Specials by Scott Westerfeld

“Tally thought they were a rumour, but now she’s one of them. A Special. A super-amped fighting machine, engineered to keep the uglies down and the pretties stupid.”

With classes and essays finally done for the semester I finally got a chance to read the third book in the Uglies series – the Specials. This book definitely lives up to my expectations based on the first two books, and made it very difficult to put it down.

Paranormal is the New Normal: Generation Dead by Daniel Waters

How would you feel if you went to school with zombies, or to be politically correct, the “differently biotic”? In Generation Dead, there is a new phenomenon where sometimes teenagers who died don’t really go away but remain as the undead. Just like living teenagers, they still go to school, but they don’t eat, their organs don’t work, and their brains take longer to process information. As such, they face significant discrimination in the high-school. With the gap between the living and the differently biotic, it is socially forbidden for a living girl to date a zombie, but Phoebe Kendall finds herself attracted to Tommy Williams, one of the differently biotic teens. Can true love break the barriers between the living and the dead?

YA Material Review - The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill

Hill, L. (2007). The Book of Negroes. Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

 “Pink is taken as the colour of innocence, the colour of childhood, but as it spills across the water in the light of the dying sun, do not fall into its pretty path. There, right underneath, lies a bottomless graveyard of children, mothers and men. I shudder to imagine all the Africans rocking in the deep... Some people call the sunset a creation of extraordinary beauty, and proof of God's existence. But what benevolent force would bewitch the human spirit by choosing pink to light the path of a slave vessel?” 

– The Book of Negroes, page 7

Marijane Meaker

Marijane Meaker

Pseudonyms: M. E. Kerr, Ann Aldrich, Mary James, M. J. Meaker and Vin Packer.
Marijane Meaker grew up in Auburn, New York until she went to boarding school in Virginia. She recalls the joy she experienced when borrowing her father’s books at a young age: “My father was an ardent reader of everything. Our living room was lined with bookcases. I was always borrowing books from them to take up to my room and devour. Anything about writing or writers interested me. I romanticized them as other children did movie stars or royalty.”  While reading these books, Meaker remembers dreaming about writing under different names, especially because she was not fond of her own. As an author, Meaker used five different names to publish her novels.

The Pretties by Scott Westerfeld

Okay, I have been getting a lot of pressure to update this more (thanks to Theresa, Sarah, Nads, Mark...) so I will try.

Uglies

For this week’s Top Trending: Dystopian YA Lit, I read The Uglies by Scott Westerfeld. I have really mixed  feelings about this book. At the beginning I found it rather boring and difficult to get through. There were parts that were interesting, but definite parts that were not. However, by the end I could not put the book down. I enjoyed the ending and look forward to after this semester when I can read the next book in the series.