Teens Blog : supernatural

There are things worse than death...

bookchick@evpl — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 18:50:00 GMT

"Beneath heaven is hell. Beneath hell is Furnace."

So begins Alex Sawyer's new life inside Furnace, a high security prison built to house the worst of the worst juvenile offenders. A life of harsh rules rules. A life of hard labor and brutality. A life without the sun or freash air. A life where a single mistep could bring the blood watch in a place where there are things worse than death.

Problem is, Alex is innocent.

"If you could do it all over again and change something, what would it be?"

myzticrhythmz@evpl — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 21:23:00 GMT

This is the big question for Jeremy Dance, aka Lil J, in Walter Dean Myers' Dope Sick. Lil J is a 17-year-old on the run, part of a drug deal gone wrong in which an undercover cop's been shot. He finds himself hiding out in an abandoned building in the company of Kelly, a weird vagrant with a television that can show Lil J's past, present, and maybe his future. It's Kelly who asks Lil J the question about what he would change in his life if he could, and much of the book covers Lil J revisiting his downward spiral: a painful home life, drugs, jail time, fathering a child.

This is a fascinating book where a kid from the streets is compelled to stop at a pivotal point in his life and consider that he may actually have options. He wasn't a bad student, has a gift for the rhythm of rap, and seems to care for his son and the child's mother.

Walter Dean Myers has taken a very contemporary, real-life situation and infused it with a bit of mysticism and fantasy. He also leaves the reader with some questions: Who was Kelly?A real, "spooky" guy? A ghost? A drug-induced hallucination? Will Lil J be able to turn his life around?

And by all means, stick around for the ending. It's not what you'd expect.

More Supernatural Love Stories

UndergroundLibrarian@evpl — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 01:16:00 GMT

Love Is Hell. That's the title of this book of short stories, each one by a different author and each one containing a supernatural being. And as in all good supernatural love stories, it takes the girl a while to discover that the boy she is interested in is indeed not exactly human. Scott Westerfield's story is exclusively about humans, but it's set in the future when humans have so many other powers -- this story is about a class in school where each kid has to give up some modern attribute and try living without it for a while. How he fits this into a love story makes for interesting reading. Other stories include faery folk, selkies, and of course ghosts. All of them are good!