What Your Librarian is Reading

Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

2009-02-05T08:47:00.000-05:00

Author: Gabrielle Zevin
Genre: Drama

What if you couldn’t remember anything that had happened to you in the past four years? Everything that you had learned, all the friends you had made, all of your experiences from that time would be gone.

Naomi Porter, after falling on the steps of her school and hitting her head, has exactly this experience. She doesn’t remember how to drive, has no idea who her boyfriend is, and has to relearn French and history during her junior year. As she adjusts to life at her school, she wonders why she is friends with people who are shallow, mean, or just don’t understand her. She also gets to know the handsome and tortured James, but will they end up together? More important, will Naomi ever get her memory back?

I really enjoyed this book because it had great characters. Naomi’s best friend Will reminds me of Duckie in the movie Pretty in Pink – he loves her so much and is such a good friend to her, even when she doesn’t remember him. Check out Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac, and if you like it, try Elsewhere, Gabrielle Zevin’s first book.

Paper Towns

2009-01-06T10:22:00.000-05:00

Author: John Green
Genre: Mystery

Let me start by saying that I LOVED this book! It had everything – an exciting, action-packed plot, hilarious dialogue, and some interesting thoughts about what it really means to know another person.

There are three parts: in the first, Quentin Jacobsen’s longtime crush, Margo Roth Spiegelman, takes him on a late-night adventure of revenge and breaking into SeaWorld. In the second, Margo goes missing, and Q tries to track her down by following a trail of clues that she left for him. Part 3 is an hour-by-hour road trip in which Q and his friends try to find Margo.
If you’ve ever felt as if none of your friends understand who you REALLY are, if you’ve ever felt that “getting [yourself] a date to prom is so hard that the hypothetical idea itself is actually used to cut diamonds,” or if you just think that the preceding quote is funny, you’ll enjoy reading Paper Towns.

The Silver Kiss

2008-11-19T20:03:00.000-05:00

Author: Annette Curtis Klause
Genre: Horror

With the Twilight phenomenon that's happening right now, I wanted to read another vampire book. The Silver Kiss is by the same author as Blood and Chocolate, a werewolf story that was made into a movie not long ago. Here's the story: Zoe is going through a tough time in her life: her mom is very sick, her best friend is moving away, and she feels like she has no one she can talk to. One night when she's sitting in a park, she sees a silver-haired, angel-faced boy in a leather jacket who captures her interest. Soon, the boy (Simon) shows up at her doorstep asking for help. Should Zoe trust him, and if she does, what kind of danger will she face?

The Silver Kiss is similar to Twilight in many ways, but it was written 15 years earlier. It's a love story that shows the struggle of the vampire between thirst for blood and tenderness for a human. I didn't feel as drawn into the story as I did with Stephenie Meyer's books, but I think that Twilight fans would enjoy this.

-Ms. Berens