Scrivener's Moon

by Philip Reeve

Picking up where A Web of Air left off, this final installment in the trilogy won't disappoint Reeve's many fans. Fever Crumb returns to London, but the place where she grew up has been transformed into a city on wheels. The nomad tribes of the North are threatened by this new moving city and plan to attack. Meanwhile, Wavey hears of a black pyramid in the North Country that might contain useful information about the past. Fever meets Cluny Morvish, a member of one of the nomadic warrior tribes and travels with her. Fever's friendship with Cluny changes her perspective on many things, including raising questions about her own sexual identity, which Reeve handles delicately. Beautifully complex language and a fully realized, highly creative future world will draw in readers, although those unfamiliar with the previous books will struggle with characters and concepts. Fever's journey concludes with satisfying answers to long-standing questions about the basis for her society and her own heritage. For die-hard fans of science fiction, it doesn't get much better.

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The Sin Eater's Confession

by Ilsa Bick   
   

Bick crafts a powerful tale of bigotry and murder in small-town Wisconsin. High school senior Ben imagines he will go to Yale and become a doctor, just like his mother has always encouraged him to do. When a star athlete dies in an accident, Ben helps the boy's family out and befriends his younger brother, Jimmy, who dreams of becoming a great photographer. Jimmy's evangelical father fears that his son's hobby and friendship with Ben are indicators of homosexuality, and the rumors and conflicts that emerge over the following months result in Ben witnessing Jimmy's brutal murder. Ben's attempts to understand what he saw, as well as his uncertainties about his own sexuality (Ben's friendships with Jimmy and a classmate named Brooke are both sources of self-doubt), drive the rest of the novel. Told entirely in flashback from Ben's perspective as a medic in Afghanistan, Bick's story isn't a mystery in the whodunit sense. Instead, it's a potent examination of teenage emotions and reactions to peer and parental pressures, and to the evil that people are capable of.

 

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