Harry, A History by Melissa Anelli

A new enhanced edition, featuring an extended transcript from Melissa Anelli's exclusive interview with J. K. Rowling and a new, updated chapter! 

Melissa Anelli wears a ring that was a gift to her from J.K. Rowling, given as a measure of appreciation for the work she does on The Leaky Cauldron, where her job entails being a fan, reporter, guardian, and spokesperson for the Harry Potter series.

For ten years, millions of fans have lived inside literary history, the only fans to know what it was like when Harry Potter was unfinished. When anticipation for a book was just as likely to cause a charity drive as a pistol shootout. When millions of rabid fans looked to friends, families, neighbors, forums, discussion groups, fan fiction and podcasts to get their fix between novels. When the death of a character was a hotter bet than who'd win the World Series. When one series of books had the power to change the way books are read.

This has been a time when a book was more popular than movies, television, and video games. The series has spawned a generation of critical thinkers and new readers. The New York Times changed the way it reported book sales just to avoid a continual overpowering of its bestseller list.

These events must be given their proper context, and this moment must be preserved.  The series will remain important to literature and pop culture, but the experience will change. Harry's fate will be as commonly known as the identity of Luke Skywalker's father, and readers who never had to wait for a Harry Potter book will have no idea what transpired when the series had hundreds of millions of people waiting desperately for the next volume.

We are the first wave of Harry Potter fans, the ones that are living in the time that shapes how Harry Potter will be remembered for all time. But when this era is over, fans will need some way to remember this strange, wonderful, dizzying experience. Future fans, too, will want to know what they missed. Harry Potter will exist as a seven-book series, but without the indivisible story of the cultural, literary and emotional impact the series has made, the story is incomplete. How can a fan understand Harry Potter without hearing about the midnight book parties, the scams, the theories, the burglaries, the bets, the bannings, and most importantly, the worldwide camaraderie spurred on by mutual love of a boy wizard? How can they know how Harry Potter changed and touched the lives of so many without hearing it first hand?

Harry, A History tells this story.  It tells the personal story of Melissa Anelli's journey through the very heart of Harry Potter fandom.  And wraps this phenomenon up into one narrative, factual volume – one book that tells what happened when Harry Potter met the world.

City of Saints and Thieves by Natalie C. Anderson

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo meets Gone Girl in this enthralling murder mystery set in Kenya.

 

In the shadows of Sangui City, there lives a girl who doesn't exist. After fleeing the Congo as refugees, Tina and her mother arrived in Kenya looking for the chance to build a new life and home. Her mother quickly found work as a maid for a prominent family, headed by Roland Greyhill, one of the city’s most respected business leaders. But Tina soon learns that the Greyhill fortune was made from a life of corruption and crime. So when her mother is found shot to death in Mr. Greyhill's personal study, she knows exactly who’s behind it.

With revenge always on her mind, Tina spends the next four years surviving on the streets alone, working as a master thief for the Goondas, Sangui City’s local gang. It’s a job for the Goondas that finally brings Tina back to the Greyhill estate, giving her the chance for vengeance she’s been waiting for. But as soon as she steps inside the lavish home, she’s overtaken by the pain of old wounds and the pull of past friendships, setting into motion a dangerous cascade of events that could, at any moment, cost Tina her life. But finally uncovering the incredible truth about who killed her mother—and why—keeps her holding on in this fast-paced nail-biting thriller.

A heart-pounding, jaw-dropping thriller you don't want to miss! 

Crazy Messy Beautiful by Carrie Arcos

When your namesake is Pablo Neruda—the greatest love poet of all time—finding “the one” should be easy. After all, sixteen-year-old aspiring artist Neruda Diaz has been in love many times before. So it’s only a matter of time before someone loves him back.

Callie could be that someone. She’s creative and edgy, and nothing like the girls Neruda typically falls for, so when a school assignment brings them together, he is pleasantly surprised to learn they have a lot in common. With his true love in reach and his artistic ambitions on track, everything is finally coming together.

But as Neruda begins to fall faster and harder than ever before, he is blindsided by the complicated nature of love—and art—in more ways than one. And when the relationships he’s looked to for guidance threaten to implode, Neruda must confront the reality that love is crazier, messier, and more beautiful than he ever realized—and riskier, too, than simply saying the words.

This book was so easy to love!  I love the poetry of Pablo Neruda and this book is a great homage. 

For Darkness Shows the Stars by Diana Peterfreund

Fans of Divergent will love Diana Peterfreund’s take on Jane Austen’s Persuasion set in a post-apocalyptic world.

In the dystopian future of For Darkness Shows the Stars, a genetic experiment has devastated humanity. In the aftermath, a new class system placed anti-technology Luddites in absolute power over vast estates—and any survivors living there.

Elliot North is a dutiful Luddite and a dutiful daughter who runs her father’s estate. When the boy she loved, Kai, a servant, asked her to run away with him four years ago, she refused, although it broke her heart.

Now Kai is back. And while Elliot longs for a second chance with her first love, she knows it could mean betraying everything she’s been raised to believe is right.

For Darkness Shows the Stars is a breathtaking YA romance about opening your mind to the future and your heart to the one person you know can break it.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

The extraordinary #1 New York Times bestseller that is now a major motion picture, Markus Zusak's unforgettable story is about the ability of books to feed the soul.

It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still.

Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement.

In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak, author of I Am the Messenger, has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time.

Marina by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

We all have a secret buried under lock and key in the attic of our soul. This is mine."

When Fifteen-year-old Oscar Drai suddenly vanishes from his boarding school in Barcelona, no one knows his whereabouts for seven days and seven nights.

His story begins when he meets the strange Marina while he's exploring an old quarter of the city. She leads Oscar to a cemetery, where they watch a macabre ritual that occurs on the last Sunday of each month. At exactly ten o'clock in the morning, a woman shrouded in a black velvet cloak descends from her carriage to place a single rose on an unmarked grave.

When Oscar and Marina decide to follow her, they begin a journey that transports them to a forgotten postwar Barcelona--a world of aristocrats and actresses, inventors and tycoons--an reveals a dark secret that lies waiting in the mysterious labyrinth beneath the city streets.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon's haunting Marina has long been a cult classic in Spain and is now an international bestseller.

Counting by 7's by Holly Goldberg Sloan

In the tradition of Out of My Mind, Wonder, and Mockingbird, this is an intensely moving middle grade novel about being an outsider, coping with loss, and discovering the true meaning of family.
Willow Chance is a twelve-year-old genius, obsessed with nature and diagnosing medical conditions, who finds it comforting to count by 7s. It has never been easy for her to connect with anyone other than her adoptive parents, but that hasn’t kept her from leading a quietly happy life . . . until now.

Suddenly Willow’s world is tragically changed when her parents both die in a car crash, leaving her alone in a baffling world. The triumph of this book is that it is not a tragedy. This extraordinarily odd, but extraordinarily endearing, girl manages to push through her grief. Her journey to find a fascinatingly diverse and fully believable surrogate family is a joy and a revelation to read.