Waiting On Wednesday: The Burning World

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly event that is hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine and spotlights upcoming releases that we’re eagerly anticipating.

The Burning World

  • Title: The Burning World
  • Author: Isaac Marion
  • Expected Publication: February 7th, 2017
  • Publisher: Atria/Emily Bestler Books
  • Read more at Goodreads.

Synopsis: Being alive is hard. Being human is harder. But since his recent recovery from death, R is making progress. He’s learning how to read, how to speak, maybe even how to love, and the city’s undead population is showing signs of life. R can almost imagine a future with Julie, this girl who restarted his heart—building a new world from the ashes of the old one.

And then helicopters appear on the horizon. Someone is coming to restore order. To silence all this noise. To return things to the way they were, the good old days of stability and control and the strong eating the weak. The plague is ancient and ambitious, and the Dead were never its only weapon.

How do you fight an enemy that’s in everyone? Can the world ever really change? With their home overrun by madmen, R, Julie, and their ragged group of refugees plunge into the otherworldly wastelands of America in search of answers. But there are some answers R doesn’t want to find. A past life, an old shadow, crawling up from the basement.

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Top Ten Tuesday #3: Fictional Schools I Wish Were Real

Top Ten Tuesday is a bookish meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.

For this week’s back-to-school freebie, I thought it would be fun to revisit some of my favorite fictional institutes that I wish I could have attended! From wizards and witches, and superheroes and villains in training, to It girls on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, walking the halls with these characters would have certainly made school a lot more interesting.

 

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Book Review: The Art of Being Normal

The Art of Being Normal: A Novel

Synopsis: David Piper has always been an outsider. His parents think he’s gay. The school bully thinks he’s a freak. Only his two best friends know the real truth: David wants to be a girl.

On the first day at his new school Leo Denton has one goal: to be invisible. Attracting the attention of the most beautiful girl in his class is definitely not part of that plan. When Leo stands up for David in a fight, an unlikely friendship forms. But things are about to get messy. Because at Eden Park School secrets have a funny habit of not staying secret for long , and soon everyone knows that Leo used to be a girl.

As David prepares to come out to his family and transition into life as a girl and Leo wrestles with figuring out how to deal with people who try to define him through his history, they find in each other the friendship and support they need to navigate life as transgender teens as well as the courage to decide for themselves what normal really means.

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Book Review: Crushed

Crushed

  • Original Title: Crushed by Laura and Tom McNeal
  • Edition: Paperback, 336 pgs.
  • Published: June 10, 2014 by Ember
  • Characters: Audrey Reed, Wickham Hill, Clyde Mumsford
  • Rating: 2/5

Synopsis: Audrey and her two best friends have just transferred to Jemison High from their tiny private school. They’re a nerdy little trio, so everyone is shocked when the handsome new guy, Wickham Hill, asks Audrey out. Audrey is so smitten that she doesn’t pay much attention to The Yellow Paper, a vicious underground school newspaper…until it threatens to tell a tale that could change everything.

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Waiting On Wednesday: Our Chemical Hearts

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly event that is hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine and spotlights upcoming releases that we’re eagerly anticipating.

Our Chemical Hearts

  • Title: Our Chemical Hearts
  • Author: Krystal Sutherland
  • Expected Publication: September 6th, 2016
  • Publisher: G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers
  • Read more at Goodreads.

Synopsis: Henry Page has never been in love. He fancies himself a hopeless romantic, but the slo-mo, heart palpitating, can’t-eat-can’t-sleep kind of love that he’s been hoping for just hasn’t been in the cards for him—at least not yet. Instead, he’s been happy to focus on his grades, on getting into a semi-decent college and finally becoming editor of his school newspaper. Then Grace Town walks into his first period class on the third Tuesday of senior year and he knows everything’s about to change.

Grace isn’t who Henry pictured as his dream girl—she walks with a cane, wears oversized boys’ clothes, and rarely seems to shower. But when Grace and Henry are both chosen to edit the school paper, he quickly finds himself falling for her. It’s obvious there’s something broken about Grace, but it seems to make her even more beautiful to Henry, and he wants nothing more than to help her put the pieces back together again. And yet, this isn’t your average story of boy meets girl. Krystal Sutherland’s brilliant debut is equal parts wit and heartbreak, a potent reminder of the bittersweet bliss that is first love.

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