What is art? And what is family?

These are two of the many questions you will find yourself contemplating while (and for some time after) reading Kevin Wilson’s debut novel.

The Family Fang is the story of two siblings, Annie and Buster Fang, the children of a pair of obsessively strange performance artists. For their entire childhoods, Buster and Annie Fang were forced to take part in ever-stranger art pieces as their parents sought to disrupt the normalcy in the lives of those around them.

Now the Fang children are all grown up, with problems of their own. While they have each created names for themselves, Annie as an actress and Buster as a writer, they are facing a few bumps in the road. In moments of desperation, they each find themselves back in their parent’s house, hoping that a little time away from the world will do them good. However, when their parents mysteriously disappear, Buster and Annie are thrown right back into the utter chaos of Fang life and forced to decide for themselves what it really means to live life and make art.

Kevin Wilson tells this tale with a deadpan sense of humor and incredible sensitivity, and his creativity appears to be utterly bottomless. If a work of art is (at least in part) something that makes you think, this book is it.

Considered by many to be the ultimate masterpiece from a master of storytelling, and winner of the Hugo, Nebula, Locus and Bram Stoker Awards, American Gods is a powerful piece of fantasy that will appeal to lovers of the genre and skeptics alike. Shadow has been released from prison just after the death of his beloved wife. Out of the blue, he is approached by a stranger calling himself Mr. Wednesday, who offers him a job. With nothing to lose, Shadow takes it and finds himself thrown into the center of a conflict for the very soul of America. You see, the old gods are not dead, they have merely taken on new forms and identities as their former worshippers moved across the Atlantic. They live here, in America and they, the old gods of Egypt, Russia, Scandinavia, Africa, the British Isles and everywhere else that has yielded immigrants to the New World, are fighting for everything they have created against the new gods of technology and business that have arisen on the new soil. What could, in the hands of a less skilled writer, have become an overdramatic and overwritten fantasy, is, in Gaiman's hands, a dark and gripping tale that cuts to the heart of what it is to be human. ***Petra's Seal of Approval***

Whether you're a teen or an adult, please, please, please don't let the less-than-engrossing jacket description stop you from picking up this book! It is one one of the best-written and most engaging sci-fi novels I've ever read. In the future, Earth has become so overrun that humans have launched two fully-populated spaceships on course for a planet that will take a generation to reach. The vessels, with their extensive gardens and fields of Earth plants and artificial gravity, are the only home that the children on the ships have ever known. Waverly and Kieran were two of the first children born on the Empyrean, and have spent their lives looking forward to living out their parents' dreams of a life on New Earth. But their world is torn apart when the Empyrean is attacked by her sister ship, the New Horizon. All of the female children, including Waverly, are kidnapped, and many of the adults are killed. Each of the characters in Glow was so well-constructed and realistically unpredictable that I was never sure what would happen next. Just when I thought someone was trustworthy, they did something terrible, and as soon as I thought I was sure who the villain was, they did something to make me doubt it! This is a fantastic book for any reader, young adult or otherwise. I can't wait for the next one! ***Petra's Seal of Approval***