Active Voice

By Robin Wasserman [LibraryThing - Amazon]

Lia Kahn was beautiful, popular, and rich. Her life was perfect — until she died, only to wake with her brain patterns transferred into a mechanical body. But society isn’t kind to Skinners, as downloaded people are called. She loses her status at school when her friends and her boyfriend abandon her. There’s a whole cult devoted to ridding the world of Skinners. Even her own family is uncomfortable with her. And for her part, Lia’s left wondering… Is she really Lia Kahn, or just a robot programmed to believe she’s a person?

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By Francis Hardinge [LibraryThing - Amazon]

Ryan, Josh, and Chelle don’t think much of it when they steal a few coins from a wishing well for bus fare back home. But to steal the coins from a well spirit is to take on her obligation of granting wishes, and soon the kids find themselves developing the powers to do just that - from the eyes on Ryan’s knuckles that see things they shouldn’t, to Chelle’s newfound ability to speak the thoughts of strangers, to Josh’s sudden affinity with electromagnetism. It’s then that they find that the wishes people make in their hearts are infinitely darker and more dangerous than the ones they speak aloud, and that the changes the well witch has wrought in them go deeper than they think.

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By Frances Hardinge [LibraryThing - Amazon]

A paraphrased conversation from your bloggers:

Jess: You know what book was awesome? Fly By Night.

(Jess may have edited this paraphrased conversation a tad.)

When 12-year-old Mosca falls in with a low-rent poet and conman named Eponymous Clent in an effort to escape her miserable, provincial life, she has no idea that she’ll soon be at the center of a dangerous web of political intrigue and rebellion. But no sooner have Mosca, Clent, and Mosca’s homicidal goose Saracen arrived in the city of Mandelion than Mosca finds herself adrift in a world of radicals, conspirators, zealots, mad dukes, highwaymen, heretics, and murderers. Mosca will need all her cunning and grit just to survive. Luckily, she’s got plenty of both.

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By Bruce Coville [Coville at LibraryThing -- Coville at Amazon]

I’m going to do something a little new, here. It’s no secret that Bruce Coville is my favorite author, and I can’t pretend to be objective about his books — I get too caught up in fangirling. I read all of these books in marathon sessions over the course of a week, so I wasn’t pausing for deep thoughts. Basically, I just want to get these book reviews out there, so I’ve decided to include two short reviews here: one of Bruce Coville’s series The Unicorn Chronicles — including the newly-released book Dark Whispers — and one of his Rod Allbright’s Alien Adventures series.

The Unicorn Chronicles: A strange man begins following Cara and her grandmother, and the incident sends her from her home town into a whole new world — literally. Cara finds herself in Luster, the land of unicorns, where she must deliver a message the unicorn’s queen. But that’s harder than it seems: not all of Luster’s creatures like humans (or unicorns). Cara soon finds herself in the middle of a centuries-old war between the unicorns and a clan of humans who have sworn to hunt them into extinction.

Rod Allbright’s Alien Adventures: Rod Allbright is a typical kid — albeit a clumsy one. Then a group of aliens crash-lands in his science project, and reveal that the school bully who torments Rod is actually a villain wanted galaxy-wide for crimes of unspeakable cruelty. Things get even worse from there when it turns out Rod’s enemy may be the only one who knows what happened to Rod’s long-missing father.

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By Tamora Pierce [Pierce at LibraryThing -- Pierce at Amazon]

Though for ten years, it’s been legal for girls to train as pages and aspire to Knighthood, Keladry of Mindelan is the first one who has actually done so — and being legal doesn’t make it easy. She’s put on probation as a page, something never done with a boy; she’s hazed by bullies; she’s treated unfairly by the training masters. No one, it seems, wants to see a lady knight. But Kel is determined, and she won’t let anything — or anyone — stand in her way.

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Apologies for the lack of posts! I have been completely swamped with moving. However, now that I can read on the subway (as opposed to the bus, which gives me a stomachache), I should be able to get a lot more Active Voicery done. Here’s hoping!

By Garth Nix [LibraryThing - Amazon]

In the beginning, the Architect made the House, the epicenter of the universe, and she made the Secondary Realms, in which to play out her great experiment: life. Then she went away, leaving the House in the hands of seven Trustees. But the Trustees were untrustworthy, corrupted by the power they held, and the House fell into disrepair.

Now 12-year-old Arthur Penhaligon has been chosen by the Architect’s Will as the Rightful Heir. One by one he must face the Trustees, take their Keys, and restore the House to rights. But all he really wants to do is go home.

