The GMBA Book List -- Long version
Welcome to the discussion group for the Green Mountain Book Award finalists for 2007-08. The purpose of this is to encourage high school students to read and discuss these books -- as part of a class or after school. We will open this up to voting on the books to help determine which book gets the award in April. YOU get to vote!
The key to this project is that we want Vermont high schoolers to read some of these books and then discuss them in our GMBA Forums Interested? Take a gander at the book summaries and links below. You will also find links to the individual forums for each book:
Said Hyder and Susan Burton, Come Back to Afghanistan. Publisher's Guide
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Hyder Akbar tells how his ordinary suburban California life was turned upside-down after 9/11. Hyder’s father, a scion of an Afghan political family, sold his business — a hip-hop clothing store in Oakland — and left for Afghanistan, where he became President Hamid Karzai’s chief spokesman and later, the governor of Kunar, a rural province. Obsessed since youth with a country he had never visited, 17-year-old Hyder convinced his father to let him join him on three successive summers. Working alongside his father at the presidential palace and in Kunar has given Hyder a rare front-row seat at the creation of democratic government in Afghanistan. In Come Back to Afghanistan, Hyder interweaves his personal journey — a teenager struggling with his identity in his parents’ homeland — with a dramatic behind-the-scenes account of political and civilian life in post-Taliban Afghanistan.
Said Hyder Akbar is currently a college student. He is also the co-director and founder of his own non-governmental organization, Wadan Afghanistan, which has rebuilt schools and constructed pipe systems in rural Kunar province.
Susan Burton is a contributing editor of This American Life, and a former editor at Harper’s. Her writing appears in the New York Times Magazine.
Steve Almond, Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America
EXCERPT
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A self-professed candyfreak, Steve Almond set out in search of a much-loved candy from his childhood and found himself on a tour of the small candy companies that are persevering in a marketplace where big corporations dominate. From the Twin Bing to the Idaho Spud, the Valomilk to the Abba-Zaba, and discontinued bars such as the Caravelle, Marathon, and Choco-Lite, Almond uncovers a trove of singular candy bars made by unsung heroes working in old-fashioned factories to produce something they love. (Including Lake Champlain Chocolate in Vermont.) If you think this is entirely a serious book, though, understand that this is hip, often irreverent and comic.
Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever.
DESSEN'S BLOG
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Macy's summer stretches before her, carefully planned and outlined. She will spend her days sitting at the library information desk. She will spend her evenings studying for the SATs. Spare time will be used to help her obsessive mother prepare for the big opening of the townhouse section of her luxury development. But Macy's plans don't anticipate a surprising and chaotic job with Wish Catering, a motley crew of new friends, or ... Wes. Tattooed, artistic, anything-but-expected Wes. He doesn't fit Macy's life at all--so why does she feel so comfortable with him? So ... happy? What is it about him that makes her let down her guard and finally talk about how much she misses her father, who died before her eyes the year before? Sarah Dessen delivers a page-turning novel that carries readers on a roller coaster of denial, grief, comfort, and love as we watch a broken but resilient girl pick up the pieces of her life and fit them back together.
Dessen's bio, in her words: I was born in 1970 in Illinois, but all the life I remember I’ve spent in Chapel Hill, NC. My parents were both professors at the University of North Carolina: my mom is a classicist (which means she knows everything you could ever imagine about myths, Latin, and words) and my dad teaches Shakespeare (which means I’d seen As You Like It about five times by the age of 18.) ... The books I read when I was teenager, the good ones anyway, have stuck more in my mind than anything since. ... As far as my other life, my non-writing life, I live in the country with my husband, some lizards, and two dogs.
Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
JONATHAN'S coolSITE
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Meet Oskar Schell, an inventor, Francophile, tambourine player, Shakespearean actor, jeweler, pacifist. He is nine years old. And he is on an urgent, secret search through the five boroughs of New York. His mission is to find the lock that fits a mysterious key belonging to his father, who died in the attack on the World Trade Center.
Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of the bestseller Everything Is Illuminated, named Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times and the winner of numerous awards, including the Guardian First Book Prize, the National Jewish Book Award, and the New York Public Library Young Lions Prize. Foer was one of Rolling Stone’s “People of the Year” and Esquire’s “Best and Brightest.”
Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys.
NEIL'S JOURNAL
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Neil Gaiman gives us a mythology for a modern age -- complete with dark prophecy, family dysfunction, mystical deceptions and killer birds. Not to mention a lime. As he describes it: "God is dead. Meet the kids."
