Special for the holidays! The perfect gift for the teen who's sick of reading about vampire-werewolf love triangles! Real stories about real people, with a twist of magic, love and fate. Both of these novels are sure to challenge the YA reader in your life. Both stories were nominated for YALSA's Best YA Fiction of 2011 list.

SET INCLUDES:

This Thing Called the Future by J.L. Powers
South Africa & AIDS. Fourteen-year-old Khosi yearns for this thing called the future. Does she want too much?

Voted one of the Best Teen Books of 2011 by Kirkus Reviews!

Khosi lives with her beloved grandmother—Gogo—her little sister Zi and her weekend mother in a matchbox house on the outskirts of Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. In that shantytown, it seems like somebody is dying all the time. Billboards everywhere warn of "the disease of the day." Her Gogo goes to a traditional healer when there is trouble, but her mother— who works in another city, who is wasting away before their eyes— refuses to go even to the doctor.

In this world where death seems to loom around every corner, Khosi must reconcile the magic inherent in her past with what cold truth the future may hold.



The Blood Lie by Shirley Reva Vernick
Latent hostility against the Jews erupts in a blood lie when Daisy, a young Gentile girl, disappears in the woods.

It’s September 22, 1928, Jack Pool’s 16th birthday. It's the Sabbath. In the synagogue that morning, he feels restless, stuck in a remote little whistle-stop town in upstate New York. He's bored to death, he has to work on the Sabbath, and he can't even date the one girl he loves—Emaline— because she's Christian.

Now Emaline's little sister Daisy has gone missing and no one can find her. When latent hostility against the Jews in town erupts in a blood libel, how can Jack clear his name?

The Blood Lie, from author Shirley Reva Vernick, tells the little-known true story of a blood libel against the Jews that took place at the beginning of the 20th century in Massena, NY.