Cambridge High School Library 2024

This book trailer is stunning, so  I have to pop it in as well, see review below!

By: Gail Carriger Location: FIC CAR Genre: Refined murder by refined young ladies.   OK- Last in my series reviews on " Schools for Crims or Crim Busters" this series is my favourite. Refined murder by refined young ladies, it is so couth, so exquisitly ladylike, so improper and unbecoming. Fourteen-year-old Sophronia is the bane of her mother's existence. Sophronia is more interested in dismantling clocks and climbing trees than proper etiquette at tea--and god forbid anyone see her atrocious curtsy. Mrs. Temminnick is desperate for her daughter to become a proper lady. She enrolls Sophronia in Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality. But little do Sophronia or her mother know that this is a school where ingenious young girls learn to finish, all right--but it's a different kind of finishing. Mademoiselle Geraldine's certainly trains young ladies in the finer arts of dance, dress, and etiquette, but also in the other kind...

By: Kirsten Miller Location: FIC MIL Genre: Violent, bad language, crime, murder, rape and other criminal stuff This book is the opposite of the Gallagher Girls from my reviews yesterday. Instead of going to a school to learn to be a criminal fighter, they go to school to learn to be a criminal. How to Lead a Life of Crime  -  if  Dead Poet's Society and Hunger Games had a baby, this would be their love child...  Jessica on Goodreads.com said this about this book 1) The use of the word "f--" seriously, as in they couldn't print the word but couldn't come up with a suitable replacement. The weirdest form of censorship. What The f---  If you won't print the word, don't have your characters say it. 2) Boring characters with inconsistent motivations. 3) Unremarkable relationships. 4) Violence for the sake of plot. Deaths because the protagonist needs a reason to be angry. But we don't really care about the victims. 5) No underlying sense ...

By: Ally Carter Location: FIC CAR Genre: Chicks who are really spies I have a gutsy daughter, she plays rugby, she bikes in insane places- like Delhi, she can beat up her two brothers- with one hand, she can out wit anyone with words and she can rock climb a sheer rock wall, she is smart, good looking and actually just like her mother! She would make a great spy and she could be in the Gallagher Academy. We had the first two books in the series in here and a student begged me to get the others, so I have, we now have all six. I need to watch this student , she may also be a spy, which would account for her wearing sunnies and playing with her cell phone behind a book cover..hmmmm Cammie Morgan is a student at the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women, a fairly typical all-girls school-that is, if every school taught advanced martial arts in PE and the latest in chemical warfare in science, and students received extra credit for breaking CIA codes in computer cl...

By: Brian McClellan Location: FIC MCC Genre: Historical Fantasy Series: Power Mage Trilogy: One George Martin, Scott Orson Card, Brent Weeks, and Brandon Sanderson fans... this new trilogy is for you. Then again with the "Age of the Kings" in its blurb, it sounds really Tolkien. This book was stolen from my office before I had a chance to process it, then it got stolen again... it is hot and the Yr 12-13 boys are desperate for the second in the triolgy. When they beg, I know it is good!! 'The Age of Kings is dead. And I have killed it.' Field Marshal Tamas's coup against his king sends corrupt aristocrats to the guillotine and brings bread to the starving. But it also provokes war in the Nine Nations, internal attacks by royalist fanatics and greedy scrambling for money and power by Tamas's supposed allies: the Church, workers' unions and mercenary forces. Stretched to his limit, Tamas relies heavily on his few remaining powder mages, including...

By: Suzanne Collins Location: FIC COL Genre: Fantasy and Collins Cockroaches, we have a few in the library, I hate it when I lift something and there it is. Big, brown, scathing and unkillable. I yell at the cleaner if she is in, and she then attacks it with the vacuum cleaner -  sucked in! Rats and mice- I must confess we also have a pet mouse in the library, I call it "LitRATure" or Litty for short. Every morning he leaves me a present of tiny licorice logs, the caretaker wants to leave Litty a present of peanut butter. In the daylight I can handle Litty and the roaches, but if I was underground, in another world and they were four feet tall and could speak- yeah- na!!!  In this first book of the Underland Chronicles by the writer of the Hunger Games we see Gregor, an eleven year old boy and his two year old sister Boots get sucked from the laundry room in their New York apartment building into The Underland. The Underland has regular-ish humans, along wit...

By: Laura Sessions and Craig Bullock Genre: Heart warming stories.. Location: 636.7 SES I had a bit of a weird day today. I was doing a 'Topic Box" about earthquakes for a YR 10 class today, andf it made me think of my home town Christchurch and the day - 22 February 2011-  the quake hit. I decided to look at my sons photos of that day when he was right in the centre of the carnage in the middle of the city. He turned on his camera immediately after the quake hit... everytime I hear it, I shudder and I tear up, he was far far to close to the falling everything. Being the amazing young man he is, he raced into town and spent three hours on the worst hit spot, the CTV building, helping with the rescue efforts. But he was not the only one helping, and this  beautiful book tells the story of the USAR dogs that rescued trapped victims. It also tells the stories of the dogs that were rescued, and those dogs that stayed by the side of the owners until help arrived. On the ...

