Snippets from the Shelves

Join Fiction Department’s Summer Reading Club with weekly activities for young adults, additional prize give-aways and an end-of-summer party.

We are regularly adding books to the Young Adult collection, so come in and check out what’s new. Young Adults will enjoy the fourth and final installment of Maximum Ride: The Final Warning by James Patterson. In Peeled, by Joan Bauer, a high school journalist and her friends try to help solve the mystery of a “haunted house” stirred up by greedy developers. Meg Cabot has written Princess Mia, the ninth book in the exciting Princess Diary series. Brady Steele discovers proof of life on Mars when a meteor crashes through his roof. Find out what happens to Bradley in Go Big or Go Home, by Will Hobbs, as he discovers that he may have been exposed to something deadly along the way.

A few new non-fiction titles for young adults to consider: Kaplan 2008 ACT Strategies for Super Busy Students; Kaplan 2008 SAT Strategies for Super Busy Students; Speak with Success; Amazing Card Tricks; A Brief Political and Geographic History of North America; Ask CosmoGIRL About Nutrition & Fitness. The new Unzipped series for newswriting, short stories, presentations, research papers and more is a great way to prepare for college and beyond. For sports enthusiasts, we have the How to Improve sports series for soccer, basketball and karate.

Did you ever long to write your own story but just didn’t know how to get started? If you are between the ages of 13 and 18 we invite you to come and join the fun at the “Teen Writers’ Workshop” every Wednesday afternoon between 4 and 5 p.m. Stop by the Fiction desk for more information on this fun and informative workshop.

Join us for all our summer activities and remember, the more you enter the better your chances of winning!

Something new is being added to the Young Adult collection in the second-floor Fiction department. Graphic novels (which look like comic books) are starting to fill some of the shelves. These are novels which were deliberately written to be illustrated and are proving very popoular among young readers (12-16 years), although older folks like them too.

There are a wide range of titles to choose from. While some are stand-alone non-fiction or novels, others are anthologies of stories, and some are excerpts from larger narratives.

A few of the new titles include: Abraham Lincoln, Alexander the Great, Christopher Columbus, Cleopatra, Harriet Tubman, Hernan Cortes, and Spartacus in non-fiction, and Stories by Mark Twain, Batman: War Drums, The Beast of Chicago and The Irregulars – in the Service of Sherlock Holmes in fiction.