The Agency by Y.S. Lee

The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

The cover of this book has been calling my name for quite some time now...and it's not just because there's a Newberry Honor medal on the front of the book.  The silhouette of a young girl with a butterfly net and the word Evolution in the title sparked some interest.  Could Mr. Charles Darwin be involved in this story somehow?  He sure is!  Calpurnia is a young girl from an upper middle class family living through a stifling summer right before the turn of the century.  With such a status comes certain expectations of a young girl. Learn how to keep house (with servant help of course), be proper, land a husband and have kids.  When things get rough, occasionally nip from your bottle of Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound. End of story.  As Calpurnia sees her brothers suddenly going ga-ga over ladies and "pitching woo" (fancy right?), she wonders if this is all that is in store for her.  When she strikes up a special relationship with her eccentric grandpa, she learns that what has been the status quo for women for a long time doesn't have to be the only path.  Calpurnia begins spending her summer days with her grandpa looking at different bug and plant species and classifying them according to Charles Darwin's classification system. Grandpa even lets her read his controversial book The Origin of Species, a book which she tried to check out at the library and was treated rather rudely by the librarian.  That would never happen now, by the way.  Librarians are awesome givers of information - there is no shame in our game! As the story comes to a climax with a breakthrough discovery found in the woods by Calpurnia and her grandpa, she begins to learn about all of the great women who have contributed to science and that her grandpa may have higher hopes for her than her own parents.  What will Calpurnia choose to do?  Can she live the life she wants to lead or is she destined to wear frilly dresses and be a proper lady? Reading this story made my librarian AND my feminist heart happy!  I love to read about girls who challenge convention and who realize what potential they have inside them.  I see this struggle every day with my middle school girls and I love it when there are such positive books like this one for them to read.  I was also surprised that this was author Jacqueline Kelly's first novel!  It was so well written, I could have sworn she had been writing for decades!  If you are looking for a great, uplifting and inspirational read, check this book out!

Dead End in Norvelt - Must Read!

Every once in a while, I come across a book that forces me to neglect all of my parental duties because it it so good.  5th Wave was one, and Dead End in Norvelt was another!  I could not put it down!  It was a fun, different read (AND it was historical fiction, which I love).  Imagine the summer vacation you are having now.  Now imagine being grounded for your entire summer vacation for something your dad made you do. That is how Jack's 1962 summer is going - his dad made him mow down his mom's cornfield (which she grew to help feed the elderly residents of the town, by the way) in order to make way for a landing strip for his plane.  Jack is done for.  There's not many kids in town for him to play with anyway, but now his hopes of getting out and playing with his one friend, Bunny, are dashed.  Did I mention that most of the residents of the town are elderly women?  Jack's one hope to get out springs when his mom loans him out to help Miss Volker write obituaries for the residents as they die off in the town.  She's a crazy old lady who must immerse her hands in hot wax in order to get them to work due to terrible arthritis - I pictured one of those hand candles that people burn around Halloween...creeptastic!  Never will you see one person get so excited for people to die.  You see, once all of the original members of the town die, Miss Volker will have fulfilled her promise to Eleanor Roosevelt, who helped found the town, that she would nurture it until the end.  Once all of the originals die, Miss Volker can move to Florida to be with her sister.  The town members seem to be dying off pretty quickly, almost too quickly, except for the fiesty, self-appointed town rule-keeper, Mr. Spizz.  Mr. Spizz rides his man-tricycle all over town enforcing the rules and also secretly trying to get Miss Volker to fall in love with him.  Jack's life gets some excitement as he gets to know Miss Volker and accompany on her travels to witness the bodies of the dead town folk (she's also the medical examiner for the town), help her write their obituaries and then hand them off the the printer in town.  Mix that with a night sneaking out with this best friend, a scary encounter with a Hell's Angel motorcyclist, driving under age and poisoning critters with a heavy duty poison (critter bodies EVERYWHERE), you might almost miss that something isn't right in town...and it's not the fact that a grown man is riding a tricycle.  Read to find out what happens to Jack during his exciting summer in 1962!  Jack Gantos is a fabulous writer for boys, so if you are a boy who has a hard time finding something to read, give this book a try! Dead bodies and Hell's Angels burning down houses?  I mean come on...