By: Patrick Ness Review of this book is below So they say this is the best book trailer ever.... Do you agree

By: Patrick Ness Location: FIC NES Genre: Ness at his best- Life, Death and everything inbetween When a Monster Calls was one of the most heart wrenching, depictions of the reality of death I have read, and now am watching. Ness can write- from the guts! and it hurts your heart and blows your mind! This book is the same, if you want nice happy themes, easily solved issues and niceness go read something else! “He wanted something, he realizes now. Wanted an answer other than the ones he’d been given. Wanted to find out this whole world had some purpose, some particular purpose. For him.” ― Patrick Ness , More Than This Emily May reviews it this way.. More Than This is a compelling read with a wonderful and diverse set of characters. It's creative and different. This book is about existentialism. It's about those old questions: what is the meaning of life, the universe and everything? What is "reality"? Is there a pattern amid this chaos or can it...

By : John Green and David Levithan Location : FIC GRE with all the other John Greens, but you wont find them cause they are always out!!! Genre: Hmm this is an interesting one.. Youth Fiction and LGBT Just been to India, actually this book has hardly any cultural connection to India except I bought it there, have not seen it in New Zealand - ever. It cost 350 rupees- $6.70NZ- a total bargain. I did not expect the plot to evolve the way it did and I get annoyed that LGBT literature hides itself, why cant they simply state what the book is really about! It is a great asset to the genre so why hide it? It is about two guys- both called Will Grayson and it is written by two amazing Youth Fiction Authors, and it deals with two big youth issues- depression and being a teenager who is gay. Arlene from Goodreads says it better than I can.. Wow! What did I just finish reading? I don't know whether to cringe, cry, walk away baffled, or sing from the top of the mountain in a musi...

By: Marsha Mehran Location: FIC MEH Genre: Food Lit with a bit of Ireland and Iran chucked in. Its a big genre at the moment, the food and ethnic thing. The biggest last year was Jodi Picoults The Storyteller , which I read over summer as well as this book. They are right up my alley, and then there is Tomorrow there will be Apricots , which is ths same deal, but I am picking on Pomegranate Soup for my review on this genre. Why? I reckon it will appeal more to you guys, it has a couple of powerful love stories, one with a 15 year old girl and it contrasts that with a long love of an elderly Italian couple. New love vs old, there is power in both. There is also some great threads of real history that helps us understand people of other nations that come to live in our lands. They come to us- hurt! So this is an immigrant story that tells the struggle of three sisters moving from the violence and hated of the Iran revolution to the sheltered and bigoted village in sea-coa...

By: Ian Doescher, Shakespeare and Yoda Genre: Verily a new hope.. Location: Is is 813.6, or is it in the 400's or do I just leave it lying around.. so it be. Return once more to a galaxy far, far away with this sublime retelling of George Lucas’s epic Star Wars in the style of the immortal Bard of Avon. The saga of a wise (Jedi) knight and an evil (Sith) lord, of a beautiful princess held captive and a young hero coming of age, Star Wars abounds with all the valor and villainy of Shakespeare’s greatest plays. ’Tis a tale told by fretful droids, full of faithful Wookiees and fearstome Stormtroopers, signifying...pretty much everything. HAN: Pray tell, what shall the cargo be? OBI-WAN: -Myself The boy, two droids, and ne're a question ask'd. HAN 'Tis what, a touch of local trouble here? OBI-WAN Nay, let us simply say it thus: we would Imperial entanglements avoid HAN Aye, there's the rub, so shalt though further pay. Ten thousand is the cost, and...

Location: At the movies... By John Green Genre: Tear Jerker This movie is going to launch mega stars, make you weep, and be huge, get ready for this one! Nope it wont make you weep, it will make you sob- uncontrollably... dont say I did not warn you!!! And boys- you are not immune!!!

By: Carlos Ruiz Zafon Location: ZAF Genre: Mystical Over summer I read a range of books, and sadly when I examine the list they are all kind of similar, Jodi Picoults Storyteller , Sarah's Key , Pomegranate Soup , Tomorrow there will be Apricots ... they all have a cultural or historical base and all have woman as the protagonist. Then I went to India and found Prince of Mist . Books are cheap in India, it is a constant fear , the excess luggage fine, I have a SonyE Reader, I can get these books electronically, but you know what, a book in the hand, that is cheap. is so irresistible, especially when you have never seen it in New Zealand. I bought 6 book home. Prince of Mist was my favourite, not a genre I read often, it is youth fiction, it is mystical, it is very clever.  It is stunningly beautifully written.... The prose is perfect. “Age makes you notice certain things. For example, I now know that a man’s life is broadly divided into three periods. During the first...

The summer holidays in New Zealand are over, the books are read, the beach visited , the ukulele learnt, and now we are back to work, school and BOOKS!!!! I am looking forward to an awesome year, with plenty of new initiatives and lots of book reviews to be had. I hope you all enjoy the journey 2014 will be for us on this blog. Glenys