In My Mailbox October 23, 2011

Rave Master Volume 1 by Hiro Mashima

The all-powerful Dark Stone — a magical stone and ruler of the dark side — awakes after a fifty-year-long respite and falls into the hands of Demon Card, an evil organization bent on world domination. Only one thing can resist the Dark Stone`s evil powers: a sacred stone called Rave. Demon Card dispatches an assassin after the Rave Master; a man called Shiba and the only living person with the power to use the sacred stone. Mortally wounded in the assault, Shiba is distressed to learn that he no longer has control over Rave. Will this mean that the world will pass over to the dark side?But wait! Shiba was not alone. Next to him stands a boy called Haru. Miraculously, the boy rekindles life in the sacred stone when he takes Rave in his hands and becomes its chosen successor. With his friends by his side Haru sets out on a quest to locate the other four remaining Raves that supposedly exist somewhere in the world. Only with these other sacred stones can the evil Demon Card — more awesome a foe than ever could be imagined — be finally vanquished.

NO OF PAGES: 176  BUY ON AMAZON

Rave Master #2 by Hiro Mashima

The all-powerful Dark Stone — a magical stone and ruler of the dark side — awakes after a fifty-year-long respite and falls into the hands of Demon Card, an evil organization bent on world domination. Only one thing can resist the Dark Stone`s evil powers: a sacred stone called Rave. Demon Card dispatches an assassin after the Rave Master; a man called Shiba and the only living person with the power to use the sacred stone. Mortally wounded in the assault, Shiba is distressed to learn that he no longer has control over Rave. Will this mean that the world will pass over to the dark side?But wait! Shiba was not alone. Next to him stands a boy called Haru. Miraculously, the boy rekindles life in the sacred stone when he takes Rave in his hands and becomes its chosen successor. With his friends by his side Haru sets out on a quest to locate the other four remaining Raves that supposedly exist somewhere in the world. Only with these other sacred stones can the evil Demon Card — more awesome a foe than ever could be imagined — be finally vanquished.

NO OF PAGES: 192 BUY ON AMAZON

Rave Master #3 by Hiro Mashima

NO OF PAGES: 192 BUY ON AMAZON

Rave Master #4 by Hiro Mashima

NO OF PAGES: 200 BUY ON AMAZON

Let’s Pretend This Never Happened (Dear Dumb Diary, No. 1) by Jim Benton

Take a peek inside the diaries of Jamie Kelly! She’s cool (sometimes), nice (mostly), and funny (always). Kid-friendly humor & art, along w/JKBenton’s signature style make this series a standout!Read the hilarious, candid (& sometimes mean) diaries of Jamie Kelly, who promises that everything in her diary is true…or at least as true as it needs to be. In this book, Jamie contends with Angeline, the school’s prettiest, most popular girl (who Jamie thinks is a goon!) and the impending visit of her troll-like little cousin. Will Jamie survive? Will she go mad? Will she send her mom’s nasty casserole to starving children in Wheretheheckistan? You’ll just have to read the first installment of Dear Dumb Diary to find out!

NO OF PAGES: 129 BUY ON AMAZON

My Pants Are Haunted! (Dear Dumb Diary, No. 2) by Jim Benton

Read the hilarious, candid (and sometimes not-so-nice), diaries of Jamie Kelly, who promises that everything in her diary is true — or at least as true as it needs to be.They were just a soft, ordinary pair of thrift-shop jeans until Jamie Kelly tried them on . . . Then they became a tight, scratchy, slightly smelly, and utterly ordinary pair of thrift-shop jeans with an embarrassing haunting problem. Do the pants have the power to soothe a vengeful beagle, vanquish The Prettiest Girl in the World, or make the wearer irresistible to the eighth cutest guy in the grade? Are the haunted pants so dazzling they can hurt and maybe permanently damage the eyes of onlookers? Or are the haunted pants just, well, haunted (which is kind of gross when you think about it)?

