Here are some terrific books I have been reading recently:
Novels:
SCARLET is the second of four projected books in the Lunar Chronicles, by Marissa Meyer. The first, Cinder, was the fabulously told story of a cyborg Cinderella. As a follow-up, Scarlett does not disappoint. This time around, the story is based on Little Red Riding Hood, and comes complete with a French teenager, her missing grandmother, and Wolf, who is a very strong person with pointy teeth. The action is non-stop, and intertwines nicely with the plot begun in Cinder. The third installment will be based on Rapunzel. These are really fun books. The audio for Cinder was good, too.
NAVIGATING EARLY, by Newbery medalist Clare Vanderpool, is an inspiring coming-of-age odyssey through the backwoods of Maine. When Jack Baker's mother dies, Jack finds himself uprooted from his home in Kansas. Taken to boarding school in Maine, he becomes an outsider, "with nowhere to call home, at a school with no baseball, unable to row a boat straight." Then Jack meets Early Auden, a strange boy who lives in the school's basement and makes up stories about the mathematical number pi. This is a story about finding one's way through landscapes both mythical and real, while learning the true meaning of friendship.
NEVER FALL DOWN, by Patricia McCormick, is a hard-hitting look at Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge march in. What makes this subject inspiring as well as heartbreaking is the narrator, Arn Chorn-Pond, a real person whose story is told through the skillful writing of McCormick. Though it's called a novel, Arn was in fact captured by soldiers who took him, his family, and many entire villages to labor camps to be worked to death or shot on a whim. But Arn is a survivor, and an adult now, he travels around the world, working for humanitarian causes and speaking about his experiences. It's beautifully written. Patricia McCormick also wrote Sold, a previous Book Talk book about Nepalese girls sold into slavery.
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