Modern Weapons Compared and Contrasted: Naval Vessels

Dougherty, Martin. Modern Weapons Compared and Contrasted: Naval Vessels. 2013. 48p. ISBN 978-1-4488-9248-8. 623.82 on the library shelves.

Ever since the first ships were used to fight, naval warfare has been a part of conflicts the world over. Following the Second World War, the battleship has been replaced by the mighty aircraft carrier, but there are a host of other ships, from submarines to destroyers, that are used by navies around the world to protect themselves from attack.

In this volume, Dougherty explores different types of ships, from corvettes and patrol crafts to frigates, destroyers, carriers and submarines and compares ships of similar classes together, discussing range, armaments, and capabilities. Ships are illustrated and statistics are presented to highlight their similarities and differences.

Fans of military hardware will appreciate the details provided by the author, especially the comparison between similar aircrafts.

Anyone with a fascination for military power will enjoy this quick and succinct read into one of the most powerful military arms a nation can deploy. Other books on the subject that can be enjoyed also include the Modern Weapons Compared and Contrasted series (Aircraft, Armored Fighting Vehicles; Artillery and Missiles; Naval Vessels; and Small Arms) as well as Warships Inside and Out, The History of Navies Around the World, The History of Marines Around the World, and The History of Armies Around the World.

Modern Weapons Compared and Contrasted: Aircraft

Dougherty, Martin. Modern Weapons Compared and Contrasted: Aircraft. 2013. 48p. ISBN 978-1-4488-9246-4. 623.74 on the library shelves.

Ever since flight was first developed military forces around the world have created fighters and bombers dedicated to the destruction of opposing forces and the bombing of structures and equipment. More recent development, such as helicopters and missiles, have greatly augmented the destructive power that aircraft possess.

In this book, Dougherty compares and contrasts several classes of aircraft, from helicopters to air-superiority fighters, ground attack aircraft to bombers and naval aircrafts, and VTOL enabled aircraft. Aircraft are presented in relation to each other, with specific statistics such as range, ceiling of operation, and combat radius. Fans of military hardware will appreciate the details provided by the author, especially the comparison between similar aircrafts.

Anyone with a fascination for military power will enjoy this quick and succinct read into one of the most powerful military arms a nation can deploy. Other books on the subject that can be enjoyed also include the Modern Weapons Compared and Contrasted series (Aircraft, Armored Fighting Vehicles; Artillery and Missiles; Naval Vessels; and Small Arms) as well as Warships Inside and Out, The History of Navies Around the World, The History of Marines Around the World, and The History of Armies Around the World.

Game Slaves

Skinner, Gard. Game Slaves. 2014. 336p. ISBN 978-0547972596. Available as an eBook on Overdrive.

Phoenix leads a team of highly specialized and efficient non-player characters in the Blackstar gaming console environment. When people play a computer game, the bad bosses they encounter are Phoenix and his teammates. There is a difference between other computer games and Blackstar’s, however. They can adapt, listen in on the players’ communications, and anticipate their every move. Phoenix and the others are self-aware and know that they are computer programs created for the enjoyment of people who escape their otherwise bleak lives. They are corporate property.

But when Dakota joins the team, everything changes. As the newest model, she is faster and more accurate. She is also full of doubt that she is a computer code. How else could she remember details like swimming in a lake? In her quest to discover the truth of what, or who, she really is, Dakota leads Phoenix and his friends on a deadly game against Blackstar and its agents, who are bent on restoring the five to their place as best gaming villains and not as individuals.

Virtual reality offers authors the ability to play Russian dolls and present an environment within an environment within an environment. This book is no exception, and the reader, much like the main characters, never quite know whether they are joined the real world or are still zeroes and ones on a server. An interesting exploration of what is reality, this action packed novel provides characters that are designed to be bigger than life, and they do not disappoint.

If you enjoyed this book, consider Phoenix, a space opera adventure with similar questioning of what it means to be human.

Scan

Fine, Sarah & Walter Jury. Scan. 2014. 338p. ISBN 0399160655. FIC FIN on the library shelves. This book has been nominated for the New Hampshire Flume award in 2015!

Tate Archer is not your typical high schooler. His father, Fred Archer, has always pushed him hard in all things. Tate is a competitive wrestler. He knows many languages. He can hack into computer systems. He masters advanced math. His father measures exactly how much food intake he receives every day, and ensures that Tate stays with his exercise regimen. The only thing Tate enjoys about his life is his girlfriend, Christina.

