This week is the launch of Angie Smibert's THE MEME PLAGUE! It's so exciting to have another League member's trilogy finished! It feels like just yesterday that we started here, launching our debuts!
One of the coolest things about Angie's series is the extras. I've always loved how she has real-world things associated with her books.
For Memento Nora, she has tons of extras, including the free first chapter, teacher and classroom ideas for creating comics, and discussion questions.
MEMENTO NORA (
Marshall Cavendish, April 1, 2011)
(This book now has it’s own website:www.mementonora.com. Pop over there for more info on inspirations, activities, and a cool educational project underway very soon.)
Nora, the popular girl and happy consumer, witnesses a horrific bombing on a shopping trip with her mother. In Nora’s near-future world, terrorism is so commonplace that she can pop one little white pill to forget and go on like nothing ever happened. However, when Nora makes her first trip to a Therapeutic Forgetting Clinic, she learns what her mother, a frequent forgetter, has been frequently forgetting. Nora secretly spits out the pill and holds on to her memories. The memory of the bombing as well as her mother’s secret and her budding awareness of the world outside her little clique make it increasingly difficult for Nora to cope. She turns to two new friends, each with their own reasons to remember, and together they share their experiences with their classmates through an underground comic. They soon learn, though, they can’t get away with remembering.
READ THE FIRST CHAPTER:
TEACHER / LIBRARIAN RESOURCES:
For The Forgetting Curve, she's got all the same, cool things. What better way to get your reluctant readers into reading than by enticing them with comics? It's awesome--and Angie's series lends itself to that so nicely.
THE FO
RGETTING CURVE (Marshall Cavendish, Spring 2012)
Aiden Nomura likes to open doors—especially using his skills as a hacker—to see what’s hidden inside. He believes everything is part of a greater system: the universe. The universe shows him the doors, and he keeps pulling until one cracks open. Aiden exposes the flaw, and the universe—or someone else—will fix it. It’s like a game.
Until it isn’t.
When a TFC opens in Bern, Switzerland, where Aiden is attending boarding school, he knows things are changing. Shortly after, bombs go off within quiet, safe Bern. Then Aiden learns that his cousin Winter, back in the States, has had a mental breakdown. He returns to the US immediately.
But when he arrives home in Hamilton, Winter’s mental state isn’t the only thing that’s different. The city is becoming even stricter, and an underground movement is growing.
Along with Winter’s friend, Velvet, Aiden slowly cracks open doors in this new world. But behind those doors are things Aiden doesn’t want to see—things about his society, his city, even his own family. And this time Aiden may be the only one who can fix things . . . before someone else gets hurt.
READ THE FIRST CHAPTER:
TEACHER / LIBRARIAN RESOURCES:
With the final book in this trilogy, Angie's done it again. She's got resources for "Maker Spaces" -- places where you can take something and "make" it into something else. This is something Winter, Aiden, and Lina do in THE MEME PLAGUE. Angie's done it again!
THE MEME PLAGUE (Skyscape, August 13, 2013)
It begins with the name JONAS W. on the side of a cardboard coffin—right before the funeral procession blows up. Then it’s the whisper in the back of Micah’s head: Your father betrayed his country. You can’t always trust your own brain. Not when you have one of the mayor’s mandatory chips in your skull. Micah knows that the chip developed by TFC (the corporation that runs the Therapeutic Forgetting Clinics) does more than just erase unpleasant memories—it implants new ones. The MemeCast warns citizens to “fight the hack.”
Micah and his friends have each lost something—a parent, a relationship, a home, maybe even their own identities as they remembered them to be. But together, they can make sure some things are never forgotten.
Election Day is coming, and Mayor Mignon is set to be elected to Congress. It’s time to build a new electronic frontier, one that’s not controlled by the mayor and his cronies. It’s time to get out the vote and shake up the system. It’s time to finally sayenough.
READ THE FIRST CHAPTER:
TEACHER / LIBRARIAN RESOURCES:
I have a lot of information for teachers, students, and librarians on the
Memento Nora Series website (www.mementonora.com). The links particular to this book include:
If you haven't gotten your hands on this series yet, DO IT. Angie is also celebrating the launch of THE MEME PLAGUE with a giveaway! She's giving away the following prizes:
• Grand prize: (1) Kindle (courtesy of Amazon)—the basic 6” display / wifi one.
• (1)Complete set of the series. (MN, FC, MP). Signed if in US; unsigned and delivered through Book Depository if outside US.
• (3) Meme Plague (hard copy) plus swag.
Requirements to enter found on the Rafflecopter widget, and remember to please help out by donating to Feeding America.
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