Shadowcry

A moonlit city with shadows across an open grave "yawning like an open throat..." A woman with a lamp in her hand, hooded against the wind with shovelfuls of earth being thrown about her... Shadowcry,  by Jenna Burtenshaw, snatches the reader on Page 1 of the prologue with a spine-tingler of a setting. The Night of Souls -- when the veil between the living and the dead is thinnest -- is only days away. Wardens have been sent by the High Council to harvest citizens for battle. They are kidnapping innocent citizens and searching for one of the Skilled. It's Kate Winters, 15, who has just resurrected a blackbird without meaning to -- or knowing that she could -- and now the wardens are after her.
Sit by the fire. Forget the chores. You'll want to know what happens to Kate when she's taken to the graveyard city of Fume and its many secret tunnels and underground villages.
Highly recommended.

--GSouth

Dystopian novel: Across the Universe

Dystopian novels are what teen readers want to check out this year. Dystopian novels have been around before. We may not have called them that, but they've been here. Orwell's 1984 is a good example. Dystopian is a futuristic society that appears utopian, or perfect, on the surface, but characters in these stories live in oppressive, authority controlled societies. Sort of a worse-case scenario, society wise. No freedom. No choices. The Haves versus the Have Nots...
Anyway, Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, has been popular this year. The teenagers in this tale must represent their districts in an arena full of deadly contests. They must fight until there is one winner left -- and everything takes place on screen for all the districts to watch.

 And that brings me to this review of Across the Universe by Beth Revis (Razorbill. 2011. 398p. ISBN 9781595143976. $17.99). From the Library Journal's Book Smack... "This book's first scene is a chiller. Amy watches as her parents are (painfully) cryogenically frozen, preparing themselves to wake 300 years in the future as colonists of a new planet. Rather than facing a life without them, she decides to be frozen as well. But as her consciousness is freezing, she overhears some alarming news: it may be 301 years, or more. The colony's funding is in question. Flash forward 250 years. Amy awakes aboard the spaceship Godspeed and learns that her parents are still in state, that she was thawed accidentally, and that a cryo-killer is opening the frozen coffins, leaving the people inside to die. The ship is managed by the tyrant Eldest, and his teenaged successor, Elder, is infatuated with Amy, which may be the only thing between her and a one-way trip out the space lock. Part space opera, part murder mystery, this first novel holds its pace and fulfills the promise of that chilly opening scene."

Sounds like a good summer read to me...

--G