lstolarz

In honor of my Touch series, also known as the "Deadly Little..." series, I recently asked Jessi Kirby, author of MOONGLASS, to fill in the following blank: “I have a deadly little pair of red cowboy boots.”  I wonder if her boots match the cover of her new book, IN HONOR.  Read more about it here.

The Book:

Honor receives her brother’s last letter from Iraq three days after learning that he died, and opens it the day his fellow Marines lay the flag over his casket. Its contents are a complete shock: concert tickets to see Kyra Kelly, her favorite pop star and Finn's celebrity crush. In his letter, he jokingly charged Honor with the task of telling Kyra Kelly that he was in love with her.

Grief-stricken and determined to grant Finn's last request, she rushes to leave immediately. But she only gets as far as the driveway before running into Rusty, Finn's best friend since third grade and his polar opposite. She hasn't seen him in ages, thanks to a falling out between the two guys, but Rusty is much the same as Honor remembers him: arrogant, stubborn. . . and ruggedly good looking. Neither one is what the other would ever look for in a road trip partner, but the two of them set off together, on a voyage that makes sense only because it doesn’t. Along the way, they find small and sometimes surprising ways to ease their shared loss and honor Finn--but when shocking truths are revealed at the end of the road, will either of them be able to cope with the consequences?

The Buzz:

“A beautiful, engaging journey with heart, humor, and just a pinch of Texas sass. Hands down my favorite contemporary of the year.” --Sarah Ockler, bestselling author of Twenty Boy Summer, Fixing Delilah, and Bittersweet

“An amazing novel about first kisses, last goodbyes, and what it means to finally let go. I absolutely loved it.” --Lauren Barnholdt, author of Two Way Street

The Author: Jessi Kirby is the author of Moonglass, published in May 2011 by Simon and Schuster. She is also a wife, mom, English teacher and former librarian, beach bum, runner, and lover of Contemporary YA, strong coffee, and dark chocolate.

Her webpage: www.jessikirby.com

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/kirbyjessi

Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/jessikirby  (@jessikirby)

anywherebeyond

So these are not the first pictures I planned to share of my new abode. But I’m sharing them because soon, these beautiful trees will be gone. One of the things my husband and I loved about the house we bought was the beautiful wooded area nearby and the mature trees in our yard. If you’ve ever taken a look at my Pinterest, it’s pretty clear that I get a lot of joy and inspiration from trees.

One of the first things we did when we signed the papers was hire an arborist. The Corkscrew Willows out front had some dead patches, and they were overhanging the street. The 30 ft maple (not seen above) had some dead branches overhanging a neighbor’s yard. The 50 foot Cottonwood in the back was glorious, but also needed to be trimmed. We expected to get a quote for tree trimming.

Instead, what we got was terrible news. The willows, being planted in far too small a space, are dying. They have outgrown the patch of earth they’re in and there’s no way to expand it, since they’re sandwiched between the sidewalk and the road. They have maybe a year left in them. The maple has a split at its Y, which means at any time– and we have a lot of storms here in Indiana– that part of it could come down on our neighbor’s house.

And the Cottonwood once had a twin. Someone cut the twin down, but they didn’t seal the stump. Since then, the stump has rotted, and the rot invaded the remaining tree, destroying its roots. The tree is dying. Worse, it’s so large, that if a storm took it down, it would take out the power lines to the neighborhood. It would definitely destroy our neighbors’ fences, and there’s a good chance it would collapse on someone’s roof.

So we moved into a house with four, beautiful, mature trees and now we have to cut all of them down. I know we can plant new trees, and we will. But it feels so personal, and so wrong, to destroy them. They breathe for us, and shelter us. They give us food, and shade, and paper for stories. They keep their own histories in their rings. They watch silently as we come and go. They are sentinels, the trees, and I’m truly grieved to lose these four.

Yesterday, I really did. I sat down, and I wept for the trees.

Originally published at MSUFaL. You can comment here or there.

slwhitman

ETA 5/22/12: I’m keeping this book list up to date on Pinterest nowadays, linking each book to its Goodreads entry. It’s much easier to just pin a book than to keep this list up to date. For the running lists (broken down by age group and genre) and more, go here:

ETA: I’ve finally gotten the ability to edit the post back, so I’ve put as many of the suggested books into the list now as I can. Suggestions always still welcome. This is a continuous project.

I’ve gotten a lot of great suggestions to add to the list, but my website seems to still be broken, and my own computer has a dead motherboard (well, it did when I started writing this last week—thankfully, it’s now fixed). I’m still figuring out why WordPress won’t let me edit any of my old content.

So, in the interest of having one place that people can use as a resource, I’m going to copy everything into this entry. Rather than divide the list by what I’ve read and what I haven’t, which was just more a personal exercise last year in wondering whether my own reading habits had reached past my own culture, I’ll divide the list by age group and genre (fantasy/SF). What that means is that I am not making a comment on how good I think a book is or recommending it/not recommending it—there are several books on this list I haven’t had a chance to read yet. It’s simply a list compiling what’s out there. I’ve also added books that I’ve discovered over the last year or that have been suggested to me in the comments. Go to the previous booklist post for comments on some of the books in this list.

