National Teen Read Week

Today I'm posting for the National Teen Read Week blog tour hosted by Inklined. 

My name is Lily, I love to read, write, play the piano (badly), and sing (also badly). As a gift for my last birthday, my mom created this blog for me.  I still have no idea what I'm doing with it, but it's been fun so far.

For my Teen Read Week post, I'm going to list some of my favorite books that aren't super popular. 

1. Gone Away Lake and Return to Gone Away by Elizabeth Enright.  Written back in the '60s, these books tell about the adventures Portia and Foster Blake when they discover an old dried up lake and the ruins of the town that used to surround it. Only two people still live by the lake, a brother and sister who grew up by there, and they tell Portia and Foster wonderful stories of what the town used to be like.  In Return to Gone Away, the Blake family buys and moves into one of the old houses by the lake.

2. Laddie: A True Blue Story by Gene Stratton Porter.  This one is about a girl called Little Sister (I don't think you learn her real name) and her adventures growing up in Indiana in the 1910s.  Little Sister is the youngest of 12 children, and her favorite sibling is her older brother Laddie. There's not really a central plot, per se, other than Laddie's crush on "The Fairy Princess" Miss Pamela Pryor, but the individual little stories told throughout the book are charming.  The blue goose, the Easter egg hunt, the evil ram, the spelling bee, those weird curtains that no one can agree on, and Leon reading from the Bible.  Seriously, you have to read the book if for just that scene.

Keeper of the Bees is another great one by Gene Stratton Porter. 

3.  The Enchanted Forest Chronicles (Dealing With Dragons, Searching For Dragons, Calling on Dragons, and Talking to Dragons) By Patricia C. Wrede.  When Princess Cimorene gets sick of being a proper princess, she runs away from the castle and volunteers her service to a dragon.  I can't tell you too much more about them without giving away spoilers, but these are great.  Cimorene is awesome.

4. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman.  Since it's by Neil Gaiman, this one may be more popular than I think, but I'll include it anyway.  This story is about Bod, a boy whose family was killed when he was a baby, and afterwards was raised by the ghosts in the local graveyard.   It's dark, and weird, but really good.


There are more books, of course, but I think I'll confine this post to the ones listed above.  Thanks for stopping by! And thanks to Sarah from Inklined for hosting the blog tour.
Here's the rest of today's schedule:
Friday, Oct. 19

8:00—Inklined

10:00—Lily’s Notes in the Margins

12:00—Of Battles, Dragons, and Sword of Adamant

2:00—________

4:00—The Book Critic

6:00—Pages from My Journal

8:00—Inklined