Heather Seggel
Content by Heather Seggel
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Lee Lipsenthal’s life changed in one bite.
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On June 22, 1769, Thomas Day turned 21.
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Unless It Moves the Human Heart is a nonfiction book described by author Roger Rosenblatt as “fiction, top to bottom.” But don’t expect Oprah Winfrey to dress him
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Jasper Jones starts with a bang. Charlie Bucktin is at home in bed when Jasper, a neighborhood outcast and older boy, taps on his window asking for help.
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The Returning opens with a scene of medieval domestic tranquility.
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Just when you thought it was safe to take off that turtleneck, along comes another teen vampire novel.
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Confessions of a Sociopath opens on a disturbing scene. Author M.E. Thomas (a pseudonym) finds a baby opossum in her swimming pool.
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At 14, Faye has learned her place in life the hard way.
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Paolo Bacigalupi’s debut YA novel (and Printz Award winner) Ship Breaker im
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Author Shannon Hale set the bar high for herself with the publication of Princess Academy in 2005. The fairy tale won a Newbery Honor, and countless fans were taken with the book’s heroine, Miri, and her home in Mount Eskel. Hale intended the novel to stand alone, but Miri, Britta and friends bubbled to the surface of her thoughts over time, and a new story took root.
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Vienna circa 1900 was a virtual paradise for artists, intellectuals and those who enjoyed their company.
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Great student, skilled actor, loyal boyfriend, good son and brother: Ben Bright’s talents can take him wherever he wants to go in life.
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In The Curse of the Wendigo, orphan Will Henry continues his work as the indispensable assistant to the “monstrumologist” of Rick Yancey’s series. When Dr.
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Grave Mercy, the first volume in an exciting new trilogy for teens, is set in a 15th-century French convent where the nuns are trained killers for the god of death.
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Fifteen-year-old Mason has never met his father.
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Eddie Reeves’ father took his own life, and she found his body.
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“The night before Amelia Anne Richardson bled her life away on a parched dirt road outside of town, I bled out my dignity in the back of a pickup truck under a star-pricked sky.” The ve
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Despite writing more than 30 books of fiction and nonfiction, author Julia Cameron is best known for one: The Artist’s Way, the iconic bestseller that guided millions of readers to i
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At just 14 years old, Celia Door has turned Dark. Not goth or emo, but withdrawn into herself, clad in black and focused solely on getting back at the kids who pushed her over the edge.
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Astrid Krieger has pretty much everything she needs to be happy: a rocket ship prototype on her parents’ estate to live in, good looks, money to burn and a grandfather who both loves her and
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Shon Hopwood was basically a good kid whose life became a case study in bad decisions.
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Martin Stokes is a 17-year-old black high school student.
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The actual solstice may be several weeks away, but Gorgeous ushers in the summer reading season with a bang.
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Ship Breaker, the new novel from highly acclaimed author Paolo Bacigalupi, poses a challenge to critics: How do you explain how good it is without a dozen “spoiler alerts”?
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Elizabeth Rew has just been offered a dream job.
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Evan and Lucy have been best friends since childhood. After Lucy’s parents split up, she moved away, and now her winter break visits are the highlights of Evan’s year. Until this year.
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Midnight Sun, Arctic Moon opens on a scene right out of a breakneck adventure novel.
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Don’t censure the messenger; I can’t review Naomi Wolf’s latest book without mentioning the title, Vagina: A New Biography.
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You could be forgiven for thinking that Skinny, the title of Donna Cooner’s debut novel, represents a goal for main character Ever Davies. But Skinny is a character, and not a nice one. She’s the voice in Ever’s head telling her that, at 15 years old and 302 pounds, she’s not worthy of love or even tolerance.
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In the fall of 2003, freelance journalist Annia Ciezadlo spent her honeymoon in Baghdad, filing war stories alongside her Lebanese husband while making pasta puttanesca in their in-room kitchen.
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"Nate stood up.
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Colby is about to embark on a year he’s been dreaming of forever: Once he graduates, he’s both driver and roadie for his best friend Bev’s band as they tour the Pacific Northwest,
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Dash is perusing the 18 miles of books at New York City’s legendary Strand bookstore when a flash of red catches his eye.
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When Jesse and Emily pass in the halls of their high school, they don’t make eye contact, and why would they?
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Rachel's older brother Micah has gone missing. She's been keeping his secrets for so long that telling her parents about his drug addiction now seems beside the point.
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Before even glancing at chapter one of Battle Dress, Amy Efaw’s sharply observed novel about the six weeks of New Cadet Basic Training at West Point (a ritual also known as “the
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David Randall had a history of talking in his sleep, and the occasional creepy incidence of falling asleep with his eyes open, but his interest in the science of sleep peaked when he hit a wall.
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Avi Steinberg was meant for greater things. If not a doctor or lawyer (per his family’s expectations), his time in yeshiva should at least have turned out a decent rabbi.
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Jenny Lawson (The Bloggess to her fans) grew up in a small town in rural Texas with a younger sister and many family pets.
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Coke or Pepsi. Bush or Gore. Sink or swim. If asked to select from any of these pairs, you might assume taste, political affiliation and basic human nature would influence your respective choices.
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Martha Mason grew up in the tiny village of Lattimore, North Carolina, with doting parents and a beloved brother who died at 13.
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William Powers spent a decade doing international aid work in Latin America and Africa among people who live at the very edge of subsistence. When he came back to the U.S.
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Joy has just moved from California to Utah; for a devout Mormon teenager, her social potential has multiplied exponentially, but the conformity is crushing.
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Beatrice Prior is about to leave her prior life behind. She loves her family and their tightly controlled life, but individuality and freedom are calling.
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When author Mary Albanese abruptly left her home in upstate New York and set out for Alaska, it was with a teaching job in mind.