But when Tate steals a scanner from his father’s secret lab, everything changes for the worse. Chased by the police and shot at, they manage to escape but his father took a wound to the stomach and is dying. That’s when he reveals to Tate that, as the last Archer, he is one of the few true humans left on the planet. Most of the population has been contaminated by the H2, a group of aliens who arrived on Earth four hundred years ago. The scanner reveals who is human (blue) and H2 (red).

Most H2, like Christina, don’t know they are not human, but a cabal of H2 agents has infiltrated all Earth’s governments and corporations and controls everything towards their own sinister purposes. A group of humans, the 50, and their corporation, Blackbox, opposes them and seeks to reverse the trend towards human extinction without alerting everyone that they are under attack from within.

Hunted by H2s and by humans alike, Tate must protect the scanner at all costs. Christina saves his life, but now they got nowhere to turn. Can he trust his mother, who abandoned them four years ago?

The Naturals

Barnes, Jennifer Lynn. The Naturals. The Naturals Series, Book 1. 2103. 308p. ISBN 9781423168232. Available as an eBook on Overdrive.

At seventeen, Cassie has spent the last five years living with her father’s Italian relatives, ever since her mother was brutally murdered and her father, in the Air Force, has been posted overseas. She’s able to read people with a simple glance. She can tell what they like or don’t like, how they think, and what motivates them.

When a teenager about her age comes to the restaurant where she is a waitress and leaves her a cryptic business card, Cassie is intrigued. Special Agent Briggs, from the FBI, wants to meet with her. That boy looked too young to work for the FBI, but Cassie still calls, and she arranges a meeting with Briggs.

Special Agent Briggs is in charge of a unit called “The Naturals,” a group of teenagers who possess special abilities that it can take decades for adults to learn, if they ever manage to master it. Cassie is a natural profiler, and, if she’s willing, she would join the team whose task is to comb through cold cases and discover new information that can lead to arrests.

Cassie joins Michael, who reads emotions; Lia, who reads lies and tells them better than anyone; Sloane, expert at numbers and patterns; and Dean, another profiler and the son of a prolific serial killer.

As Cassie begins to train with the other teens and with her handlers, a current case spills into their lives, and Cassie becomes the target of a serial killer who appears fascinated with her and might even have committed her mother’s murder. Can she help her team find the killer before she becomes the next victim?

Read other reviews of The Naturals on Goodreads.

Official site of Jessica Lynn Barnes.

Eleanor & Park

Rowell, Rainbow. Eleanor & Park. 2013. 325p. ISBN 978-1-250-01257-9. FIC ROW on the library shelves and available as an audiobook on Overdrive. . This book won the New Hampshire Flume Award in 2015.

When Eleanor walks on that bus in the fall of Park’s junior year, she instantly becomes everyone’s target. Eleanor is fat. She wears strange clothes that are too big for her. She doesn’t have much. And her hair is flaming red. As she boards the bus, she can’t find a seat. Out of embarrassment for her and for himself, Park tells her to sit next to her, but then ignores her completely. As the only Asian in his school, Park already sticks out, but because he’s from the Flats in Omaha, and his father was born here as well, he has a few friends and most leave him alone.

But as the last months of 1986 go by, Park and Eleanor begin to develop a relationship with each other. Park loves comic books and martial arts, and he’s the quiet type. Eleanor lives in poverty with her brothers and sisters and suffers from domestic violence, but she’s too proud to ask for help.

As they begin to fall in love, their relationship moves to the next stage, much to the dismay of Park’s parents, while Eleanor’s parents can’t even know about Park. Will their love, born of desperation and need, grow to something more, or will they crash back to heart, dragged there by their pasts and present situations?

If you liked Eleanor and Park, you will love Ezra and Cassidy’s growing love for each other and the obstacles life puts in their path in the Beginning of Everything. You will also like Say What You Will, the story of Amy and Matthew's opening to the world.

The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer

Hodkin, Michelle. The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer. 2011. 452. ISBN 978-1442421769. FIC HOD on the library shelves. This book has been nominated for a Flume Award in 2015.

Mara Dyer does not know why she’s in the hospital. Not a first. But fragments of memory slowly come back to her, and news report fill in the rest. She was in an ancient insane asylum with her friends in the middle of the night when the building collapsed, killing her best friend, another girl, and that girl’s brother. How she survived she doesn’t remember.

