No and Me – Delphine de Vigan

Lou is a shy, thirteen year old girl with an IQ of 160 who is two years ahead of her age-group at school. For a class presentation Lou picks homeless teenagers as her topic. When Lou meets No, an older girl living on the streets of Paris, a friendship develops between the two girls. Driven by a strong sense of justice, Lou decides to try to help No and convinces her parents to allow No to move in with them. No’s presence has a powerful impact on her family, which has been quietly falling apart after the death of her baby sister. But can there be a happily ever after ending to this story?

An insightful novel tackling the true meaning of home and homelessness

Wordchasing

Look Into My Eyes (Ruby Redfort, #1) – Lauren Child

A modern Nancy Drew, Ruby Redfort is ready for whatever the spy world has to offer her when a secret agency comes into her seemingly ordinary world. Although she might seem so on the surface, she is not your usual seventh-grader: she is highly intelligent, loves solving puzzles and can pretty much outsmart all of the adults around her. Mind you, it’s not hard with her parents – airhead socialites, although the family butler is another story. Ruby is a creation out of Lauren Child’s highly popular Clarice Bean series, and is a highly enjoyable mystery filled with suspense.

Barnes & Noble

A monster calls – Patrick Ness

The monster showed up after midnight. As they do. But it isn’t the monster Conor’s been expecting. He’s been expecting the one from his nightmare, the one he’s had nearly every night since his mother started her treatments for cancer. The monster outside his window is different. It’s ancient. And wild. And it wants the most dangerous thing of all from Conor. It wants the truth.

Stark black and white illustrations reflect Connor’s anguish as he struggles with his fears and the progression of his mother’s illness.

From the final idea of award-winning author Siobhan Dowd — whose premature death from cancer prevented her from writing it herself — Patrick Ness has spun a haunting novel of life and loss, and monsters both real and imagined.

Watch the book trailer

Full of words

The Help – Kathryn Stockett

Minny, Abilene and Skeeter don’t seem to have much in common – especially in the Mississippi of 1962 where race relations are still strained. Skeeter has come home after graduating from University and her mother is just desperate for her to be married. Skeeter, however, is more concerned about where her beloved maid Constantine has disappeared to, and she starts to investigate what life is actually like as a black maid – using Minny and Abilene as her clandestine subjects. An extraordinary story about women’s lives and the rules to which they are forced to conform.

Kathryn Stockett

The Invention of Hugo Cabret – B. Selznick

At 533 pages this is hardly your usual picture book, but this novel is littered with beautiful images which help to tell its tale. Inspired by a pioneering French film-maker, the protagonist is Hugo: an orphan who survives each day by clinging to hope, a hope that one day he can complete the work started by his father. To fix a mechanical man (an automaton) left behind by his father, Hugo is forced to steal parts from a local toy store and is led into a world he never knew existed. A modern fairytale of sorts, this is an uplifting story with a dreamlike style which clearly evokes life in an earlier Paris for readers.

Goodreads

Into the Wild (Warriors #1) – E. Hunter

After four generations, the ThunderClan Cats are in grave danger. With a traitor hidden in their midst, the warrior code laid down by their ancestors is being threatened. The last thing Rusty, a young house cat, expects is to be invited to join this group of feral cats, but he does – and is renamed ‘Firepaw’. Rusty has to learn the ways of the wild, hunting and fighting, and how to survive a turf war. Sometimes violent, but always action-packed, if you love animal adventures you are sure to enjoy this series!

Goodreads

The Capture (Guardians of Ga’hoole, Book 1) – K. Lasky

Soren is a young barn owl whose life seems quite idyllic, as he participates in coming-of-age rituals and enjoys legends about the knightly Guardians of Ga’Hoole, owls “who would rise each night into the blackness and perform noble deeds.” That is, until he ‘falls’ out of the family nest … pushed by his older brother. Before he can worry too much about his fate, though, he is snatched up and taken to the St. Aegolius Academy for Orphaned owls. However, all is not well at the academy as Soren quickly realises that there is something evil and menacing going on, and that it links to sinister events across the entire Owl kingdom. Soren needs to live up to the legends of the knightly Guardians, and perform his own great deeds – if he is to have any hope of surviving.

