1 . Nasugraq Rainey Hopson is an author and illustrator (插图画家). She has written short stories and made art inspired by her Iñupiaq culture. The Iñupiaq people are native to Alaska, the US. Hopson’s first and only novel to date, Eagle Drums, is set in Iñupiaq tales about a great festival. The great festival is still celebrated locally today.

In the book, the hero Pina struggles with the suffering from losing his brothers, who have traveled to a nearby mountain and never returned. Pina decides to go to the same mountain, trying to uncover the facts, where he happens to meet Savik, who gives Pina a choice: To follow him or to meet the same fortune as his brothers. Pina’s decision takes himself on a journey that exposes himself to the dances and songs that are part of Iñupiaq culture. Eagle Drums describes aspects of Iñupiaq life as a world that doesn’t exist much in the current world, such as walking in the tundra (苔原) and imagining mythological beings and talking animals everywhere. It will definitely inspire the teen magical thinking in its beauty.

Hopson wants to write more Iñupiaq stories. “We have a lot of oral history and stories in our culture,” she says. Hopson explains that Iñupiaq people use their voices, facial expressions and movements to express emotions as they tell a story. “But you can’t do that when you’re writing,” she says. “It’s very uncomfortable, in a way, to have to write down something that is a performance.” But she’s up for the challenge.

Eagle Drums is for anyone who is looking for a vivid adventure. Hopson says that when Iñupiaq kids read her work, they get excited about seeing something from their own area and their own culture. Other kids who read her work tell Hopson they’re excited about experiencing a story they’ve never experienced before in a new place. “You know, that’s the best part, hearing feedbacks,” she says.

2 . This spring’s best page-turners

Run Towards the Danger

by Sarah Polley

Director and actor Sarah Polley last examined her personal history in her 2012 documentary, Stories We Tell. Her first book, a collection of biographic (传记的) essays, reconstructs her difficult childbirth, injuries, stage fright, and how she deals with these memories in order to move past them.

The Candy House

by Jennifer Egan

This new novel involves many of the same characters as Egan’s 2011 bestseller, A Visit from the Goon Squad. The new novel describes a social media network which allows users to upload and download their memories using futuristic technology. Egan lives up to her unpredictable reputation, writing chapters as series of tweets, emails and dialogues.

Trust

by He man Diaz

Anyone in need of an escape from reality will enjoy Diaz’s story set in the 1920s. It’s about Benjamin and Helen Rask, a pair of wealthy, strange business people in Jazz Age New York whose tricks and secrets threaten to destroy their lives.

This Time Tomorrow

by Emma Straub

Emma Straub’s novels offer fresh twists (转折) on the everyday relationships that form the glue of our lives. Her latest adds a fantasy to the mix. Alice is a middle-aged school admissions officer who’s transported back into her 16-year-old body, giving her the opportunity to reconnect with her father and correct the mistakes that separated them.

3 . Charlotte Grainger explains that it was her primary school teacher who first speculated that she might write a novel. “I thought the height of achievement would be to write a book because it seemed such a challenge and anyway I didn’t know what other teenagers were doing, like being in the Olympics, for example. When I turned 13, I thought I may be as well attempt this now. Recently I told my ex-teacher about it and she was astonished. She told me she’d meant I’d do it when I was 30 or 40. That had never occurred to me — I couldn’t understand why I’d be expected to put something on hold that I had a chance of being good at.”

It’s a winter afternoon, in the offices of Charlette’s publishers. The public relations representative for the book is keeping us company in case Charlotte might need defending. But she needs neither parental nor professional support. She’s her own person: spirited, with an alert face and great intelligence, but also a steadiness that prevents any overconfidence she could be forgiven for feeling.

She has a theory about teenagers and the way they are “betrayed” by the fiction that is specifically aimed at them. There are, she maintains, three types of teenagers depicted in novels. “There’s the outsider who becomes acceptable to society, the naive teenager who knows nothing about the big wide world, and the awkward teenage character who is socially skilled. The overall impression teenagers can get from some writers is teenagers can’t possibly know who they are because they are not experienced enough to know the truth. And when that is being pushed onto them by writers, it can undermine their self-belief. ”

Charlotte has always been a keen reader of famous fantasy writers, some of whom you might suppose she’d be grateful to, but in fact they almost put her off writing entirely. “Books by my favorite fantasy writers explore deep things about psychology and about life. I was asking myself: is this seriously what I have to be doing to write a good book and am I really up to it?” She does, however, praise the influence of a book called “How Not to Write a Novel. “It tells you that if the reader starts to guess what’s going to happen, the suspense has probably gone. ”

4 . In recent years, science fictions are becoming increasingly popular. Science fiction writers using their magical imagination create imaginary worlds that attract a great number of readers especially teenagers. But how can they make it so believable?     1    

The way things work in your imaginary worlds will be based on actual science. So you must be familiar with the scientific laws related to your creation. If you’re writing about humans living on a planet with zero gravity, then you need to know the effects of zero gravity on the human body.     2     Only in this way can you gain the readers’ trust.

Then the rules in your creation can be different from our daily life, so you have to figure out the exact rules of your imaginary worlds.     3     For example, if humans in your creation are able to breathe underwater in Chapter 1, your characters can’t drown (溺水) in a swimming pool or river in Chapter 3.

    4     You should decide the following issues: the history of the world, the geography, what possibilities it offers, how everything works in this new reality, as well as how all of these factors affect the way your characters think, feel, and react. You don’t have to tell your readers all the rules in the first chapter. But you have to let readers know enough to understand what’s going on.

When you are writing, remember to make it feel real. You are creating a new real world for the readers.     5     They are able to see, hear, feel, smell, and even taste what it’s like in the new world. Whether your novel is about a world without disease or an undiscovered planet, help your readers feel like they’ re actually there.

5 . The Other Mrs.

by Mary Kubica (Park Row, $27)

“Full of Secrets in the latest terror-meets-family drama from the best selling author of The Good Girl,” said Cogdill. A troubled couple and their children move from Chicago to an island in Maine to attempt a fresh start, but trust among them is not enough even before a niece joins the household and a murder puts the father’s honesty in doubt. The Other Mrs. “moves at a quick pace, with believable and surprising twists and an unexpected ending.”

Sharks in the Time of saviors

by Kawai Strong Washburn (MCD, $27)

“Despite its unclear feeling of of sadness, this novel about Hawaii feels like a drop of tropical sun,” said Jenny. It follows a native islander who is regarded as a potential savior by his family and community after he falls from a boat at age 7 and is rescued by uncommonly gentle sharks. As Nainoa and his family members take turns telling the story. “The author’s hoping for the land and traditions of Hawaii is so strong you might catch his homesickness.”

The Jetsetters

by Amanda Eyre Ward (Ballantine, $28)

“Sure, this novel’s plot sails through the Hallmark into Love Boatish,” said Judy Blundell. But after a woman brings her family together for a journey, which she’s won by writing about a long-ago story with Pablo Picasso, humor and an attention to detail carry the story. Through the author’s involvement in many tricks, she “uncovers how family journeys are saved, over and over again, by short period of moments of connection with celebrities.”

The Mountains Sing

by Nguyen Phan Que Mai(Workman, $27)

“The story of Vietnam is so much bigger than most Americans know,” said Diana Nelson Jones. This “wonderful and vivid” novel by a Vietnamese poet follows a single family across several decades of 20th-century occupation and civil war, but “the story is inspired by the family’s extraordinary adjustment” and by the author’s writing skill. “The book is so destroying in places as to be unbearable, but then the flow of the writing and the story brings you onto a wave of hope.”