Sarah Kurz

"This moment-this boy-could tear me apart and upend everything.  But in the heat of the cottage, wind rattling the glass in the windows, rain pelting the roof, with our skin flecked with salt water, I don't care." Welcome to Sparrow, OR.  A small coastal town has been haunted every June by three sisters for the past 200 years.  The Swan sisters were sentenced to death for witchery, and on June 1st of each year they return to Sparrow to inhabit the bodies of young girls and steal the life of young boys. Seventeen-year-old Penny Talbot has lived on the small lighthouse island outside of Sparrow her entire life.  She has led a quiet life with her mother and tried her hardest to avoid the Swan festival that takes place each June drawing in hundreds of tourist.  This year it isn't so easy.  Bo Carter, an outsider, has come to town to stay for the summer and he changes who Penny thought she was.   "Loving someone is dangerous.  It gives you ...

"This, even if it's crazy, and foolish, and I don't have a chance at succeeding, it's something.  Right now, it's really the only thing." The Other Side of Lost,  by Jessi Kirby, is the story of Mari, a girl who has created a perfect looking life for herself on social media.  She has a huge following and a knack for capturing stunning images that make her well loved in the world of Instagram.  But her real life is anything but perfect.  On the night of her 18th birthday, feeling more alone than ever, she sends a tear filled message out into the cyber world declaring herself a fake.  The next morning she wakes to find an inbox full of hateful messages.  She also finds a box on her front steps. Two months earlier Mari's cousin, Bri, tragically passed away.  As young girls the cousins dreamed of hiking the John Muir Trail on their 18th birthday.  Over the years the friendship drifted apart, but Bri still planned to hike the trail.  The...

"So we stood up there for a long while, watching the sunset and discussing how it was one of those things you could never truly capture in 8-bit, not with the 64's simplistic definition of violet (CHR$(156)), orange (CHR$(129)), and yellow (CHR$(158)).  There were too many other colors, thousands of colors.  The hardware could never do it justice." Sometimes you get so into a book that you read it obsessively and finish it in just two sittings.  That was  The Impossible Fortress.   The first novel by Jason Rekulak,  The Impossible Fortress  is the story of two 14-year-old computer geeks in a small New Jersey town in 1987. Life was fine for Billy.  He had a mother who loved him and left him home alone at night, giving him lots of freedom.  He had his two best friends, Alf and Clark.  He had his beloved Commodore 64 computer.  All of that changes one day when Alf shows up with news...Vanna White is on the cover of Playboy.  ...

"Where will this road end?  In a crater, an inferno, a rush of water?  I have spent my entire life inside a ten-mile radius.  There is something to be said about a place you can memorize." The year is 1985 and 15-year-old Pony Darlene Fontaine's mother has disappeared.  She has left the territory just as she appeared...suddenly and without a word.  Left behind the 88 bungalows, the women with their tracksuits, and the men with their matte black trucks.  Pony hasn't given up hope though.  She is determined to find her mother and help her with the mental break she has slowly been having.  Or maybe she's been having it the entire 15 years that she has lived in the territory?  Neither Pony or her father know the entire story behind Billie Jean Fontaine.  Only the family dog has the privilege of knowing all of the secrets.  But even she doesn't know what's happened to Billie Jean. Heartbreaker,  by Claudia Dey, was a fantastic ...