The girl is a necromancer--not the sexiest supernatural power to have, and kind of scary until you figure out what's what. After an incident at her performing arts high school, protagonist Chloe finds herself remanded to a group home for troubled teens.
A delegation of librarians, archivists, and other library workers will travel to Palestine in the summer of 2013. We will connect with our colleagues in library- and archive-related projects and institutions there, applying our experience in the form of skillshares and other types of joint work. We will travel as truth-seekers and information-skeptics, eager to dispense with the superficial and inaccurate portrayals of life in Israel/Palestine that we see in the west and to learn about the realities of life under occupation and apartheid. As library workers, we support access to information, and recognize that this goes in more than one direction. Our trip will shed light on how Palestinian voices and information about Palestine reach us (or do not) and how Palestinian people access (or cannot access) information. We will bear witness to the destruction and appropriation of information, and support efforts to preserve cultural heritage and archival materials in Palestine. Upon return to our communities, we will share what we have seen, apply what we have learned, publicize projects we have visited, and otherwise break down barriers to access in any way we can.
I only made it about halfway through this novel about a midwestern girl making it big in World War II era Hollywood. It reads like a biography of someone who should be interesting, but isn't.
Vampires, werewolves, elves and lawyers are the dangerous creatures in this new series by Phillipa Bornikova (a pen name, so readers don't get confused between this and Snodgrass's sf novels). It's a fine read, though sometimes surprisingly amateurish for such a veteran writer. There are also typos and misspellings that the editors should have caught, like George M. "Cohen" for "Cohan" and "vise" for "vice," or the overuse of the word "saliva." (Four times denoting the narrator's hunger "Saliva burst in my mouth..." and only once a vampire's fangs.) So not to seem entirely petty, let me say that I like the protagonist because she's short.
My holds hadn't come in, so I grabbed this book from the YA shelf at the Tompkins Square branch of NYPL because I remembered the name Susan Beth Pfeffer from reading her YA books when I actually was a young adult. Weirdly the book didn't list all of her earlier works, just one recent publication, so I wasn't sure I had the person I remembered. I was shaky on her name and thought maybe Susan was the daughter of the Someone Beth Pfeffer I was thinking of. The Wikipedia page I viewed today didn't indicate any of the works I remembered either, but with a little digging, I found that she is indeed the author of classics like Marly the Kid, The Beauty Queen and Starring Peter and Leigh, none of which has a science fiction theme, btw.
When we first meet Mary Ann Singleton in Tales of the City, she's just moved to San Francisco from Ohio. She is naive and a bit of a ninny. There are eight TofC books, and although Mary Ann seems to be beloved by the author, truthfully, she's rather annoying. In book or two before Mary Ann in Autumn she's even worse--a self-centered, self-involved climber who abandons her friends and child. Still, Maupin gives her a chance at redemption.
A Toronto ex-cop with night blindness and decreasing peripheral vision, turned private investigator, finds herself hunting a demon. It's a compellingy told first entry in a vampire series. My only complaint is that there were some weird typos and spelling mistakes, e.g., MacDonald's for McDonald's and I Dream of Genie instead of Jeannie. I'm pissy like that, though.
