eccentric founder seem to be falling apart.

Never More

Never More

James Patterson

Fiction P277n

One last chance...

For Max, Fang, and Dylan...

Before it all ends.

Are you ready for the final chapter? Are you ready for the ultimate fight? Because THIS IS IT.

One last incredible, explosive adventure with an astonishing ending that no one could have seen coming.

Pirate Cinema

Pirate Cinema

Cory Doctorow

Fiction D659p

Trent McCauley is sixteen, brilliant, and obsessed with one thing: making movies on his computer by sampling and reassembling footage he downloads from the net. In the near-future Britain where Trent is growing up, this is more illegal than ever; if you’re caught three times, your entire household is cut off from the Internet for a year, with no appeal.

Trent is sure this won’t happen to him; he’s too clever. Except it does, and it nearly destroys his family—his father’s living, his mother’s health, and his kid sister’s studies all depend on Internet access. 

Shamed and shattered, Trent runs away to London where he learns how to stay alive on the streets. This drops him straight into the city’s always-rambunctious street scene, a demimonde of artists and activists who are fighting a new bill that will criminalize digital copying even more harmless than Trent’s, making millions of people felons at a stroke. 

Things look bad. The government is in the grip of a few wealthy media conglomerates. But the powers that be haven’t entirely reckoned with the power of a movie to change people’s minds. . . .

The Diviners

The Diviners

Libba Bray

Fiction B738d

Evie O’Neill has been exiled from her boring old hometown and shipped off to the bustling streets of New York City–and she is pos-i-tute-ly ecstatic .It’s 1926, and New York is filled with speakeasies, Ziegfeld girls, and rakish pickpockets. The only catch is that she has to live with her uncle Will and his unhealthy obsession with the occult.

Evie worries he’ll discover her darkest secret: a supernatural power that has only brought her trouble so far. But when the police find a murdered girl branded with a cryptic symbol and Will is called to the scene, Evie realizes her gift could help catch a serial killer.

As Evie jumps headlong into a dance with a murderer, other stories unfold in the city that never sleeps. A young man named Memphis is caught between two worlds. A chorus girl named Theta is running from her past. A student named Jericho hides a shocking secret. And unknown to all, something dark and evil has awakened...

Printz Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author Libba Bray opens a brand-new historical series with The Diviners, where the glittering surface of the Roaring Twenties hides a mystical horror creeping across the country.

The Shadow Speaker

The Shadow Speaker

Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu

Fiction Ok5s

 

The year is 2070, and civilization has been completely transformed following a nuclear fallout in the early twenty-first century. Magic, mysticism, and mind-blowing technology now rule the world. 

In West Africa, fourteen-year-old Ejii struggles to master her own magical powers. When her world is completely upended after she witnesses her father's death, Ejii faces a unique opporuntity to explore her power and realize her destiny. But is she ready for the responisbility that comes along with that? Embarking on a journey across the sands of the Sahara,Ejii befriends new allies and battles new foes. It soon becomes clear that her people need to be protected from a terrible force seeking to annihiliate them. And Ejii may just be their last hope for survival.

Fast-paces and full of tender friendships and thrilling action, this futuristic adventure heralds a bright new talent in young adult fantasy.

The Raven Boys

The Raven Boys
Maggie Stiefvater

Fiction St522r

Every year, Blue Sargent stands next to her clairvoyant mother as the soon-to-be dead walk past. Blue herself never sees them—not until this year, when a boy emerges from the dark and speaks directly to her.

His name is Gansey, and Blue soon discovers that he is a rich student at Aglionby, the local private school. Blue has a policy of staying away from Aglionby boys. Known as Raven Boys, they can only mean trouble.

But Blue is drawn to Gansey, in a way she can’t entirely explain. He has it all—family money, good looks, devoted friends—but he’s looking for much more than that. He is on a quest that has encompassed three other Raven Boys: Adam, the scholarship student who resents all the privilege around him; Ronan, the fierce soul who ranges from anger to despair; and Noah, the taciturn watcher of the four, who notices many things but says very little.

