one of those hideous books where the mother dies

"My name is Ruby.
This book is about me.

It tells the deeply hideous story
of what happens when my mother dies
and I'm dragged three thousand miles away
from my gorgeous boyfriend, Ray,
to live in LA with my father,
who I've never even met
because he's such a scumbag that he
divorced my mom before I was born.

The only way I've ever even seen him
is in the movies,
since he's this mega-famous actor
who's been way too busy
trying to win Oscars
to even visit me once in fifteen years"

Will Ruby ever forgive her famous father? And will she survive losing her mother?
one of the hideous books where the mother dies is told totally in verse by Sonya Somes.

The Exploding Toilet

We've all heard modern urban legends. Take, for example, the oft-repeated story of knowing a friend whose cousin's mother-in-law ordered Kentucky Fried Chicken and found a deep fried rat in her bucket of chicken. It didn't happen but the story spreads anyway. The Exploding Toilet is a collection of similar urban legends: "Two animal rights protesters were protesting the cruelty of sending pigs to the slaughterhouse in Bonn {Germany}. Suddenly the pigs, all two thousand of them, escaped through a broken fence and stampeded, trampling the two protestors to death." As for the exploding toilet? You'll have to read that for yourself!

Urban legends circulate even faster these days because of the Internet. A wonderful website debunks or verifies all the stories circulating through e-mail and Internet postings. So the next time you hear a story too good or weird to be true, check out http://www.snopes.com

DaVinci Code meets Dracula

Was Dracula (aka Vlad the Impaler) truly a vampire? Did he die back in the 1300's or does he still walk the earth? Did he possess nobility or was he a monster? These are some of the questions confronted in The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. I'll let our narator introduce you to the book:

This is the story of how as a girl of sixteen I went in search of my father and his past, and of how he went in search of his beloved mentor and his mentor's own history, and of how we all found ourselves on one of the darkest pathways into history. It is the story of who survived that search and who did not, and why.

This long and complicated story moves between the medieval Ottoman Empire, pre-World War II Europe, and the Cold War as three generations of historians use their gifts to seek the truth about Dracula. Along the way, they encounter homicidal librarians (hmm), the undead, professors, gypsies, monks, and other keepers of the secrets.