Spotlight on: Teens’ Top Ten Nominees – Part 3

TeensTopTen_winner_WMWelcome back to our 4-part series highlighting the 24 titles nominated (by teenagers; no grown-up opinions polluting the list!) for this year’s Teens’ Top Ten list. You can find Part 1 here, and Part 2 here, if you missed them earlier. Voting starts this week, on August 15, so encourage the teenagers you know to exercise their right to influence sales, movie deals, and publishing trends by voting here.

Here are the penultimate 6 books nominated for the Teens’ Top Ten list this year:

Since You've Been GoneSince You’ve Been Gone by Morgan Matson – In this, Matson’s third stand-alone contemporary fiction title, relationships and personal growth share center stage with the unique pleasures of summer’s disrupted routines and subsequent possibilities for change. Matson’s first novel, Amy & Roger’s Epic Detour, was a 2011 Top Ten Best Fiction for Young Adults pick and a 2012 Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults pick, and her second novel, Second Chance Summer, was a 2013 Best Fiction for Young Adults pick, so her work is already well-established. Matson has an author page, and is active on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

 

The Shadow ThroneThe Shadow Throne by Jennifer A. Nielsen – The third and final volume in the bestselling, historical-fantasy Ascendence trilogy. The first title in the series, The False Prince, was a 2013 Teens’ Top Ten book and a 2015 Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults pick. Nielsen has an author page here (currently highlighting the first book in her newest series, The Mark of the Thief), and she’s also on Twitter and Facebook. A movie adaptation of The False Prince is currently underway (it’s still in the scripting phase, so it’ll be awhile still), and rumor (aka The Hollywood Reporter has it that a Game of Thrones story editor is in charge of the adaptation, so this has certainly has the potential to stick around and continue to attract more readers.

Continue reading Spotlight on: Teens’ Top Ten Nominees – Part 3

What are you reading over Vacation?

Summer is here! It’s been here for a while but there is a something about July that seems to be the prototypical summer month: school is neither just getting out or just about to begin; it’s hot but you aren’t sick of it yet like you are at the end of August; and even the word “July” tends to lend itself to being drawn out in a long, slow, lazy way.

With summer at its height, lots of people are on vacation and there is national focus on reading. Almost every library has a summer reading program and many schools require students to read over the summer. Even people who don’t normally read feel pressure to pick out a good “beach read” for their summer vacations.

So I wanted to know what some of my other Hub bloggers were reading for the summer. Are they reading YA or taking a break and sneaking in – gasp! – an adult book? And are they reading from any interesting locales? Here are pictures that feature your Hub bloggers reading– or the stacks of books they plan on reading this summer.

I’m reading Rebel Belle  by Rachel Hawkins in my little town on Boston’s North Shore: no vacation for me until the summer is over! Luckily for me I live a short, five-minute walk from the beach. There is nothing like the cold New England sea to make you want to read some Southern Gothic YA fiction!

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Jennifer Rummel reads The Diva Wraps it Up by Krista Davis in her local park:

jennifer rummel

Tara Kehoe reads Pandemonium by Lauren Oliver on the beach in St. Maarten!

Tara Kehoe
  Continue reading What are you reading over Vacation?

Teen Tech Week: Building a Better Human

TTW14_featureslideMarch 9 – 15 is YALSA’s annual Teen Tech Week, when libraries shine a spotlight on all of the great technological tools that they offer for their patrons. And though this event only lasts for one week, technology is a core element of most libraries’ mission year round. More and more are offering digital labs and makerspaces where patrons can learn to use technology to create fantastic projects and give free rein to their imagination.

Photo by unloveablesteve. CC BY-NC-SA
Photo by unloveablesteve. CC BY-NC-SA

One of my favorite examples of this is the prosthetic Robohand that was recently created for a young boy using the 3-D printer at the Johnson County Library Makerspace. As soon as I read the story, it got me thinking about all of the great stories I have read about technology being used to augment the human body or even change what it means to be a person. And, so, in honor of Teen Tech Week, I decided to create a list of some of my favorite books about technology being used to augment the human body or fundamentally alter humanity as we currently conceive of it. Continue reading Teen Tech Week: Building a Better Human