Carter Finally Gets It – Brent Crawford

Will Carter, known to everyone as Carter, and thankfully not Slappy (and is that a funny/painful story…)  is about to become a freshman at Merrian High.   Carter finally gets it by Brent Crawford is all about Carter’s freshman year and it is funny (read: hilarious) and embarrassing (read: cringe-worthy).

Carter has a mild form of ADD and has to really concentrate on not spacing out, which can be a problem when he is playing sports (football and swimming).   Luckily, he has a close group of friends but, man can he get himself into situations!

From going to high school parties where people get drunk and his bike gets stolen, to dating and bragging in the locker room, Carter has a lot to deal with.  His sister tries to help out by giving him advice.  Which isn’t a bad idea because if he does something embarrassing it will reflect poorly on her.  Expect to read language you would hear walking down the hall of a high school and expect to be telling the people around you what it is that you are reading that is so funny.  I’m sure you will easily convince others to pick up a copy.  That is, once you stop snorting and have wiped the tears from your eyes.

Funny how things change – Melissa Wyatt

Dwyer, West Virginia is a dying town in the Appalachian Mountains that offers little opportunity now that most of the easy coal has been mined out of the mountains.  The most cost effective way of getting the coal out now is mountaintop removal mining where they blast the mountain to get to the coal.  Remy Walker’s family has lived there for generations and one of the mountains, the one he and his dad live on,  is named Walker Mountain after the first people to live there.

Remy recently graduated from high school and has agreed to follow his girlfriend when she moves from Dwyer to go to college in Pennsylvania.  Remy is an auto-mechanic and should be able to find work near the college so that they can afford to have an apartment off campus.  He won’t be moving to go to college, he just doesn’t want to be away from Lisa because he loves her.

Remy only needs to tell his dad that he is going to move away and then he and Lisa can start their life together like they have been talking about for a long time.  But when Remy meets an artist and she reminds him how fascinating the mountains are, Remy needs to decide if his love for Lisa is greater than his love for his home and his heritage.  Does he have to “get up, get out” (p.5), like they say in school, or can he have a happy life on Walker Mountain?

Funny how things change by Melissa Wyatt reminded me of what it felt like to be Remy’s age and to have such an important decision in front of me.

Gym Candy – Carl Deuker

Football has been the most important thing in Mick Johnson’s life since forever.  Mick’s dad, a past professional football player, made sure that Mick started kindergarten a year later then he should have so that he would have a size advantage over his team mates.

That, along with Mick’s drive and talent earn him a spot on the high school varsity team as a freshman halfback.  But, when he gets his chance on the field he gets stopped twelve inches short of the goal.

He just wasn’t strong enough.  And he is determined that next year he will be.  He lifts weights.  He takes supplements and protein shakes.  His dad brings him to a gym that has better equipment than at the school.  He also sets him up with a personal trainer.  And the trainer?  He sets Mick up with something else altogether.

Gym Candy by Carl Deuker follows Mick as he makes the decision to start using steroids and shows us what happens next.

Slant – Laura E. Williams

When her crush, Sean, calls her “Slant” one day, she decides this is it.   Lauren is ready.   She has been saving all of her money for a long time.  She just has to find an adult to take her to the doctor.

Lauren’s mom is dead, and she doesn’t think she can convince her father to let her have the operation.  But when her grandmother comes to visit, her mom’s mom, Lauren has an ally.  Lauren is a Korean-American adoptee and  she wants her eyes to look more like the rest of the people at school.

Lauren’s little sister is a Chinese-American adoptee and is as cute as a bug.  Her father has finally begun dating.  It has been three years since Lauren’s mother died and the woman that her dad is dating is nice.  Lauren’s  best friend is beautiful and talented and while she is preoccupied with her weight, she would stick up for Lauren against anything.

In Slant by Laura E. Williams, Lauren doesn’t make the best decisions, such as getting her five-year-old  sister’s ears pierced because she said she want’s “to be pretty too.”  (p. 36)  But the decision to get her eyes done is one she has though about for a long time.  If she looks like everyone else, people will treat her differently.  Right?

The Mealworm Diaries – Anna Kerz

Jeremy and his mom recently moved to Toronto from rural Nova Scotia.  This means that he is in a new school with people he doesn’t know.  His new teacher is okay and really likes science.  When the class divides up into partners to study mealworms, no one chooses Jeremy  so he is left with the boy everyone calls Aaron Cantwait.  Aaron can’t sit still and he can’t stop talking.

