All summer you can get free audio downloads of YA contemporary and classic titles from this amazing program called SYNC: Sync YA literature into your earphones.  The program is sponsored by audiobook publishers and Audio File Magazine.   Their goal is to introduce teens to listening to audio books by giving away two books each week all summer.

Details:  Each book is only available for download for one week, but can then be listened to when you want.  The downloads are in the MP3 format , compatible with both Macs and PCs.  The titles are downloaded through the Overdrive Media Console app, the same one used by the Berkeley Public library for audio and e-books.  Although the first download is a little tricky, it’s easy once you get the hang of it.  (The beauty part is that then you can use it to get e-books for your smart phone, iPad or computer using the same app!)  The weekly downloads will be a pair of related current YA and classic novels.  You can also  sign up at their website for for text or email reminders when new books are available for free download.  Could it be any easier???

Schedule of SYNC Downloads

photo by Lizard10979 on Flickr

Sad to say, but yesterday was the last book review for this school year. (Don’t worry, I As all books are due back the library on Friday (May 25, 2012), it only makes sense not to tempt with with titles you can’t checkout until the fall.

However, I will be posting to the blog over the summer.  Tomorrow I’ll tell you how to get some free audiobooks to listen to courtesy of a program called SYNC.  I’ll also be posting about YA titles coming out, movies that might be of teen interest, YA author gossip, and author event around the Bay Area.  If there is anything in particular you would like to hear about, just drop me an email at alexandraprovence@berkeley.net.

Zahra’s Paradise by Amir and Khalil

Readers who appreciated Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi will be taken in by this story.  It is a fictionalized account of what happened to one young man who protested in Tehran during the 2009 Green Revolution in Iran.  Mehdi has disappeared during the street protests, and we watch as his mother and our narrator, a blogger, search everywhere for him.  They start with his friends, check the morgue, try to check the infamous prison named Kahrizak, and even Tehran’s largest cemetery, Zahra’s Paradise.  In essence, this is a story of the most recent human rights abuses in Iran.  The writers do not pretend to be impartial, and lambast the Iranian government time and again.  No matter what one thinks about Iran or the Middle East, this story of a family searching for its son will wrench your heart.

This soft revolution was made famous throughout the world by its participants using their cell phones to record the events then post them immediately on YouTube.  Millions of citizens took to the streets of Tehran to protest the results of the presidential election, calling them fraudulent.  During the riots that took place, thousands of people were arrested, beaten,  and/or imprisoned, and dozens more were killed.  The book blends fiction with real people and events, like the killing of Neda Agha Soltan near the ironically named Freedom Square. The authors have also enhanced the book by including a number of sections after the story itself, to further explain the Green Revolution while giving historical context.  Readers will find these and the brief glossary of Farsi terms especially helpful in understanding this precursor to Arab Spring.  I very much recommend this book to high school readers, especially those with an interest in human rights, the Middle East and Iran.

Starters by Lissa Price

Thanks to the Spore Wars, Callie and her seven-year-old brother Tyler have lost both their parents and are now “unclaimed minors,” living in abandoned buildings with their friend Michael.  They’re just barely able to stay alive, but the most pressing problem is that Tyler is sick, and Callie needs money for healthy food and a warm home for them.  Out of desperation, she visits a secret company called Prime Destinations, which she heard about from a boy in their building.  The company rents the bodies of teens (Starters) to aged people (Enders) so the older “renters” can experience life as a young and healthy teenager again. This is the only way she sees to save her brother, so Callie reluctantly agrees to be a donor, signing a contract for the minimun of three rentals.  However, something goes wrong in her last rental, and she regains consciousness only to realize that her Ender renter plans to have her murder someone!

This book contains lots of plot twists and turns, which I’m sure will engage most teen readers.  Right up until the end, we’re not sure about the supposedly evil owner of Prime Destinations everyone calls the “old man.”  While I didn’t like this book as much as  I had expected to, it was a quick read that will become popular among our dystopia and science fiction fans.  The second book called Enders is due out in December of 2012.

