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Teen Blog

Reading, Wellington, and whatever else – teenblog@wcl.govt.nz

Month: April 2014

Dystopias for all!

You probably know all about The Hunger Games and Divergent by now, right? And if you’re anything like me, they hooked you right in and you just can’t get enough of those dystopian wastelands. So future, much wow. There are heaps and heaps of really great dystopian novels which lurk in the shadows of their better-know literary cousins, but I’m here to shine a spotlight on a few of them.

Book cover courtesy of SyndeticsBumped, Megan McCafferty

“In 2036 New Jersey, when teens are expected to become fanatically religious wives and mothers or high-priced Surrogettes for couples made infertile by a widespread virus, sixteen-year-old identical twins Melody and Harmony find in one another the courage to believe they have choices.” (from library catalogue)

The first in a trilogy, as dystopias tend to be.

Book cover courtesy of SyndeticsPastworld, Ian Beck

In 2050, Pastworld is a Victorian London themed park where teenaged Caleb meets 17-year-old Eve, who knows nothing of modern life outside Pastworld. They both become entangled in the diabolical plans of a murderer, revealing disturbing facts about the muddy origins of both Caleb and Eve’s lives.

Book cover courtesy of SyndeticsLife As We Knew It, Susan Beth Pfeffer

A meteor hits the moon, throwing it ever so slightly out of sync and causing disastrous havoc for everyone on Earth. Tsunamis, earthquakes and eruptions interrupt every day life what with the moon being out of whack. Told through the diary entries of 16-year-old Miranda, Life As We Knew It explores the struggle of Miranda and her family to survive through this catastrophe.

Book cover courtesy of SyndeticsWither, Lauren DeStefano

Modern science has turned every living human into a genetic timebomb, with men all dying at age twenty-five and women all dying at age twenty. In these cruel and unusual circumstances, young girls are kidnapped and forced to help repopulate the planet. This is the first in the Chemical Garden trilogy.

Book cover courtesy of SyndeticsCinder, Marissa Meyer

Cinder crosses a classic fairytale with cyborgs… Cyborg-ella! Cinder is a gifted cyborg mechanic living in New Beijing. She is reviled by her stepmother and blamed for her stepsister’s sudden illness. But when her life becomes entangled with Prince Kai’s, she finds herself forced to confront her own past in order to protect Earth’s future.

Book cover courtesy of SyndeticsShip Breaker, Paolo Bacigulupi

Teenage Nailer works as a “ship breaker” scavenging copper from grounded oil tankers. But when he finds a beached clipper ship with a girl aboard, Nailer must decide whether to strip the ship of its worth, or save the girl inside. This one is gritty and harsh and completely action-packed. It also has a follow-up companion novel called The Drowned Cities which takes place in the same universe.

There are so many out there, what are your favourite dystopias?

Comics Fest 2014

It’s no secret that I love graphic novels, which is why I’m so excited about ComicFest, an event that the library is running from the 2nd-3rd of May. We’ve got some great events lined up: a panel on Friday night with some of the best cartoonists in New Zealand, plus more events on the Saturday.  You can find out more on the event page, but here are just some of the events running:

A panel on Friday Night featuring Ant Sang, who wrote and drew the awesome comic Shaolin Burning and worked on Bro’ Town. There’s also Robyn Kenealy who’s a brilliant webcomic artist and creator of Steve Rogers’ American Captain, which chronicles Steve Rogers’ attempts to work out his place in the twenty-first century. Grant Buist, another one of our awesome panelists, has been working in comics for almost twenty years. He’s currently working on a graphic novel and draws Jitterati for Fishhead Magazine. His website is well worth a look, since he’s done a heap of great reviews of our graphic novel collection. This is definitely the panel you want to attend if you want to know what it’s like working in comics today.

There are also some wicked workshops: Ant Sang is running “Comics 101” from 4:30-6:30 for those aspiring artists among you, and then there’s another workshop run on the Saturday by Gavin Mouldey, a Wellington-based animator and illustrator. He’s done all the gorgeous promotional art for all our advertising, and owns the dittybox shop and gallery in Island Bay.

There’s a costume competition all day Saturday with a special category for teens and great prizes for you to win, generously provided by Unity Books and and White Cloud Worlds. A fair few of the library staff will be in costume too, so try and work out who we’re being!

Finally, last but certainly not least, we are giving away FREE, yes, FREE comics from when we open. We have limited stock, so get in early! This is because the library is participating in Free Comic Book Day, a day where all over the world stores and librariess give away a selection of comics and graphic novels. We decided to use this as an opportunity to promote a great (and steadily growing) part of our collection and bring together some of the best comic artists working in New Zealand today. You can find the main Facebook event here, and interviews with our featured panelists and artists on our main blog.