"Fat Charlie" Nancy's father bestowed dropped dead on a karaoke stage and ruined Fat Charlie's life. Mr. Nancy left Fat Charlie things. Things like the tall, good-looking stranger who appears on Charlie's doorstep, who appears to be the brother he never knew. All of a sudden, life starts getting very interesting for Fat Charlie. Because, you see, Charlie's dad wasn't just any dad. He was Anansi, a trickster god, the spider-god. Anansi is the spirit of rebellion, able to overturn the social order, create wealth out of thin air, and baffle the devil. Some said he could cheat even Death himself.
Bestselling author Neil Gaiman has long been one of the top writers in modern comics, as well as writing books for readers of all ages. He is listed in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as one of the top ten living post-modern writers, and is a prolific creator of works of prose, poetry, film, journalism, comics, song lyrics, and drama.
John Green, Looking for Alaska
JOHN'S BLOG
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Miles Halter is fascinated by famous last words--and tired of his safe life at home. He leaves for boarding school to seek what the dying poet Francois Rabelais called the "Great Perhaps." Much awaits Miles at Culver Creek, including Alaska Young. Clever, funny, screwed-up, and dead sexy, Alaska will pull Miles into her labyrinth and catapult him into the Great Perhaps.
Looking for Alaska brilliantly chronicles the indelible impact one life can have on another. A stunning debut, it marks John Green's arrival as an important new voice in contemporary fiction.
John Green is the Michael L. Printz Award-winning author of Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines. When he was little, he wanted to be an earthworm scientist. (There is a word for such a person: oligochaetologist.) But he killed off his entire earthworm farm due to his general inability to care for pets. Later, he made a list of things he was good at. The list included "telling lies" and "sitting." So he became a writer.
Kenneth Oppel, Airborn
KEN'S SITE
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Matt Cruse is the 15-year-old cabin boy aboard the Aurora, the 900-foot luxury airship he has called home for the past two years. While crossing the Pacificus, Matt fearlessly rescues the unconscious pilot of a crippled hot air balloon. Before he dies, the balloonist tells him about the fantastic, impossible creatures he has seen flying through the clouds. Matt dismisses the story as the ravings of a dying man, but when Kate de Vries arrives on the Aurora a year later, determined to prove the story is true, Matt finds himself caught up in her quest. Then one night, over the middle of the ocean, deadly air pirates board the Aurora. Far from any hope of rescue, Kate and Matt are flung into adventures beyond all imagining. . .
The author's bio: "I was born in 1967 in Port Alberni, a mill town on Vancouver Island, British Columbia but spent the bulk of my childhood in Victoria, B.C. and on the opposite coast, in Halifax, Nova Scotia...At around twelve I decided I wanted to be a writer (this came after deciding I wanted to be a scientist, and then an architect). I started out writing sci-fi epics (my Star Wars phase) then went on to swords and sorcery tales (my Dungeons and Dragons phase) and then, during the summer holiday when I was fourteen, started on a humorous story about a boy addicted to video games (written, of course, during my video game phase)."
Julie Otsuka, When the Emperor Was Divine
JULIE ON WRITING
Publisher's Reader's Guide
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Julia Otsuka’s quietly disturbing novel opens with a woman reading a sign in a post office window. It is Berkeley, California, the spring of 1942. Pearl Harbor has been attacked, the war is on, and though the precise message on the sign is not revealed, its impact on the woman who reads it is immediate and profound. It is, in many ways she cannot yet foresee, a sign of things to come. She readies herself and her two young children for a journey that will take them to the high desert plains of Utah and into a world that will shatter their illusions forever.
Moving between dreams, memories, and sharply emblematic moments, When the Emperor Was Divine reveals the dark underside of a period in American history that, until now, has been left largely unexplored in American fiction.
Julie Otsuka was born and raised in California. She is a graduate of Yale University and received her M.F.A. from Columbia. She lives in New York City.
Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now
READER'S GUIDE
MEG'S SITE
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Fifteen-year-old Daisy is sent from Manhattan to England to visit her aunt and cousins she’s never met: three boys near her age, and their little sister. Her aunt goes away on business soon after Daisy arrives. The next day bombs go off as London is attacked and occupied by an unnamed enemy.
As power fails, and systems fail, the farm becomes more isolated. Despite the war, it’s a kind of Eden, with no adults in charge and no rules, a place where Daisy’s uncanny bond with her cousins grows into something rare and extraordinary. But the war is everywhere, and Daisy and her cousins must lead each other into a world that is unknown in the scariest, most elemental way.
