It’s Monday, What Are You Reading? was initiated by Sheila at Book Journey, and adapted by Kellee at Unleashing Readers and Jen at Teach Mentor Texts with a children’s/YA focus. This weekly roundup is a great way to discover new blogs and bloggers, share recommended (or not so recommended….) titles, and add to your ever-growing to-read list.
My goodness, can you believe it’s 2016?! Where does the time go?
Title: The New Hunger: A Warm Bodies Novella
Author: Isaac Marion
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publication Date: 2015
Genre/Format: YA / Adult Fiction
My Two Cents: I don’t typically read a lot of young adult fiction and I didn’t really get into the recent zombie craze, but I read Isaac Marion’s debut novel Warm Bodies for a YA lit class and enjoyed it quite a lot. This breezy little novella is a prequel to Warm Bodies, providing a bit of backstory for several of the main characters. Like the original, we join a story already in progress, as we find our characters struggling to survive in a world that has collapsed due to circumstances that aren’t definitively explained. I wouldn’t call this a must-read, as it doesn’t really provide any shocking insights into any of the characters or change how you interpret the events of the original novel, but I enjoy Marion’s writing and became quite fond of the characters he created, so I was happy to encounter them again.
Warm Bodies was a cross-over novel, popular with adults and teenagers, and although I originally read it for a YA lit class, it was shelved in the adult section of the library. Like Warm Bodies, The New Hunger features teen characters, but the amount of violence and potentially scary content might make it more suitable for older teens.
Title: Moon at Nine
Author: Deborah Ellis
Publisher: Pajama Press
Publication Date: 2014
Genre/Format: Fiction/Novel
My Two Cents: This is a very intense book. I knew that this wasn’t going to be an easy read – the subject matter is absolutely terrible, with two young women risking their lives just to share their love. Still, I wasn’t prepared for just how gutting the story would be. I don’t want to spoil anything, but this isn’t a fairy story, and not everyone gets a happy ending. While it it’s not an uplifting read, Moon at Nine is a very moving one, and it could be an eye-opening experience for teenage readers, and provide a bit of well-needed perspective. It’s all-too easy to become consumed with life’s (real and imagined) dramas, and Farrin and Sadira’s love story is a gentle reminder (without being at all preachy) that there are countless young people who would give anything to have the freedom and safety we enjoy in our part of the world.
I’ll leave you with a quote from Moon at Nine:
“I choose you, not just because you are wonderful and not just because you love me. I choose you because the act of choosing you belongs to me. It is mine, my choice, my free will. I choose you over my father. I choose you over my country. And even if you decide you don’t want me, I still choose you.
Because in choosing you, I am choosing myself.”
So what have you been reading this week?
I read this a while ago chain because Deborah Ellis Wrote it. Now it’s one of the stellar titles I contemplated rereading it but I think it’s one of those books, that for me at least, where once was enough. With you I agree with you, that it is a reminder of how lucky we are to live where we are.
Oh wow, there’s a new Deborah Ellis novel – I have yet to read her books. Hopefully 2016 would be the year for that.
So much YA is deeply grim — my kids screen some for me because their tolerance of pain on kids is much higher than mine. I was much less vulnerable to the pain of teenagers when I was one!