New Zealand Post Book Awards

The nominees are:

Young Adult Fiction

A Necklace of Souls, by R L Stedman – “In a hidden kingdom a mysterious Guardian protects her people with the help of a magical necklace. But evil forces are also seeking the power of the necklace, and as the Guardian grows weaker these forces threaten to destroy the kingdom. With the help of her best friend, Will, and the enigmatic N’tombe, Dana, the rightful heir, must claim the power of the necklace and save her people. But the necklace takes a terrible toll on whoever wears it – a toll that Dana may not be prepared to face” – Publisher information.

Bugs, by Whiti Hereaka – “Bugs is about the unfolding lives of three young people in their last year of school in small-town New Zealand. Life is slow, and it seems not much happens in town or in Jez and Bugs’s lives. But when Stone Cold arrives, the three come to different conclusions about how to deal with being trapped in a small town and at the bottom of the heap” – Publisher information.

Mortal Fire, by Elizabeth Knox – “When sixteen-year-old Canny of the Pacific island, Southland, sets out on a trip with her stepbrother and his girlfriend, she finds herself drawn into enchanting Zarene Valley where the mysterious but dark seventeen-year-old Ghislain helps her to figure out her origins” – Publisher information.

Speed Freak, by Fleur Beale – “Fifteen-year-old Archie is a top kart driver, aiming to win the Challenge series and its prize of racing in Europe. He loves the speed, the roar of the engine, the tactics and the thrill of driving to the limits. Craig is his main rival, and there’s also Silver, who drives like she’s got a demon inside. Archie knows he’ll need all his skill and focus to win. But sometimes, too, you need plain old luck. Can Archie overcome the odds and win?” – Back cover.

When We Wake, by Karen Healey – In 2027, sixteen-year-old Tegan is just like every other girl–playing the guitar, falling in love, and protesting the wrongs of the world with her friends. But then Tegan dies, waking up 100 years in the future as the unknowing first government guinea pig to be cryogenically frozen and successfully revived. Appalling secrets about her new world come to light, and Tegan must choose to either keep her head down or fight for a better future. (catalogue summary)

Congratulations to these fab New Zealand authors, and all the best!

Recent DVD releases

We have some really awesome films in the library collection, and a bunch of these sit right among our very own YA section. There are comedies, mysteries, sci-fis and award winners all tucked away amongst the stacks. Here are my picks of our newest additions to the shelves:

From Up On Poppy Hill
This is one of the newest DVDs we have from Studio Ghibli, who have brought us so many other amazing films such as Howl’s Moving Castle, The Cat Returns and Spirited Away. From Up On Poppy Hill is set in Japan, 1963. Umi is a high school girl living in a boarding house. She meets Shun, a member of the school’s newspaper club and together they decide to clean up the club’s vast and sprawling clubhouse. However Tokumaru, a businessman as well as the high school chairman intends to tear down the clubhouse for redevelopment. Umi and Shun must work together to convince Tokumaru that the clubhouse should remain standing.

The Bling Ring
Based on the Vanity Fair article titled “The Suspects Wore Loboutins” The Bling Ring follows a group of Hollywood Hills teens who are mostly rich and all bored. One night they discover Paris Hilton is on the other side of the country partying so they figure they could break into her home, because why not? They find that it’s not exactly hard to get inside and they steal countless items from a slew of celebrities, whose wealth and possessions are so vast they don’t even notice things are missing for several weeks. The ring can only keep up the game for so long before they are caught though, and the defence statements of the teens after they’re arrested are pretty hilarious (and accurate, taken from police records!). Well worth the watch from the directorial wonder Sofia Coppolla, not to mention it has a killer soundtrack.

Legend of Korra Book One: Air
If you’ve seen the original Avatar series (nothing to do with blue people) then you’ve got to see Korra. If you haven’t seen the original, it doesn’t matter, you’ve got to see Korra anyway. Among water-, earth-, fire- and air-benders, the Avatar is the only one who can master all four elements and keep peace with the world. Korra is the successor to Aang, the Avatar from the previous series of the show. In Korra, technology has progressed to a steampunk-like level of technology, drawing inspirations from metropolitan cities of the 1920s. Korra is still coming to terms with her Avatar responsibilities, and travels into the city to live and train with a master waterbender. But everything is not as peaceful as it first appears in the city, and Korra faces an enemy in the Equalist movement leader Amon. Amon plans to rid the world of elemental bending powers forever, and it’s up to Korra to stop him!