But Aaron is only one of Jeremy’s problems.  Another is the nightmares he often has where he wakes up soaking wet.  The school is also getting new gym uniforms and Jeremy will have to wear shorts that will show the ugly scar on his leg.

The Mealworm Diaries by Anna Kerz covers life, death and some of the changes in between.  Sometimes bad things happen.

Super Stock Rookie – Will Weaver

Trace Bonham is back in book two of Will Weaver’s Motor Novels.  Super Stock Rookie starts with Trace, his dad, and a few buddies caravanning to  North Dakota so Trace can tryout for a new racing team scouting for a hot young driver.  He is looking pretty good after his win in his Street Stock at the Headwaters Speedway earlier in the month.

The Super Stock is a different type of car, but it still rides on a dirt track.  And Trace is good at driving on dirt tracks.  But, so are all of the others at the tryout.  Team Blu is looking for a good driver, with a good face, a good attitude and good grammar.  Trace just wonders what Team Blu is selling.

This book drives us to new tracks and back to the Headwaters.  Characters return from the first book, Saturday Night Dirt, but quite a few new characters are introduced.  Team Blu adds an edge to the regular Minnesota dirt track racing.  And not everybody is happy.

But, what a car.

Jellicoe Road – Melinda Marchetta

Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta is the winner of the Michael L. Printz award (excellence in young adult literature)  for 2009.

After Taylor Markham was been abandoned by her drug addicted mother in a parking lot when she was eleven,  she was picked up by a woman, Hannah,  who took her to a boarding school.  Now Taylor is seventeen and is in charge of one of the houses in the boarding school on Jellicoe Road.  Her task is to lead her school in the territory wars with the Townies and the Cadets.

Why did the wars start?  Where is Taylor’s mother?  Who is her father?  And where did Hannah disappear to?  And, for my own part, who is who in the book?

I found this to be an interesting read.  There are mysteries to be solved and this is one of those books where when you get to the end, you just want to go right back to the beginning to pick up on what you missed the first time through.

Dope Sick – Walter Dean Myers

I am not sure what to think about Dope Sick by Walter Dean Myers.

Lil J. painfully makes his way into a run down building (crack house) in Harlem after being shot in the arm by police.  He can’t figure out how to get out of the building without being caught.  He hears voices and finds his way to an apartment where a young man is watching TV with a spectacular remote.

With this remote, not only can you see what is on broadcast television, but you can also see what is going on outside of the apartment building.  You can see what will happen in the future, and what has happened in the past.

Will Lil J. find a way out of his predicament?  He wasn’t the one who shot the cop when the drug deal went bad.  Where did his life go wrong?  If he could change one thing, would that make his life better?

Wintergirls – Laurie Halse Anderson

Lia needs to be weighed every week.  Before each weighing she gulps down as much water as she can and dons her yellow robe with the quarters sewn into the pockets.  She stands on the scale in front of her stepmother and she tips the scales at 107 pounds.  That number is too low.  (According to her stepmother.)

When she goes back to her room and uses her own scale, after peeing out the water and removing the robe, she weighs 99 pounds.  That number is too high.  (According to Lia.)  But it is goal number 1.

The book starts out with Lia being told that her old best friend Cassie was found dead in a motel room, all alone, early Sunday morning.    Lia tells no one that Cassie had called her many times starting late Saturday night.  Lia was too angry at Cassie to answer the phone.  And really, why should she answer a call from a person who abandoned her 6 months ago?

33 times Cassie called.   And now she is haunting Lia.

Lia has anorexia.  Lia is starving herself in control. Except she doesn’t know why Cassie was calling her, or what she wants now. Wintergirls is another riveting book by Laurie Halse Anderson.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw – Jeff Kinney

Greg is back in Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw.

Poor Greg not only has to share late evening T.V. watching with his mom and younger brother, but he is forced to participate in sports.   (Do you agree with his thoughts on Shel Silverstein?)

And going to a sleepover with his friend Rowley doesn’t give Greg the chance to see the cute girl down the block,  but what can a wimpy kid do?

For information about the author and more information about the series (like book 4 is coming out October 2009), go to the official Diary of a Wimpy Kid website.

I was just digging around on his site and saw that he had originally published the first book online at Funbrain.com and it is still there.