Two author birthdays today

Happy birthday to David Almond!

Billy Dean is a secret child. He has a beautiful young mother and a father who arrives at night carrying the scents of candles and incense and cigarettes. Birds fly to his window. Mice run out from his walls. His world is a carpet, a bed, pictures of the holy island, and a single locked door. His father fills his mind and his dreams with mysterious tales and memories and dreadful warnings. But then his father disappears, and Billy's mother brings him out into the world at last. He learns the horrifying story of what was saved and what was destroyed on the day he was born, the day the bombers came to Blinkbonny. The kind butcher, Mr. McCaufrey, and the medium, Missus Malone, are waiting for him. He becomes The Angel Child, one who can heal the living, contact the dead, bring comfort to a troubled world. But there is one figure who is beyond healing, who comes looking for Billy himself -- and is determined on a kind of reckoning. 

Happy birthday to Lauren Myracle!

TTYL (2005), TTFN (2007), and L8R, G8R (2008) follows the lives of three friends- Zoe, Maddie, and Angela- as they deal with such topics of high school social drama as boys, drugs, alcohol, parties, driving, emotional rampages, and college prep. The series begins when the girls are in middle school and ends in their senior year.

Having grown up in a California commune, Bliss sees her aloof grandmother's Atlanta world as a foreign country, but she is determined to be nice as a freshman at an elite high school, which makes her the perfect target for Sandy, a girl obsessed with the occult.

 When her best friend falls victim to a vicious hate crime, sixteen-year-old Cat sets out to discover the culprits in her small North Carolina town.