For as long as she can remember, Blue has been warned that she will cause her true love to die. She never thought this would be a problem. But now, as her life becomes caught up in the strange and sinister world of the Raven Boys, she’s not so sure anymore.

From Maggie Stiefvater, the bestselling and acclaimed author of the Shiver trilogy and The Scorpio Races, comes a spellbinding new series where the inevitability of death and the nature of love lead us to a place we’ve never been before.

Son

Son

Lois Lowry

Fiction L9553s

When the young girl washed up on their shore, no one knew she had been a Vessel. That she had carried a Product. That it had been carved from her belly. Stolen.

Claire had had a son. She was supposed to forget him, but that was impossible. When he was taken from their community, she knew she had to follow. 

And so her journey began.

But here in this wind-battered village Claire is welcomed as one of their own. In the security of her new home, she is free and loved. She grows stronger. 

As tempted as she is by the warmth of more human kindness than she has ever known, she cannot stay. Her son is out there; a young boy by now. 

Claire will stop at nothing to find her child . . . even if it means trading her own life.

With Son, the two-time Newbery Medal–winning Lois Lowry has spun another mesmerizing tale in this thrilling and long-awaited conclusion to The Giver.

Every Day

Every Day

David Levithan

Fiction L579ev

Every day I am someone else. I am myself--I know I am myself--but I am also someone else. It has always been like this.

Every morning, A wakes up in a different person’s body, a different person’s life. There’s never any warning about where it will be or who it will be. A has made peace with that, even established guidelines by which to live: Never get too attached. Avoid being noticed. Do not interfere.

It’s all fine until the morning that A wakes up in body of Justin and meets Justin’s girlfriend, Rhiannon. From that moment, the rules by which A has been living no longer apply. Because finally A has found someone he wants to be with – day in, day out, day after day.

The Peculiars

The Peculiars

Maureen Doyle McQuerry

Fiction M242p

On her 18th birthday, Lena Mattacascar decides to search for her father, who disappeared into the northern wilderness of Scree when Lena was young. Scree is inhabited by Peculiars, people whose unusual characteristics make them unacceptable to modern society. Lena wonders if her father is the source of her own extraordinary characteristics and if she, too, is Peculiar. 

On the train she meets a young librarian, Jimson Quiggley, who is traveling to a town on the edge of Screen to work in the home and library of the inventor Mr. Beasley. The train is stopped by men being chased by the handsome young marshal Thomas Saltre. When Saltre learns who Lena’s father is, he convinces her to spy on Mr. Beasley and the strange folk who disappear into his home, Zephyr House. A daring escape in an aerocopter leads Lena into the wilds of Scree to confront her deepest fears.

Chopsticks: A Novel

Chopsticks: A Novel

Jessica Anthony & Rodrigo Corral

Fiction An867c

Glory is a piano prodigy. After her mother died, Glory retreated into herself and her music. Her father raised her with the goal of playing sold-out shows at Carnegie Hall and across the globe. Brilliant and lonely, Glory is drawn to Frank, who moves in next door. She loses herself in his paintings and drawings, mix CDs and late-night IM conversations. Soon, Frank becomes both her connection to the world--and her escape from reality.

Before long, Glory is unable to pay anything but the song "Chopsticks"; F and G notes moving closer together, and farther apart.

Now Glory has disappeared.  But nothing is what it seems. And we must decide what is real, what is imagined, and what has been madness all along....

Seraphina

Seraphina

Rachel Hartman

Fiction H255s

Four decades of peace have done little to ease the mistrust between humans and dragons in the kingdom of Goredd. Folding themselves into human shape, dragons attend court as ambassadors, and lend their rational, mathematical minds to universities as scholars and teachers. As the treaty's anniversary draws near, however, tensions are high. 

Seraphina Dombegh has reason to fear both sides. An unusually gifted musician, she joins the court just as a member of the royal family is murdered—in suspiciously draconian fashion. Seraphina is drawn into the investigation, partnering with the captain of the Queen's Guard, the dangerously perceptive Prince Lucian Kiggs. While they begin to uncover hints of a sinister plot to destroy the peace, Seraphina struggles to protect her own secret, the secret behind her musical gift, one so terrible that its discovery could mean her very life. 