Paranorman
From the same animation company that brought us button-eyed Coraline comes Paranorman. Norman loves ghosts, ghouls, mummies, monsters and just about anything scary that lives under your bed. His schoolmates and even his family make him feel like an outsider for his interests, but when he awakens a ghoul from a long hibernation, Norman’s supernatural know-how could be the key to defeating the curse dispelled by the ancient ghost.

Pacific Rim
I name this the action movie of 2013! And in a year full of them, that’s high praise. It’s the near future and Earth is being attacked again and again from an interdimensional portal in the center of the planet by huge dinosaur-like monsters called kaiju. The current defence involves giant humanoid kaiju-punching mecha robots, each piloted by a team of two people. Raleigh Beckett is a washed-up Jaeger pilot, called out of retirement to team up with rookie Jaeger pilot Mako Mori in a last ditch attempt to overcome the kaiju attacks. Pacific Rim is full of cool martial arts, robots punching giant dinosaurs and amazing robot CGI that Transformers could only dream of. This is one of my picks of the whole year of 2013 so I hope you like it!

The Wind Rises this weekend

Weekend newsflash: The latest film from Studio Ghibli (and the last film directed by Hayao Miyazaki before his retirement!) is showing this Sunday at the Embassy cinema! It’s called The Wind Rises and it tells the story of Jiro Horikoshi, the man who designed Japanese fighter planes during World War II. Check out the trailer below and book your tickets over at the Embassy website.

Space Jam

I loooove books set in outer space. It’s something that most of us will never be able to experience, so to read about it is pretty exciting. Here are some of my picks of books set in outer space:

Book cover courtesy of Syndetics172 Hours On The Moon, Johan Harstad

Three teenagers from across the globe have the opportunity to win a place on the next space launch thanks to NASA’s worldwide lottery. It’s been decades since anyone set foot on the moon, and Mia (Norway), Midori (Japan) and Antoine (France) are among the few who will be next. But before they even get to the launch site, things seem off. Something sinister is waiting for them on the moon’s surface, and in the vaccuum of space, no one can help them.

Book cover courtesy of SyndeticsAcross the Universe, Beth Revis

Seventeen-year-old Amy is cryogenically frozen, along with her parents, and loaded onto the vast spacecraft Godspeed, set to wake up three hundred years in the future. But her hibernation comes to an abrupt end 50 years too early, thrusting her into the thriving living community on Godspeed. Amy discovers out she was awoken not by accident, but by a murder attempt by one of the several thousand people on board. And if she doesn’t act quickly, Amy’s parents could be next.

Book cover courtesy of SyndeticsEnder’s Game, Orson Scott Card

This one has just been made into a movie. To defend themselves from hostile alien attacks, the human race has begun breeding genius children and training them as soldiers. Andrew “Ender” Wiggin is one such child drafted into military training. His skills make him a leader in battle school, but leave him lonely and fearful of the impending alien attack intended to wipe out all humans. Ender could be the military general the battle has been searching for for the last hundred years, but is he prepared to face such huge responsibility?

Book cover courtesy of SyndeticsLosers in Space, John Barnes

It is the year 2129 and fame is all that matters. Everyone has a rating and the more people that ID you, the better. Susan and her almost-boyfriend Derlock hatch a scheme to stow away with seven of their friends on a Mars-bound spaceship. They figure the stunt and their story of survival will skyrocket their ratings across the globe. But Susan stumbles across a hitch: Derlock is a sociopath. Losers in Space combines an ominous countdown, an awesome heroine and accurate science (!) all bundled up into a great sci-fi novel. What more could you need?

Book cover courtesy of SyndeticsGlow, Amy Kathleen Ryan

Decades ago two ships were launched, both bound for mysterious New Earth where they hoped to settle and create new life. The only difference between the ships was their religious following – New Horizons contained the religious crew, and the Empyrean had a non-religious crew. Sixteen-year-old Waverly and Kieran live aboard Empyrean and are expected to marry soon. Waverly’s not so sure about the arrangement, but since she’s supposed to have four children while she’s still young so that the generations won’t die out, there’s not a whole lot of choice involved. What the Empyreans don’t know is that all the young girls on New Horizons have died – and the New-Horizoners plan to kidnap the girls from Empyrean. Suddenly Waverly and Kieran are separated and they quickly learn that not all enemies come from the outside…

And one about aliens, for good measure:

Book cover courtesy of SyndeticsThe True Meaning of Smekday, Adam Rex

The True Meaning of Smekday is structured like an essay, written by 12-year-old Gratuity Tucci (Tip) for a contest. The essay contest winner will have their essay included in a time capsule to be opened in 100 years, and Tip reckons her unique experience of Smekday will be important to future generations. Smekday (a.k.a Christmas) was the day a huge spaceship filled with Boov (aliens) descended on Earth, declared it a colony named Smekland, abducted Tip’s mother and forced all Americans to relocate to Florida via rocketpod. Tip enlists a renegade Boov mechanic called J.Lo to help her track down her mother at Happy Mouse Kingdom, and together they must try to save the Earth from yet another alien invasion.

