Showing posts with label piano. Show all posts
Showing posts with label piano. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 1, 2014

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.

Monday, June 3, 2013

New Books ~ June (Part 4)

Amber House by Kelly Moore, Tucker Reed, & Larkin Reed
After her grandmother's death Sarah Parsons, nearly sixteen, delights in exploring her family's centuries-old Maryland estate with new friend Jackson, but soon she is having vivid visions of her ancestors, one of whom may be a threat to Sarah's autistic brother, Sam.

Devil's Pass by Sigmund Brouwer
Webb, a young street musician, faces grizzly bears and a madman on the Canol Trail when he tries to fulfill a request in his late grandfather's will.

The Rithmatist by Brandon Sanderson
As Wild Chalklings threaten the American Isles and Rithmatists are humanity's only defense, Joel can only watch as Rithmatist students learn the magical art that he would do anything to practice.

Chantress by Amy Butler Greenfield
Fifteen-year-old Lucy discovers that she is a chantress who can perform magic by singing, and the only one who can save England from the control of the dangerous Lord Protector.

The Lucy Variations by Sara Zarr
Sixteen-year-old San Franciscan Lucy Beck-Moreau once had a promising future as a concert pianist. Her chance at a career has passed, and she decides to help her ten-year-old piano prodigy brother, Gus, map out his own future, even as she explores why she enjoyed piano in the first place.