NO OF PAGES: 144 BUY ON AMAZON

Am I the Princess or the Frog? (Dear Dumb Diary, No. 3) by Jim Benton

Jamie is crushing on Hudson. Someone too-gross-to-be- named is crushing on Jamie. And Hudson is crushing on . . . Princess Turd of Turdsylvania (a.k.a. The Prettiest Girl in the World). Middle school may be grim, but it’s no fairy tale. And crazy doesn’t even begin to cover it. "Dear Dumb Diary, I got another poem today from You-Know-Who! ‘She is the fairest blossom, true, She blooms in any weather. But I must love her from afar. We’ll never be together.’ Signed, M.P. Can you believe the pain he’s in? His suffering? The crushing heartache he endures every time he sees me? Gosh, it just makes me so happy!" ABOUT JIM BENTON: JIM BENTON is not a middle school girl, but do not hold that against him. He has managed to make a living out of being funny anyway. He is the creator of many licensed properties, some for big kids, some for little kids, and some for grown-ups that, frankly, are probably behaving like little kids. You may already know his properties It’s Happy Bunny!, or Just Jimmy, and you are about to get to know Dear Dumb Diary. He’s created a kids TV series, designed clothing, and written books. Jim Benton lives in Michigan with his spectacular wife and kids. They do not have a dog, and they especially do not have a vengeful beagle. This is his first series for Scholastic. Jamie Kelly doesn’t know who Jim Benton is and wonders why he is even being mentioned in connection with her diary. She also wonders when the poison will take effect and if he is a boy . . . and cute.

NO OF PAGES: 160 BUY ON AMAZON

Never Do Anything, Ever (Dear Dumb Diary, No. 4) by Jim Benton

Her best friend’s a backstabber. Her worst enemy is a sweetheart. And her dog is just waiting for the right moment to seek his revenge. Why should Jamie even bother going to school? Why not? After a run-in with Mega-Popular Angeline, aka Pure Evil, Jamie reforms her selfish ways & becomes the decent human being she never thought she could be. But she quickly realizes that helping others kind of stinks. Is someone trying to thwart her attempts at irresistible inner beauty? Or will Jamie finally achieve the "I’m an angel" glow she knows will make Hudson Rivers fall madly in love w/ her?

NO OF PAGES: 144 BUY ON AMAZON

Can Adults Become Human? (Dear Dumb Diary, No. 5) by Jim Benton

Jamie go school. School full savages. Savages be mean Jamie. Jamie teach hippo bite Angeline. Good hippo.

NO OF PAGES: 144 BUY ON AMAZON

The Problem with Here Is That It’s Where I’m From (Dear Dumb Diary Series #6) by Jim Benton by by Jim Benton

NO OF PAGES: BUY ON AMAZON

Never Underestimate Your Dumbness (Dear Dumb Diary Series #7) by Jim Benton, Jamie Kelly by Jamie Kelly by Jim Benton

NO OF PAGES: BUY ON AMAZON

Dear Dumb Diary #8: It’s Not My Fault I Know Everything by Jim Benton

It’s an eventful month for Jamie Kelly. Stinker and Stickybuns’ litter of puppies has arrived — which makes Jamie and her nemesis Angeline "in-laws by dog." Ugh. Jamie’s class at Mackerel Middle School is doing a unit on journal-writing, and someone’s diary falls into the wrong hands. But worst of all, Angeline and Isabella are becoming . . . friends. Dear Dumb Diary, It’s not my fault I know everything. Okay, I don’t know where Timbuktu is, but I refuse to know that. Even if somebody told me, I would flush my brain like a thought-potty and wave goodbye to Timbuktu as it swirled down my brain hole. I know everything that I WANT to know.

NO OF PAGES: 131 BUY ON AMAZON

Dear Dumb Diary #9: That’s What Friends Aren’t For by Jim Benton

Dear Dumb Diary, So now I’m friends with Angeline. This is automatic friendship, and I have to just accept it and make the best of things. See, if I objected, then Aunt Carol might divorce Angeline’s uncle, sending both of them tumbling into a deep pit of depression for the rest of their lives, and Angeline could wind up feeling so guilty that she would have to go be locked up in an old dirty insane asylum for years and years, and Stinker’s puppies could grow up not knowing both their parents — and I couldn’t live with myself for doing something like that to a puppy.

