Read This!: HOW TO HANG A WITCH by Adriana Mather

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How to Hang a Witch (How to Hang a Witch, #1)How to Hang a Witch by Adriana Mather

Summary: Salem, Massachusetts is the site of the infamous witch trials and the new home of Samantha Mather. Recently transplanted from New York City, Sam and her stepmother are not exactly welcomed with open arms. Sam is the descendant of Cotton Mather, one of the men responsible for those trials and immediately, she becomes the enemy of a group of girls who call themselves The Descendants. And guess who their ancestors were?  If dealing with that weren’t enough, Sam also comes face to face with a real live (well technically dead) ghost. A handsome, angry ghost who wants Sam to stop touching his stuff. But soon Sam discovers she is at the center of a centuries old curse affecting anyone with ties to the trials.  Sam must come to terms with the ghost and find a way to work with the Descendants to stop a deadly cycle that has been going on since the first accused witch was hanged. If any town should have learned its lesson, it’s Salem. But history is about to repeat itself.

In the 1690s, the Salem Witch Trials consumed the town of Salem, Massachusetts in a frenzy of accusations, mass hysteria, and executions. There’s a reason the Witch Trials still loom large in the popular imagination. They demonstrate the very basest bits of human nature: the instinct to raise oneself up by pushing others down, and the tendency of ordinary people to remain silent out of fear, allowing astonishing atrocities to go unchecked. In How to Hang a Witch, we meet Samantha Mather, modern-day descendant of Cotton Mather, one of the men responsible for the Witch Trials. Her coming to Salem triggers a series of events that parallel the horrors of the Trials, and she must work with the descendants of the accused witches and the ghost who haunts her house to break the cycle of violence they represent. Author Adriana Mather, herself an actual descendant of Cotton Mather, draws keen parallels between the Trials and modern-day bullying, demonstrating the ways that “group silence can be a death sentence”. Samantha is a fierce and winning heroine, and the setting and events of the story are presented with a creepy verisimilitude that had this scaredy-cat sleeping with the lights on. A terrific, involving read that is sure to ignite many discussions.

How to Hang a Witch is out now.

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Read This!: COUNTING THYME by Melanie Conklin

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Counting ThymeCounting Thyme by Melanie Conklin

Summary: When eleven-year-old Thyme Owens’ little brother, Val, is accepted into a new cancer drug trial, it’s just the second chance that he needs. But it also means the Owens family has to move to New York, thousands of miles away from Thyme’s best friend and everything she knows and loves. The island of Manhattan doesn’t exactly inspire new beginnings, but Thyme tries to embrace the change for what it is: temporary. 
After Val’s treatment shows real promise and Mr. Owens accepts a full-time position in the city, Thyme has to face the frightening possibility that the move to New York is permanent. Thyme loves her brother, and knows the trial could save his life—she’d give anything for him to be well—but she still wants to go home, although the guilt of not wanting to stay is agonizing. She finds herself even more mixed up when her heart feels the tug of new friends, a first crush, and even a crotchety neighbor and his sweet whistling bird. All Thyme can do is count the minutes, the hours, and days, and hope time can bring both a miracle for Val and a way back home.

Oh, this book.

Sometimes when I read a book I love, I want to stop every few paragraphs and tell the world about it. And sometimes when I read a book that captures my heart, I want to hold it close and tell no one about it as I lose myself in the story. The characters speak to me so strongly that I don’t want to share them.

Counting Thyme is one of the latter. The moment I met eleven-year-old Thyme – struggling to be okay in New York City when her whole life is thousands of miles away, feeling overlooked as her family struggles to deal with her brother’s cancer, resisting making a place for herself in her new home while still being drawn into her new life – I connected with this thoughtful protagonist. Thyme wants the things all young people want: friends, a happy family, a place in the world. She wants to count. And watching her navigate new relationships and changing old ones, all the time with the specter of her brother’s illness hanging over her, was a deeply moving experience.

If you’re expecting a “sad cancer book” full of noble suffering and platitudes, think again. Yes, Thyme’s little brother has cancer, and yes, that affects the lives of her whole family. Sometimes they don’t react to their fear in brave or noble ways, but every piece of the story rings with truth. The ending had me in tears, but not for the reasons I expected. It affected me so deeply because of the way the emotions were beautifully earned by the characters and the intertwining threads of the story. This is not a sad book, not by a long shot – this is a story of hope and love and finding your place. Thyme’s story will stick with me for a long time.

COUNTING THYME is out now.

