Mailbox Monday - July 9, 2012

Welcome to Mailbox Monday, the weekly meme created by Marcia from A girl and her books.  This is where I share the titles I have received for review or purchased during the past week.  Mailbox Monday will be hosted in July by Mrs Q Book Addict.

The Zombie Generation

by Drake Vaughn

Warner is the sole survivor of a deathscape dominated by hordes of the undead.  Years of isolation and lack of any human contact has driven him to the brink of insanity.  Plagued with vivid hallucinations and shocking nightmares, he scours the deadlands for any signs of life.

While discovering a temporary cure for his creeping mental illness, Warner is attacked and infected with the deadly disease.  Switching between man and beast, he must decide on risking a desperate cure or attempting a suicidal quest to rescue a group of stranded survivors.  Worse, these survivors may only be a figment of his crumbling sanity.

The Zombie Generation is a terrifying tale, perfect for fans of horror and the flesh guzzling undead.

Schooled
by Tali Nay


"Do you have to have sex to have a baby?"


It's a question that ten-year-old Tali Nay asked the office assistant at her elementary school after the woman had done her best to explain how it all happened to a roomful of confused girls.  Or maybe Tali was the only one who was confused.  It's entirely possible, for if there's anything she knew at this point in her schooling, it was that she -- without fail -- was the last to know about anything interesting. Take her first day of kindergarten, where it turned out that every other kid already knew which letters were the vowels.  Her first lesson as a student was consequently one of humiliation, and her second -- only slightly less important -- was that puking in a classroom tends to start a chain reaction.  A refreshingly honest deep-dive into what we actually take away from a public education, this hilarious and heartfelt memoir captures the things we learn in school that are never part of any lesson plan yet somehow have the biggest impact upon the shaping of our perceptions over the years we spend in a classroom.  Things like competition, failure, scandal, popularity, disillusionment, triumph, guilt, and, of course, throwing up in public.  From the glorious to the gloriously awkward, this everyman tale is a story of growing up, one semester at a time. 

The Raven Boys

by Maggie Stiefvater

"There are only two reasons a non-seer would see a spirit on St. Mark's Eve.  Either you're his true love. . . or you killed him."

Every year, Blue Sargent stands next to her clairvoyant mother as the soon-to-be dead walk past.  Blue never sees them -- until this year, when a boy emerges from the dark and speaks to her.

His name is Gansey, and he's a rich student at Aglionby, the local private school.  Blue has a policy of staying away from Aglionby boys.  Known as Raven Boys, they can only mean trouble.

But Blue is drawn to Gansey, in a way she can't entirely explain.  He is on a quest that has encompassed three other Raven Boys:  Adam, the scholarship student who resents the privilege around him; Ronan, the fierce soul whose emotions range from anger to despair; and Noah, the taciturn watcher who notices many things but says very little.

For as long as she can remember, Blue has been warned that she will cause her true love to die.  She doesn't believe in true love, and never thought this would be a problem.  But as her life becomes caught up in the strange and sinister world of the Raven Boys, she's not so sure anymore.

India's Summer
by therese


India Butler, single and about to turn forty, travels to LA in an attempt to reinvent her life in a world rarely illuminated by the flashbulbs of the paparazzi, she discovers the true meaning of "having it all."

Nightwoods
by Charles Frazier


Charles Frazier, the acclaimed author of Cold Mountain and Thirteen Moons, returns with a dazzling novel set in small-town North Carolina in the early 1960s. With his brilliant portrait of Luce, a young woman who inherits her murdered sister's troubled twins, Frazier has created his most memorable heroine.  Before the children, Luce was content with the reimbursements of the rich Appalachian landscape, choosing to live apart from the small coummunity around her.  But the coming of the children changes everything, cracking open her solitary life in difficult, hopeful, dangerous ways.  In a lean, tight narrative, Nightwoods resonates with the timelessness of a great work of art. 

Louder than Words
by Chelsey Shannon, Emily Smucker, Marni Bates
edited by Deborah Reber


Real Girls. Real Words. Real Life.


What do you get when you give talented teen girl writers a chance to share their life stories with the world?  The first-ever series of teen-authored memoirs:  Louder Than Words.  Each Louder Than Words book features a young author sharing her powerful story through unique prose, journal entries, and poetry.  Louder Than Words: The First Collection features three unique books written by three incredible teen authors in one riveting compilation.


In Marni: My True Story of Stress, Hair-Pulling, and Other Obsessions, Marni Bates brings us insider her secret world of "pulling" and the challenges of surviving high school while trying to hid an obscure stress disorder.


Then in Emily: My True Story of Chronic Illness and Mission Out on Life, Emily Smucker takes us through the senior year that wasn't when chronic illness forced her to miss out on one of the most important times of her life.


And finally in Chelsey: My True Story of Murder, Loss, and Starting Over, Chelsey Shannon uses writing as a way to recover from experiencing the unthinkable when her father was murdered the week before her fourteenth birthday.