Zevin, Gabrielle, Elsewhere

Is it possible to grow up while getting younger? Welcome to Elsewhere. It is warm, with a breeze, and the beaches are marvelous. It's quiet and peaceful. You can't get sick or any older. Curious to see new paintings by Picasso? Swing by one of Elsewhere's museums. Need to talk to someone about your problems? Stop by Marilyn Monroe's psychiatric practice.   Elsewhere is where fifteen-year-old Liz Hall ends up, after she has died. It is a place so like Earth, yet completely different. Here Liz will age backward from the day of her death until she becomes a baby again and returns to Earth. But Liz wants to turn sixteen, not fourteen again. She wants to get her driver's license. She wants to graduate from high school and go to college. And now that she's dead, Liz is being forced to live a life she doesn't want with a grandmother she has only just met. And it is not going well. How can Liz let go of the only life she has ever known and embrace a new one? Is it possible that a life lived in reverse is no different from a life lived forward? This moving, often funny book about grief, death, and loss will stay with the reader long after the last page is turned.

Anderson, M. T., Thirsty

In a first novel for which the word offbeat could have been coined, a modern Massachusetts teenager is swept into a plot of cosmic proportions as adolescence dishes up an unpleasant personal revelation--he's on the cusp of becoming a vampire. In Chris's familiar world of high school, bickering parents, and secret crushes, the vampires have always been an acknowledged but distant reality, on the nightly news when their victims are found or when they are summarily executed by police. They are collectively weak; their god, Tch'muchgar, has long been banished from this plane of existence, kept away by regular rites. As the peaceful town of Clayton is preparing for one of its annual picnic-cum-ritual-blood-sacrifices (only goats, unlike in Boston, where virgins are required), Chris notices disquieting changes in himself: violent mood swings, sleeplessness, relentless thirst, and a tendency, when agitated, to fade out of mirrors and other reflections. Enter Chet, an alleged avatar of the Forces of Light, to confirm Chris's fears about his own nature and to reveal that a local group of vampires is plotting to derail the rites, thus bringing Tch'muchgar back into the world. At Chet's behest, Chris infiltrates the group to place a magic token where it will do the most good--but then he begins to wonder: Which side is Chet actually on? Anderson leaves this desperate, naive protagonist in doubt until the end, then finishes with a breathtaking twist.

Alvarez, Walter, T. Rex and the Crater of Doom

Why did the dinosaurs die out?
There are dozens of theories to explain a probable cause or causes. Throughout the Mesozoic Era, individual dinosaur species were evolving and becoming extinct for various reasons. The unusually massive extinction at the end of the Cretaceous exterminated the last of the dinosaurs, the flying reptiles, and the large swimming reptiles, as well as many other marine animals. There is now widespread evidence that a meteorite impact was at least the partial cause for this extinction. Impact craters are visible on most planets in our solar system. A spectacular example of this was witnessed in 1994, when Jupiter was struck by a series of cometary fragments. Some of these impact blasts were larger than the Earth's diameter. Other factors such as extensive release of volcanic gases, climatic cooling (with related changes in ocean currents and weather patterns), sea-level change, low reproduction rates, poison gases from a comet, or changes in the Earth's orbit or magnetic field may have contributed to this extinction event. - From the USGS.

How was "Tyrannosaurus rex" toppled from the apex of creation? In a gripping work that is both a scientific detective story and a convincing account of "one terrible day in the history of the Earth", Alvarez makes his case for the mysterious, catastrophic theory of dinosaur extinction

Kobo Abe, The Ark Sakura

A classic from the renowned Japanese novelist about isolation and the threat of a nuclear holocaust.  The Ark Sakura is as timely today as it was at its original publication. In this Kafkaesque allegorical fantasy, Mole has converted a huge underground quarry into an "ark" capable of surviving the coming nuclear holocaust and is now in search of his crew. He falls victim, however, to the wiles of a con man-cum-insect dealer. In the surreal drama that ensues, the ark is invaded by a gang of youths and a sinister group of elderly people called the Broom Brigade, led by Mole's odious father, while Mole becomes trapped in the ark's central piece of equipment, a giant toilet powerful enough to flush almost anything, including chopped-up humans, out to sea.