Defect – Will Weaver

Defect by Will Weaver is about fifteen-year-old David, a teen who has spent much of his childhood in foster homes in Minnesota.  He has bug eyes and “hearing aids,” he smells strange and he can glide.  He gets kicked out of his high school over fallout from his “suicide attempt” where he jumped off a cliff to teach the school bullies a lesson.  He ends up in an alternative school for “young people who need a more nontraditional learning environment” (p. 19).  Here he meets Cheetah, a girl who may change his life just by accepting him for who he is.  But can he accept himself?

Quaking – Kathryn Erskine

Quaking by Kathryn Erskine is a novel about a fourteen-year-old girl, called Matt – don’t call her Matilda, who gets passed around in her family until she ends up with relatives in Pennsylvania.  Jessica and Sam are peaceful people who are raising their adopted son, Rory who was born with a “severe developmental condition” (p. 9).  Sam holds peace rallies every Thursday night but these rallies become dangerous because some people in the town where they live believe that anyone who is seeking peace is against America, and against our troops.

Churches and synagogues are vandalized.  Where will it end?  And will Matt ever fit in at her school when she can’t even look up?

Fantastic books about animals that you shouldn’t miss

A beautiful nonfiction book from a few years ago, Priceless : the vanishing beauty of a fragile planet by Bradley Trevor Greive with photographs by Mitsuaki Iwago, has images of endangered animals in their natural environment along with a plea for humanity to take care of the environment. It suggests that we need to think about how what we do impacts the lives of animals. The jacket image in this post does not always match the cover of the DPL’s book.  For some reason the jacket in the blog keeps switching between the chimpanzee and the loris.  Our book has the chimpanzee on the cover. 

Owen and Mzee : the true story of a remarkable friendship by Isabella and Craig Hatkoff, and Paula Kahumbu, with photographs by Peter Greste. “When a baby hippo named Owen was stranded after the Dec 2004 tsunami, villagers in Kenya worked tirelessly to rescue him. Then, to everyone’s amazement, the orphan hippo and a 130-yr-old giant tortoise named Mzee adopted each other.”