Heidi's Books

Georgia Peach Book Awards 2014-2015

Me, Him, Them and It - Caela Carter

Eleanor & Park - Rainbow Rowell ***winner***

March - John Lewis

The 5th Wave - Rick Yancey

Steelheart - Brandon Sanderson

Please Don’t Tell My Parents I’m A Super Villain - Richard Roberts

Orleans - Sherri Smith

Winger - Andrew Smith

All Our Yesterdays - Cristin Terrill Out of Nowhere - Maria Padian

Openly Straight - Bill Konigsberg

In The Shadow of Blackbirds - Cat Winters

The Shadow Society - Marie Rutkoski

Living With Jackie Chan - Jo Knowles

Yaqui Delgado Wants To Kick Your Ass - Meg Medina

Of Beast And Beauty - Stacey Jay

The Tragedy Paper - Elizabeth LeBan

Torn - David Massey

Just One Day - Gayle Forman

My Friend Dahmer - Derf Backderf

Criminal - Terra McVoy From this list I’ve read and reviewed the following:

Me, Him, Them and It - Carter ME is Evelyn Jones, 16, a valedictorian hopeful who's been playing bad girl to piss off THEM, her cold, distant parents. HIM is Todd, Evelyn's secret un-boyfriend, who she thought she was just using for sex - until she accidentally fell in love with him. But before Evelyn gets a chance to tell Todd how she feels, something much more important comes up. IT. IT is a fetus. Evelyn is pregnant - and when Todd turns his back on her, Evelyn has no idea who to turn to. Can a cheating father, a stiff, cold mother, a pissed-off BFF, and a (thankfully!) loving aunt with adopted girls of her own help Evelyn make the heart-wrenching decisions that follow?

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I found this to be very well written. The story follows Evelyn as she navigates her fractured life after she discovers she is pregnant while her home life (parents) fall apart. The story narrative outlined her thoughts but kept me guessing as to what she would eventually decide to do with the pieces of her life.

This is what I imagine many teens who become pregnant go through - children themselves, having to make grown up decisions. A difficult subject presented very fairly.

Winger - Smith

Ryan Dean West is a fourteen-year-old junior at a boarding school for rich kids in the Pacific Northwest. He’s living in Opportunity Hall, the dorm for troublemakers, and rooming with the biggest bully on the rugby team. And he’s madly in love with his best friend Annie, who thinks of him as a little boy.

With the help of his sense of humor, rugby buddies, and his penchant for doodling comics, Ryan Dean manages to survive life’s complications and even find some happiness along the way. But when the unthinkable happens, he has to figure out how to hold on to what’s important, even when it feels like everything has fallen apart.

Filled with hand-drawn info-graphics and illustrations and told in a pitch-perfect voice, this realistic depiction of a teen’s experience strikes an exceptional balance of hilarious and heartbreaking.

----- This book was difficult for me to figure out what the theme was. Finally, I realized it was about Friends, Loyalty and Love. Who has friends and who knows how to be a good friend. Who has, and doesn't have, loyalty. Who has love, who doesn't have love and who wants love so badly they will do desperate things. This story had me distracted from the beginning because the main character kept calling himself a loser. He said it so often that at page 108 I started keeping a tally-sheet. I went back and re-read pages 1-108 where he called himself a loser 9 times. In total, he called himself "loser" 57 times. 57! He also used other put-downs to describe himself 18 times, which totals 75 comments of negativity about himself. Because this kept me distracted, the ending came as quite a surprise. I knew the story would have to culminate in some sort of tension that ultimately gets resolved, but it spiraled to a climactic ending I could NEVER have predicted.

Of Beauty and Beast - Jay

In the beginning was the darkness, and in the darkness was a girl, and in the girl was a secret...

In the domed city of Yuan, the blind Princess Isra, a Smooth Skin, is raised to be a human sacrifice whose death will ensure her city’s vitality. In the desert outside Yuan, Gem, a mutant beast, fights to save his people, the Monstrous, from starvation. Neither dreams that together, they could return balance to both their worlds.

Isra wants to help the city’s Banished people, second-class citizens despised for possessing Monstrous traits. But after she enlists the aid of her prisoner, Gem, who has been captured while trying to steal Yuan’s enchanted roses, she begins to care for him, and to question everything she has been brought up to believe.

As secrets are revealed and Isra’s sight, which vanished during her childhood, returned, Isra will have to choose between duty to her people and the beast she has come to love.

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I loved this Beauty/Beast story. It is one of my favorite re-tellings that I found unique in that it takes place on a dying planet in a futuristic world ... with a story twist I didn’t see coming. I had just finished another book where sacrifice of the women was involved and I was predisposed to dislike this story because I felt they were similar. Not fair to the book, I know. But the story pulled me in, grabbed me, showed me what it was about, made me invested in it and I couldn't let it go until I'd read to the end. I loved it and will *highly* recommend it to my readers.

Heidi Y.