The Teen Menu

YA News

One of the best books I've read in recent years is Marcus Zusak's The Book Thief. So it's cool news that Fox 2000 is set to begin production on a movie version this summer. Deadline.com recently reported that director Brian Percival (Downton Abbey) will direct the film.

We are a mere 13 days away from the opening of The Hunger Games in theaters. I suspect it is going to have a huge opening weekend box office take. The artists on the movie's soundtrack were recently revealed along with the video of "Safe and Sound" by Taylor Swift with The Civil Wars. Among the other artists featured are Maroon 5, The Decemberists, Miranda Lambert, Kid Cudi, and several others.

More photos from the film were recently featured on the Entertainment Weekly website. Check them out here.

And here's a cool clip in which Katniss begins to impress the Capitol bigwigs with her archery skills.

In non-Hunger Games news, Austin Butler has been cast to play male lead Sebastian Kydd in The CW's television adaptation of The Carrie Diaries. The book and show chronicle the teen years of Carrie Bradshaw of Sex in the City fame. I'll have to check this out because it's set in the '80s, and that's when I was in high school. I wonder if parachute pants will make an appearance. :)

The Pottermore site from J.K. Rowling, which will sell electronic and audio versions of the Harry Potter books, will be out of beta testing and debut to everyone in early April.

YA Review

I realized recently while going through a list of the books I read in 2011 that I read a YA at the end of the year that I neglected to review here. Ally Condie's Crossed is the second in the trilogy that began with Matched. The series is set in a dystopian world, one in which the Society chooses everything for all its citizens (jobs, clothing, what people can read and do, even who one is to marry aka their match). The Society does this in exchange for safety. But the question central to this trilogy is whether guaranteed safety is worth giving up one's ability to choose. The books' central character, Cassia, has come to believe that choice is more important, including her choice to love Ky instead of Xander, the boy the Society has chosen for her who also happens to be her best friend.

Cassia's struggle is made more difficult by the fact that Xander is her dear friend, and had she not fallen for Ky she could probably be happy with Xander. But events in Matched have sent Ky to the outer reaches of the Society, and Cassia spends a good bit of Crossed moving from one work station to another in attempt to eventually get transferred to the area where she believes Ky to be. Even when they are eventually reunited, there is no time to rejoice. They're on the run, fleeing the Society and seeking out two different groups -- one a group of farmers that live in the canyons that Ky heard about as a child before his parents' deaths, another a group of rebels whose aim is to fight the Society and what it stands for.

Reached, the final book in the trilogy, is set to release in November. I'm curious to see how Condie wraps up the story and what will be the eventual fate for Cassia, Ky, Xander and the Society.
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Pardon me for a bit of self-promo. I just wanted to announce that my new paranormal YA novel, White Witch, is now available from Bell Bridge Books. It's the first in the Coven trilogy about Jax Pherson, who flees her dark witch coven in pursuit of a normal teenage life. This book, originally titled Coven, won RWA's Golden Heart award in the Young Adult category in 2007.

Stock Up Saturday Reviews

Wrangled and Tangled
Book 3, Blackstop Cowboys Series

by Lorelei James
Publisher: NAL Trade
Release Date: November 1, 2011


Wrangled and Tangled is two love stories in one novel. While in most cases it is difficult to have two couples be the star of one book, Ms. James does a fantastic job of keeping the reader interested in both couples.

Janie Fitzbugh and Abe Lawson married at an early age. Instead of growing together, the two grew apart. Janie’s hopes for her marriage were not the reality of their day to day life, so she packed up her stuff and left Muddy Gap, Wyoming. Eight years later, Janie has returned to the rural town to work in the new resort. When Abe and Janie see each other again, the sparks begin to fly and before long those warm, tender feelings resurface. Abe’s love for Janie never diminished over the years of her absence and now that Janie is back in town, Abe is hoping to convince her they need to be a lifetime couple only this time Abe is going to be tell her exactly what he wants … especially in the bedroom.

Renner Jackson has opened his own ranch and resort in Muddy Gap. As a part of his deal with an investor, Renner has agreed to have an onsite representative of the investor though Renner never thought it would be the rich investor’s daughter. Tierney Pratt has had it with her all-business father. After dear daddy passed Tierney over for a huge promotion, she took an on-site representative job to get away from Chicago and her father. But when rough and tough Renner goes head to head with accountant pencil pusher Tierney, their first meeting is not good. But as we all know, there is a fine line between love and hate and these two dance across that line quite well. I think the passion between these two is smokin’ hot. There is one scene with a desk, a chair, and an unwanted guest that will surprise you … in a good way.

If you are looking for a few hours of escape and would like to spend it with some sexy Montana cowboys, then this book is just for you!

