Back to Blogging for Teen Reviews- I recently read a free ARC that I had received from Little Brown & Co. for Guardian of the Dead by Karen Healey. It was an interesting tale of both paranormal and folk legend set in New Zealand. Not knowing much about New Zealand, this was a great entry into their mythology. Interesting story of friendship, attraction, monsters and Shakespeare. Ellie Spencer discovers that she has powers of her own after a chance encounter with the loner at her boarding school. They ahve to pair up to save their corner of the world. A much darker mythology than what you would find in Percy Jackson, and for a much older crowd.

Twitter

I have been tweeting for a while and have found it to be a great way to annotate a book. I have posted several short book reviews. None of the teens I know use twitter, so I am not sure how much of a useful application this will be for them, but I can see its use as an application for adults.

RSS feeds

While I like the idea of the RSS feeder, I have a hard enough time keeping up with all of the other things. I realize that this can make life somewaht easier at being informed. So I am going to try adding some feeds to my blog.

I like the application being an option for our patrons. I hope that this is something that we can use in the future. Not everyone reads information the same way, so the more options we have to reach out to current and potential users the better.

I am back from vacation! Needed that rest!! I am now trying to get caught up with all of the work that I missed.

I see that for our technology training twitter was an option for last week. I actually already twitter - (marylibrarian) and have been tweeting since last November, I think. I signed up on facebook today. I am not sure how I feel about that yet. I actually liked being somewhat anonymous, but oh well.

From the YA perspective, I have read a few YA books lately and am thinking about the September programming. Besides the TAB stuff...

Today's Middle School Book Discussion

I went to Byrd Middle School and had a great time talking about The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan. There were 20 teens ready to talk about the Greeks. I brought Baklava and 4 different kinds of Nectar from the Mediterranean Bakery for a snack. We had a good time talking about which God we would want to have as our parent, and favorite scenes from the book. Not everyone had read the series, so keeping it to the one title was difficult. We had a trivia time where everyone got to pick a prize from the leftovers from Scavenger Hunts long since past. I also had a nice copy of Bulfinch's Age of the Fable with slews of Greek mythology. The teen who won looked very excited about getting it. We played some games and had a great time.

I will have one more discussion at Byrd towards the end for the whole Twilight series. 2 down and 2 more books to go.

What's new for YA at GA

I will have my third book discussion with Byrd this week for The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan. We had about 1/2 boys 1/2 girls last time. I am hoping that we can continue this way for this book. Twilight had all girls. My last book discussion will be in May for the whole Twilight series. I should get started on the last 2 books. I feel it may take me a while.

My first blog

Well, since I needed to create a blog, here it is. I suppose that this blog will be mostly about YA stuff since I included YA in my user id. The most recent YA book I have read would be...

Fade by Lisa McMann. I enjoyed her first work called Wake. Fade picks up where Wake left off. A young girl has the extraordinary ability to enter people's dreams. She uses this skill to help the police solve crimes, but also to help people change bad elements of their dreams. This does not come without a price. This was a nice change from the usual vampire/paranormal stories that are so trendy now. I hope that there will be a third book.