Taken by Edward Bloor

The first couple of pages got me right away. It looks as though this Young Adult book is going to be great. I will keep you posted. (3 out of 5)

The Jacket:

BY 2035 THE RICH have gotten richer, the poor have gotten poorer, and kidnapping has become a major growth industry in the United States. The children of privilege live in secure, gated communities and are escorted to and from school by armed guards.But the security around Charity Meyers has broken down. On New Year's morning, she wakes and finds herself alone, strapped to a stretcher, in an ambulance that's not moving. She is amazingly calm - kids in her neighborhood have been well trained in kidnapping protocol. If this were a normal kidnapping, Charity would be fine. But as the hours of her imprisonment tick by, Charity realizes there is nothing normal about what's going on here. No training could prepare her for what her kidnappers really want . . . and worse, for who they turn out to be.

Tithe A modern Faerie Tale by Holly Black

My next adventure into Fantasy is Tithe, a young adult book about a 16 year old who finds that she is part of a Faerie world. Its a quick, easy, and fun book to read. I really enjoyed it and would recommend it to teens and adults.

4 out of 5

New York Times Bestselling Author. A YALSA Best Book of 2003. Sixteen-year-old Kaye is a modern nomad. Fierce and independent, she travels from city to city with her mother's rock band until an ominous attack forces her back to her childhood home. There, against the industrial, blue-collar New Jersey backdrop, Kaye finds herself an unwilling pawn in an ancient power struggle between two rival faerie kingdoms. An Accelerated Reader title for ages 12 and up.



Followed by Valiant.......

3 out of 5

When 17-year-old Valerie Russell finds her boyfriend having sex with her mother, she splits Jersey for Manhattan, takes in a Rangers game and falls in with some creepy homeless teens who live on an abandoned subway platform. They survive by rooting through trash, and shoot up to take the edge off their urine-scented, rat-infested existence. It isn't until Val realizes that they're shooting up faerie drugs that this unevenly paced companion to Black's debut novel, Tithe, takes off. Val joins her fellow squatters as a courier for the faerie healer Ravus, a troll who, in a Beauty-and-the-Beast-inspired twist, becomes Val's romantic interest while turning her skills with a lacrosse stick into prowess with a sword. But Val succumbs to addiction, siphoning Ravus's potion for personal thrills. When she finds one of the troll's customers (a mermaid) murdered, she gets caught in the internecine politics of rival faerie courts. Black draws on a grab bag of fairy and folk motifs to create a labyrinthine plot with a decidedly dark edge in a narrative rife with expletives. Val, though sympathetic, is not as memorable as Tithe's Kaye, and that book's fans may miss the trips into the enchanted faerie world. The squatters' actions spiral inexorably toward a death, but the victim turns out to be a cop-in a horrifying incident that is never mentioned again. The climax connects with the plot of Black's first novel, and fans of Tithe will probably stick with the long build-up to get to the exciting finish. Ages 14-up.

French Fries