~ Buffie

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Kiss of Frost
Mythos Academy, Book 2
By Jennifer Estep
Publisher: K-Teen (Kensington)
Release Date: December 1, 2011


At Mythos Academy, teen warriors in the making train to take up their roles protecting humankind. With her snarky, self-deprecating voice and strange gift of psychometry – the ability to know an object’s history just by touching it – Gwen Frost is an outsider both to the students of the Academy and the rest of the world. But now that she’s taking private tutoring with the Academy’s most notorious young Spartan, and has Nike’s own sword to protect her, she’s ready to make her mark…


Kiss of Frost picks up shortly after where Touch of Frost (Book 1) left off. (Read my review here if you need a little backstory). Gwen still feels incredibly out of place at Mythos Academy, amongst the pampered, rich teen warriors. She's just that "Gypsy girl" without any super cool strength and speed like the Spartans, Amazons, Valkyries, and Vikings that populate Mythos Academy. Talk about feeling awkward! Add to that the fact that she's crushing on Logan Quinn, the dark and sexy Spartan who's is training her in combat skills, and that she's the target of every Reaper of Chaos---Gwen has more angst and stress than your average teen.

The whole school is headed up in the mountains for Winter Carnival, a weekend of skiing, fun, frolic, and serious partying. Gwen really doesn't want to go, but her best friend (and Valkyrie), Daphne convinces her to go. Maybe a few days away from Mythos is a good idea. Surely the Reapers won't bother to follow her. Not only is someone still trying to kill Gwen, but there's also a killer Fenrir wolf all too eager to make her his afternoon snack. Even the very hunky new boy, Preston, that she meets can't make her forget all that. Looks like it's time to put her new fighting skills to the test. But will Gwen emerge the victor or die trying?

Jennifer Estep has created a world full of myth, action, a little romance, a lot of raging hormones. Gwen Frost is someone most of can relate to. Who hasn't felt a little awkward at some point during their teen years? But she knows who she is: smart, tough, loyal, and sweetly vulnerable. The Mythos Academy series is great young adult reading, but I'd recommend it for about 14 and up for some of the content. It is best to read the series in order, beginning with Touch of Frost---Jennifer also has a prequel, First Frost---so you can experience Gwen's time at Mythos Academy from day one. Dark Frost, book three in the series, is scheduled for release in June 2012. Young adult books aren't just for the young; I'd recommend them for the rest of us grown ups, too.

~ Gannon

The Teen Menu

It's here, release month for the first part of the movie version of Breaking Dawn. Chances are if you haven't seen some reference to it (trailers, magazine covers, etc.), you've been spelunking in a cave for weeks.

YA News

This isn't particularly YA-related, but it is important to many of us who have been readers for as long as we can remember. This month, Reading is Fundamental (RIF) celebrated its 45th anniversary. I can distinctly remember how excited I was whenever the RIF book fair came to my school each year. All those awesome new books fostered my love of reading which continues today.

Entertainment Weekly's website has some awesome new character posters from the upcoming Hunger Games movie. They're simple, and I think that's what makes them so beautiful. You see Katniss, Peeta, Gale, Rue, Haymitch, Cinna, Cato and Effie in profile.

YA Review

This month I finished reading Fury of the Phoenix, the sequel to Cindy Pon's wonderful Silver Phoenix: Beyond the Kingdom of Xia, which I reviewed here previously. In Fury, the heroine, Ai Ling, leaves Xia (based on ancient China) and stows away on a ship bound for the faraway land of Jiang Dao because she believes the boy she cares deeply about, Chen Yong, who is on board, is in serious danger. When Chen Yong and the ship's crew discover her, she and Chen Yong have to pose as brother and sister. Though that allows her to be close to Chen Yong, it's difficult to hide her true feelings from those around them.

They are on the way to Jiang Dao in search of Chen Yong's birth father, so this book has that same sense of adventure-on-the-road that Silver Phoenix had. It had less overall action and excitement, but it still kept me turning the pages to figure out exactly what was going on with the alternating stories. We had Ai Ling and Chen Yong's present story, but we also got to see the past of Zhong Ye, the ruthless man Ai Ling had been forced to marry and who she sent to the underworld. We see that he wasn't always so, that there was a reason he grew hard and cruel, a reason that Ai Ling has had unexplained powers that have allowed her to look into others' minds and control them.

Along with the unraveling of these mysteries, the relationship between Ai Ling and Chen Yong continues to grow, but not without its bumpy patches.

The Teen Menu

Welcome to another helping of the Teen Menu, offering up monthly news and reviews from the world of young adult fiction.

