LITTLE ROCK — Crispin: The End of Time
Avi
HarperCollins Children’s, $16.99, ages 10-up
The final installment in Colorado author Avi’s brilliant Crispin series begins with sorrow and tension. Crispin’s beloved friend and protector,Bear, is dead. Rudderless, he and his painfully shy compatriot, Troth, wander the French countryside with a vague goal of heading north to Iceland.
When Troth finds a haven in a convent, Crispin reluctantly moves on without her. He happens upon a group of apparent minstrels and decides to travel with them, thinking he has found a new family to adopt. But on this journey, not everything is what it seems, and the price of freedom proves to be a punishing fee.
My Best Friend Is Sharp as a Pencil
Hanoch Piven Schwartz & Wade, $17.99, ages 4-8
An enterprising girl, peppered with a visiting grandmother’s routine questions - Who is your best friend?What’s your favorite teacher like? - is tired of “the same old boring answers.”
To the narrator, “art teacher,” “best friend” and “the wildest girl in class” all are accurate, but diminish their larger-thanlife subjects. Instead, Sofia is “as happy as a balloon” and “graceful as a ballet slipper” and “as jumpy as a million rubber bands.”
A prized teacher is “as relaxed as my favorite pair of jeans” and “as mysterious as dark glasses.” Her best friend is “as curious as a magnifying glass” and “as precise as a microscope.” It’s an entertaining illustration of colorful similes.
Fire Will Fall
Carol Plum-Ucci Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $18, ages 13-up
Taut and trembling with energy, this sequel to Streams of Babel is utterly absorbing. “TheTrinity Four,” all teenage victims of water poisoned by biological terrorists, find themselves visited by demons, virtual and real, as they fight the poison’s malignant symptoms.
Fire Will Fall will resound with readers who like John Marsden’s Tomorrow series and Susan Beth Pfeffer’s apocalyptic trilogy that began with Life As We Knew It.
In this book, the Trinity Four forge a union with two accomplished hackers after bumping into their darkest enemies. Chapters alternate among viewpoints, expertly building pressure to the exploding point.
Vintage Veronica
Erica S. Perl Knoph, $16.99, ages 13-up
Veronica is 15, fashionforward (ahead of Seventeen magazine) and selfconsciously fat. She works in Consignment Corner, a subset of Clothing Bonanza, colloquially known as Dollar-a-Pound.
The store’s motto is “No New Clothing,” and the way it replenishes inventory makes most secondhand stores look as decorous as Neiman Marcus. Everything that’s available is in a giant pile that’s rejuvenated hourly by a torrent of fresh clothing that pours from a hatch in the ceiling.
The store’s regulars are known as Pickers, and the staff caste system puts Florons (the sleek, catty girls who work the retail section) far above Veronica and other serfs. When some of the most elite Florons enlist Veronica in a mean-spirited prank, she’s so eager for approval that she falls in step. But can she extract herself from their size-zero grasp?
Family, Pages 31 on 06/30/2010