	Palmer High School Library Read Any Good Books Lately?

Must Reads in Our Collection

Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater

Ready for a supplement to your regular diet of vampire romances? This Romeo-and-Juliet-style approach to a relationship between a teen girl and a werewolf might be just the boost you're looking for.

School Library Journal Review

Starred Review. Gr 9 Up Grace, 17, loves the peace and tranquility of the woods behind her home. It is here during the cold winter months that she gets to see her wolf the one with the yellow eyes. Grace is sure that he saved her from an attack by other wolves when she was nine. Over the ensuing years he has returned each season, watching her with those haunting eyes as if longing for something to happen. When a teen is killed by wolves, a hunting party decides to retaliate. Grace races through the woods and discovers a wounded boy shivering on her back porch. One look at his yellow eyes and she knows that this is her wolf in human form. Fate has finally brought Sam and Grace together, and as their love grows and intensifies, so does the reality of what awaits them. It is only a matter of time before the winter cold changes him back into a wolf, and this time he might stay that way forever. Told from alternating points of view, the narrative takes a classic Romeo & Juliet plot and transforms it into a paranormal romance that is beautiful and moving. Readers will easily identify with the strong, dynamic characters. The mythology surrounding the wolf pack is clever and so well written that it seems perfectly normal for the creatures to exist in today's world. A must-have that will give Bella and Edward a run for their money. Donna Rosenblum, Floral Park Memorial High School, NY Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

T-Minus by Jim Ottaviani

A graphic novel depiction of a fictional story about the space race, in which two global superpowers along with a number of pilots, engineers, and scientists work to send the first man to the moon.

Booklist Review

Just as rocket science works from the ground up, Ottaviani tracks the history of man's first flight to the moon from its very inception. Starting with dreamers as far back as the 1880s and moving through the scientists and astronauts of later years, T-Minus is a fictionalized graphic-format examination of the race for the moon. It is loaded with historical and technical information, but effective as both a human drama and a recollection of a bygone era, when everybody from children listening to Sputnik's signal on the radio to President Kennedy himself were caught up in space-age wonderment. The weight of the narrative falls on the dedicated scientists both in the U.S. and Russia, and the early Soviet victories provide a fine opportunity to bring out the two cultures' differing ambitions, work ethics, and notions of heroism. Crisp, precise black-and-white art and page compositions that invoke historic newsreels, along with footnotes and a fact page (including suggestions for further reading), make for a solid docudrama feel in the style of Nick Abadzis' Laika (2007).--Karp, Jesse Copyright 2009 Booklist From: Syndetics Solutions, Inc. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

The Great Fire by Jim Murphy

Photographs and text, along with personal accounts of actual survivors tell the story of the great fire of 1871 in Chicago.

School Library Journal (starred)
"A book that sparks excitement and interest from the cover to the last well-written chapter. Murphy’s text reads like an adventure/survival novel and is just as hard to put down. The diversity and multitude of personal accounts [provide] a better appreciation of the event as a dynamic experience from which we still have much to learn. History writing at its best."

Death From the Skies by Philip Plait

Kirkus Review starred (September 15, 2008)

A surprisin gly upbeat look at all the ways the universe can destroy us. After a brief introduction, astronomer Plait (Bad Astronomy, 2002) gets down to business with asteroid strikes. The chapter begins with a fictionalized episode that leads to the arrival of the killer planetoid. The author then steps back to relate the science: what meteors are, how often they hit Earth, evidence that very large ones have done so (including the famous dinosaur-killer 65 million years ago) and the probability that it will happen again. He points out that unlike many other disasters, this one is potentially preventable if humans make it a priority to find and deflect possible impactors. Plait then moves on to the next killer: a hyperactive sun. Each chapter introduces a new, plausible and usually unstoppable cosmic disaster: nearby supernovae, cosmic ray bursts, black holes, hostile aliens--ending with (in order) the eventual deaths of the sun, the galaxy and the universe as a whole. He also calculates the probability of each occurrence. More interestingly, Plait uses each of the doomsday scenarios to teach about astronomy and physics. The supernovae chapter includes material on the history of science, stellar evolution, astrophysics and day-to-day astronomy. For example, some 100 tons of material from the Crab Nebula supernova, which was seen exploding nearly 1,000 years ago, will eventually impact Earth. That sounds like a lot, but 20 to 40 tons of meteoric material impacts our planet every day, so the effect of the Crab will be at most a blip. The text is full of similar mundane facts, related clearly and logically to the sensational scenarios, the author's purported subject. An epilogue gives the odds on different types of cosmic doom. Readers will be glad to know that most of them are extremely unlikely--at least in their lifetimes. Eminently readable basic science with an irresistible hook.

The Wizard of Earthsea by UrsulaK. Le Guin

Long before Harry Potter went to Hogwarts, on a faraway island an unloved boy named Ged discovered he could do magic. This is a story about how frightening magic can be, the danger and the responsibility of it. Ged’s talent leads him into wonderful adventures, on marvelous islands, and you won’t be able to put the book down until you finish it. And when youd do finish it, you will know something important about yourself. You may not be a Harry Potter, but you are certainly a Ged. The world you live in has a deep balance, and the best magicians learn to use magic only in the greatest emergency . . . (Jill Paton Walsh, Author from The Ultimate Teen Book Guide, 2008)