The Book Search

Yesterday I got to go to the Miami Book Fair and wow, was it terrific.  In case you didn't know, there is a completely AMAZING book fair in Miami every year in November.  The down side is that the weather in November can be a bit dodgy.  It's Miami, so what that translates into is pretty much a range of choices... either it's sunny, quite warm and muggy or we get a cold front and it can be quite cool and windy.  This weekend we had the remarkable combination of lots of wind, muggy, rainy and not too hot.  Although it was not picture perfect weather, the event was as usual, just wonderful. The first thing that's awesome about the Miami book fair is that they invite authors from all over the place to come and speak.  Miami is a bilingual kind of town so there are many Hispanic as well and English speaking authors.  There is also an amazing range of authors from chefs to political commentators to fiction, poetry, non fiction, murder mysteries and kids ...

I've been reading a big mix of things this week.  I finished another one on the short list for the National Book award for young people.  This one was called Noggin by John Corey Whaley.  It's about a 16 year old boy who had been dying of leukemia, had his head cryogenically frozen, then five years later his head was reattached to a new body (of a boy of a similar age who had died of a brain tumor) and he wakes up.  The author's voice on this was amazing... a strong clear voice of this young man who is 16 and trying to cope with not only being gone for 5 years but living with a body that's different from the one he left behind.  Parts of it are funny and parts are heart rending.  It was a great mix of social issues and humor.  Here's a book trailer about it. I also read on called The Infinite Sea by Rick Yancey.  It's the continuation of a book that came out last year called The Fifth Wave about an alien invasion of the earth.  I really...

This week I've been reading award winning books.  My local library JUST got in the books that are on the short list for the National Book award for young people so I totally SCORED.  I'd read three of them already, so I had two left.  This week I read one of them called "Threatened" by Eliot Schrefer.  He also wrote Endangered which was also on the short list for the National Book award last year and I can totally see why.  "Threatened" was such an interesting story with very compelling characters and very topical situations.  It's about a boy named Luc who lives in Gabon.  He is so ignorant that as he starts to tell his story, I was bit confused about how he had come to live in a boarding house (essentially a share cropper kind of situation where he owed a lot of money from his mother's and sister's extended hospital stay so he was working off the debt, which sounded like it would probably take forever).  Luc is serving drinks at a local bar whe...