Matched by Ally Condie    

This book opens with a very happy Cassia heading for her Matching ball.  She is wearing a formal dress, everyone is wearing their finest and the ceremony is full of splendor.  Right away, I suspected something foul in a scene that was perfect.  The society that Cassia lives in controls EVERYTHING, even who they can marry.  They aren't allowed to own any items (that wouldn't be fair) and everyone dies at age 80.  It is an authoritarian regime to the utmost degree, reminding me of Fahrenheit 451. In fact, her dad is in charge of burning books at the library!  As the book unravels, so does the utopian picture of Cassia's life.  She likes the wrong guy, she starts to feel stifled by her lack of choices, and her grandfather shares a *gasp* poem that is outlawed.  Only 100 poems are chosen from the myriad of poetry written and none other can exist.   Only 100 songs are allowed, no other music. This is society gone terribly wrong, and Cassia is stuck right in the middle of it. Great read, hard to put down.  It reminded me of how revolutionary reading can be!

The Order of Odd-Fish by James Kennedy

This book is ODD right out of the gate.  The characters are bizarre (one of them is a nappy dressing cockroach) and the situations are even more weird.  The main character, Jo, lives with her aunt in the desert, which is the most normal thing in the whole book.  Jo is not who she thinks she is and neither is anyone else in her strange family.  Her journey is never boring and often whimsical, with boxes that fall from the sky, cockroaches with impeccable manners that talk, and strange lands that don't seem to exist here on Earth.  One of my favorite characters is the evil Ken Kiang who is so bored with being rich and good at everything, that he decides to try to be the best at being evil.  Good read, rich and imaginative.