Now her life is too painful in Rhode Island, and the whole family moves to Florida to help her recuperate away from her memories. Her two brothers enter new school, even though there are only six weeks left. Mara herself returns to school, and on her first day she meets Noah Shaw, who turns out to be one of the strangest and richest boy at school.

However, she still sees the ghosts of her dead friends, which is what forced her out of her home, and they seem to be haunting her. The moments she lose and the things she does when she has visions get progressively worse.

As people around her start dying in strange ways, and as Noah becomes more insistent they share unnatural abilities, can Mara come to term with her own life? Can she find the memories that are preventing her from moving on? Or will her visions cause her untimely death?

Read other reviews of The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer on Goodreads.
Official site of The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer

Unbreakable

Garcia, Kami. Unbreakable. Legion Book 1. 2013. 305p. ISBN 9780316210171. Available as an eBook from Overdrive.

Kennedy Waters has always felt different from the other kids. She has eidetic memory, also referred to as photographic memory. Unlike most people, she can recall all words and images she sees, even if only briefly. She is also an accomplished artist, dabbling in drawing and other forms of visual arts. Ever since her father left her and her mother when she was only five, it has been the two of them together, Kennedy and her mother.

But when her mother suddenly dies of an apparent heart attack, Kennedy is left alone in the world. Her mother’s sister comes over to help with the arrangements and the sale of the house, but Kennedy won’t go live with her. Instead, she’ll be attending a private boarding school.

Grieving, and about to lose her best friend as well on the eve of her final departure for school, Kennedy is attacked in her house by a ghost. She never believed in ghosts, until this one tried to kill her. She had recently seen it in the graveyard where her cat, Elvis, had escaped to, and she would have been strangled to death had two strangers not burst in her room and destroyed the ghost.

Identical twins Jared and Lukas have been spying on Kennedy for a few days, and their appearance at this crucial moment is no coincidence. They are members of a group called the Legion, who hunts paranormal activities linked to an ancient demon, invoked back in the 1700s to chase members of the Illuminati in a summoning turned horribly wrong. Since then, each of the five members of the legion has sworn to do whatever it takes to banish the demon. And her mother’s death was not an accident, but a murder most likely committed by the same ghost who tried to kill her.

On that same night all five members of the Legion were murdered, but as each had already begun training a family member, the new members of the Legion have gathered to put an end to that demon: Priest, the weapons designer and the youngest member of the team; Alara, who knows ancient rituals taught by her grand-mother, and the twins. Unlike them, however, Kennedy has never heard of the Legion, and her mother never trained her.

Now that deadly spirits are chasing them, Kennedy must decide if she does in fact belong to the Legion as the others believe, or if she is a fraud. What skills could she possibly bring to this motley group? Can she help save the world from a powerful demon or will she be its next victim?

The story continues in Unmarked.

Marina

Zafon, Carlos Ruiz. Marina: A Gothic Tale. Little, Brown & Company. 2014. 326p. ISBN 978-0316044704. FIC ZAF on the library shelves.

Oscar is in 7th grade and has been attending a resident catholic school in Barcelona for years. On one of his meandering walks, he discovers a dilapidated home and feels compelled to enter. He finds an elderly man sleeping by the fire and accidentally steals a watch when the man wakes. When he returns to drop off the watch, he encounters Marina and Germán, her father. She shows him a cemetery where, every month, a figure clad in black comes to worship at an unmarked grave. They begin investigating, but soon become confronted by horrors beyond their imagination. As they dig further into the secrets of people who died more than thirty years ago, they uncover a sinister and horrific plot with a villain bent on wrecking vengeance on all who wronged him. Will Oscar and Marina be added to his list?

In a tale reminiscent of Frankenstein, Zafon weaves suspense from a string of small events that build towards a confrontation between the teens and the tale’s villain. The characters are all well-rounded and contribute to the narrative, and Oscar’s relationship with Marina is an accurate portrayal of early teen relations. The setting of Barcelona at the beginning of the 1980s, a few years after the end of the Franco dictatorship, adds an element of mystery and the city is almost its own character. Fans of mysteries will devour this book.

The One

Cass, Kiera. The One. 2014. 323p. ISBN 0007466714. Book 3 of The Selection series. FIC CAS on the library shelves, and available as an eBook on Overdrive.

American never thought she would make it this far. She started as one of thirty-five girls in the Selection, then moved on to the Elite six. Now, as Christmas approaches, the Elite has been reduced down to four girls who are now competing for Prince Maxon’s attentions, and she is one of the girls still in contention to become a Princess.