In Superior Saturday, Arthur, having defeated the first five Trustees, takes on the one who has been working insidiously against him from the start. Disguised as a Piper’s child, faithful companion Suzy Turquoise Blue by his side, he must infiltrate Saturday’s realm – which is entirely populated by sorcerers – free her section of the Will, and take her Key. Meanwhile, his forces are waging war on the Piper’s army, Saturday is waging war on Sunday, the lower sections of the House are crumbling into Nothing, and Arthur is becoming less and less human.

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By Rick Riordan [LibraryThing - Amazon]

Percy Jackson is about to get kicked out of school…again. He doesn’t mean to get in trouble, but it follows him everywhere and he just doesn’t know why. At least not until he finds out the teacher who’s always hated him is one of the Furies, and his friend Grover is actually a satyr, sent to protect him. Soon Percy discovers that all of his troubles happen because he’s the son of a Greek god, and he finds himself first surrounded by other half-human kids like him and then out on a dangerous quest to recover Zeus’s stolen lightning bolt. And if he fails, it means war among the Gods—and probably the end of the world as we know it.

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Sometimes here at Active Voice headquarters, we start a book and find it is so terrible we can’t – or at least don’t want to – finish it. What do we do? We can’t review it if we don’t finish it!

And so I’m kicking off a new category here at AV: Unfinished/Unrated. We don’t feel comfortable rating books we haven’t finished, but we still want to talk about them – and why we didn’t finish them.

By Charlie Fletcher [LibraryThing - Amazon]

From the back cover blurb: “When, on an otherwise normal day, George breaks the head from a stone dragon outside the Natural History Museum in a tiny act of rebellion, he inadvertently awakens an ancient power. The results are instant and terrifying: a stone pterodactyl unpeels from the wall and starts chasing George. He runs for his life, but the strangest part is, no one around him can see what he’s running from. No one except Edie, who is also trapped in this strange world.

“Now that George has disturbed the fragile truce between the warring statues of London, he is forced into a race for survival, where nothing is what it seems, and it’s never clear who to trust.”

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By Scott Mebus [LibraryThing - Amazon]

Rory’s always been able to see past tricks and deceptions, but even he’s surprised when he finds himself able to see even farther, deep into the secret history of New York. There notable figures of the city’s past walk as gods: Peter Stuyvesant, Babe Ruth, Alexander Hamilton, and countless others. Cockroaches ride rats into battles, albino alligators swim the sewers, and statues whisper secrets for a handful of coins. Rory quickly finds himself and his little sister Bridget immersed in this world, working to correct a great injustice committed a hundred and fifty years ago, but a great enemy is doing his best to stop them – an enemy with the power to murder the gods themselves.

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The great thing about this blog is that it helps me keep track of what some of my favorite authors are up to (and is, in fact, how I discovered some of them!). In something resembling chronological order, here are some upcoming books (and a bonus movie) that I’m on the edge of my seat, anticipating:

Bruce Coville’s The Unicorn Chronicles, Book 3: Dark Whispers
Release Date: August 1
To be up front about it, Bruce is pretty much my favorite ever. This is the third book in what will probably be a four-book series (though originally it was only supposed to be a trilogy), and it has been a long time coming. I absolutely love the first two books in the series and am intensely excited for the next installment. If you have a fondness for unicorns and dragons or for portal fantasy stories, this is definitely something you should check out.

Justine Larbalestier’s How to Ditch Your Fairy
Release Date: September 16
Justine is also totally fantastic. Her blog is so much fun to read that I can’t wait to see her actually do humor, and so far she’s gotten nothing but positive reviews. I will be snatching this one off the shelf as soon as I can find it, and hoping she does a signing somewhere in the city so I can fangirl at her in person.

Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games
Release Date: October
Collins wrote the knock-out fantastic Underland Chronicles, which I think are probably the best books I’ve blogged about since AV has been around. And her upcoming trilogy is a dystopia with a teen girl protagonist… In other words, pretty much my very favorite things! All the reviews I’ve seen on this one have described it as intense, exciting, and gripping, and I’d expect nothing less after the Gregor books.

Movie: The City of Ember
Release: October
Speaking of dystopias where a (pre-)teen girl (and a boy) saves the world, The Books of Ember are great. The movie trailer and the stills all look fantastic, and I’m a Bill Murray fan and was excited he got involved in the project. I’m actually skeptical about how well this will do in the theaters, but I will definitely see it. (And, as a double bonus, there will be a fourth Book of Ember released sometime in the fall, according to the author’s website. Score!)

So that’s my list. What’s everyone else looking forward to?