A Bird's Eye Review

One of my favorite things to do is to peruse the clearance rack.  I feel like I’m on a treasure hunt!  What’s even better is the bookstore clearance rack!  A lot of times I find books I have never heard of, and they end up being fantastic. 

Sunday I spent a good portion of my day at Books-a-Million.  Here are the treasures I found!

Sixteen-year-old Nick and his brother, Alan, are always ready to run. Their father is dead, and their mother is crazy—she screams if Nick gets near her. She’s no help in protecting any of them from the deadly magicians who use demons to work their magic. The magicians want a charm that Nick’s mother stole—and they want it badly enough to kill. Alan is Nick’s partner in demon slaying and the only person he trusts in the world. So things get very scary and very complicated when Nick begins to suspect that everything Alan has told him about their father, their mother, their past, and what they are doing is a complete lie. . . .

Belly measures her life in summers. Everything good, everything magical happens between the months of June and August. Winters are simply a time to count the weeks until the next summer, a place away from the beach house, away from Susannah, and most importantly, away from Jeremiah and Conrad. They are the boys that Belly has known since her very first summer–they have been her brother figures, her crushes, and everything in between. But one summer, one terrible and wonderful summer, the more everything changes, the more it all ends up just the way it should have been all along.

A sense of foreboding sets in the moment fourteen-year-old twins Rachel and Adam arrive from New York to visit their English grandmother. The station is empty, village streets are deserted, locals are hostile, and even their frail Granny Root is oddly distant. And who is the strange boy, Gabriel, who speaks to them telepathically, and what about the bees that appear to follow a mysterious force? It all seems tied up with the Triskellion — a symbol etched in chalk on the moors — and an ancient feud that keeps villagers warily apart. With a growing sense of danger, the twins must unearth a secret that has protected the village for centuries, one that reveals a shocking truth about their ancestors — and themselves.

After the shocking revelations in Triskellion, being guests of the "Hope Project" might seem like a relief. But Rachel and Adam soon figure out that they’re being held prisoner, and that the program has more sinister goals than archaeological research in mind. A hideous discovery at the funeral of their grandmother makes it clear that the teenagers must flee from England to Paris, Seville, and fi nally Morocco, evading not only their former benefactors but also the followers of "The Englishman," a zombie-like fi gure with a frightening agenda of his own. It will take all of their special abilities and courage to stay alive until their journey reaches an explosive climax — and they unearth, on the North African coast, an ancient secret even more startling than the first.

Let me know if you have read any of these!  Also, be sure to share your clearance finds!