172 Hours on the Moon is probably one of my personal favourites – it involves Japanese culture, it’s suuuper creepy, and it’s a translated novel (originally Norwegian) which are all checkboxes for things I like in a novel. Have you got any space-themed favourites, either included on this list, or not?

New books

Book cover courtesy of SyndeticsSwagger, Carl Deuker (297 pages)When high school senior Jonas moves to Seattle, he is glad to meet Levi, a nice, soft-spoken guy and fellow basketball player. Suspense builds like a slow drumbeat as readers start to smell a rat in Ryan Hartwell, a charismatic basketball coach and sexual predator. When Levi reluctantly tells Jonas that Hartwell abused him, Jonas has to decide whether he should risk his future career to report the coach. (Goodreads)

First lines: All this started about a year and a half ago. Back then I was a junior at Redwood High in Redwood City, a suburn twnty-five miles south of San Francisco. In those days, before Hartwell, before Levi, I took things as they came, without thinking a whole lot about them. Maybe that’s because most of the things that came my way were good.

Book cover courtesy of SyndeticsAnything to have you, Paige Harbison (303 pages)Natalie and Brooke have had each other’s backs forever. Natalie is the quiet one, college bound and happy to stay home and watch old movies. Brooke is the movie—the life of every party, the girl everyone wants to be.Then it happens—one crazy night that Natalie can’t remember and Brooke’s boyfriend, Aiden, can’t forget. Suddenly there’s a question mark in Natalie and Brooke’s friendship that tests everything they thought they knew about each other and has both girls discovering what true friendship really means.(Goodreads)

First lines: I heard her before I saw her. Music blasted from inside her car despite the fact that she was in a quiet neighborhood. I climbed in, and she turned down the volume.

Book cover courtesy of SyndeticsThe Osiris Curse, Paul Crilley (286 pages) When Nikola Tesla is murdered and blueprints for his super weapons are stolen, Tweed and Nightingale are drawn into a global cat and mouse chase with his killers. What’s more, it seems that the people who shot Nikola Tesla are the same people responsible for Octavia’s mother’s disappearance. As the two cases intertwine, Tweed and Nightingale’s investigations lead them to a murdered archeologist and a secret society called The Hermetic Order of Set. Fleeing the cult’s wrath, they go undercover on the luxury airship, The Albion, setting out on her maiden voyage to Tutankhamen’s View, a five star hotel built in the hollowed-out and refurbished Great Pyramid of Giza.In Egypt, the duo begin to unravel the terrible truth behind Tesla’s death, a secret so earth-shattering that if revealed it would mean rewriting the entire history of the world. But if the cult’s plans aren’t stopped, Britain may lose the future.(Goodreads)

First lines:Death stalks the streets of London. The winter wind, sensing its presence and feeling some distant, ancient kinship, soars above the frozen city, tossing snowflakes though the oil-black sky as it searches for its location.

Book cover courtesy of SyndeticsHalf Bad, Sally Green (394 pages)Half Bad by Sally Green is a breathtaking debut novel about one boy’s struggle for survival in a hidden society of witches.You can’t read, can’t write, but you heal fast, even for a witch. You get sick if you stay indoors after dark. You hate White Witches but love Annalise, who is one. You’ve been kept in a cage since you were fourteen. All you’ve got to do is escape and find Mercury, the Black Witch who eats boys. And do that before your seventeenth birthday.(Goodreads)

First lines: There’s these two kids, boys, sitting close together, squished by the arms of an old chair. You’re the one on the left. The other boy’s warm to lean close to, and he moves his gaze from the telly to you sort of in slow motion.
“You enjoying it?” he asks.

Backward glass, David Lomax (315 pages) Crack your head, knock you dead, then Prince Harming’s hunger’s fed. It’s 1977, and Kenny Maxwell is dreading the move away from his friends. But then, behind the walls of his family’s new falling-apart Victorian home, he finds something incredible–a mummified baby and a note: “Help me make it not happen, Kenny. Help me stop him.” Shortly afterwards, a beautiful girl named Luka shows up. She introduces Kenny to the backward glass, a mirror that allows them to travel through time. Meeting other “mirror kids” in the past and future is exciting, but there’s also danger. The urban legend of Prince Harming, who kidnaps and kills children, is true–and he’s hunting them. When Kenny gets stranded in the past, he must find the courage to answer a call for help, change the fate of a baby–and confront his own destiny.(Goodreads)

First lines: Here’s what you need to know: You’re my son and you’re something like negative twenty-two, because that’s how long it will be before you’re born. I have a story to tell you. Most of it happened right here in Scarborough, forty, fifty, even sixty years ago, but it happened to me. Last year. 1977. The year I turned fifteen.

