Welcome to another edition of Must Read Monday! This feature is where I spotlight older, recent, or upcoming releases I am looking forward to. The lists will include all genres I like to read, everything from picture books to comics, children’s lit to adult fiction!

This week: Jenny Valentine’s Fire Colour One and Kate Klise’s Grounded: two authors whose work I have heard great things about but haven’t yet had the chance to read. These two titles have so piqued my interest- from their descriptions, to their reviews, to the brief excerpts I have read.

Fire Colour One by Jenny Valentine
Publication: July 1, 2015 by HarperCollins

A teenage girl will soon discover, there are some things which burn even brighter than fire.

Iris’s father Ernest is at the end of his life.

Her best friend Thurston seems like a distant memory to her.

Her mother has declared war. She means to get her hands on Ernest’s priceless art collection so that she can afford to live the high life.

But Ernest has other ideas.There are things he wants Iris to know. Things he can tell her and things that must wait till he’s gone. What she does after that is up to her.

 

Grounded by Kate Klise
Publication: November 9, 2010 by Feiwel & Friends

After her brother, sister, and father die in a plane crash, Daralynn Oakland receives 237 dolls from well-wishers, resulting in her nickname: Dolly. But dolls are little comfort to a twelve-year-old girl whose world is rocked by the dramatic changes in her life, including her angry, grieving mother’s new job as a hairstylist at the local funeral home.

Dolly gets a job, too, where she accidentally invents a fashionable new haircut. But her real work begins when a crematorium comes to town, and someone has to save a dying business, solve a burning mystery, and resuscitate the broken hearts in Digginsville, Missouri, population 402.