Library News

Check out the following books, that are here the Holdrum Middle School Library:

It doesn't take long for Tara Brennan to realize that breaking into school to steal a goat while wielding a can of pepper spray is not a good idea. As punishment for her misdeed, Tara's parents send her to the sleepy little town of Willow Falls to stay with relatives she hardly knows, including her eleven-year-old cousin Emily, who, the last time they were together, ate an entire stick of glue. Tara quickly learns that Emily isn't even remotely the strangest person in town. There's a boy who sings in the bottom of an empty pool, two best friends who use blackboards to Communicate (Amanda and Leo from 11 BIRTHDAYS), and a green-eyed girl who mayor may notbe dating the world's hottest teen movie star (Rory from FINALLY)

Due to another huge lapse in judgment, Tara finds herself beholden to perhaps the strangest person of all: Angelina D'Angelo. If Tara can't collect thirteen mysterious objects for the old woman in time for her rapidly approaching thirteenth birthday, the consequences will be REALLY BAD. Like losing-her- immortal-soul kind of bad. And that's just for starters! Tara's adventures take her and her new friends to places they'd never thought they'd find, some in the real world, and a lot deep inside themselves.

With a big dose of birthday magic, 13 Gifts will make readers laugh, think, and possibly even hum a show tune or two. Because, in Willow Falls, anything's possible, and nothing is as it seems.

In Beatrice Priors dystopian Chicago world, society is pided into five factions, each dedicated to the cultivation of a particular virtueCandor (the honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), and Erudite (the intelligent). On an appointed day of every year, all sixteen-year-olds must select the faction to which they will devote the rest of their lives. For Beatrice, the decision is between staying with her family and being who she really isshe cant have both. So she makes a choice that surprises everyone, including herself.

During the highly competitive initiation that follows, Beatrice renames herself Tris, and struggles alongside her fellow initiates to live out the choice they have made. Together, they must undergo extreme physical tests of endurance and intense psychological simulations, some with devastating consequences. As initiation transforms them all, Tris must determine who her friends really areand where, exactly, a romance with a sometimes-fascinating, sometimes-exasperating boy fits into the life shes chosen. But Tris also has a secret: one shes kept hidden from everyone, because shes been warned it can mean death. And as she discovers unrest and growing conflict that threatens to unravel her seemingly-perfect society, she also learns that her secret might be what helps her save those she loves . . . or it might be what destroys her.

Tangerine, Floridaonce known for its citrus grovesis now an uninhabitable quagmire of muck fires and school-swallowing sinkholes. Still, twelve-year-old Paul sees the move as a way to start anew, maybe even make a name for himself in middle school soccerdespite his fathers obsession with his high-school-age brother Eriks future in football. Paul is visually impaired (without his Coke bottle glasses), but its everyone else who seems to be blind to Eriks dangerous nature.

After the grisly murder of his entire family, a toddler wanders into a graveyard where the ghosts and other supernatural residents agree to raise him as one of their own.

Nobody Owens, known to his friends as Bod, is a normal boy. He would be completely normal if he didn't live in a sprawling graveyard, being raised and educated by ghosts, with a solitary guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor of the dead. There are dangers and adventures in the graveyard for a boy. But if Bod leaves the graveyard, then he will come under attack from the man Jackwho has already killed Bod's family . . .