NO OF PAGES: 144 BUY ON AMAZON

The Dear Dumb Diary #10: The Worst Things in Life Are Also Free by Jim Benton

School’s out for the summer, and that means no more Meat Loaf Thursdays, Sunday homework-cramming, or teachers (way way unsuccessfully) trying to act cool. It also means that certain Mackerel Middle Schoolers have a lot of time on their hands . . . and seriously empty pockets. Isabella is going to change all that. And Jamie and Angeline are going to help — whether they like it or not. It’s the best kind of teamwork: When a whole bunch of people work together to do something wrong, instead of doing it wrong one at a time. "Mr. Benton’s intellectual properties . . . have made him stand out in an industry dominated by big entertainment companies." —The Wall Street Journal

NO OF PAGES: 160 BUY ON AMAZON

Beautiful Chaos (Beautiful Creatures, Book 3) by Kami Garcia

Ethan Wate thought he was getting used to the strange, impossible events happening in Gatlin, his small Southern town. But now that Ethan and Lena have returned home, strange and impossible have taken on new meanings. Swarms of locusts, record-breaking heat, and devastating storms ravage Gatlin as Ethan and Lena struggle to understand the impact of Lena’s Claiming. Even Lena’s family of powerful Supernaturals is affected – and their abilities begin to dangerously misfire. As time passes, one question becomes clear: What – or who – will need to be sacrificed to save Gatlin?For Ethan, the chaos is a frightening but welcome distraction. He’s being haunted in his dreams again, but this time it isn’t by Lena – and whatever is haunting him is following him out of his dreams and into his everyday life. Even worse, Ethan is gradually losing pieces of himself – forgetting names, phone numbers, even memories. He doesn’t know why, and most days he’s too afraid to ask. Sometimes there isn’t just one answer or one choice. Sometimes there’s no going back. And this time there won’t be a happy ending.

NO OF PAGES: 528 BUY ON AMAZON

Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King

"I believe there is another man inside every man, a stranger . . ." writes Wilfred Leland James in the early pages of the riveting confession that makes up "1922," the first in this pitch-black quartet of mesmerizing tales from Stephen King. For James, that stranger is awakened when his wife, Arlette, proposes selling off the family homestead and moving to Omaha, setting in motion a gruesome train of murder and madness. In "Big Driver," a cozy-mystery writer named Tess encounters the stranger along a back road in Massachusetts when she takes a shortcut home after a book-club engagement. Violated and left for dead, Tess plots a revenge that will bring her face-to-face with another stranger: the one inside herself. "Fair Extension," the shortest of these tales, is perhaps the nastiest and certainly the funniest. Making a deal with the devil not only saves Dave Streeter from a fatal cancer but provides rich recompense for a lifetime of resentment. When her husband of more than twenty years is away on one of his business trips, Darcy Anderson looks for batteries in the garage. Her toe knocks up against a box under a worktable and she discovers the stranger inside her husband. It’s a horrifying discovery, rendered with bristling intensity, and it definitively ends a good marriage. Like Different Seasons and Four Past Midnight, which generated such enduring films as The Shawshank Redemption and Stand by Me, Full Dark, No Stars proves Stephen King a master of the long story form.

NO OF PAGES: 384 BUY ON AMAZON

Gerald’s Game by Stephen King

When rough sex between Jessie and Gerald Burlingame turns deadly, leaving Gerald dead and Jessie handcuffed to the bed, it sets in motion a terrifying and psychologically twisted twenty-eight hours. 1,500,000 first printing. $750,000 ad/promo. BOMC Main.

NO OF PAGES: 352 BUY ON AMAZON

Duma Key: A Novel by Stephen King

No more than a dark pencil line on a blank page. A horizon line, maybe. But also a slot for blackness to pour through… A terrible construction site accident takes Edgar Freemantle’s right arm and scrambles his memory and his mind, leaving him with little but rage as he begins the ordeal of rehabilitation. A marriage that produced two lovely daughters suddenly ends, and Edgar begins to wish he hadn’t survived the injuries that could have killed him. He wants out. His psychologist, Dr. Kamen, suggests a "geographic cure," a new life distant from the Twin Cities and the building business Edgar grew from scratch. And Kamen suggests something else. "Edgar, does anything make you happy?" "I used to sketch." "Take it up again. You need hedges… hedges against the night." Edgar leaves Minnesota for a rented house on Duma Key, a stunningly beautiful, eerily undeveloped splinter of the Florida coast. The sun setting into the Gulf of Mexico and the tidal rattling of shells on the beach call out to him, and Edgar draws. A visit from Ilse, the daughter he dotes on, starts his movement out of solitude. He meets a kindred spirit in Wireman, a man reluctant to reveal his own wounds, and then Elizabeth Eastlake, a sick old woman whose roots are tangled deep in Duma Key. Now Edgar paints, sometimes feverishly, his exploding talent both a wonder and a weapon. Many of his paintings have a power that cannot be controlled. When Elizabeth’s past unfolds and the ghosts of her childhood begin to appear, the damage of which they are capable is truly devastating. The tenacity of love, the perils of creativity, the mysteries of memory and the nature of the supernatural — Stephen King gives us a novel as fascinating as it is gripping and terrifying.

