(DLA Las Piñas HS LRC) January Author of the Month - Markus Zusak

This month we're featuring Markus Frank Zusak, an Australian young-adult fiction writer. He's best known for two international bestsellers. Zusak won the annual Margaret Edwards Award in 2014 for his contribution to young-adult literature published in the US.

He was born on the 23rd of June 1975 in Sydney, Australia. His mother, Lisa, is originally from Germany and his father, Helmut, is from Austria. They emigrated to Australia in the late 1950s. Markus is the youngest of four children, he has two sisters and one brother.

Zusak attended Engadine High School in New South Wales and briefly returned there to teach English while writing. He studied English and History at the University of New South Wales, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts and a Diploma of Education.

He is the author of five books. His first three books: The Underdog, Fighting Ruben Wolfe, and When Dogs Cry released between 1999 and 2001 were all published internationally. They also garnered a number of awards. The Underdog, his first, took 7 years to publish. The Messenger, published in 2002, won the 2003 NSW Premier's Literary Award (Ethel Turner Prize) in Australia and was a runner-up for the Printz Award in America.

The Book Thief, published in 2005, has been translated into more than 30 languages. Beside winning awards in Australia and overseas, it has held the number one position at Amazon.com and on the New York Times bestseller list. It was adapted as a film of the same name in 2013. In 2006, Zusak was the recipient of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Young Australian Novelist of the Year Award. His next novel is reported to be Bridge of Clay. He has two beautiful children with spouse, Mika.

(DLA Las Piñas GS LRC) January Book of the Month - The Name of This Book Is Secret

Kickstart the new year right by reading something fictionally intriguing! The Name of This Book Is Secret is a secret story about a storied secret where it all begins, it's the first book off of The Secret Series, a pentalogy of novels all about one secret based on the five senses: Sight, Smell, Sound, Taste, and Touch written by an anonymous author.

Frequently during the course of the book, Pseudonymous Bosch chastises himself for writing the secret, going so far as to change his mind and stop halfway through, only to bribe himself into completing the story with chocolate.

When a real-estate agent for the deceased, named Gloria, finds a mysterious box called, "The Symphony of Smells," in a dead magician's house, she gives it to Cass and her grandfathers. Cass is a misfit in her school until she meets another misfit, Max-Ernest, who talks too much and has divorced parents but are still living in the same house.

The Name of this Book is Secret chronicles the hair-raising adventures of two 11-year-old heroes as they soon become collaborators and investigate nefarious villains alongside the mysterious death of Pietro Bergamo who has vanished under strange (and stinky) circumstances.

A sequel was published in late 2008, under the name If You're Reading This, It's Too Late. A third book was released on September 1, 2009, with the title This Book Is Not Good for You. A fourth book, This Isn't What It Looks Like, was released on August 21, 2010. A fifth book titled You Have to Stop This was released on September 20, 2011.

Recommended by teachers and librarians alike, you'll surely enjoy this funny read, even the vocabulary and wordplay scattered throughout the book is uncommon and definitely interesting especially if you like Lemony Snicket or Monty Python.

(DLA Las Piñas HS LRC) January Book of the Month - Percy Jackson's Greek Gods

Who could tell the origin stories of the gods of Olympus better than a modern-day demigod? Percy Jackson provides an insider’s view with plenty of attitude in this hefty illustrated collection of short stories as he takes a break from his exciting but surely exhausting adventuring to serve up the Greek gods in a more organized introduction like pancakes you have for breakfast before going to school.

"A publisher in New York asked me to write down what I know about the Greek gods, and I was like, Can we do this anonymously? Because I don’t need the Olympians mad at me again. But if it helps you to know your Greek gods, and survive an encounter with them if they ever show up in your face, then I guess writing all this down will be my good deed for the week."

So begins Percy Jackson’s Greek Gods, in which the son of Poseidon adds his own magic--and sarcastic asides--to the classics. The son of Poseidon is on form as he debriefs readers concerning Chaos, Gaea, Ouranos and Pontus, Dionysus, Ariadne and Persephone:

"He'd forgotten how beautiful Gaea could be when she wasn't all yelling up in his face."

Here they are, all 12 Olympians, plus many various offspring and associates: the gold standard of dysfunctional families, whom Percy plays like a lute, sometimes lyrically, sometimes with a more sardonic air. The age-old stories are endlessly strong, resonant, and surprising, while the telling is fresh, irreverent, and amusing. Percy's gift, which is no great secret, is to breathe new life into the gods along with the many pop-culture references. Percy definitely does not hold back.

“If you like horror shows, blood baths, lying, stealing, backstabbing, and cannibalism, then read on, because it definitely was a Golden Age for all that.”

The Greek gods have been around for, well, ages, but until New York Times best-selling author Rick Riordan got his hands on them, they seemed as remote as Mount Olympus to most young readers. Now he's agreed to oversee a tour through the pantheon of these often temperamental deities and he's enlisted Percy to be the tour guide in approximately 400 delightful pages. Dramatic full-color artworks throughout by Caldecott Honoree John Rocco which smokes and writhes on the page as if hit by lightning make this volume a must-read as stunning as it is entertaining.