Nothing like a good mystery. Some serial fun, with Giles Blunt, Ian Hamilton, Louise Penny, or my most recent discovery, the Nina Borg series by Lene Kaaberbøl and Agnete Friis. But one can find a good page-turner in the standalone novels on the fiction shelves too. Take Claire Cameron's freshly published The Bear, longlisted
A Stephen King blurb. And, it's declared: a novel of terror. Nick Cutter's readers know what they're in for. And, if there was any doubt, little clues speckle the first few chapters. Readers are "waiting for unknown wickedness". There are shadows coalescing into permanence and logs groaning. There is a sheet
When I was in high school, I read Fran Arrick's Steffie Can't Come Out to Play (1978) more than once. I even wrote a book report on it in the ninth grade, when the assigned reading included J. Meade Falkner's Moonfleet and Robert Westall's The Machine Gunners. (Wanted: female characters.)
Like Katherine Dunn's Geek Love, Alice Hoffman's novel begins from a place of belonging. Scribner - Simon & Schuster, 2014 Coralie is a professional mermaid in early twentieth-century Coney Island, who grows up with the Wolfman and various other characters who seem to step from the pages of
How fully can an author inhabit an addict's world and still spin a story coherent enough to engage the teen reader? Margaret K. McElderry Books(Simon & Schuster Books), 2004 In the 1970's, kids might have turned to the anonymously penned Go Ask Alice (1971), which was billed as