But as the brutal southern rebellion rages on, and as the more genteel northern rebellion seeks to advance its cause directly to Maxon, America finds herself in the middle of it all. Plus, she remains conflicted on her feelings for Maxon and for Aspen, her first love who is now a palace guard.

With all the turmoil and drama, can America ever learn to say “I love you?” This is the thrilling conclusion to the Selection series. A companion series begins in The Heir, which takes place twenty years later.

If you enjoyed this series, read the Matched trilogy, which features a similar love triangle.

A companion book, Happily Ever After, features several novellas about beloved characters from the series.

The Elite

Cass, Kiera. The Elite. 2013. 336p. ISBN 0062059963. Book 2 of The Selection series. FIC CAS on the library shelves, and available as an eBook on Overdrive.

America has captured the heart of Prince Maxon during the first part of the selection process. She’s pretty and stands up for herself and for what’s right. However, America is still conflicted between her growing feelings for Maxon and those she has harbored for years for Aspen, who is now a guard at the palace.

Now part of the elite six, America must continue to avoid pitfalls and the petty jealousies of some of the other girls. As she discover secrets about the founding of the kingdom of Illéa, she begins questioning both the history and the value of the caste system, and she begins thinking of ways to expose the brutal repression system set up by Maxon’s ancestor.

With rebels fighting in the palace and her family threatened, as well as her open conflict with Maxon’s father the king, the stakes are getting higher and deadlier. Can America survive her dilemmas and insecurities long enough to become the One?

A companion book, Happily Ever After, features several novellas about beloved characters from the series.

The Selection

Cass, Kiera. The Selection. Book 1 of The Selection Series. 2012. 336p. ISBN 9780062059932. FIC CAS on the library shelves and available as an eBook on Overdrive. This book has been nominated for a Flume Award in 2015.

Following the Fourth World War, the new kingdom of Illéa was founded on the ruins of the United States, and the people were organized in eight castes, depending on their usefulness. This order became permanent, and moving from one caste to the next became very difficult.

America Singer was born to the 5th caste, that of artists, musicians, and entertainers, and though she loves playing music, her life is difficult, and there isn’t always food on the table for her family. Desperately in love with Aspen, a Six, America is envisioning a future as one of that cast, servants and helpers to higher casts. In love with America, Aspen is conflicted at the prospect of his future wife moving to a lower caste.

But then the Selection takes place. When a Prince becomes of age, a girl from each province is selected and is welcomed to the Palace, and the Prince chooses a bride among them. It is Prince Maxon’s Selection, and America is encouraged to participate by Aspen and her own mother. To her surprise, she is selected and is shipped to the Palace.

Now Lady America must survive the Palace intrigues long enough to provide money for her family, and decide whether she in fact has feelings for Maxon. Her life becomes complicated when Aspen arrives at the Palace as a guard who is posted outside her bedroom. With this love triangle so close, America must make a choice that is sure to disappoint someone...

If you liked The Selection, you will enjoy reading about Cinder's exploits and her relationship to Emperor Kai in the Lunar Chronicles. You might also enjoy Cassia's love triangle in Matched. 

A companion book, Happily Ever After, features several novellas about beloved characters from the series.

Winger

Smith, Andrew. Winger. 2013. 439p. ISBN 1442444924. FIC SMI on the library shelves. This book was been nominated for a Flume Award in 2015.

At fourteen, Ryan Dean West is the youngest junior at Pine Mountain Academy in Oregon, a school for students who are both rich and neglected at home by their self-absorbed parents. Ryan Dean, who goes by the nickname Winger for his position on the rugby team, has been assigned to Opportunity Hall, the worst dorm on campus where students are only a step away from suspension or expulsion. Worse, his roommate is none other than Chas, the meanest and biggest rugby player on the team.

Madly in love with Annie, his best friend and confidante, he has revealed to her many times his attraction, but she’s always blown him off because he’s so young. But this year, Winger plans on becoming a changed man, and that means getting Annie to love him back. Oh, and survive rugby season and Chas’ bullying.

But when Winger begins making out with Megan, Chas’ girlfriend, it could land him in a host of trouble, with Chas, with Annie, his friends, the rugby team and even the whole school. Will Winger step up and win the girl of his heart, or will he think with his, well, you know?

Hilarious and heartbreaking at the same time, Winger is a book you won’t want to put down.

Fans of this book will appreciate another of Andrew Smith’s books, Grasshopper Jungle; Jesse Andrews’ Me, Earl and the Dying Girl; Antony John’s Busted.