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Anyone who has ever sat facing a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream with a grimness better suited to a chess match with Death himself knows Geneen Roth’s work.
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Philip Hoare’s literary and cultural history of the world’s largest and oldest animal may lead you to brush up on your sea chanteys and protest ballads simultaneously.
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Tallulah Casey is spending the summer at a performing arts school in Yorkshire (described in its brochure as like “Wuthering Heights but with more acting and dancing and less freezing to deat
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Sixteen-year-old Sydney Biggs is a girl in trouble and then some: not just pregnant, but grounded with good cause.
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When Pablo Picasso said, “I’d like to live as a poor man with lots of money,” many people probably wrote the statement off as a bit of verbal cubism and forgot it.
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Quick: Can you list all the American presidents in order from first to most recent? How about most recent to first?
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Contemporary science is for the most part attached to determinism, or the belief that physical laws govern the physical world, of which we humans are a part.
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Happy New Year! Time to shake off that hangover and hit the treadmill for an hour a day! Woo-hoo!
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Allie Kim is the near opposite of most 16-year-olds. Living with Xeroderma Pigmentosum (XP) means avoiding sunlight is a matter of life or death, so she can only go out at night.
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Amy Reed sets her new novel, Clean, in a drug and alcohol rehab clinic for teens.
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It should not shock you to learn that Why We Broke Up doesn’t have a happy ending.
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Daniel Handler is a force to be reckoned with in the world of children’s literature.
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By the time Greer Cannon is shipped off to rehab at McCracken Hill, her family views her as beyond redemption.
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Some of My Best Friends Are Black looks at integration and the ways it has failed from a fresh perspective.
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In The Madman’s Daughter, Megan Shepherd revisits the H.G. Wells classic The Island of Dr. Moreau from the point of view of Juliet, the doctor’s daughter.
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After a lifetime of public service that included 40 years in Congress and the Maine Legislature, Republican Senator Olympia Snowe walked away from the job in 2012.
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The French Quarter of New Orleans is no place for a child. Josie Moraine, the daughter of a prostitute, grew up there and made her own way by cleaning the brothel and working in a bookstore.
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Mia is gearing up for the best senior year ever. She's got cheerleader BFFs, the captain of the soccer team on her arm and her pick of Ivy League schools.
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Meet Mary Quinn: 12-year-old orphan, thief and pickpocket, sentenced to die for her crimes.
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You may not know Liz Murray by name, but you may be familiar with the TV movie Homeless to Harvard, Lifetime’s version of her teen years, during which she transitioned from sleeping
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If you’ve ever lived in a house made of wood and found one termite, you likely recall finding thousands more attempting to make brunch out of your walls.
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Escaping an abusive stepfather has left Brent Conboy a homeless street kid.
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Lyssa was raised in idyllic Austin, Texas, by a magical mother who starred in the local talent show and seemed to hang the stars without a stepladder.
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Call it the “Antiques Roadshow” effect: You pull over at a yard sale, just to stretch your legs, when an ugly painting of a woman holding a rolling pin catches your eye.
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The Sharp Time spans just one week in the life of high school senior Sandinista Jones.
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The high school lunch bell has just sounded; where are you going to sit? Do you have a spot reserved at the popular table?
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Earth—you know, that big round thing we live on?—is in for a rough time. We’re overdue for a catastrophe the likes of which have caused mass extinctions in the past.
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Idiot Girls and other fans of writer Laurie Notaro most likely know what they’re getting themselves into with her latest collection, It Looked Different on the Model.
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Fingerprints of You opens on Lemon’s 17th birthday, which her mom, Stella, is celebrating by getting herself a new tattoo.
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Alice Ozma grew up with a single father who was a dedicated elementary school librarian. Even her two middle names, under which she writes, testify to a love of children’s literature.
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When I say “Davy Crockett,” what do you see? A man in a coonskin cap? The vaguely Taco Bell-ish profile of the Alamo?
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The 10 P.M. Question is a wonderful study in opposites.
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The League of Heroes would be out of a job if there were no supervillains for them to vanquish, and the Vindico have played that role for a long time now—too long.
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Cartoonist Jen Sorensen once drew a strip titled “How to get Americans to care about genocide,” which included “D
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While on assignment in China, journalist Amanda Bennett met and fell in love with a complicated man.
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If they’re listed in order of importance, the Fourth Commandment (“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy”) actually beats out admonitions against thievery and murder as more c
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At its peak, during and after the Second World War, American manufacturing was much like the country as a whole: full of can-do spirit and open to most anyone willing to jump in and work hard, with
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Monstrous Beauty combines horror, romance and fantasy in an affecting and creepy tale.
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Vera Dietz would rather be ignored by her classmates than have them know the truth about her mother.
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Hank and Liana meet cute when he bursts in on her in a hospital ladies room, the crotch of his pants soaked with . . . energy drink.
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When 15-year-old Phillip hurts his foot on a cross-country run, he hides to avoid sadistic Coach Farragut, aka “Ferret,” and meets the most amazing girl.
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Malcolm is a runt of a rat, enough so that he's mistaken for a mouse and brought from the Pet Emporium to Mr. Binney's fifth-grade classroom.
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In life as in business, the evidence of success lies in what you get in exchange for your effort. Doesn’t it? Not so fast.
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When a group of orphans in Calcutta form a secret society, they vow to protect one another as a family would. Little do they know how much that pledge will demand of them later.
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Even if you think you’re above such distinctions, we all have a rough idea of what someone means when they say “red state” or “blue state.” A red-stater stops at Dunki
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In last year’s The Monstrumologist, Rick Yancey introduced readers to a terrifying world much like our own, where monsters are not only real but also the subject of scientific study.
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