Thursday, November 23, 2017

New in November Fiction for Middle Grades




 Alex Rider: Never Say Die


  Never Say Die
byAnthony Horowitz.  Although it has been 6 years since the last Alex Rider mission was published, Never Say Die picks up six weeks after Scorpio Rising ended.  Terrorism, assassination, and a gripping story.  Ian Fleming’s worthy successor for teen boys. Gr 5+   Lexile 760









 The Perfect Score
    The Perfect Score by Bob Buyea :  Mandated student testing.  Students don’t like it, teachers don’t like it.  So it’s okay to cheat, right?  The voices five 6th graders give varying perspectives on this ethical dilemma.  Buyea gives each narrator a compelling back story, as he did in the popular Mr. Terupt series.  Gr. 4-7 Lexile 710








 Mr. Lemoncello's Great Library Race
  Mr. Lemoncello’s Great Library Race:  The kids from the Alexandriaville  Library are  ready for another fantastically fun challenge.  Mr. Lemoncello’s newest game uses virtual reality technology to recreates historical figures and events.  Then it’s time to get out into the real world for a race around the globe.  Of course there is a plot, but the real star of the book is the dream library & its puzzle genius creator. Gr. 4-8   Lexile 750







 Medusa's Curse
  Myth Raiders 1: Medusa's Curse  Fast paced fantasy adventure for young readers not yet ready for the Percy Jackson books.  Two pen pals who agree to meet discover they have independently each happened upon halves of an ancient artifact.  When put together, the Heart of Light transports our questers  to ancient Greece, where they must find other pieces of  The Shield of Light in order to protect humanity against the Dark Forces. Gr. 3-5





 The Power

  The Magnificent 12:the Power
by Michael Grant.  Final installment of a four-part fantasy adventure.  Twelve-year-old Mack MacAvoy and a team of other twelve-year-olds travel the globe to find the rest of the Manifica team so they can defeat the Pale Queen and save the world from destruction. Infused with humor and world travel.   Gr. 3-7









 Laura Ingalls is Ruining My Life
  Laura Ingalls isRuining My Life by Shelley Tougas.  . Charlotte’s mom has just moved the family across the country to live in Walnut Grove.  What she defines as adventuresome, Charlotte feels is flightiness.  After trying to write a prairie girl story for years, a dream comes as an omen to move close to the source.  But this place is worse than everywhere else the family has lived—it’s freezing in the winter, it’s small with nothing to do, and the people talk about Laura Ingalls all the time. Charlotte is convinced her family will not be able to make a life on the prairie—until the indomitable spirit of Laura Ingalls starts getting to her, too.     Gr. 4-7  Lexile 580


Monday, November 6, 2017

Read- Alike Monday; Stephen King's It

If you are like a lot of people you are either reading or re-reading Stephen King's It with the release of the new movie. Originally published in 1986, it has been back on the New York Times Best Seller list for the last 12 weeks. If you're looking for something spooky to read after It, try one of these.

It by Stephen King

To the children, the town was their whole world. To the adults, knowing better, Derry, Maine was just their home town: familiar, well-ordered for the most part. A good place to live.

It was the children who saw - and felt - what made Derry so horribly different. In the storm drains, in the sewers, IT lurked, taking on the shape of every nightmare, each one's deepest dread. Sometimes IT reached up, seizing, tearing, killing . . .

The adults, knowing better, knew nothing.

Time passed and the children grew up, moved away. The horror of IT was deep-buried, wrapped in forgetfulness. Until they were called back, once more to confront IT as IT stirred and coiled in the sullen depths of their memories, reaching up again to make their past nightmares a terrible present reality.
 

 
READ-ALIKES:

NOS4A2 by Joe Hill

Victoria McQueen has a secret gift for finding things: a misplaced bracelet, a missing photograph, answers to unanswerable questions. On her Raleigh Tuff Burner bike, she makes her way to a rickety covered bridge that, within moments, takes her wherever she needs to go, whether it’s across Massachusetts or across the country.

Charles Talent Manx has a way with children. He likes to take them for rides in his 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith with the NOS4A2 vanity plate. With his old car, he can slip right out of the everyday world, and onto the hidden roads that transport them to an astonishing – and terrifying – playground of amusements he calls “Christmasland.”

Then, one day, Vic goes looking for trouble—and finds Manx. That was a lifetime ago. Now Vic, the only kid to ever escape Manx’s unmitigated evil, is all grown up and desperate to forget. But Charlie Manx never stopped thinking about Victoria McQueen. He’s on the road again and he’s picked up a new passenger: Vic’s own son.

 


Boy's Life by Robert McCammon


Zephyr, Alabama, is an idyllic hometown for eleven-year-old Cory Mackenson -- a place where monsters swim the river deep and friends are forever. Then, one cold spring morning, Cory and his father witness a car plunge into a lake -- and a desperate rescue attempt brings his father face-to-face with a terrible, haunting vision of death. As Cory struggles to understand his father's pain, his eyes are slowly opened to the forces of good and evil that surround him. From an ancient mystic who can hear the dead and bewitch the living, to a violent clan of moonshiners, Cory must confront the secrets that hide in the shadows of his hometown -- for his father's sanity and his own life hang in the balance....









The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn't thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she'd claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.

Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways. The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy. And Lettie—magical, comforting, wise beyond her years—promised to protect him, no matter what.
 


Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
A carnival rolls in sometime after the midnight hour on a chill Midwestern October eve, ushering in Halloween a week before its time. A calliope's shrill siren song beckons to all with a seductive promise of dreams and youth regained. In this season of dying, Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show has come to Green Town, Illinois, to destroy every life touched by its strange and sinister mystery. And two inquisitive boys standing precariously on the brink of adulthood will soon discover the secret of the satanic raree-show's smoke, mazes, and mirrors, as they learn all too well the heavy cost of wishes - and the stuff of nightmare.
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