Parenthetical.net

When Alton’s mother pushes him to play bridge with his blind, crotchety uncle in the hopes of scoring a big inheritance, he’s irritated — who wants to play a boring, mystifying game with old people? — but he goes along with it. Of course, he ends up loving bridge, and his uncle as well.
The [...]

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Russ and DJ have been best friends forever, and so have their “outrageous courageous” firefighter fathers. When both men die fighting a house fire, they’re town heroes — until the coroner finds drugs in their systems. All Russ wanted was to be just like his dad, but how can he accept the flawed man his [...]

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Scarlett’s family owns, and lives in, a stately old hotel in Manhattan, but both the hotel and the family have seen better days. They barely have enough money to make ends meet, Scarlett’s brother’s last chance at an acting career is crashing, her older sister is stuck in an Austenesque relationship with Wealthy Fratboy McYacht, [...]

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Incarceron is the ultimate prison: no way in, no way out. It was designed long ago to prove that even the dregs of humanity could create a paradise if properly managed, but the AI that manages the prison became sentient and turned it into a hell. Finn was born full-grown in Incarceron and remembers nothing [...]

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I didn’t read a single piece of fiction this summer. This is unheard of. What’s even more surprising is that I read all four non-fiction books cover to cover and enjoyed most of them. From favorite to least:

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, by Chip and Dan Heath — When I described [...]

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It’s an eventful year for Frankie: she starts a new school (the formerly all-boys St. Seb’s, at which girls are welcome officially if not in practice), her normally outgoing mother becomes so depressed she won’t get out of bed, and… y’know, boy stuff. It’s YA, after all.
I didn’t love it like I loved Jellicoe Road, [...]

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Jazz runs a business in Berkeley with Steve, her best friend and longtime pine-object. (They sell personalized postcard photos of local landmarks to ex-hippies, which I think is hilarious.) She’s psyched to spend the summer growing their business and doing some more quality pining over Steve. Until her mom, do-gooder extraordinaire, announces that she has [...]

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Callie Tate lives on a wealthy farm of pecan trees and too many brothers in turn-of-the-century Texas. One day she gathers the courage to ask her intimidating grandfather about the two different kinds of grasshoppers she sees in the fields, and he tells her to figure it out herself. From her eureka moment — they’re [...]

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Naomi and her little brother Owen are content living with their great-grandmother in a trailer park — Naomi carves soap into animal shapes, hangs out with the (clearly flaming, even though the text doesn’t say so explicitly) librarian at school, and watches Wheel of Fortune every night with Gram and her best friend Fabiola. But [...]

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After the discussion of trilogies (and Martini-Corona’s eternal John Christopher obsession), I decided this project wouldn’t be complete without a Tripod book. The Tripod trilogy (…heh) might have been the first major YA science fiction trilogy, and is certainly a classic.

If you somehow missed these books, the premise is that aliens invade, in giant metal [...]

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