This is Meg Rosoff’s first novel. The author was born in Boston and lives in London. When Meg Rosoff's youngest sister died of breast cancer, Rosoff decided that life was too short not to make an attempt to follow her own dream of being a writer. She left her job in advertising and began writing a novel, and the result was How I Live Now.
Michael Simmons, Finding Lubchenko
AN EXCERPT
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Evan MacAlister always has a scheme. Since his millionaire father never gives him any money, Evan "liberates" equipment from Dad’s business and sells it on eBay. But when a man is murdered and Mr. McAlister is accused, Evan is fresh out of plans. He alone can clear his father’s name— but only by revealing his own theft operation. And then he’ll be grounded forever.
There’s just one thing to do—find the real murderer. Armed only with a cryptic e-mail from someone named Lubchenko, Evan sets off on a quest that catapults him and his two best friends into a world of danger and international intrigue.
Brian Vaughan, Runaways Vol. 1: Pride & Joy.
BRIAN Q&A
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All young people believe their parents are evil ... but what if they really are? Meet Alex, Karolina, Gert, Chase, Molly and Nico - whose lives are about to take an unexpected turn. When these six young friends discover their parents are all secretly super-powered villains, the shocked teens find strength in one another. Together, they run away from home and straight into the adventure of their lives - vowing to turn the tables on their evil legacy. MARVEL COMIC.
Websites of author:main site and myspace
Jeanette Walls, The Glass Castle
JEANETTE Q&A
An EXCERPT
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Jeannette Walls's father always called her "Mountain Goat" and there's perhaps no more apt nickname for a girl who navigated a sheer and towering cliff of childhood both daily and stoically. In The Glass Castle, Walls chronicles her upbringing at the hands of eccentric, nomadic parents--Rose Mary, her frustrated-artist mother, and Rex, her brilliant, alcoholic father. To call the elder Walls's childrearing style laissez faire would be putting it mildly. As Rose Mary and Rex, motivated by whims and paranoia, uprooted their kids time and again, the youngsters (Walls, her brother and two sisters) were left largely to their own devices.
Jeannette Walls lives in Virginia and is married to the writer John Taylor. She is a regular contributor to MSNBC and has worked at several publications, including Esquire, USA Today, and New York.
Laura Whitcomb, A Certain Slant of Light
LAURA'S SITE
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In the class of the high school English teacher she has been haunting, Helen feels them: For the first time in 130 years, human eyes are looking at her. They belong to a boy, a boy who has not seemed remarkable until now. And Helen--terrified, but intrigued--is drawn to him. The fact that he is in a body and she is not presents this unlikely couple with their first challenge. But as the lovers struggle to find a way to be together, they begin to discover the secrets of their former lives and of the young people they come to possess.
Laura Whitcomb grew up in Pasadena, California in a mildly haunted house. She received her English degree at California State University at Northridge in 1993. She has taught Language Arts in California and Hawaii. She lives in West Linn, Oregon. This is her first novel.
Gene Luen Yang, American Born Chinese
GENE Q&A
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When his family moves to a new neighborhood, Jin Wang suddenly finds that he's the only Chinese-American student at his school. Jocks and bullies pick on him constantly, and he has hardly any friends. Then, to make matters worse, he falls in love with an all-American girl...
Jin's story is interwoven with the legend of the Chinese folk hero Monkey King, and a sitcom starring buck-toothed Chinese stereotype Cousin Chin-Kee.
Gene Luen Yang, born in Alameda, California, is an American comics artist; American Born Chinese was named a 2006 finalist for the National Book Award in the young people's literature category. This was the first graphic novel to be nominated for a National Book Award. It has also won the 2007 Michael L. Printz Award for young-adult literature, a first for a graphic novel
Marcus Zusak I am the Messenger.
EXCERPT
MARCUS Q&A
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Meet Ed Kennedy—underage cabdriver, pathetic cardplayer, and useless at romance. He lives in a shack with his coffee-addicted dog, the Doorman, and he’s hopelessly in love with his best friend, Audrey. His life is one of peaceful routine and incompetence, until he inadvertently stops a bank robbery. That’s when the first Ace arrives. That’s when Ed becomes the messenger. . . .
Chosen to care, he makes his way through town helping and hurting (when necessary), until only one question remains: Who’s behind Ed’s mission?
I am the Messenger is a cryptic journey filled with laughter, fists, and love.
Markus Zusak is an Australian author.
