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Who would believe that we're already a week into November! As much as I love summer, I know I'll be looking forward to some cold nights curled up next to my fireplace (ahem, radiator...but we can pretend) catching up on my reading. This week we don't have too many new releases, but they're all great. Two picks: The unlikely romance in THE FORTUNE OF CARMEN NAVARRO, and the boy with a terminal disease who wants nothing more than to swim with Great Whites in WISH. 

November 9^th

Hardcover

THE FORTUNE OF CARMEN NAVARRO by Jen Bryant (Knopf Books for Young Readers)

Carmen Navarro rings up customers at the Quikmart, bored to tears. It’s a job, and she needs it. But Carmen’s true love is music: she dropped out of high school to sing with the Gypsy Lovers and land a recording contract, someday.

Just a few miles away, Ryan Sweeney hunches over his books, a studious cadet with his eye on West Point. There’s not a single girl at the Valley Forge Military Academy, and that’s fine by him.

But when Ryan, on a day pass from campus, spots Carmen, with her shining black hair and snake tattoo, his pulse quickens. Carmen, who normally rolls her eyes at the stiff Academy soldados, can tell this one is different. She slips him a note: “Come hear my band.” A romance begins, unlikely, passionate . . . and quickly imbalanced. In an enthralling narrative of obsessive love, the novel builds to a stunning close.

Inspired by the novella and opera Carmen, Jen Bryant creates a strong-minded and alluring heroine in this contemporary tale of tragic love.

THE MARBURY LENS by Andrew Smith (Feiwel and Friends)

Sixteen-year-old Jack gets drunk and is in the wrong place at the wrong time. He is kidnapped. He escapes, narrowly. The only person he tells is his best friend, Conner. When they arrive in London as planned for summer break, a stranger hands Jack a pair of glasses. Through the lenses, he sees another world called Marbury.

There is war in Marbury. It is a desolate and murderous place where Jack is responsible for the survival of two younger boys. Conner is there, too. But he’s trying to kill them.

Meanwhile, Jack is falling in love with an English girl, and afraid he’s losing his mind.

Conner tells Jack it’s going to be okay.

But it’s not.

Andrew Smith has written his most beautiful and personal novel yet, as he explores the nightmarish outer limits of what trauma can do to our bodies and our minds.

THE SWEETNESS OF SALT by Cecilia Galante (Bloomsbury USA Children's Books)

Julia just graduated as her high school valedictorian, has a full ride to college in the fall and a coveted summer internship clerking for a federal judge. But when her older sister, Sophie, shows up at the graduation determined to reveal some long buried secrets, Julia's carefully constructed plans come to a halt. Instead of the summer she had painstakingly laid out, Julia follows Sophie back to Vermont, where Sophie is opening a bakery—and struggling with some secrets of her own. What follows is a summer of revelations—some heartwarming, some heartbreaking, and all slowly pointing Julia toward a new understanding of both herself and of the sister she never really knew.

WISH by Joseph Monninger (Delacorte Books for Young Readers)

Bee’s brother, Tommy, knows everything there is to know about sharks. He also knows that his life will be cut short by cystic fibrosis. And so does Bee.
 
That’s why she wants to make his wish-foundation-sponsored trip to swim with a great white shark an unforgettable memory.
 
But wishes don’t always come true. At least, not as expected. Only when Bee takes Tommy to meet a famous shark attack survivor and hard-core surfer does Tommy have the chance to live one day to the fullest.
 
And in the sun-kissed ocean off a California beach, Bee discovers that she has a few secret wishes of her own. . . .

November 11^th

The Foundling’s Tale, FACTOTUM: The Foundling’s Tale, Book Three by D.M. Cornish (Putnam Juvenile)

Rossamand Bookchild stands accused of not truly being a human at all, but of being a monster. Even the protection of Europe, the Branden Rose, the most feared and renowned monster-hunter in all the Half-Continent, might not be enough to save him. Powerful forces move against them both, intent on capturing Rossamand whose existence some believe may hold the secret to perpetual youth.