Read This!: ZERO DAY by Jan Gangsei

September 21, 2016Read This, Reviewsjan gangsei, zero daykathymacmillan

Summary: Eight years ago Addie Webster was the victim of the most notorious kidnapping of the decade. She vanished-and her high-profile parents were forced to move on. Mark Webster is now president of the United States and fighting to keep the Oval Office after a tumultuous first term. Then the unthinkable happens: the president’s daughter resurfaces. Addie is brought back into the family fold, but who is this sixteen-year-old girl with a quiet, burning intelligence now living in the White House? There are those in the president’s political circle who find her timely return suspicious.When a national security advisor approaches Darrow Fergusson, Addie’s childhood best friend and the son of the president’s chief of staff, he doesn’t know what to think. How could the girl he’s missed for all these years be a threat to national security? Still, at the risk of having his own secrets exposed, Darrow agrees to spy on Addie and soon realizes that his old friend is much more than the traumatized victim of a sick political fringe group. Addie has come with a mission … but will she choose to complete it?

This breathless thriller grabbed me from the first chapter, and the heart-pounding pace doesn’t let up. Gangsei combines the multiple perspectives typical of the political thriller genre with an unerring focus on the two teen protagonists, Addie Webster, the First Daughter who has returned home after being abducted at age eight, and Darrow Fergusson, the best friend she left behind. Addie is at once smart and ruthless and relatable and vulnerable, and the details of both plot and setting make Gangsei’s knowledge of life inside the DC Beltway clear. Reader, prepare to be sucked in. You have been warned.

ZERO DAY is out now.

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Read This!: RIPPLE by Heather Smith Meloche

September 20, 2016Read This, Reviewsheather smith meloche, ripplekathymacmillan

Ripple by Heather Smith Meloche

Summary: With her impossible-to-please grandmother on her back about college and her disapproving step-dad watching her every move, Tessa would do anything to escape the pressure-cooker she calls home. So she finds a shot of much-needed power and confidence by hooking up with boys, even though it means cheating on her boyfriend. But when she’s finally caught red-handed, she’ll do anything she can to cover up what she’s done. Jack is a prankster who bucks the system every chance he gets—each transgression getting riskier and riskier. He loves the thrill, and each adventure allows a little release because his smug smile and suave demeanor in the face of authority doesn’t make life at home with his mom any less tough. He tries to take care of her, but the truth is he’s powerless in the face of her fragile mental health. So he copes in his own way, by defacing public property and pulling elaborate pranks, though he knows in the end this’ll only screw up his life even more. As they both try not to let their self-destructive patterns get the best of them, Tessa and Jack gravitate toward one another, discovering the best parts of themselves in the process. An honest portrayal of the urges that drive us and finding the strength to overcome them.

Tessa and Jack, two teenagers whose lives are spinning out of control, become one another’s unlikely confidants – and maybe more – in this gripping coming-of-age story. Paralyzed by her stepfather’s drunken verbal abuse and her wealthy grandmother’s well-meaning yet myopic plans for her future, Tessa seeks comfort in a series of meaningless hook-ups that she will do anything to hide from her popular boyfriend. Jack is flip and cocky, but also hard working, earnest, and fiercely protective of his brilliant mother even as her mental illness makes her more and more dangerous to herself and others, and his only outlet is the elaborate pranks he pulls to buck the system. When Tessa and Jack meet, the electricity of their connection is more than just romantic – each recognizes the desperation of the other and is able to see through the layers of hurt and artifice to the goodness underneath. Both of their roads to redemption are paved with hard truths and painful confrontations, but in finding the good in each other, they are finally able to see the good in themselves. In alternating first-person narratives, Meloche takes us into the imperfect lives of these imperfect, entirely relatable characters, and shows how good as well as bad can ripple out of human connections.

RIPPLE is out now.

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Read This!: THE READER by Traci Chee

September 14, 2016Read This, Reviewsthe reader, traci cheekathymacmillan

The Reader by Traci Chee

Summary: Sefia knows what it means to survive. After her father is brutally murdered, she flees into the wilderness with her aunt Nin, who teaches her to hunt, track, and steal. But when Nin is kidnapped, leaving Sefia completely alone, none of her survival skills can help her discover where Nin’s been taken, or if she’s even alive. The only clue to both her aunt’s disappearance and her father’s murder is the odd rectangular object her father left behind, an object she comes to realize is a book—a marvelous item unheard of in her otherwise illiterate society. With the help of this book, and the aid of a mysterious stranger with dark secrets of his own, Sefia sets out to rescue her aunt and find out what really happened the day her father was killed—and punish the people responsible.

We all know that books are magic, but in Sefia’s world, it’s literally so. No wonder literacy is such a forbidden commodity, so coveted that there are those who would die – or kill – for the words on the page. With its twisty narrative and surprising turns, THE READER will keep readers turning the pages till the end, and turning over the big ideas presented long after the story is over.

THE READER is out now.

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Read This!: INTO WHITE by Randi Pink

September 13, 2016Read This, Reviewsinto white, randi pinkkathymacmillan

Into White by Randi Pink

Summary: LaToya Williams lives in Montgomery, Alabama, and attends a mostly white high school. It seems as if her only friend is her older brother, Alex. Toya doesn’t know where she fits in, but after a run-in with another student, she wonders if life would be different if she were . . . different. And then a higher power answers her prayer: to be “anything but black.”

Toya is suddenly white, blond, and popular. Now what?

Randi Pink’s debut is heartfelt, honest, and sure to be controversial. The characters ring painfully true, from Toya, who must choose whose reality she will honor, to her sweet, smart brother Alex, who tries to dull his own genius to avoid standing out, to the clueless , racial-slur-spewing twins Amera and Amelia, who turn out to be powerless once called on their nonsense. Compelling and compulsively readable, this book is also a brutal, incisive commentary on the role of the media in denigrating black bodies and the mental and emotional damage that systemic racism does to the individual.

INTO WHITE is out now.

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Read This!: FRANNIE AND TRU by Karen Hattrup

September 12, 2016Read This, Reviewsfrannie and tru, karen hattrupkathymacmillan

Frannie and Tru by Karen Hattrup

Summary: When Frannie Little eavesdrops on her parents fighting she discovers that her cousin Truman is gay, and his parents are so upset they are sending him to live with her family for the summer. At least, that’s what she thinks the story is. . . When he arrives, shy Frannie befriends this older boy, who is everything that she’s not–rich, confident, cynical, sophisticated. Together, they embark on a magical summer marked by slowly unraveling secrets

A beautiful, literary coming-of-age story about a young girl opening her eyes to the wider world around her. Fifteen-year-old Frannie Little is prepared for the summer after her freshman year of high school to be a total disaster – she’s going to a new school in the fall, drifting away from her old friends, and her father’s work situation means her family is running out of money. But then her troubled, charming, two-years-older cousin Truman comes to stay for the summer, a refugee from his Connecticut prep school life. Frannie connects with Tru more than she has ever connected her own older brothers, and tagging along with him becomes a lesson in opening up to new experiences. The story is steeped in its Baltimore City setting, and Hattrup uses city landmarks to play against the themes of the story. Questions of race and class bubble up throughout, seen through the lens of Frannie awakening to the realities of how her experiences differ from those of her African American friends. Frannie is a quiet, thoughtful protagonist, blossoming slowly into a confident, self-aware young woman. More than anything, the push and pull of Frannie and Tru’s relationship – troubled and close and caring and contentious all at once – is a pitch-perfect portrayal of those seminal friendships that only seem possible in the throes of adolescence.

FRANNIE AND TRU is out now.
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