Crispin: The End of Time, by Avi, $16.99. The final installment in Colorado author Avi’s brilliant Crispin series begins with sorrow and tension. Crispin’s beloved friend and protector, Bear, is dead. Rudderless, he and his painfully shy compatriot, Troth, wander the French countryside with a vague goal of heading north to Iceland.
When Troth finds a safe haven in a convent, Crispin reluctantly moves on without her. He happens upon a group of apparent minstrels and decides to travel with them, thinking he has found a new family to adopt. But on this journey, not everything is what it seems, and the price of freedom proves to be a punishing fee. Ages 10 and up.
My Best Friend Is Sharp as a Pencil, by Hanoch Piven, $17.99.
An enterprising girl, peppered with a visiting grandmother’s routine questions — Who is your best friend? What’s your favorite teacher like? — is tired of “the same old boring answers.”
To the narrator, “art teacher,” “best friend” and “the wildest girl in class” all are accurate but diminish their larger-than-life subjects. Instead, Sofia is “as happy as a balloon” and “graceful as a ballet slipper” and “as jumpy as a million rubber bands.”
A prized teacher is “as relaxed as my favorite pair of jeans” and “as mysterious as dark glasses.” Her best friend is “as curious as a magnifying glass” and “as precise as a microscope.” It’s an entertaining illustration of colorful similes. Ages 4 to 8.
How to Clean Your Room in 10 Easy Steps, by Jennifer Larue Huget and Edward Koren, $16.99.
Working backward from introducing readers to her spotless, faultlessly tidy room, Erica Ann Kelly brightly offers an outline and advice to other messy kids.
First, “wait until your mom hollers . . . using all three of your names.” Then empty your drawers, creating a big pile in the middle of the room. “While you’re working, it is OK to talk to yourself. Try ‘Oh, I forgot I had this!’ “
The next steps — dividing that stuff into three piles, picking up abandoned clothing, sorting things — are familiar from cable decluttering shows.
But she goes a step beyond what “Clean House” and its ilk advise. “If you find any dirty socks or undies, stick them under the bed.” Dust bunnies? “Scoop up as many as you can. . . . Stash them in the sock drawer with the candy wrappers.” Koren’s perennially disheveled characters perfectly match the text. Ages 4 to 8 and beyond.
Fire Will Fall, by Carol Plum-Ucci, $18.
Taut and trembling with energy, this sequel to “Streams of Babel” is utterly absorbing. “The Trinity Four,” all teenage victims of water poisoned by bioterrorists, find themselves visited by demons, virtual and real, as they fight the poison’s malignant symptoms.
“Fire Will Fall” will resound with readers who like John Marsden’s “Tomorrow” series and Susan Beth Pfeiffer’s apocryphal trilogy that began with “Life As We Knew It.”
In this book, the Trinity Four forge a union with two accomplished hackers after bumping into their darkest enemies. Chapters alternate among different viewpoints, expertly building pressure to the exploding point. Age 13 and up.
Vintage Veronica, by Erica S. Perl, $16.99.
Veronica is 15, fashion-forward (ahead of Seventeen magazine) and self-consciously fat. She works in Consignment Corner, a subset of Clothing Bonanza, colloquially known as Dollar-a-Pound.
The store’s motto is “No New Clothing,” and the way it replenishes inventory makes most secondhand stores look as decorous as Neiman Marcus. Everything available is in a giant pile that’s rejuvenated hourly by a torrent of fresh clothing that pours from a hatch in the ceiling.
The store’s regulars are known as Pickers, and the staff caste system puts Florons (the sleek, catty girls who work the retail section) far above Veronica and other serfs. When some of the most elite Florons enlist Veronica in a mean-spirited prank, she’s so eager for approval that she falls in step. But can she extract herself from their size-zero grasp? Ages 13 and up.