News

We finally have a teaser trailer for The Hunger Games, which premiered during the recent MTV Movie Awards. Take a look.



The Hollywood Reporter has a slideshow of photos from Breaking Dawn, Part 1 on its site. Click here to take a look.

The CW television network is looking at possibly acquiring the rights to produce a TV series based on Candace Bushnell's The Carrie Diaries, the younger-skewing prequel to Sex and the City.

Review

I've always been a fan of survival stories, whether it's The Swiss Family Robinson or The Day After Tomorrow. Trapped by Michael Northrop is more like the latter than the former. Narrated by a 15-year-old boy, it's the story of how he and five of his classmates survive (or don't) when they are trapped in their rural New England high school by the biggest Nor'easter blizzard to ever hit the region. We know from the beginning of the book that not everyone comes out of the experience alive, so this gives the book an edge-of-your-seat quality. I read each page wondering if it held clues to who would perish.

When the storm first hits, the four boys and two girls aren't all that worried. After all, they've seen big snows before. But as the snow continues to fall day after day without ceasing, quickly burying the lower level access to their school, they begin to think they might truly be in trouble. Things just get worse as the power goes out, then the heat, and cell phone service. They are thrust firmly into survival mode.

Compared to a lot of the YA books I read, this was a quick read. And for those of you who are looking for YA that appeals to boys, add Trapped to your list.

The Teen Menu

Sorry to have missed sharing a Teen Menu post last month, but I had an unexpected death in the family and was unable to pull together a post. But I'm back this month with a review and some interesting YA news.

YA News

This is a bit of older news, but I've been out of the loop and just saw it a few days ago. Jamie Campbell-Bower, who plays Volturi member Caius in the Twilight movies and had the lead role of Arthur in the one-season series Camelot, has been cast as Jace in the upcoming The Mortal Instruments movie. The funny thing about this is I found out literally minutes after I saw a picture of Jamie and his fiance, Bonnie Wright (Ginny Weasley in the Harry Potter movies), together and thought they'd make a great Clary and Jace. The role of Clary has already gone to Lily Collins, however. See author Cassandra Clare's blog post on the casting choice for more information and her take on Jamie.

Lise Haines' Girl in the Arena, about a modern-day teenage gladiator, has been optioned for TV by actress Charlize Theron and Denver and Delilah Productions.

A vast array of media rights to Sherrilyn Kenyon's works were recently acquired by Amber Entertainment. First to go into film production is her Chronicles of Nick YA series.

Sad that the Harry Potter books and movies are now over? Never fear! Author J.K. Rowling is launching a new site called Pottermore in October which will be full of Harry Potter-related content and will be the exclusive place to buy digital copies of the Harry Potter books. Beware if you see any offers to sell you access to the site. Scammers are taking advantage of Harry Potter fans by trying to sell bogus access when the site will be free to all when it fully launches. To stay up on Pottermore news and see a video message from Rowling, visit the Pottermore site.

Entertainment Weekly recently did a feature story on the guys in The Hunger Games movie -- Josh Hutcherson as Peeta and Liam Hemsworth as Gale. Check out the pictures here.

And check out the wickedly cool motion poster for the movie here. Yes, I'm counting down to this movie.

Even more Hunger Games news! Lionsgate has already announced the release date for the movie adaptation of the second movie in the trilogy, Catching Fire. It will hit theaters Nov. 22, 2013. As a reminder The Hunger Games releases March 23, 2012 -- months and counting.

YA Review

The City of Fallen Angels by Cassandra Clare is the fourth in her popular The Mortal Instruments series. The first three books in the series had the arc of a trilogy, leading up to the confrontation with the big baddie in the third, City of Glass. But just because that particular battle is over, don't think things are going to go swimmingly for Clary and Jace, the main focus of the series, and their friends, Alec, Isabelle, Simon, Maia and Magnus. There are still battles to be fought, foes to face, and complicated feelings to work through.

In this fourth installment, we get to see more about Simon, Clary's best friend who has gone from geeky boy in a crappy garage band to geeky vampire in a crappy garage band. Simon is dealing with what it means to be a vampire and how he can't ignore it anymore, hoping it'll magically go away. Oh, and there are some mysterious people who evidently want to kill him for some reason. Maybe it's because he's the only Daylighter, a vampire who can go out in the daytime.

And someone is killing Shadowhunters, the angel-human hybrids who protect the world from demons and keep peace among Downworlders (vampires, werewolves, warlocks and fairies). Just when you think you know who and why, another twist in the story proves you wrong. As layer upon layer of the story is revealed, I found myself turning the pages faster and faster to find out what was going to happen next and where Clare was going to end this particular installment. As I expected, it was at a point that left me wanting the next one immediately.