THE RAVEN BOYS 
From the "Raven Cycle" series, volume 1 
by Maggie Stiefvater 
Age Range : 13 - 18  
Pub Date: Sept. 18th, 2012  
ISBN: 978-0-545-42492-9 
Page count: 416pp 
Publisher: Scholastic 

KIRKUS REVIEW

An ancient Welsh king may be buried in the Virginia countryside; three privileged boys hope to disinter him. Meanwhile, 16-year-old Blue Sargent, daughter of a small-town psychic, has lived her whole life under a prophecy: If she kisses her true love, he will die. Not that she plans on kissing anyone. Blue isn't psychic, but she enhances the extrasensory power of anyone she's near; while helping her aunt visualize the souls of people soon to die, she sees a vision of a dying Raven boy named Gansey. The Raven Boys—students at Aglionby, a nearby prep school, so-called because of the ravens on their school crest—soon encounter Blue in person. From then on, the point of view shifts among Blue; Gansey, a trust-fund kid obsessed with finding King Glendower buried on a ley-line in Virginia; and Adam, a scholarship student obsessed with his own self-sufficiency. Add Ronan, whose violent insouciance comes from seeing his father die, and Noah, whose first words in the book are, "I've been dead for seven years," and you've got a story very few writers could dream up and only Stiefvater could make so palpably real. Simultaneously complex and simple, compulsively readable, marvelously wrought. The only flaw is that this is Book 1; it may be months yet before Book 2 comes out. The magic is entirely pragmatic; the impossible, extraordinarily true. (Fantasy. 13 & up)

WAITING 
by Carol Lynch Williams 
Age Range : 12 - 18 
Pub Date: May 1st, 2012  
ISBN: 978-1-4424-4353-2 
Page count: 352pp 
Publisher: Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster 

KIRKUS REVIEW

A girl copes with the death of her beloved brother Zach, and the devastation it has wrought on her family. London clearly has sunk into despair. She goes to school but doesn’t interact with her friends. At home, her mother refuses to speak with her at all, eventually becoming openly hostile to her. Her father does his best to hold the family together on his own, but he has his own limits. London does find herself strongly attracted to Jesse, a new boy in school, but he’s in a relationship with London ’s former best friend. Another new student, Lili, manages to penetrate London ’s mental fog with her inexhaustible energy, apparently on a mission to make London her friend. London finds herself caught between the old and the new as she delves ever more deeply into the chaos that her brother’s death has caused. Williams, as always, keeps her prose, this time arranged on the page as prose poems, sensitive, intelligent and completely absorbing. She slowly peels back the veils on London ’s, her father’s and her mother’s psychology, eventually revealing the strong and the weak and, ultimately, how Zach died. The family she depicts are former missionaries, giving the book strong spiritual undertones that should appeal to religious as well as general audiences. Exceptional. (Fiction. 12 & up)