Middle Grade Fantasy

• Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, 2009, Grace Lin
• Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit, 2008, Nahoko Uehashi, and its sequel, Moribito II
• City of Fire, Laurence Yep
• The Tiger’s Apprentice, Laurence Yep
• Dragon of the Lost Sea, Laurence Yep (and pretty much anything else written by Laurence Yep)
• Zahrah the Windseeker, Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu
• Chronus Chronicles, Anne Ursu (someone mentioned this and I haven’t read them—are the main characters people of color or is it set in a non-Western culture? from its Amazon listing, it seems to star a white girl and use Greek mythology, which are great, but don’t fit the definition we’re using here)
• The Red Pyramid, Rick Riordan
• Sword and Wandering Warrior, Da Chen
• The Conch Bearer, Chitra B. Divakaruni
• Circle of Magic quartet, Tamora Pierce
• Circle Opens series, Tamora Pierce
• Pendragon series (?)
• Un Lun Dun, China Mieville
• Lavender-Green Magic, by Andre Norton
• Dragon Keeper and Garden of the Purple Dragon, Carole Wilkinson
• Moonshadow: Rise of the Ninja, Simon Higgins
• The Magical Misadventures of Prunella Bogthistle, Deva Fagan
• Magic Carpet, Scott Christian Sava
• Marvelous World #01: The Marvelous Effect, Troy Cle
• Ninth Ward, Jewel Parker Rhodes

Middle Grade Science Fiction

• The Animorphs series
• The True Meaning of Smekday, Adam Rex

Young Adult Fantasy

• Wildwood Dancing, Juliet Marillier
• Book of a Thousand Days, Shannon Hale
• Flora Segunda, Isabeau S. Wilce, and its sequel Flora’s Dare
• Little Sister, Kara Dalkey, and a sequel for which I’ve forgotten the name
• Magic or Madness, and its sequels, Justine Larbalestier
• Eternal, Cynthia Leitich Smith
• Tantalize, Cynthia Leitich Smith
• Tantalize: Kieren’s Story, Cynthia Leitich Smith
• Sucks to Be Me, Kimberly Pauley
• Silver Phoenix, Cindy Pon
• How to Ditch Your Fairy, Justine Larbalestier
• Guardian of the Dead, Karen Healey
• A Wish after Midnight, Zetta Elliott
• The Black Canary, Jane Louise Curry
• The Secrets of Jin-Shei, Alma Alexander (older YA and up)
• The Worldweavers Trilogy, Alma Alexander
• The Will of the Empress, Tamora Pierce and its sequels
• Libyrinth, Pearl North
• Across the Nightingale Floor and its sequels, Lian Hearn (older YA)
• Devil’s Kiss, Sarwat Chadda
• Annals of the Western Shore series, Ursula K. LeGuin
• The Two Pearls of Wisdom (or Dragoneye Reborn as it’s known in the US), Alison Goodman
• City of the Beasts, Isabel Allende
• Blood Ninja, Nick Lake
• Magic under Glass, Jaqueline Dolamore
• Stormwitch, Susan Vaught
• 47, Walter Mosley
• Pemba’s Song, Marilyn Nelson and Tonya C. Hegamin
• Rogelia’s House of Magic, Jamie Martinez Wood
• Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Salman Rushdie
• The Icarus Girl, Helen Oyeyemi
• Invisible Touch, Kelly Parra
• Soul Enchilada, David Macinnis Gill
• Eon: Dragoneye Reborn, Alison Goodman
• The Comet’s Curse: A Galahad Book, Dom Testa
• Bleeding Violet, Dia Reeves
• Liar, Justine Larbalestier
• Meridian, Amber Kizer
• Ruined, Paula Morris

Young Adult Science Fiction

• The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm, Nancy Farmer
• The House of the Scorpion, Nancy Farmer
• A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Leguin
• The Shadow Speaker, Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu
• Extras, Scott Westerfeld
• Black Hole Sun, David Macinnis Gill

Unsure of whether these books are MG or YA (have not read yet, pulled titles from Shweta Narayan and The Happy Nappy Bookseller‘s lists. Can someone give me a head’s-up what categories they fit in?

• A Posse of Princesses Sherwood Smith. (Is this YA?)
• The Dragon Keeper, Carole Wilkinson
• A Girl Named Disaster, Nancy Farmer
• The Wizard series, Diane Duane
• The Green Boy, Susan Cooper
• The Magical Adventures of Pretty Pearl, Virginia Hamilton
• Willie Bea and the Time the Martians Landed, Virginia Hamilton
• The Night Wanderer, Drew Hayden Taylor
• Dread Locks (Dark Fusion), Neal Shusterman

Please feel free to continue to leave other suggestions in the comments.

Originally published at Stacy Whitman's Grimoire. You can comment here or there.

rkvincent

30,537 / 100,000
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"Even scarier was the fact that I had yet to find a limit to what I’d be willing to do to protect him. To keep him with me. To keep us together. I’d spent most of my life setting boundaries. Lines I wouldn’t cross. Lines I wouldn’t let others cross.

With [redacted], there were no boundaries."