The missing piece meets the big O - Shel Silverstein

Bone Gap - Laura Ruby

Gift of the Magi - O. Henry

Gift of the Magi - Henry, O.

Summary: A brother and sister sell their greatest possessions to buy Christmas gifts for each other.

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Book of a Thousand Days - Shannon Hale

Book of a Thousand Days - Hale, Shannon

Summary: Fifteen-year-old Dashti, after sacrificing her own freedom to follow her sixteen-year-old mistress, the Lady Saren, into exile, brings Saren safely to the lands of the man they both love where they are forced to hide their true identities as they vie for his attention




Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* The author of the Newbery Honor Book Princess Academy (2005) offers another captivating fantasy filled with romance, magic, and strong female characters. The story, based on a little-known fairy tale from the Brothers Grimm, takes place in an imagined ancient Central Asia. Orphaned Dashti is a hardworking, pragmatic girl, who grew up in the open, windswept steppes. She finds work in the city with a young noblewoman, Lady Saren. Then Lady Saren refuses an advantageous marriage, and as punishment, she and Dashti are sentenced to seven years in a sealed tower. A tiny window is the tower's only connection to the outside world, and it's there that Saren's two suitors, the terrifying Khasar and the handsome Tegus, come calling. Written in diary form in Dashti's voice, the gripping tale follows the two young women through their imprisonment and their escape into a grim world of warring societies. Readers will quickly embrace Dashti, an invincible storybook heroine with a healer's touch, who accomplishes battlefield heroics while nurturing a powerful, secret love for a lord. Fans of Gail Carson Levin's Fairest (2006) will embrace this similar mix of exotic, fully realized setting; thrilling, enchanted adventure; and heart-melting romance

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The Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter

The Bloody Chamber - Carter, Angela

Summary: Combining the erotic and the sinister, the lyrical and the grisly, and the comic and the demonic, these twelve stories are startling transformations of such classic children's tales as Bluebeard's Castle and Beauty and the Beast.




Los Angeles Review of Books
What if Little Red Riding Hood seduced the wolf? What if one of Bluebeard’s wives turned the tables on her murderous husband, and lived to tell the tale? What if Beauty’s father lost her to the Beast at cards? The English writer Angela Carter (1940-1992) answered these questions in The Bloody Chamber (1979), a story collection that changed literary fiction for good. Tilting the fairy tale to refract new light from its facets of sex, wonder, and grief has become a welcome strategy for writers in the last decade, from Tin House’s “Fantastic Women” issue to Kate Bernheimer’s anthology My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me to the work of Karen Russell, Aimee Bender, and Kelly Link, and gems like Lorrie Moore’s “The Juniper Tree.” But Angela Carter marked this path for all of us. Rooted in literature, folklore, and history — alive to their enchantments and general bloodiness — she was able to metabolize them into a new kind of fruit, borne on a profuse and fascinating tree.

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The girl of fire and thorns - Rae Carson

The girl of fire and thorns - Rae Carson

Summary: A fearful sixteen-year-old princess discovers her heroic destiny after being married off to the king of a neighboring country in turmoil and pursued by enemies seething with dark magic.


Booklist Reviews
In 16-year-old Elisa, first-time novelist Carson has created a fascinating and credible heroine who battles her way through her own timidity and self-doubt to discover her abilities to love, lead, and suffer loss without denying her future or her faith. Set in an alternative premodern Iberian- and Christianity-hued Saharan-like world, Elisa's adventures include an arranged marriage, a politically and religiously inspired kidnapping, hand-to-hand combat with knife and wits against men trained for battle, the traumatic death of her beloved, and the care of a six-year-old boy. She, as well as the central drama of this promising series starter, depends on the guidance of the holy gem she carries in her navel: the Godstone, which marks her as one whose service shows forth through history-changing practice as well as belief. Carson presents a thorough theology (complete with holy texts), complex characters, dramatic landscapes, royal courts, and a range of difficulties solved through wisdom rather than accident. Romantic, lush, and thought provoking. Copyright 2011 Booklist Reviews.

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