The Library's Got New Books!

Thanks so much to Nathan and Anthony for helping me when doing some end-of-the-year purchasing at Barnes and Noble last week! We've got about eighty new titles that should be on the shelves just before Spring Break.

Here's a few you might want to try:

The Sweet Far Thing by Libba Bray: This book ends the series begun in A Great and Terrible Beauty, the story of Victorian heroine Gemma Doyle and her growth to leadership and mastery in the secret and magic realm that is her birthright. While I haven't read this book yet, it's not for lack of pressure -- everyone who's read it wants everyone else to finish as soon as possible so they can discuss it.

How NOT to be Popular by Jennifer Ziegler: Sugar Magnolia - or Maggie, as she prefers - used to love her parents' rootless hippie lifestyle, and their habit of moving across the country from year to year. But as the new school year begins, she's leaving behind a best friend, a social life, even a boyfriend she was really serious about back in Portland. Brokenhearted, Maggie Dempsey decides that in Austin, her family's new destination, rather than open herself up to further pain by connecting with people, she is going to do everything she can NOT to be popular. Whatever it takes, even if that means wearing flowered plastic swim caps and Star Trek uniforms, hanging out with do-gooding losers, and turning down the hot guy who just won't leave her alone. So begins this book's comedy-movie premise, and it's a winner. Many of you were not fans of Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli. Maggie shares some of Stargirl's tactics for not fitting in, but I found it a lot easier to cheer for her than the somewhat preachy Stargirl. The reader is given plenty of reason to empathize with Maggie, and her reasons for her weirdness are much clearer and less idealized. Funny stuff, and for our male readers who might hesitate -- it's more comic than girly.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman: Gaiman may be best known to readers of this blog as 'the fella who wrote Stardust', or for the more savvy, 'the mind behind the Sandman comics'. This is perhaps his best-received book, the story of a drifter hired by a man who may or may not be Odin to participate in a war brewing between all the gods of the old world who migrated to America with their believers. It's a story that's sort of like the big brother to the Percy Jackson books, and easily one of the best fantasy novels of the last ten years. Gaiman is almost always worth a look if fantasy's your pick.

Speaking of graphic novels, both Flight and Fables are great places to start if you haven't read much in comics but would like to start. We now have both of the starting volumes of Fables, Bill Willingham's fantasy comic of displaced fairy tales living in America as refugees after a faceless Adversary drove them from the Homelands they remember. A tough (and divorced) Snow White leads Fabletown with the assistance of one Bigby Wolf (get it?), but her ex-husband Prince Charming, troublemaker Jack, and her bitter younger sister Rose Red all pose problems within the Fable community hidden just out of sight of 'Mundy' eyes. It's a story that's more Grimm Brothers than Disney - the second volume has plenty of violence, and takes its name from Orwell, after all. Flight, on the other hand, is a multi-story volume from some of the hottest new names in comics, all about different kinds of flight - from planes to rockets to kites in the sky, to the funny story of a girl who wakes up one day with wings. I've got a personal commission from one of the artists, Bill Mudron, and let me tell you - he's one of the many huge talents in this book, which is worth it just for the beautiful art alone.

Take a look!