Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut, by Rob Scheffield [$25.95 hardcover] – In Talking to Girls About Duran Duran, Sheffield shares the soundtrack to his eighties adolescence. When he turned 13 in 1920, Rob Sheffield had a lot to learn about women, love, music and himself, and in Talking to Girls About Duran Duran we get a glimpse into his transformation from pasty, geeky "hermit boy" into a young man with his first girlfriend, his first apartment, and a sense of the world. These were the years of MTV and John Hughes movies; the era of big dreams and bigger shoulder pads; and, like any all-American boy, this one was searching for true love and maybe a cooler haircut. It's all here: inept flirtations, dumb crushes, deplorable fashion choices, Members Only jackets, and girls, every last one of whom seems to be madly in love with the bassist of Duran Duran. Sheffield's coming-of-age story is one that we all know, with a playlist that any child of the eighties or anyone who just loves music will sing along with. These songs-and Sheffield's writing-will remind readers of that first kiss, that first car, and the moments that shaped their lives.
Pretty Monsters, by Kelly Link [$9.99 paper] – Through the lens of Kelly Link's vivid imagination, nothing is what it seems, and everything deserves a second look. From the multiple award- winning The Faery Handbag, in which a teenager's grandmother carries an entire village (or is it a man-eating dog?) in her handbag, to the near-future of The Surfer, whose narrator (a soccer-playing skeptic) waits with a planeload of refugees for the aliens to arrive, these ten stories are funny and full of unexpected insights and skewed perspectives on the world. Kelly Link's fans range from Michael Chabon to Peter Buck of R.E.M. to Holly Black of Spiderwick Chronicles fame. Now teens can have their world rocked too!
