msjamgochian'sinfinitebooklist

Spark picks up right where Glow left off: a diminished Waverly has returned to the Empyrean, after escaping Anne Mather's clutches on enemy spaceship the New Horizon, to nurse her wounds and assess conditions. Wracked with guilt over the acts she was forced to commit on the New Horizon, she is surprised to find her boyfriend, Kieran, in self-imposed charge of the ship, acting as a semi-evangelical spiritual leader with an authoritarian approach. When Waverly discovers that Kieran has incarcerated hunky Seth Ardvale in the brig for treason, she decides he's taken his power too far. After an unxplained and frightening explosion rocks the Empyrean, Kieran points his paranoid finger at Waverly and Seth, who set out to discover the truth behind the terrorist act. Plenty of action will keep readers turning the pages, even though the plot gets a bit convoluted towards the end, and Waverly's new alliance with Seth turns up the heat on the romance angle. A solid follow-up that wil...

When seventeen-year-old Eddie Reeves' once-famous photographer father jumps off of a building and commits suicide, he leaves behind little more than a two-sentence goodbye and a host of unanswered questions that are pushing Eddie towards her own jumping-off point. To make matters worse, her best friend, Milo, has taken back up with his Marilyn Monroe look-alike ex-girlfriend, her comatose Mom, who hasn't stopped wearing Dad's bathrobe, has completely checked out, and Mom's annoying best friend Beth has moved in to help them 'get on with their lives.' When one of her father's photography students, good-looking older guy Culler, shows up on the scene, he and Eddie pair up in an attempt to discover the why of her father's suicide, with surprising results. An honest and raw portrayal of suicide's particular strain of grief. Give it to fans of Nina LaCour's Hold Still . Click here for a full review and here for the book trailer. Grade 8+

A can't-put-it-down literate thriller for summer, Gillian Flynn's latest entry in her collection of disquieting tales tells the story of a picture-perfect marriage gone horribly wrong. Dark handsome midwestern transplant Nick and perfect blonde New Yorker Amy meet at a swank writers' soiree in Manhattan, exchanging the kind of repartee familiar to fans of Nick and Norah Charles. She thinks he's smitten, but in a heavy dose of foreshadowing, he doesn't call her for months; they reconnect after she accidentally runs into him at a local market. Their chemistry kicks in, they get married, and live fairly happily in a lovely flat owned by Amy's parents. When the recession hits their industry (they both write for print publications), they lose their jobs, and when Amy's parents inform her that they need to 'borrow back' her trust fund to avoid bankruptcy, things quickly head south. Or west. They pack up and retreat to Nick's hometown of Carthage, Mi...

On a hot summer night in a small country town, local teen pariah Jasper Jones raps on book nerd-sensitive Charlie Bucktin's window, and leads him to a discovery that will change both of their lives. Laura Wishart, daughter of the town shire, and friend to Charlie, is found hung from a tree where she and Jasper used to meet in secret. Knowing that Jasper will be suspected of the murder, the boys hide her body in the river, and that is where the trouble, and their relationship, truly begins. As the summer progresses and Laura's disappearance is investigated, Charlie is faced with a host of hard truths: his parents' marriage isn't what it seems to be, his best friend Jeffrey Lu suffers at the hands of racists, and the local tendency to turn the other way rather than stand up for what is right has tragic results. The bitterness is balanced by the sweetness of Charlie's relationship with Laura's little sister Eliza; Mr. Silvey masterfully depicts the magic of first ...