Bibliophile Support Group

Insatiable is Meg Cabot's newest release and her first ever adult paranormal novel. Meena Harper is an average, ordinary sort of young adult woman. She goes to work every day writing dialogue for the daytime soap opera Insatiable and comes home to her beloved, adorable dog Jack Bauer and currently unemployed brother, Jon. And, oh yeah, she knows how you're going to die. She doesn't really tell people this, though, since almost no one ever believes her. And she had to spend some dark years in high school as the You're Gonna Die Girl. So, instead, she just suggests you don't take such-and-such street home from work, or that you don't climb that ladder. But it's a burden Meena has always lived with. However, when she meets an incredibly handsome stranger, Lucien, in an unbelievably weird way - she's flabbergasted to realize she has absolutely no idea how he will die. It's almost as if he's... already dead. In fact, it looks like Meena will be...

Nocturne , written by L. D. Harkrader, is a companion novel to A Practical Guide to Vampires . (Wish I coulda found a bigger pic, but this was the best I could find.) To sum up a premise that could easily be spoilery (I'll do my best to give away as little as possible): Flannery Lane is a fifteen year old girl living with her "Uncle" Anatole who took her in as an infant found on his shop's doorstep - she has strong magical abilities that she keeps secret at his behest, though Uncle Anatole is a known, practicing wizard shopkeeper in the village. When strange, dangerous things begin happening, Flannery finds herself having a harder and harder time not using her magic to help. Okay, that synopsis is kind of weak. See, I liked the book SO MUCH I didn't really want to give away anything much. Here's the thing: I thought, based off it's Twilight -esque cover and basic description on the back, that Nocturne took place in modern times. But that is oh-so-delightf...

Still Sucks to be Me is the very recently released YA sequel to Kimberly Pauley's 2008 Sucks to be Me . Personally, I cannot be more ecstatic to have our insanely likable, hilarious Mina back! How about you? And if you can't answer that because you haven't read the first novel Sucks to be Me - check out my review on that one here: http://bibliophilesupportgroup.blogspot.com/2008/05/sucks-to-be-me.html and skip this review. Trust me, you don't want to get any spoilers!!! :) For the rest of you, I promise to have next to no spoilers on Still Sucks to be Me in this review, as I am an avid avoider of spoilers myself!!! Now that Mina has taken the plunge and become a teenage vampire (after being threatened by the Northwest Regional Vampire Council with either doing so or losing all her memories - and having a four-week deadline for making the decision), she and her parents are unexpectedly killed in a car accident (or so everybody is led to believe), uprooted from her ho...

Middleworld is a middlegrade fantasy/adventure novel by Jon and Pamela Voelkel and the first of the Jaguar Stones trilogy. Synopsis as summarized by your Support Group leader: Max Murphy is a video game loving, indoorsy, kinda irritated fourteen-year old - and for good reason (well, the last part anyway). His parents, archaeologists, take off on a suddenly open dig in Central America, thereby canceling Max's family vacation to Italy - which he'd been really looking forward to (his grandma makes awesome pizza). And his dad isn't all the apologetic about it either. So before he can even digest this turn of events, his parents are gone and he is all alone with Zia, the odd housekeeper. But in yet another sudden twist, Max is shipped off to San Xavier to be with his parents, because, apparently, they need him. His estranged Uncle Ted isn't all that friendly - and Max quickly realizes that his parents didn't send for him - they're missing. And there might be somethi...

Wayback is an adult Christian fiction sci-fi novel by the first time author Sam Batterman. (ISBN: 978-1-933204-87-1, VMI Publishers, 2009, $14.99) It all begins with the discovery of a strange and super-powerful futuristic weapon that has been hidden since the fall of Hitler and his Nazis. He had a horrific plan to use it's abilities to transport its user to any time period in the past. Now, a group of handpicked scientists, adventurers, and geniuses have been recruited to put this machine to use as a tool for understanding the true age and history of the world. What they find and the time period they enter proves to be dangerous and eye-opening for science, so-called established facts, and religions. So, in Wayback the machine takes this group to the time of the Flood and Noah's arc in biblical times. I'm not a big fan of biblical fiction, but for those of you who are interested... The writing is of a pretty high level. I felt that Sam Batterman wrote with lovely imagery...

Runaway is the third and final book in the Airhead YA trilogy by Meg Cabot. Here I am sounding like a broken record again - but please, please, PLEASE do not read the review of this book if you haven't yet read Airhead and Being Nikki - it will have all sorts of spoilers for the uninitiated! Anyway, Runaway starts shortly after Being Nikki left off - the recently-revealed-psycho Brandon has Em held hostage, basically, because he has threatened to tell his father, president of Stark Enterprises, where the real Nikki is (and that she's alive in another girl's body) if Em doesn't go along with his crazy plan to get whatever info Nikki has that made her killable in order to take down his father (because he doesn't like him anymore than Em does). Oh, yeah, and his oh-so-great plan to force Em to pretend to be his girlfriend. Doesn't get more insane than that. Especially for a guy as dumb as Brandon. From there, some pretty darn exciting stuff starts happening. St...

The Missionary is an adult fiction novel, co-written by William Carmichael and David Lambert. (ISBN: 978-0-8024-5569-7, Moody Publishers, 2009, $13.99) American missionary David, his wife Christie, and four-year-old boy Davy are living in Caracas, Venezuela, helping to rescue homeless, sick, and starving orphans on the streets - of which there are many. The only problem is that David begins to find his work to be almost pointless - for every child they take in at Hope Village, there are dozens more still out there. He desperately wants to do more. And when an opportunity presents itself, David finds himself participating in a dangerous attempt to change the Venezuelan government - an attempt that puts his life, as well as his wife's and son's, at risk and causes him to become an international fugitive. So, I thought the premise sounded pretty good - and it is. Plus, the cover is nice and eye-catching. There's a slow build in momentum, and the action does pick up. At times ...