The Rest of Your Summer Reading ~ August New Books (part 6)

Nova by Margaret Fortune

Nova #1

Science Fiction 

Lia Johansen was created for only one purpose: to slip onto the strategically placed New Sol Space Station and explode. But her mission goes to hell when her clock malfunctions, freezing her countdown with just two minutes to go. With no Plan B, no memories of her past, and no identity besides a name stolen from a dead POW, Lia has no idea what to do next. Her life gets even more complicated when she meets Michael Sorenson, the real Lia’s childhood best friend.

Drawn to Michael and his family against her better judgment, Lia starts learning what it means to live and love, and to be human. It is only when her countdown clock begins sporadically losing time that she realizes even duds can still blow up. If she wants any chance at a future, she must find a way to unlock the secrets of her past and stop her clock. But as Lia digs into her origins, she begins to suspect there’s far more to her mission and to this war, than meets the eye. With the fate of not just a space station but an entire empire hanging in the balance, Lia races to find the truth before her time—literally—runs out.

Out of  Control by Sarah Alderson

Action/Adventure 

A girl looking to escape her past in New York City ends up on the run from a dangerous conspiracy in this sizzling, high-stakes novel. When seventeen-year-old Liva came to New York City, all she wanted was to escape the painful memories of her past and finally find a fresh start. Her hopes for a new future were dashed the moment she became the sole witness to a brutal murder. When she's taken into police custody-supposedly for her own protection-she realizes something isn't right, but it's too late. Soon, bullets start flying, and Liva realizes that she is not just a witness, but the target-and she needs to escape before it's too late. With the help of a sexy car thief that she met at the station, Liva manages to get away from the massacre unharmed, but now the two of them are alone in New York, trying to outrun and outwit the two killers who will stop at nothing to find them. Liva and Jay are living on the edge, but when you're on the edge, there's a long way to fall.

Outrage by John Sandford & Michelle Cook

Singular Menace #2

Action/Adventure 

Shay Remby and her gang of renegades have struck a blow to the Singular Corporation. When they rescued Shay's brother, Odin, from a secret Singular lab, they also liberated a girl. Singular has been experimenting on her, trying to implant a U.S. senator's memories into her brain--with partial success. Fenfang is now a girl who literally knows too much. Can the knowledge brought by ex-captives Odin and Fenfang help Shay and her friends expose the crimes of this corrupt corporation? Singular has already killed one of Shay's band to protect their secrets. How many more will die before the truth is exposed?

Princess Ugg by Ted Naifeh

Princess Ugg #1

Graphic Novel 

Princess Ülga isn't your standard princess, but her royal lineage goes back for generations. At her mother's bequest, [she] travels to the city-state of Atraesca, where the prestigious Princess Academy lies, so that she can learn about things like diplomacy-- hopefully for the benefit of her rough and tumble people. But Ülga will learn that she's more behind in her studies than she realized-- and that when you're a princess, you're bound to have a few enemies.

Prison Boy by Sharon McKay

Contemporary Fiction 

When the orphanage they live in is closed, Pax and a younger boy, Kai, are forced to live on the streets. Desperate to make enough money to send Kai to school, Pax does jobs for a shady character known only as Mister. When Pax is given a "special mission"--to deliver a heavy box to a certain location--Pax winds up charged with terrorism and plunged into a brutal prison environment where his captors will do anything to make him talk.

New Books for October ~ Part 6

In 1959 Virginia, the lives of two girls on opposite sides of the battle for civil rights will be changed forever.  Sarah Dunbar is one of the first black students to attend the previously all-white Jefferson High School. An honors student at her old school, she is put into remedial classes, spit on and tormented daily. Linda Hairston is the daughter of one of the town's most vocal opponents of school integration. She has been taught all her life that the races should be kept "separate but equal." Forced to work together on a school project, Sarah and Linda must confront harsh truths about race, power and how they really feel about one another.

Shay Remby arrives in Hollywood with $58 and a handmade knife, searching for her brother, Odin. Odin's a brilliant hacker but a bit of a loose cannon. He and a group of radical animal-rights activists hit a Singular Corp. research lab in Eugene, Oregon. The raid was a disaster, but Odin escaped with a set of highly encrypted flash drives and a post-surgical dog. When Shay gets a frantic 3 a.m. phone call from Odin--talking about evidence of unspeakable experiments, and a ruthless corporation, and how he must hide--she's concerned. When she gets a menacing visit from Singular's security team, she knows: her brother's a dead man walking. What Singular doesn't know--yet--is that 16-year-old Shay is every bit as ruthless as their security force, and she will burn Singular to the ground, if that's what it takes to save her brother.

For a responsible sixteen-year-old, Michael Wilson has a lot of problems--his father was killed in Afghanistan in 2005, his overworked and overprotective mother will not talk about their situation, and does not want him playing football, and he has suddenly started to receive letters that his father wrote before his death.

After he joins the new football team, Jack, a new junior and a skilled piano player at a preparatory boarding school, must decide how far he is willing to go to fit in with his new teammates, and how much he is willing to compromise himself to play the kind of music the school expects him to.

After a synthetic hormone in beef kills fifty million American women, seventeen-year-old Avie struggles for a normal life in a world where teenage girls are a valuable commodity, but when her father contracts her to marry a rich, older man, Avie decides to run away with her childhood friend and revolutionary, Yates.