My Gift to You ~ New Books for December (part 9)

The Ultimate Unofficial Encyclopedia for Minecrafters by Megan Miller

Nonfiction 

From abandoned mineshafts to mini-games, mods, and zombie sieges, The Ultimate Unofficial Encyclopedia for Minecrafters reveals expert tricks of the trade for gamers. Want to know where you’ll find the most diamonds or how to protect your villagers at night? This A–Z reference is a quick guide to all the tips you want to know, including:

• How to spawn and kill the Wither boss
• How to rescue a baby zombie villager
• How to make a portal without a diamond pickaxe
• How to make a secret passageway using paintings

This exciting book will cover everything players need to know about mining, farming, building, villagers, the Nether, and more! A big book of players’ hacks for Minecrafters organized in an easy-to-reference A–Z encyclopedia format, this book will show readers the ins and outs of the game, how to survive and thrive, and various mods that can improve play. The book will be illustrated with screenshots throughout, making it easy for new and experienced Minecrafters to build, fight, protect, and survive in their creative worlds.

Untwine by Edwidge Danticat

Contemporary Fiction 

Identical twin teenagers Giselle and Isabelle Boyer have always been inseparable, and expected to stay that way even though their Haitian American parents are separating--but when when the entire family is caught in a car crash, everyone's world is shattered forever.

Violent Ends by various

Contemporary Fiction 

Relates how one boy--who had friends, enjoyed reading, playing saxophone in the band, and had never been in trouble before--became a monster capable of entering his high school with a loaded gun and firing on his classmates, as told from the viewpoints of several victims. Each perspective is written by a different writer of young adult fiction.

What We Left Behind by Robin Talley

Contemporary Fiction 

Toni and Gretchen are the couple everyone envied in high school. They've been together forever. They never fight. They're deeply, hopelessly in love. When they separate for their first year at college--Toni to Harvard and Gretchen to NYU--they're sure they'll be fine. The reality of being apart, though, is very different than they expected.

What We Saw by Aaron Hartzler

Contemporary Fiction 

The party at John Doone's last Saturday night is a bit of a blur. Kate Weston can piece together most of the details: Stacey Stallard handing her shots, Ben Cody taking her keys and getting her home early. . . . But when a picture of Stacey passed out over Deacon Mills's shoulder appears online the next morning, Kate suspects she doesn't have all the details. When Stacey levels charges against four of Kate's classmates, the whole town erupts into controversy. Facts that can't be ignored begin to surface, and every answer Kate finds leads back to the same questions: Who witnessed what happened to Stacey? And what responsibility do they have to speak up about what they saw?

Willful Machines by Tim Floreen

Action/Adventure

In a near-future America, a sentient computer program named Charlotte has turned terrorist, but Lee Fisher, the closeted son of an ultraconservative President, is more concerned with keeping his Secret Service detail from finding out about his developing romance with Nico, the new guy at school, but when the spider-like robots that roam the school halls begin acting even stranger than usual, Lee realizes he is Charlotte's next target.

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.