NO OF PAGES: 800 BUY ON AMAZON

The Monstrumologist by Rick Yancey

These are the secrets I have kept. This is the trust I never betrayed. But he is dead now and has been for more than forty years, the one who gave me his trust, the one for whom I kept these secrets. The one who saved me…and the one who cursed me. So begins the journal of Will Henry, orphaned assistant to Dr. Pellinore War throp, a man with a most unusual specialty: monstrumology, the study of monsters. In his time with the doctor, Will has met many a mysterious late-night visitor, and seen things he never imagined were real. But when a grave robber comes calling in the middle of the night with a grueso me find, he brings with him their most deadly case yet. Critically acclaimed author Rick Yancey has written a gothic tour de force that explores the darkest heart of man and monster and asks the question: When does a man become the very thing he hunts?

NO OF PAGES: 464 BUY ON AMAZON

The Curse of the Wendigo (Monstrumologist) by Rick Yancey

While attempting to disprove that Homo vampiris, the vampire, could exist, Dr. Warthrop is asked by his former fiancÉ to rescue her husband from the Wendigo, a creature that starves even as it gorges itself on human flesh, which has snatched him in the Canadian wilderness. Although Warthrop also considers the Wendigo to be fictitious, he relents and rescues her husband from death and starvation, and then sees the man transform into a Wendigo. Can the doctor and Will Henry hunt down the ultimate predator, who, like the legendary vampire, is neither living nor dead, whose hunger for human flesh is never satisfied? This second book in The Monstrumologist series explores the line between myth and reality, love and hate, genius and madness.

NO OF PAGES: 464 BUY ON AMAZON

The Isle of Blood (Monstrumologist) by Rick Yancey

When Dr. Warthrop goes hunting the "Holy Grail of Monstrumology" with his eager new assistant, Arkwright, he leaves Will Henry in New York. Finally, Will can enjoy something that always seemed out of reach: a normal life with a real family. But part of Will can’t let go of Dr. Warthrop, and when Arkwright returns claiming that the doctor is dead, Will is devastated–and not convinced. Determined to discover the truth, Will travels to London, knowing that if he succeeds, he will be plunging into depths of horror worse than anything he has experienced so far. His journey will take him to Socotra, the Isle of Blood, where human beings are used to make nests and blood rains from the sky–and will put Will Henry’s loyalty to the ultimate test.

NO OF PAGES: 560 BUY ON AMAZON

Teeth: Vampire Tales by Ellen Datlow

The first bite is only the beginning. Twenty of today’s favorite writers explore the intersections between the living, dead, and undead. Their vampire tales range from romantic to chilling to gleeful—and touch on nearly every emotion in between. Neil Gaiman’s vampire-poet in "Bloody Sunrise" is brooding, remorseful, and lonely. Melissa Marr’s vampires make a high-stakes game of possession and seduction in "Transition." And in "Why Light?" Tanith Lee’s lovelorn vampires yearn most of all for the one thing they cannot have—daylight. Drawn from folk traditions around the world, popular culture, and original interpretations, the vampires in this collection are enticingly diverse. But reader beware: The one thing they have in common is their desire for blood. . . .

NO OF PAGES: 480 BUY ON AMAZON

Inkdeath (Inkheart Trilogy) by Cornelia Funke

The Adderhead–his immortality bound in a book by Meggie’s father, Mo–has ordered his henchmen to plunder the villages. The peasants’ only defense is a band of outlaws led by the Bluejay–Mo’s fictitious double, whose identity he has reluctantly adopted. But the Book of Immortality is unraveling, and the Adderhead again fears the White Women of Death. To bring the renegade Bluejay back to repair the book, the Adderhead kidnaps all the children in the kingdom, dooming them to slavery in his silver mines unless Mo surrenders. First Dustfinger, now Mo: Can anyone save this cursed story? 6. INKSPELL, Book Sense Book of the Year, has spent more than 40 weeks of the NYT list. 7. INKHEART movie, starring Paul Bettany, Brendan Fraser, and Oscar-winner Helen Mirren, now available on DVD. 8. Funke, a four-time nominee and two-time Book Sense winner, is a favorite of booksellers. 9. More than 5 million Funke titles in print across all channels in North America alone!

NO OF PAGES: 704 BUY ON AMAZON