El Demonio stealing Papi’s memories,
Family duty stealing Jude’s theater dreams,
Memories stealing Emilio’s happiness.
Can thieves be banished by hard work – and love?
Jude is sure that Papi’s memory bank will refill if he can just ride once more on the Harley that took him up the Argentine mountains read more here
Too sad to keep on living in a climate chaotic world,
her parents have chosen their time to die…
or is it the pharma talking?
Nat’s mom and dad – former environmental activists – could have waited just a few more years to invoke the Service Contract ending their lives, till the teen and her younger brother moved out as workers – why now?
In this too-possible dystopia, global warming has changed weather patterns, babies are now illegal, and new diseases mutating weekly make face-to-face contact rare.
Ask for Nat’s story at your local library or independent bookstore to see if she can find a way to keep her family together once she discovers the truths that pharma-corps are trying to hide. (I loved the book, but its title… not so much)
**kmm
Book info: Pills and Starships / Lydia Millet. Black Sheep/Akashic Books, 2014. [author site] [publisher site] [author interview on NPR] Review copy and cover image courtesy of the publisher.
My book talk: Preparing to honor her parents’ final week of life, Nat learns that big money uses pharma to trick the few remaining Americans into thinking that global warming has eliminated the entire natural world.
At a tropical resort devoted to final Contracts, the teen and her hackerkid brother discover real plants and animals and people who think for themselves. Are pharma-corporations really lying to the public about imminent doomsday?
Her decision about joining the rebels must come soon, as her parents’ date with a lethal farewell drink in mere days will leave Nat and Sam in a group survivors’ home in Oregon – are her parents really sad enough about the state of the world to leave it forever?
When a mega-hurricane hurtles toward Hawai’i, will it be too late to rescue her not-old parents and not-old-enough brother?
Addressed to an imagined friend safely orbiting this climate-chaos world, Nat reflects in the Contract-provided mourning journal about Starships and Pills and her unexpected opportunity to escape pharma-managed life… if she can. (One of 6,000 books recommended on www.abookandahug.com)
Breaking out of her normal drive to work, speeding through the desert, away from cancer specialists and Mom’s insistence that everything is fine.
“Unfortunately, I seem to have packed all my emotional baggage for this impromptu road trip,” to where? Click to read more
Teen songwriter wants an ukulele and better days.
Teen’s long-gone dad wants to see her at last.
Teen’s hyper-organized mom wants him to stay gone.
As the Rolling Stones sang, “You can’t always get what you want,” but be assured that the teens eventually do get what they need, even if they don’t know what it is Read on, read on!
Moving past grief means leaving Luke behind.
Tressa just can’t do that,
but she can’t find peace among the living either. read my recommendation
Each choice you make creates a fork in time,
a new path in the multiverse through history –
Which dimension holds Meg’s happiness? Read more about this new book
High school can be frightful for some folks, and when you add in some ghosts who never graduate… just plain spooky! Tread the haunted halls in these BooksYALove faves (and watch your back)… This way to scary school stories
Another pair of scary BooksYALove favorites for the witching season: if blood-spatter and dire peril aren’t your thing, search the tag cloud (over there on right) for something else!
Y’all know that I cannot read horror books; my imagination is just too good and needs no super-terrifying prompts.
I can take on scary tales in measured doses and do love mysteries, of course..
So as we count down the days till Hallowe’en, check out BooksYALove favorites to get you ghoul and ready for some frights! Today’ pair, future based on past inequities and past predicting the future: Click for today’s titles
Aspens at Grand Mesa, Colorado, Sept. 2014
Sometimes you just need to get away from it all, right?
But for this avid reader and intrepid book reviewer, the “stepping away for a little while” got a bit lengthier than planned.
A combination of factors is usually the culprit – simple burnout, outside distractions, and so forth.
But this time around, it’s been harder than normal to get back in the book recommending groove despite my best intentions.
Y’all know that I try hard to choose books outside the big bestsellers and copycat stuff for BooksYALove. But sometimes, things just don’t go the way I expect.
Like when… a book gets noticed by the big wide world before I can craft just the right no-spoilers booktalk to post = Revolution by Deborah Wiles, a compelling novel about young people in Jim Crow days during the summer of Voting Rights activists coming to Mississippi.
Darned if those National Book Award folks wouldn’t wait till I’d finished writing my recommendation before they announced it as a 2014 finalist! So I won’t write here about Revolution, but will urge you to read it along with Deborah’s post on NerdyBookClub talking about how some vital things have hardly changed in Greenwood since that pivotal summer of 1964. (Luckily, I already raved here about John Corey Whaley’s Noggin which is also a finalist)
Like when… books that sounded so good, so interesting, and so worth reading turn out to be flops. I have very wide-ranging reading tastes and am very selective about requesting review copies, so I can almost always think of someone I know who would love such-and-such book (not every book is for every reader, of course).
But a few titles in a row lately have just been flat-out duds, due to writing that needed stronger editing (no, that girl isn’t poignantly introspective; she’s a whiner) or pop references which are already dated. If I knew who’d written the jacket-flap copy on some others, I’d give them a piece of my mind as the book in my hands bore no resemblance to their description of plot, motivation, etc. Yep, I finally have some DidNotFinish titles, despite my best efforts to choose ones worth our time to read.
Like when… I just can’t turn the page because I know that a character I’ve become emotionally invested in is about to do something incredibly stupid – it’s like watching a train wreck about to happen. A couple of books are waiting on me to be ready for the inevitable outcome – great books, but I’m not yet ready to uncover my eyes and let those characters go and live with their bad decisions. I will, and y’all will get the recommendations of these books, but not right this minute.
Like when… I couldn’t get to KidLitCon blogger conference this year, so I missed my current and new Kidlitosphere friends, all the great discussions about Diversity in YAlit and Kidlit, and the refreshed attitude toward blogging that this gathering always gives me.
Like when… we really are on vacation – watching the aspens turn golden or discovering an orchard stand with heirloom apple varieties is more important than jumping into someone’s fictional world.
So… a little breather, some homemade apple pie, some visits with family and I’ll be back. My To-Be-Reviewed pile has some dandy books which will be published in winter and spring, and you won’t want to miss them!
**kmm