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)