Here’s a video book trailer you can watch from home:

The Dangerous Days of Daniel X  by James Patterson

Since he heard a bad alien kill his parents when he was only 3 years fold, Daniel X has been tracking bad aliens on earth. He’s finding them from the list his parents refused to give the alien who killed them. Daniel has learned his parents were alien hunters, and is beginning to suspect both his mother and father were aliens. Of course, that means Daniel would be an alien too! Now that he’s a teenager Daniel uses powers he’s been developing to keep up the hunt, but now Ergent Seth, the alien he’s looking for, sends messages that he’s coming after Daniel!

The action never stops in this adventure, all 92 chapters, some of which are only 1-1/2 pages long. The author, James Patterson, also writes the Maximum Ride series, and he promises more Daniel X adventures.

Review by Ms. Goldstein-Erickson

Ultraviolet by R.J. Anderson

When sixteen-year-old Alison wakes up in a mental hospital, she truly believes she made the most popular girl at her private school “disintegrate” and die.  She saw this with her own eyes, and has already confessed to it numerous times to both her parents and the police.  But Tori’s body was never found, and you can’t just make another person disappear into thin air, right?  Despite all logic, Alison believes she has killed Tori and that it’s somehow connected to her extraordinary sensory abilities, that allow her to taste colors and see sounds.  Her mother has always believed that Alison is mentally damaged in some way, and has always kept an emotional distance between the two of them.  And now she acts like she’s afraid of her own daughter, hardly even visits the hospital, and eventually refuses to allow her to come home out of fear for her younger brother’s safety.  It’s not until Alison meets Dr. Farady, that she learns she has an actual condition called synesthesia, and that maybe she’s not crazy after all.

This book is full of plot twists and surprises, and will keep readers enthralled and on their toes to keep up.  While I found the ending a little disappointing, I think many readers will love this title because Alison is drawn so skillfully by Anderson, that one is quickly pulled into her world.  I recommend this to teen girls, especially fans of paranormal romance.

The Off Season by Catherine Gilbert Murdock

After playing varsity linebacker in her school’s opening football game and scoring a touchdown on an interception, DJ Schwenk starts the school year feeling upbeat. But after People magazine publishes an article about her, all the attention embarrasses her. A shoulder injury in football puts her basketball season in danger, especially since her only chance of affording college will be on an athletic scholarship. All these problems become minor when her brother Win, in college on a football scholarship, is badly injured. DJ keeps Win company in the hospital and rehab. Trying to lift his spirits becomes DJ’s fulltime job until her parents get some help for the family’s farm and can join Win and DJ. As the family adjusts to what has become their “new normal,” their relationships shift to accommodate everyone’s new roles.

Ms. Murdock makes DJ such a true-to-life character that I feel like she could be a student at Berkeley High. Another feature I like about the book is the humor that keeps popping up, even in serious situations. This book is the sequel to Dairy Queen.

Front and Center by Catherine Gilbert Murdock

Third in the Dairy Queen series. DJ Schwenk returns to high school after Thanksgiving, having missed 27 days of school caring for her injured brother Win. DJ wants nothing more than to return to being in the background in school and her hometown, but her brother’s injury and her prominence after playing football won’t allow that to happen. After learning that she has to contact college coaches who are interested in her in order to start the scholarship process, DJ works hard to overcome her shyness. At the same time she has two boys interested in dating her, a situation she never expected would happen to her. By the end of the book DJ has followed both her brothers’ and friends’ advice plus her own instinct and learned much about herself and how to achieve her goals.

DJ has become such a real person to me that I’m sorry this is the last book in the series. All the characters, from her family to her friends to her coaches and the people in her town have true to life personalities. I really want to know what will happen to them next. The author adds humor to both serious and minor situations, which I really liked.