Railsea

Railsea

China Miéville
Fiction M586r 

On board the moletrain Medes, Sham Yes ap Soorap watches in awe as he witnesses his first moldywarpe hunt: the giant mole bursting from the earth, the harpoonists targeting their prey, the battle resulting in one’s death and the other’s glory. But no matter how spectacular it is, Sham can't shake the sense that there is more to life than traveling the endless rails of the railsea–even if his captain can think only of the hunt for the ivory-coloured mole she’s been chasing since it took her arm all those years ago. When they come across a wrecked train, at first it's a welcome distraction. But what Sham finds in the derelict—a series of pictures hinting at something, somewhere, that should be impossible—leads to considerably more than he'd bargained for. Soon he's hunted on all sides, by pirates, trainsfolk, monsters and salvage-scrabblers. And it might not be just Sham's life that's about to change. It could be the whole of the railsea.

Keeping the Castle

Keeping the Castle

Patrice Kindl

Fiction K576k

Seventeen-year old Athea bears a heavy burden on her slender shoulders. She must support her widowed mother, young brother, two stepsisters who plead poverty--and she must maintain Crawley Castle, a tumbledown folly designed and built by her great--grandfather. Althea, in short, must marry well. But there are few wealthy suitors--or suitors of any kind--in their small Yorkshire town of Lester Hoo.

Then Lord Boring comes to stay with his aunt and uncle. Althea immediately starts a clever, stealthy campaign to become Lady Boring. There's only one problem; his cousin and business manager, Mr. Fredericks, keeps getting in the way. And it turns out, Fredericks has his own set of plans...

Between the Lines

Between the Lines

Jodi Picoult & Samantha van Leer

Fiction P588b

Delilah hates school as much as she loves books. In fact, there’s one book in particular she can’t get enough of. If anyone knew how many times she has read and re-read the sweet little fairy tale she found in the library, especially the popular kids, she’d be sent to social Siberia... forever.

To Delilah, this fairy tale is more than just words on the page. Sure, there’s a handsome (well, okay, hot) prince, and a castle, and an evil villain, but it feels as if there’s something deeper going on. And one day, Delilah finds out there is. Turns out, this Prince Charming is real, and a certain fifteen-year-old loner has caught his eye. But they’re from two different worlds, how could it ever possibly work out? (Publisher's Description)

You Killed Wesley Payne

You Killed Wesley Payne

Sean Beaudoin

Fiction B381y

He's come to do a job.
A job that involves a body.
A body wrapped in duct tape found hanging from the goal posts at the end of the football field.

You Killed Wesley Payne is a truly original update of classic pulp-noir filled with dark humor. Hard-boiled seventeen year-old Dalton Rev transfers to the mean hallways of Salt River High to take on the toughest case of his life. The question isn't whether Dalton's going to get paid. He always gets paid. Or whether he's gonna get the girl. He always (sometimes) gets the girl. The real question is whether Dalton Rev can outwit crooked cops and power-hungry cliques in time to solve the mystery of "The Body" before it solves him.

Sean Beaudoin (Going Nowhere Faster, Fade to Blue) evokes the distinctive voices of legendary crime/noir authors Dashiell Hammett and Jim Thompson with a little bit of Mean Girls and Heathers thrown in for good measure. It'll tease you, please you, and never ever leave you. Actually, that's not true. It's only a book. One that's going to suck you in, spit you out, and make you shake hands with the devil. Probably. (Publisher's Description)

The Disenchantments

The Disenchmantments

Nina LaCour

Fiction L1194d

Colby and Bev have a long-standing pact: graduate, hit the road with Bev's band, and then spend the year wandering around Europe. But moments after the tour kicks off, Bev makes a shocking announcement: she's abandoning their plans - and Colby - to start college in the fall.

But the show must go on and The Disenchantments weave through the Pacific Northwest, playing in small towns and dingy venues, while roadie- Colby struggles to deal with Bev's already-growing distance and the most important question of all: what's next?

