FINISHED:

Price, Charlie. (2007). Lizard people. New York: Roaring Brook.

[Here's my ACL review - it was OK, but lacked a certain something:

While high school student Ben is checking his mother into a mental hospital ward after she claims that lizard people are taking over the Earth, he meets another young man, Marco who is doing the same with his mother. Through ongoing storytelling sessions, Marco tells Ben how he has traveled through time to the year 4000 via a wormhole in the trunk of a tree in his backyard, all in an effort to gain insight into mental illness and bring a cure back to 2007. The author does a solid job keeping the reader guessing as to the authenticity of Marco’s tale, especially when details of Ben’s own life start to show up in the story, and things get even more intriguing as no one else seems to have even heard of Marco causing Ben to question his own sanity – could his mother’s mental illness have been passed on to him? Not for the faint of heart, this is a young adult novel that refuses to shy away from the gritty and awful side of drug abuse and mental illness giving us a gritty picture of one young man’s struggles with his drug addicted, bipolar mother, his absentee/alcoholic father, and, ultimately, his own sanity. Fairly satisfying overall, but one wonders what the novel could’ve really been like if some of the supporting characters – especially Ben’s father and his best friend’s sister, Z – were more thoroughly fleshed out and their reason for being more thoroughly stated.]

STARTED:
Wiles, Deborah. (2007). The Aurora County all-stars. New York: Harcourt.

[A much lauded book from last year - I'm reading it to see if I feel the same way about it.]

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