1) "The Reader" by Brenhard Schlink
A compact portrayal of a teenaged German boy's love affair with an emotionally remote older woman, and the troubled consequence of his discovery of who she really is and why she simultaneously needed him and rejected him. Seven years after their intimacy, university student Michael Berg accidentally learns that (now) 40ish Hannah Schmitz had concealed from him a past that reaches back to Auschwitz and had burdened her with nightmares from which her young lover was powerless to awaken her. Toward its climax, the novel becomes, fitfully, frustratingly abstract, but on balance this is a gripping psychological study that moves skillfully toward its surprising and moving conclusion.
2) "Ruby Red" by Kerstin Gier
A contemporary English teen discovers she possesses a gene enabling her to travel into the past in this riveting first volume of the Ruby Red trilogy. Sixteen-year-old Gwen lives in London with her mum’s eccentric family. Her cousin Charlotte’s the expected carrier of the family time-travel gene that has been passed along the female line since the 16th century, so Gwen’s totally unprepared when sudden vertigo morphs into uncontrolled time travel working her as the gene carrier. Apparently her mum falsified Gwen’s birth date to protect her from the Guardians, the old, powerful and dangerous secret society obsessively watching over the time travelers and protecting the chronograph, a device for negotiating time travel. To the Guardians, Gwen is the Ruby, the crucial last link in their Circle of Twelve, while 19-year-old Gideon, her handsome fellow time traveler in the male line, is the Diamond. Together Gwen and Gideon are expected to complete the Circle and solve an undefined mystery involving Count Saint-Germain, a malevolent time traveler from the 18th century. As she narrates this fast-paced puzzler, Gwen convincingly conveys the bewilderment, fear and excitement of a teen rooted in the present but catapulted from her school-girl routine into the past. Bell’s deft translation captures an engaging heroine with a cell phone and a sense of humor, an emerging romance and a complex, unresolved time-travel mystery spanning four centuries. (Fantasy. 12 & up)
3) "Inkheart" by Cornelia Funke
Book One of Three
4) "Siddhartha" by Hermann Hesse
5) "Momo" by Michael Ende
The 40th-anniversary edition of a beloved German fable carries a pointed message that might already be too late.
Momo, a homeless, parentless waif of undetermined age in a nameless European city, is blessed with the gift of listening—“with utmost attention and sympathy”—and adopted by her humble neighbors as a treasured member of their community. Then the sinister gray men arrive, persuading everyone to “save time” by abandoning such idle pleasures as friendship and play. The townsfolk become obsessed with efficiency and shallow consumption, their lives stripped of dreams, beauty and joy. Targeted by the gray men, Momo escapes to the very heart of time to discover the secrets that will rescue her friends. The heavy-handed moral is impossible to miss, but the tale is saved from being preachy by wittily perceptive social criticism and haunting, surrealistic imagery. Despite some mild profanities, this new translation is more graceful and whimsical than the 1985 edition, though lacking its old-fashioned charm; the dark and dreary pen-and-ink illustrations do not improve on the earlier simple line drawings.
Nonetheless, this all-ages delight deserves rescue and is ideal for classroom (or bedtime) read-alouds—especially if the grown-ups pay attention along with the children. (Fantasy. 10 & up)
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