I’d Tell You I Love You, But Then I’d Have to Kill Youby Mary Downing Hahn Pages: 284 Goodreads synopsis: The Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women lives up to its name. Not only does this exclusive boarding school teach advanced language skills and correct deportment; its students also master the arts of tapping phones, hacking into …

Al Capone Does My Shirtsby Gennifer Choldenko Pages: 225 Today I moved to a twelve-acre rock covered with cement, topped with bird turd and surrounded by water. I’m not the only kid who lives here. There’s my sister, Natalie, except she doesn’t count. And there are twenty-three other kids who live on the island because their dads …

The Time Traveler’s Wifeby Audrey Niffenegger Pages: 537Source: Purchased This is the extraordinary love story of Clare and Henry, who met when Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-two and Henry was thirty. Impossible but true, because Henry suffers from a rare condition where his genetic clock periodically resets and …

The Glass Castleby Jeannette Walls Pages: 288 The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant. When sober, Jeannette’s brilliant and charismatic father captured his children’s imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and how to embrace life fearlessly. But when he drank, …

A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Futureby Daniel H. Pink Pages: 275My rating: C Goodreads synopsis: The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: artists, inventors, storytellers-creative and holistic “right-brain” thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn’t. Drawing on research …

Speakby Laurie Halse Anderson Pages: 224My rating: **** The first ten lies they tell you in high school.“Speak up for yourself—we want to know what you have to say.”From the first moment of her freshman year at Merryweather High, Melinda knows this is a big fat lie, part of the nonsense of high school. She is friendless, …