A Kiss in Time

Coming off of my 5th Wave high, I decided to go with something a little less "murdery."  Looking to keep it light, I perused through the box of book goods I smuggled home from my library for the summer and happened upon A Kiss in Time.  While it's not normally a book type that I seek out (fractured fairy tale, love and all that stuff), I always need to keep expanding my horizons so that I can be best prepared to recommend different books to all of the different types of readers that come to my library.  So here's the scoop - Jack is your stereotypical spoiled rich kid.  He keeps getting into trouble at home, so rather than deal with him, his parents send him off on a tour of Europe with his friend Travis.  Jack turns out to be not only a troublemaker at home, but also a pretty terrible representative of the U.S. whilst traveling abroad. When he's rude to a French concierge, the concierge decides to exact his revenge by giving him out of the way directions to a beach that Jack and Travis are trying to get to.  Once they finally reach their destination, they end up walking into a place where time seems to have stood still...FOR 300 YEARS.  They happen upon a castle, notice that all of the "actors" in this place seem to be on a sleep break, and continue on to see her, the absolutely beautiful Talia, sleeping just as soundly as all of the others in this place.  Little does he know, Talia and the rest of the castle are sleeping because of a curse put upon her by a jealous witch.  After checking her out for a creepily long time, Jack decides to kiss her.  Now let me just say this.  I don't recommend kissing unconscious people.  It's called assault.  Just sayin'.  However, Jack kisses her and I think you know what happens next....she wakes up, slaps him and calls him a creep.  Just kidding!  She awakens thinking that he is her one true love because the curse that was put upon her says that a kiss from her true love will be the only way she wakes up.  What happens next is similar to the scene from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure....you know, when they meet the princesses from the past and their dad wants to put them in the iron maiden (cue guitar riff).  If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you're probably not 37 like me, so Google it (just ask mom or dad first).  While I normally wouldn't seek this book out, I enjoyed it. I wish that Talia would have been more of a strong female instead of following some dude around that she just met, but that's how these stories usually go.  However,  I often find that when I read books that I think I normally wouldn't like, I end up liking them...craziness!  The author, Alex Flinn, also wrote Beastly so if you enjoyed that book or saw the movie, you will most definitely like this book.  If you're looking for something light and fun to read this summer, try A Kiss in Time!

The 5th Wave - I LOVED IT!

So, are you catching on to the theme of books lately?  Girl lives in a post-apocalyptic, dystopian society. Girl sees many flaws in the society despite her friends and family's urgings to keep things the way they are.  Girl begins to question and fight back against the powers that be, putting herself in grave danger...girl finds love along the way.   Yes, I love these books too, so I wasn't expecting much more from Rick Yancey in The 5th Wave.  Girl surviving in a post-apocalyptic world?  Yes.  And that's about where the similarity to the growing trend in teen writing ends.  Cassie must survive in a world taken over by aliens, but not in the way you see it in the movies...you know, where the mother ship comes and little creatures come and either eat all of your Reese's Pieces or try to scalpel your brain out.  These aliens are taking out the human race in waves. The first wave took out all electrical capabilities (imagine planes just all falling from the sky in one instant), the 2nd wave is a giant tsunami, the 3rd wave is a horrible plague and the 4th wave includes human-like aliens hunting and killing any remaining humans they find.  Cassie and her 5 year old brother manage to survive all of these waves.  The rest of her family? Not so much.  When Cassie lets her brother go with some soldiers to what she is told is a safe haven, she reluctantly lets him go but promises she will come back for him. When she realizes that all is not how it seems and that her brother could really be in the hands of the "Others", she desperately tries to find her way to him, all the while fending off a sniper who doesn't seem to be a very good shot, meeting a handsome stranger whom she must learn to trust, as well as facing her past in a very interesting way.  I have 2 very active children, so the fact that I managed to finish this almost 500 page book in under a week tells you that it was darn good (and that maybe I was kind of a terrible parent this week). I bought this book with the intention of donating it to my school library, but upon reading it, have determined that it is more of an older teen book due to lots of swearing and heavy violence at times.  The imagery of young children being groomed for war and dying was hard to take personally, but the book was just too good to put down.  I got past that little uncomfortable bit real quick.  I'm taking a little break from the heaviness of the book before reading the sequel, "The Infinite Sea," and am going to read a fractured fairy tale that's been on my radar for a while (review coming soon!).