Beckys Book Reviews: Favorites of 2008 (middle grade & YA Fiction)
Discover Becky's top middle grade and YA fiction picks of 2008! Explore her favorite book reviews and recommendations for young readers and teens.
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Shooting the Moon
by Frances O'Roark Dowell
When her brother is sent to fight in Vietnam, twelve-year-old Jamie begins to reconsider the army world that she has grown up in.
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The Dead and the Gone
by Susan Beth Pfeffer
After a meteor hits the moon and sets off a series of horrific climate changes, seventeen-year-old Alex Morales must take care of his sisters alone in the chaos of New York City.
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The Adoration of Jenna Fox
by Mary E. Pearson
In the not-too-distant future, when biotechnological advances have made synthetic bodies and brains possible but illegal, a seventeen-year-old girl, recovering from a serious accident and suffering from memory lapses, learns a startling secret about her existence.
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Girl, Hero
by Carrie Jones
Dangerous men swirl around Lily's needy mother and traumatized older sister, and Lily wishes for someone to stand up and take charge, someone strong just like her movie hero, John Wayne. Writing letters to the dead screen legend, Lily struggles to find someone to believe in, ultimately finding a hero inside herself.
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The Underneath
by Kathi Appelt
An old hound that has been chained up at his hateful owner's run-down shack, and two kittens born underneath the house, endure separation, danger, and many other tribulations in their quest to be reunited and free.
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Sweethearts
by Sara Zarr
After losing her soul mate, Cameron, when they were nine, Jennifer, now seventeen, transformed herself from the unpopular fat girl into the beautiful and popular Jenna, but Cameron's unexpected return dredges up memories that cause both social and emotional turmoil.
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Perfect You
by Elizabeth Scott
Kate Brown's life has gone downhill fast. Her father has quit his job to sell vitamins at the mall, and Kate is forced to work with him. Her best friend has become popular, and now she acts like Kate's invisible. And then there's Will. Gorgeous, unattainable Will, whom Kate acts like she can't stand even though she can't stop thinking about him. When Will starts acting interested, Kate hates herself for wanting him when she's sure she's just his latest conquest. Kate figures that the only way things will ever stop hurting so much is if she keeps to herself and stops caring about anyone or anything. What she doesn't realize is that while life may not always be perfect, good things can happen -- but only if she lets them....
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Primavera
by Mary Jane Beaufrand
Growing up in Renaissance Italy, Flora sees her family's fortunes ebb, but encounters with the artist Botticelli and the guidance of her nurse teach her to look past the material world to the beauty already in her life.
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Greetings from Nowhere
by Barbara O'Connor
In North Carolina's Great Smoky Mountains, a troubled boy and his mother, a happy family seeking adventure, a man and his lonely daughter, and the widow who must sell the run-down motel that has been her home for decades, meet and are transformed by their shared experiences.
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Good Enough
by Paula Yoo
Paula Yoo scores big in her hilarious debut novel about an overachiever who longs to fit in and strives to stand out. The pressure is on! How to make your Korean parents happy: 1. Get a perfect score on the SATs. 2. Get into HarvardYalePrinceton. 3. Don't talk to boys.* Patti's parents expect nothing less than the best from their Korean-American daughter. Everything she does affects her chances of getting into an Ivy League school. So winning assistant concertmaster in her All-State violin competition and earning less than 2300 on her SATs is simply not good enough. But Patti's discovering that there's more to life than the Ivy League. To start with, there's Cute Trumpet Guy. He's funny, he's talented, and he looks exactly like the lead singer of Patti's favorite band. Then, of course, there's her love of the violin. Not to mention cool rock concerts. And anyway, what if Patti doesn't want to go to HarvardYalePrinceton after all? *Boys will distract you from your studies.
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The Latent Powers of Dylan Fontaine
by April Lurie
Fifteen-year-old Dylan's friend Angie is making a film about him while he is busy trying to keep his older brother from getting caught with drugs, to deal with his mother having left the family, and to figure out how to get Angie to think of him as more than just a friend.
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Climbing the Stairs
by Padma Venkatraman
In India, in 1941, when her father becomes brain-damaged in a non-violent protest march, fifteen-year-old Vidya and her family are forced to move in with her father's extended family and become accustomed to a totally different way of life.
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A la Carte
by Tanita S. Davis
Lainey, a high school senior and aspiring celebrity chef, is forced to question her priorities after her best friend (and secret crush) runs away from home.
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Artichoke's Heart
by Suzanne Supplee
While working in her mother's beauty shop where all the best town's gossip flies free, Rosemary Goode becomes determined to lose the weight that seems to be an all too common topic and starts keeping a journal to record the year-long experience in achieving her goals, her relationships with others, and her feelings about life in her tight-knit Southern community.
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No Cream Puffs
by Karen Day
In 1980, when twelve-year-old Madison, who loves to play baseball, decides to play in her town's baseball league, she never envisions the uproar it causes when she becomes the first girl to join.
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Living Dead Girl
by Elizabeth Scott
Once upon a time, I was a little girl who disappeared. Once upon a time, my name was not Alice. Once upon a time, I didn't know how lucky I was. When Alice was ten, Ray took her away from her family, her friends -- her life. She learned to give up all power, to endure all pain. She waited for the nightmare to be over. Now Alice is fifteen and Ray still has her, but he speaks more and more of her death. He does not know it is what she longs for. She does not know he has something more terrifying than death in mind for her. This is Alice's story. It is one you have never heard, and one you will never, ever forget.
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Found
by Margaret Peterson Haddix
Thirteen-year-old Jonah has always known that he was adopted, and he's never thought it was any big deal. Then he and a new friend, Chip, who's also adoped, begin receiving mysterious letters. The first one says, "You are one of the missing." The second one says, "Beware! They're coming back to get you." Jonah, Chip, and Jonah's sister, Katherine, are plunged into a mystery that involves the FBI, a vast smuggling operation, an airplane that appeared out of nowhere -- and people who seem to appear and disappear at will. The kids discover they are caught in a battle between two opposing forces that want very different things for Jonah and Chip's lives. Do Jonah and Chip have any choice in the matter? And what should they choose when both alternatives are horrifying? With Found, Margaret Peterson Haddix begins a new series that promises to be every bit as suspenseful as her Shadow Children series -- which has sold more than 41/2 million copies -- and proves her, once again, to be a master of the page-turner.
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Zombie Blondes
by Brian James
From the moment Hannah Sanders arrived in town, she felt there was something wrong. A lot of houses were for sale, and the town seemed infected by an unearthly quiet. And then, on Hannah’s first day of classes, she ran into a group of cheerleaders—the most popular girls in school. The odd thing was that they were nearly identical in appearance: blonde, beautiful, and deathly pale. But Hannah wants desperately to fit in—regardless of what her friend Lukas is telling her: if she doesn’t watch her back, she’s going to be blonde and popular and dead—just like all the other zombies in this town. . . .
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Something Wicked
by Alan Gratz
In a contemporary story based on Shakespeare's play, Macbeth, Horatio Wilkes seeks to solve the murder of Duncan MacKae at the Scottish Highland Games in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.
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The Ghost's Child
by Sonya Hartnett
When a mysterious child appears in her living room one day, the elderly Maddy tells him the story of her love for the wild and free-spirited Feather, who tried but failed to live a conventional life with her, and her search for him on a fantastical voyage across the seas.