The Perks of being a Wallflower – Stephen Chbosky

This coming-of-age novel charts Charlie’s attempts to navigate his way through high school. Aged fifteen, Charlie is intelligent but also shy and socially awkward: this doesn’t make his life easy. Charlie is likeable, sensitive and emotional, and he isn’t dealing well with a lot of the issues life has thrown at him. This novel will make you laugh and cry, as Charlie makes his way through this uncharted territory.

Inside a dog

Words in the dust – Trent Reedy

A portrait of Afghanistan through the eyes of one brave girl, Zulaikha.  She hopes for peace, now that the Taliban have been driven from Afghanistan; a good relationship with her difficult stepmother; and one day even to go to school, or to have her cleft palate fixed. In the meantime, with the support of her father and sister, Zulaikha knows all will be provided for her — “Inshallah,” God willing.  Then she meets Meena, who offers to teach her Afghan poetry, and the Americans come to their village, promising not just new opportunities and dangers, but surgery to fix her face. These changes could mean a whole new life for Zulaikha.

Inspired by a girl whom the author met in Afghanistan, this is not only a fascinating portrait of life in a country we hear about, yet rarely see from inside.

Fluttering butterflies

The Convent – Maureen McCarthy

Peach is nineteen and pretty happy with the way things are. She has her university work, two wildly different best friends, her sister, Stella, to look after and a broken heart to mend. But when she takes a summer job at a cafe at the Abbotsford convent, her idea of who she is takes a sharp turn into the past. Where once there were nuns, young girls and women who had fallen on hard times, Peach discovers secrets from three generations of her family. As their stories are revealed, Peach is jolted out of her comfort zone. But does she really want to know who she is? This absorbing novel shows in vivid detail how fate and the choices we make ripple and reverberate through time.

Inside a dog

Wonder – R J Palacio

It’s not easy to be the new kid at school, and for Auggie Pullman starting fifth grade at Beecher Prep it’s a bit harder. Inside, Auggie feels like just a normal kid but all other people seem to see is his face. Born with a serious facial deformity, his move into a mainstream school seems fraught with challenges – he just wants his new classmates to see him for who he is, but will they? This is a novel that will make you both laugh and cry.

The Telegraph

Agent 21 – Chris Ryan

Zac Darke is left alone when his parents are killed in an unexplained mass murder in Lagos, a dangerous city in Africa. Approached by a mysterious man claiming to work for an unnamed government agency, Zac becomes Agent 21 … but there is no explanation of what happened to the twenty agents before him. Sent undercover, Zac is soon part of a world he had no idea existed.

YA Book Reads

Cinder (Lunar Chronicles #1) – Marissa Meyer

This is not the Cinderella of the old fairy tale! This Cinder lives in a crowded, imagined Beijing of the future – filled with humans and cyborgs, they face plagues and attacks from an agressive lunar people. Lihn Cinder is a gifted mechanic, but she’s also a cyborg and a second class citizen, hated by her step-mother and step-sisters. But when the heir to the throne, Prince Kai, steps into her workshop one afternoon her whole life changes track and she is caught up in an inter-galactic struggle, which requires her to find out the truth about her own mysterious past.

RonReads

The Iron King (The Iron Fey #1) – Julia Kagawa

A mixture of faery lore, magic, adventure and romance, this first novel in ‘The Iron Fey’ series follows what happens when Meghan Chase discovers her four-year-old brother is a changeling on her sixteenth birthday. But this is only the first in a series of revelations! Her best friend, Robbie, turns out to actually be Shakespeare’s mischevious Puck (from A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and he is her guardian as they travel into the faery world to save her young brother. Meghan also turns out to be the daughter of powerful King Oberon and is thus a princess in the Unseelie Court. However, Meghan and Puck underestimate the magical powers they will be faced with in their action-packed quest – powers that could destroy the entire magical world.

Gripped into books!