One to Watch: REVOLUTION
Jennifer Donnelly, whose sophisticated young adult novel A Northern Light won a Printz honor back in 2002/2003, returns with Revolution, which has been getting good trade reviews. It’s a teen drama about a high school senior grieving over her younger brother’s murder and her mother’s subsequent breakdown, who becomes obsessed with a diary written by a young woman during the French Revolution while on Christmas break in Paris with her father and his pregnant 25 year-old wife.
Orders are in line with reserves at libraries we checked, but this one may get more media attention, and word among early readers is that it has crossover appeal to adults.
Booklist is enthusiastic:
The ambitious story, narrated in Andi’s grief-soaked, sardonic voice, will wholly capture patient readers with its sharply articulated, raw emotions and insights into science and art; ambition and love; history’s ever-present influence; and music’s immediate, astonishing power: It gets inside of you . . . and changes the beat of your heart.
And more than 75 reviewers on GoodReads give it 4.08 out of 5 stars.
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Other Notable Young Adult and Children’s Fiction
The Lost Hero by Rick Riordan (Hyperion) begins a new series set in the same universe as his bestselling Percy Jackson and the Olympians series.
Beautiful Darkness by Margaret Stohl and Kami Garcia is the followup to the bestselling young adult vampire novel Beautiful Creatures, which was one of Amazon’s Top 10 picks for 2009.
Fancy Nancy and the Fabulous Fashion Boutique by Jane O’Connor and Robin Preiss Glasser (HarperCollins) is a picture book for young readers.
Usual Adult Suspects:
Our Kind of Traitor by John Le Carre (Viking) gets the thumbs up from Kirkus: “Le Carre uses still another aspect of international relations in the new world order—the powerful, equivocal position of money launderers to the Russian mob—to put a new spin on a favorite theme: the betrayal that inevitably follows from sharply divided loyalties.”
American Assassin (Mitch Rapp Series #11) by Vince Flynn (S&S) introduces the young Mitch Rapp, as he takes on his first assignment.
Forbidden Places by Penny Vincenzi (Overlook) is a sprawling saga set in the WWII-era English countryside and revolves around the ordeals of three young women. Booklist says “Vincenzi does an admirable job of evoking the bustle and fears of wartime England, and providing plenty of juicy plot twists and turns to keep readers hooked.”