Reviewed by Ms. Goldstein-Erickson

Small Town Sinners by Melissa C. Walker

This book took me completely by surprise.  I had read that it was about the Hell Houses that evangelical Christian groups put on yearly to scare young people into joining their churches.  I was expecting an indictment of these sorts of events, not the well-balanced view Walker portrays in her new YA novel.  High school junior Lacey Anne is the story’s protagonist, with her father being the children’s pastor at her church, the House of Enlightenment.  She’s just about to get her drivers’ license and is  hoping her super strict parents will loosen the reins once she is able to drive herself and her two best friends around their small hometown.  She plans to audition for the Hell House’s most challenging part, that of Abortion Girl, who goes through a mock bloody abortion and dies as part of the production.  but, when she see’s a super hot new guy at the DMV, it takes her awhile to realize that he’s really Tyson Davis who moved out of town ten years ago.  But Ty seems to have secrets of his own, and is full of thoughtful questions about religion, beliefs and morality.  While he and Lacey Anne begin to secretly see each other, she begins to question her certainty about the strict biblical interpretations she’s been taught by her parents and church.

I literally could not stop reading this book until I finished it.  I expected it to be pretty one-sided against the controversial Hell Houses, but it showed the humanity of the people who put them on and their true desire to help other people by “saving them.”  Although I disagreed with many stands taken by Lacey’s church, they were portrayed fairly, with Walker going to pains not to demonize them.  It forced me to look at my own prejudices and make room for other perspectives, even those with which I strongly disagree.  This, I think is one of the strengths of this book.  It reminds us that just because we all have different beliefs, it doesn’t mean the people on the opposite side of the fence are the enemy.

I would recommend this book to all teens, especially those who like books that encourage them to think about the big issues–religion, morality, war, etc.  It’s a short, fast read so it’s perfect for that last minute book project or long car ride with the family.

Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson

This fast-paced action novel was originally written for an adult audience, but is the perfect Young Adult story.  It starts the reader off a year before the robot wars, what author Wilson calls the Zero Hour.  Basically this is the story of an artificial intelligence named Archos rebelling  and killing its creator Dr. Nicholas Wasserman.  Eventually Archos assumes control of all robotic intelligence, and directs them to kill all humans.  What we end up with is a bloody war, with cars running people over in the streets, robot servants ruthlessly  killing their owners, and the robots becoming “smarter” and developing new and more efficient machines to destroy their human enemies.

Something I especially liked about this book was its documentary style of storytelling.  The author narrates the action through the perspective of various characters, each with a different background and role to play in the continuing war.  Comac Wallace, originally a civilian but now the leader of the fearless Bright Boy squad, relates the story from the beginning, which is really the end of the war told as a sort of prologue to the action.  His authoritative voice leads the readers through the spell-binding story.  My other favorite narrator was the ten-year-old  Matilda Perez, a congresswoman’s daughter who realizes something is wrong when her Baby-Comes- Alive doll wakes up in her toy box and tries to convince the girl to get her mother to come home for the weekend instead of helping implement the robot defense act.

I highly recommend this title to readers looking for an engaging action story, science fiction fans, readers who liked the zombie book World War Z, and readers who enjoy losing themselves in a great story.

Stupid Fast by Geoff Herbach

Sixteen-year-old Felton can’t figure out what’s going on with his body.  He can never get enough to eat, and yet never feels full.  He’s sprouting hair in places he’d rather not even think about. And, he’s outgrowing his clothes so fast he doesn’t have any jeans that are even close to long enough.  To add to all this, suddenly he can run “stupid fast,” and the track and football team coaches are eyeing him to try out.  Due to his crazy meditation attempts in his younger days, he’s been known as Squirrel Nut since elementary school.  But things might be changing as the jocks start to find his ability to run “fast like a donkey” valuable to their teams.

His home life isn’t much calmer; his mom can only be called a retrograde hippie.    When he was only five, Felton found his dad’s dead body hanging by one of the beams in the garage.  Although Felton and his younger brother barely remember their professor father, their mom has burned all his belongings in an effort to start fresh.  Partly due to his strange family, Felton has been bullied by the other students and only has one good friend Gus, who is gone for the summer.  Now that Felton has to take over Gus’ newpaper delivery route, he sees a beautiful girl his age playing piano at the crack of dawn as he makes his paper deliveries.  And she doesn’t know he’s viewed as smelly, hairy squirrel nut by the kids at school;  and their romance begins.

This book surprised me by being so readable.  I know young men will love it because it speaks to sports and all the physical and mental changes boys go through as they become men.  I think girls will also enjoy it’s exploration of growing up differently from the rest of the crowd.  I highly recommend this book to all teen readers as a fast and engaging read.