Tidbits and Reviews

Tidbit the first: yesterday I received a package in the mail at the store. It was a shirt. A shirt featuring Hank the Cowdog, the best canine sheriff in the contiguous states. Thank you, Steve Kent from Penguin, for making me the coolest person on earth. (Also, thank you for the Sarah Dessen galley reviewed below.)

Tidbit the second: tonight we had an author reading sans electricity. About ten minutes in, someone hit a pole with a car and knocked out the power lines. It was a candlelit reading, and it was lovely. Thank you, Tiffany Baker,

for your patience and grace. Everyone else, go read The Little Giant of Aberdeen County. It's a wonderful, sad, funny, poignant, well-written little novel. It will make you smile.

Reviews!

Along for the Ride
by Sarah Dessen
Young Adult Fiction

I do not understand how Sarah Dessen does what she does. She writes about normal high school drama, but she makes it so good that you cannot put the book down. I read A LOT of young adult fiction--WAY more than I review here--and yet I can't figure out how Sarah Dessen's books are so addictive. This one is about a very book-smart girl named Auden who decides to spend her 18th summer with her father, new stepmother, and new baby sister. Auden's parents had a rocky marriage and a cold divorce, and Auden still hasn't come to terms with the turmoil. She doesn't sleep at night, and finds herself experiencing a whole new world at night in her father's beach town. There's a boy, a bike, pie, a laundromat, three crazy girls, and some great writing. Watch for this in June.


Little Brother
by Cory Doctorow
Young Adult Science Fiction

Wow. Wow. This book is genius. It's a dystopian take on the 9/11 tragedy, except 9/11 was the bombing of the Bay Bridge in San Francisco. Marcus and his friends are skipping school for the sake of an online game, and they are arrested in connection with the terrorist attack. San Francisco becomes a police state and Marcus and his friends are on the front lines, fighting for their right to privacy and free speech. The political aspect is great, but the really brilliant part is the way that Cory Doctorow has projected American technology into the future. Cory Doctorow makes math and history AWESOME in this book.