Sixth-grader Julian Twerski discovers a love for writing as he documents his year for a teacher who wants him to come to terms with an act of bullying on his part. Set in Queens in the author's 1960s childhood, this period piece spotlights a time when boys were independent, self-sufficient in their entertainment, and entirely unsupervised. Julian's gang, led by his best friend, Lonnie, hangs out in a vacant lot or neighborhood playground, entertaining themselves by throwing things, exploding fireworks, and ragging on each other. For Lonnie, Julian writes an admiring letter to classmate Jillian, who responds by becoming interested in Julian instead. This leads to a first date, a first broken heart, and a temporary quarrel with his pal. Meanwhile, Julian's composition entries circle around to the incident that led to his punishment. The cleverly constructed first-person narrative leads readers into sympathy with the precocious narrator, so that the reveal is a surprise and the denouement a relief. There's a fair amount of nostalgia here, which adult readers may appreciate more than teens.

Gr 6-8 After participating in an act of horrendous bullying, Julian is given the opportunity to atone for his action and lighten his punishment by writing a book throughout the year. What starts as meandering thoughts and stories about him hitting pigeons and chasing cars evolves into a story of self-realization. The bulk of it is given over to a tangled love triangle. When Lonnie asks Julian, a better writer, to craft a love letter from him to new-girl Jillian and sign it anonymously, she believes the amorous intentions are Julian's. The result leaves bitter feelings between two former best friends. As the story unfolds, Julian comes to identify what he feels is right, not just what his best friend tells him is so. This honest portrayal of 12-year-olds' lives does not gloss over the stupid, hurtful things people do to one another before their moral compasses become fully calibrated. Julian is different from his friends, as he is told throughout the book, but he doesn't see it until the end. In the denouement, he finally stands up and tries to make what he has done right. Not all readers will identify with the sometimes-despicable things the protagonist does, but those who identified with the antihero in Jeff Kinney's "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" (Abrams) but have matured beyond the scope and gravity of that series will find a kindred spirit in Julian. Devin Burritt, Wells Public Library, ME

Reviewed by Stefan Dziemianowicz. Benjamin Percy-s extraordinary new supernatural thriller is a blend of alternate history and weird fiction that holds a mirror up to contemporary America to reflect its fears and biases.The novel opens with scenes that will resonate powerfully for anyone attuned to global events of the past decade: a father saying goodbye to his son before the father, a military reservist, deploys to a remote country where a fanatical sect holds sway, and an engineered terrorist attack that brings three jetliners down on American soil in a single day. In both instances, the antagonists are not jihadists, but lycans: lupine shapeshifters who have lived among regular humans since prehistoric times, and who in 21st-century America are a stigmatized subclass, forced to suppress their bestial nature pharmacologically. In quick succession, Percy introduces the characters who are the major players in his novel-s drama: teenager Patrick Gamble, the sole survivor of the airplane attacks; Claire Forrester, a teenage lycan on the run from government agents who killed her parents; Chase Williams, the opportunistic governor of Oregon (where most of the tale is set) who hopes to exploit fears engendered by the terrorist attack in his bid for the presidency; and Miriam, Claire-s aunt, who has defected from the lycan resistance movement (headed by her husband), which takes credit for the terrorist attacks. Patrick briefly falls in with a group of scary antilycan skinheads who call themselves -the Americans- before befriending Claire. Patrick-s father becomes a victim in the military occupation of the Lupine Republic, which is situated between Russia and Finland but is seemingly modeled on Iraq and Afghanistan. Chase becomes infected with the lobos prion that causes lycanthropy, and struggles to hide this from the public until a vaccine can be perfected. And the resistance, responding to increasingly inflammatory antilycan laws, plots ever more outrageous terrorist acts that escalate to an explosive denouement. Percy lends his novel-s events credibility by working out a convincing pathology and epidemiology for the lobos prion, and situating the lycan struggle at the center of historical moments that echo 20th-century eugenics experiments, the civil rights movement, the -60s Days of Rage, and the current -war on terror,- whose rhetoric he adapts brilliantly to his story-s purposes. His precision-crafted prose conveys an astonishing amount of detail in as few words as necessary, as in this description of Claire-s lupine transformation: -Her bones stretch and bend and pop, and she yowls in pain, as if she is giving birth, one body coming out of another.- The confidence and assuredness with which Percy tells his story compel him to take some risks that pay off in a shocker of a finale that follows through audaciously on the possibilities of his tale-s premise. By tapping the zeitgeist of the contemporary sociopolitical climate and distilling it into a potent myth concerned with the tyranny of the majority and the demonization of the Other, he has written an ambitious, epic novel that deserves to reach a larger readership beyond genre audiences. Stefan Dziemianowicz is co-editor of Supernatural Literature of the World:

Twelve-year-old Julian Twerski didn't mean for "soft in the head" Danley Dimmel to get hurt. Now that he's served his suspension, Julian's English teacher wants him to write about exactly what happened. Through the compositions, readers get to know Julian as he comes to know himself. The story, set in 1960s Queens, New York, is funny, poignant, and an effective commentary on bullying.