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Read This!: BOOKISHLY EVER AFTER by Isabel Bandeira

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Bookishly Ever After (Ever After, #1)Bookishly Ever After by Isabel Bandeira

Summary: In a perfect world, sixteen-year-old Phoebe Martins’ life would be a book. Preferably a YA novel with magic and a hot paranormal love interest. Unfortunately, her life probably wouldn’t even qualify for a quiet contemporary. But when Phoebe finds out that Dev, the hottest guy in the clarinet section, might actually have a crush on her, she turns to her favorite books for advice. Phoebe overhauls her personality to become as awesome as her favorite heroines and win Dev’s heart. But if her plan fails, can she go back to her happy world of fictional boys after falling for the real thing?

Phoebe is the kind of girl who gets wrapped up in books – often to the point where she prefers them to reality. (And what book lover can’t relate to that?) She crushes on the hot guy who looks like the hero of one of her favorite paranormal romances, and, if not for the encouragement of her best friend, would completely miss the other hot guy who clearly digs her as she is, no makeovers required. But Phoebe can’t get over the notion that she is bland and uncrushworthy, so she turns to passages from her favorite YA novels for help. (The passages from the fake novels are some of my favorite parts of the book, by the way – I want to read every one of them and obsess about them along with Phoebe.) It’s no secret that I love a book with a female heroine who displays her strength in smart, bookish ways, so of course I fell in love with Phoebe right away. But let’s talk about what a perfectly imperfect book boyfriend Dev turns out to be. He reads the books Phoebe recommends and even quotes them at her in romantic moments. This is a delicious sigh of a book, and I can’t wait to see what’s next in the Ever After series.

BOOKISHLY EVER AFTER is out now.

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Read This!: AFTER THE WOODS by Kim Savage

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After the WoodsAfter the Woods by Kim Savage

Summary: Would you risk your life to save your best friend? Julia did. When a paroled predator attacked Liv in the woods, Julia fought back and got caught. Liv ran, leaving Julia in the woods for a terrifying 48 hours that she remembers only in flashbacks. One year later, Liv seems bent on self-destruction, starving herself, doing drugs, and hooking up with a violent new boyfriend. A dead girl turns up in those same woods, and Julia’s memories resurface alongside clues unearthed by an ambitious reporter that link the girl to Julia’s abductor. As the devastating truth becomes clear, Julia realizes that after the woods was just the beginning.

At once a twisty psychological thriller, an exploration of the shifting boundaries of friendship, and the story of two teenage girls attempting to navigate the toxic situations they have been dealt, this book will haunt you long after you reach the last page. Julia’s been called a hero, a miracle, a plucky teen who beat the odds – but she knows that there is more below the surface of the day that she attacked the man trying to kidnap her best friend, Liv, and was then taken by him in her place. Despite Liv’s deflections and the advice of her mother and therapist, Julia is determined to find out the truth – even if that means turning to a skeevy reporter ready to use Julia to further her own career. Julia made it out of the woods alive, but will she – and her friendship with Liv – survive the aftermath?

AFTER THE WOODS is out now.

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Read This!: LEARNING TO SWEAR IN AMERICA by Katie Kennedy

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Learning to Swear in AmericaLearning to Swear in America by Katie Kennedy

Summary: An asteroid is hurtling toward Earth. A big, bad one. Yuri, a physicist prodigy from Russia, has been called to NASA as they calculate a plan to avoid disaster. He knows how to stop the asteroid: his research in antimatter will probably win him a Nobel prize–if there’s ever another Nobel prize awarded. But Yuri’s 17, and having a hard time making older, stodgy physicists listen to him. Then he meets Dovie, who lives like a normal teenager, oblivious to the impending doom. Being with her, on the adventures she plans when he’s not at NASA, Yuri catches a glimpse of what it means to save the world and save a life worth living.

What a joy this book was! For me, this was one of those reads where I didn’t want it to end, didn’t want to leave the world of the story behind, and I wanted to just hang out with the characters. Yuri is such a winning and relatable character – and that’s saying something, considering that he is a physics prodigy who’s never done any of the normal things most seventeen-year-olds have done, like kiss a girl or go to gym class. The secondary characters are just as three-dimensional, from the older scientists suspicious of Yuri’s abilities to teen artist Dovie and her hippie family, who expand Yuri’s horizons all the way to American swearing and the prom. This is my favorite kind of book: the kind where the story proceeds directly from the characters and the way they spin in and out of each other’s orbits. When the asteroid hurtling toward Earth turns out to be much more dangerous than originally thought, it’s Yuri’s teenage audacity as much as his brilliant mind that gives the world a fighting a chance. Yuri has to make choices at a grand, world-saving scale, and also at a much more intimate one, as he learns just how far he is willing to go to do the right thing.

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LEARNING TO SWEAR IN AMERICA is out now.

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