Morris Award–finalist Nina LaCour draws together the beauty and influences of music and art to brilliantly capture a group of friends on the brink of the rest of their lives. (Publishers Description)

Shadow and Bone

Shadow and Bone

Leigh Bardugo

Fiction B236s

Alina Starkov doesn’t expect much from life. Orphaned by the Border Wars, the one thing she could rely on was her best friend and fellow refugee, Mal. And lately not even that seems certain. Drafted into the army of their war-torn homeland, they’re sent on a dangerous mission into the Fold, a swath of unnatural darkness crawling with monsters who feast on human flesh.
 
When their convoy is attacked, all seems lost until Alina reveals a dormant power that not even she knew existed. Ripped from everything she knows, she is whisked away to the royal court to be trained as a member of the Grisha, the magical elite led by the mysterious Darkling. He believes she is the answer the people have been waiting for: the one person with the power to destroy the Fold.

Swept up in a world of luxury and illusion, envied as the Darkling’s favorite, Alina struggles to fit into her new life without Mal by her side. But as the threat to the kingdom mounts, Alina uncovers a secret that sets her on a collision course with the most powerful forces in the kingdom. Now only her past can save her . . . and only she can save the future. (Publisher's description)

The Chaos

The Chaos

Nalo Hopkinson 

Fiction H7772c

Scotch has never quite fit in.  With her white Jamaician father and black Canadian mother, she doesn’t belong with the Caribbeans, white, or blacks.  Though recently she feels different for stranger reasons–her skin is being covered in spots of black stickiness that won’t go away no matter what she tries.  Not to mention that she sees floating, bodiless horse heads that no one else can.  

But soon Scotch has even bigger problems.  She’s out for a night with her brother when a bubble of light appears.  Scotch dares her brother to touch it.  He does, and then he disappears.  A moment later a volcano emerges in Lake Ontario, and all Toronto is invaded by the Chaos.  

Scotch is desperate to find her brother, but she doesn’t know where to begin searching in a city gone mad.  Mythical creatures such as Sasquatches are walking down the streets, and ordinary people are transforming in truly weird ways.  Scotch herself is getting blacker and blacker.  Can she find her brother before she becomes completely unrecognizable?

Renowned author Nalo Hopkinson mixes fantasy and Caribbean folklore in this rollicking story of identity and self-acceptance in a world given over to Chaos. (Publisher's description)

Tina's Mouth: An Existential Comic Diary

Tina's Mouth: An Existential Comic Diary
Keshni Kashyap, Illus. by Mari Araki
GN K151t


In the tradition of Persepolis and American Born Chinese, a wise and funny high school heroine comes of age.


Tina M., sophomore, is a wry observer of the cliques and mores of Yarborough Academy, and of the foibles of her Southern California intellectual Indian family. She's on a first-name basis with Jean-Paul Sartre, the result of an English honors class assignment to keep an “existential diary.”
Keshni Kashyap’s compulsively readable graphic novel packs in existential high school drama—from Tina getting dumped by her smart-girl ally to a kiss on the mouth (Tina’s mouth, but not technically her first kiss) from a cute skateboarder, Neil Strumminger. And it memorably answers the pressing question: Can an English honors assignment be one fifteen-year-old girl’s path to enlightenment? (Publisher's description)

The Drowned Cities

Paolo Bacigalupi

Fiction B125d

Squel to Ship Breaker

Soldier boys emerged from the darkness. Guns gleamed dully. Bullet bandoliers and scars draped their bare chests. Ugly brands scored their faces. She knew why these soldier boys had come. She knew what they sought, and she knew, too, that if they found it, her best friend would surely die.

In a dark future America where violence, terror, and grief touch everyone, young refugees Mahlia and Mouse have managed to leave behind the war-torn lands of the Drowned Cities by escaping into the jungle outskirts. But when they discover a wounded half-man--a bioengineered war beast named Tool--who is being hunted by a vengeful band of soldiers, their fragile existence quickly collapses. One is taken prisoner by merciless soldier boys, and the other is faced with an impossible decision: Risk everything to save a friend, or flee to a place where freedom might finally be possible.

This thrilling companion to Paolo Bacigalupi's highly acclaimed Ship Breaker is a haunting and powerful story of loyalty, survival, and heart-pounding adventure (Publisher's description).