The Hazards of Working at a Bookstore Vol. 1.8

Saw several books on Tuesday night that I would be interested in reading. Even actually saw one in the young readers that sounded pretty good.

First is Timeless by Alexandra Monir. Our main character is named Michele Windsor, who is from a famous blue blood family. She discovers her great-great-grandmother's diary, and as she reads through it, she gets transported back in time to the Gilded Age. She meets the man of her dream in the past, but also learns some family secrets, and must try to deal with both of her lives. This is a teen book.

Second is the young readers book: The Danger Box by Blue Balliett. Now this author has had several bestselling kids' books in the Chasing Vermeer series. None of which I've read, although they sound like they have a decent plot. But this book sounds really good. The main character is named Zoomy, a 12 year old with pathological myopia, and at the beginning of the story, his absent alchoholic father shows up and leaves a box for him. Inside the box is only an old notebook, but it leads to lots of adventures. It is a journal that Zoomy goes through and then tries to find out more history about the author.

Third is a grown up book called Madame Tussaud: A Novel of the French Revolution by Michelle Moran. Her other books have been about Nefertiti and Cleopatra. Both people that I enjoy reading about. I haven't read her books, but if this one is good, then I'll put them on my list. As you can tell by the title, it is about Madame Tussaud, she who is famous for the wax museum, but she was also an eye witness to the revolution. The royal family is impressed with her talent and invite her to the palace. But as tides turn, she is now considered a traitor for this favor she has been shown. And to save herself she is commissioned to make the death masks of the beheaded royal family.

Fourth is the book Living Hell by Catherine Jinks, a teen novel. Again, this author has many teen books, none of which have quite appealed to me when I picked them up to read the summaries on the jacket flaps. However, I picked it up anyway, and it sounds very intriguing. The main character is a 17 year old boy named Cheney. He has lived his whole life on a spaceship searching for an inhabitable planet. The spaceship hits a radiation wave, and at first it seems everyone is okay, there is no damage. But what has happened is the ship is now an organic organism, and it thinks the humans living in it are parasites and sends things to kill them, just like white blood cells would in our body. The science teacher in me LOVES this story idea!

Ill Wind by Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason

Well, I feel like this is the first adult fiction I've read in a long time. Wait though, I really don't like using the term "adult fiction". In my mind it brings up the idea of an "adult bookstore" with it's XXX signs and showing an ID to get in. So maybe, just to help my own sense of silliness, I'll say this is my first "grown-up" book in a while. :-)

This was a pretty good book. I talked about it in one of my Hazards of Working at a Bookstore blogs a few weeks ago. I can tell, now that I know it was published over 10 years ago, that it wasn't published that recently. While it probably was repackaged and released with the big oil spill we had last year, there are surely some things that could stand to be updated technology wise. But, all in all, it was a good story.

Basically it is the largest oil spill in history, and it happens in San Francisco Bay. The oil company tries to save their image by releasing an untested "designer microbe" that will eat the oil and anything made of petrocarbons. It should be done once it eats the oil spill, but as it was untested, they don't realize it can travel through the air, and it does. And it eats not only oil, but gasoline right out of cars gas tanks, synthetic fabrics, and plastic. In a few days, there is no way to make cars go with no fuel. And any plastic has dissolved, and this causes problems that you don't even realize because of how many minor things are made of plastic that we don't even realize.

The world turns into the past, with really no communication other than a few science labs that figure a way around it. The president is killed as he is visiting one of the oil supplying nations and his plane has brought the microbe with it and destroyed their countries as well. The Speaker of the House ends up as president and decides Martial Law is the best way to keep the nation safe. But not everyone agrees with hanging kids who are out after curfew or who have stolen a can of tuna. And when one military commander decides to stop a science testing area where they may be able to solve the energy problems, people decide to fight back.