Book cover courtesy of SyndeticsWhere the stars still shine, Trish Doller ( 336 pages)Stolen as a child from her large and loving family, and on the run with her mom for more than ten years, Callie has only the barest idea of what normal life might be like. She’s never had a home, never gone to school, and has gotten most of her meals from laundromat vending machines. Her dreams are haunted by memories she’d like to forget completely. But when Callie’s mom is finally arrested for kidnapping her, and Callie’s real dad whisks her back to what would have been her life, in a small town in Florida, Callie must find a way to leave the past behind. She must learn to be part of a family. And she must believe that love–even with someone who seems an improbable choice–is more than just a possibility.(Goodreads)

First lines: Yellow light slashes the darkness as Mom sneaks into the apartment again. The muffled creak of the floorboards beneath the shabby carpet gives her away, along with the stale-beer-and-cigarette smell that always follows her home from the Old Dutch.

Book cover courtesy of SyndeticsMermaid in Chelsea Creek, Michelle Tea (331 pages)Everyone in the broken-down town of Chelsea, Massachussetts, has a story too worn to repeat—from the girls who play the pass-out game just to feel like they’re somewhere else, to the packs of aimless teenage boys, to the old women from far away who left everything behind. But there’s one story they all still tell: the oldest and saddest but most hopeful story, the one about the girl who will be able to take their twisted world and straighten it out. The girl who will bring the magic.Could Sophie Swankowski be that girl? With her tangled hair and grubby clothes, her weird habits and her visions of a filthy, swearing mermaid who comes to her when she’s unconscious, Sophie could be the one to uncover the power flowing beneath Chelsea’s potholed streets and sludge-filled rivers, and the one to fight the evil that flows there, too. Sophie might discover her destiny, and maybe even in time to save them all.(Goodreads)

First lines: Chelsea was a city where people landed. People from other counrties, people running from wars and poverty, stealing away on boats that cut through the ocean into a whole new world, or on plabes, relief shaking their bodies and they rattled into the sky.

Boom cover courtesy of SyndeticsI lived on Butterfly Hill, Marjorie Agosin (454 pages)Celeste Marconi is a dreamer. She lives peacefully among friends and neighbors and family in the idyllic town of Valparaiso, Chile;until the time comes when even Celeste, with her head in the clouds, can’t deny the political unrest that is sweeping through the country. Warships are spotted in the harbor and schoolmates disappear from class without a word. Celeste doesn’t quite know what is happening, but one thing is clear: no one is safe, not anymore.The country has been taken over by a government that declares artists, protestors, and anyone who helps the needy to be considered subversive; and dangerous to Chile’s future. So Celeste’s parents, her educated, generous, kind parentsmust go into hiding before they, too, must disappear. To protect their daughter, they send her to America.As Celeste adapts to her new life in Maine, she never stops dreaming of Chile. But even after democracy is restored to her home country, questions remain: Will her parents reemerge from hiding? Will she ever be truly safe again? (Goodreads)

First lines: The blue cloud finally opens-just when the bell rings to let the Juana Ross School out for the weekend. I’d been wtaching the sky from the classroom windows all day, wondering just when the rain would pour down.

Book cover courtesy of SyndeticsThe mirk and midnight hour, Jane Nickerson (371 pages)A Southern girl. A wounded soldier. A chilling force deep in the forest. All collide at night’s darkest hour. Seventeen-year-old Violet Dancey has been left at home in Mississippi with a laudanum-addicted stepmother and love-crazed stepsister while her father fights in the war—a war that has already claimed her twin brother. When she comes across a severely injured Union soldier lying in an abandoned lodge deep in the woods, things begin to change. Thomas is the enemy—one of the men who might have killed her own brother—and yet she’s drawn to him. But Violet isn’t Thomas’s only visitor; someone has been tending to his wounds—keeping him alive—and it becomes chillingly clear that this care hasn’t been out of compassion. Against the dangers of war and ominous powers of voodoo, Violet must fight to protect her home and the people she loves.(Goodreads)

First lines: he was already dead. Maybe. He had been greviously wounded-he had expected to die anyway-but they did something to him that sucked out the rest of his feeble life and will, except for the tony spark of spul that hunkered mutely deep inside.