Books-- Glow and Spark, the Sky Chasers series

Hello readers!  I'm working on compiling the recommendation list put together by this year's 7th graders.  I should have it up this weekend.

In the meantime, I wanted to share a series of books I came across by accident.  I was reading an article for teachers and it mentioned a few different series of books.  I'd heard of all of them except Sky Chasers.  It was recommended for people who liked the Hunger Games.  I downloaded the first book, Glow, to my Kindle, and I couldn't put it down.  As soon as I finished it, I downloaded Spark and read it in one day!  The only thing that frustrated me was that it had a killer cliffhanger ending, but the next book doesn't come out until January 2014.

The books are about two ships that were sent into space from Earth.  At the time, Earth was in bad shape, so their mission was to spend decades (I can't remember exactly how long) in space, and then come back and repopulate Earth.  The story starts out following Waverly and Kieran, two teenagers on the first ship.  Then the second ship attacks the first, and steals all the girls, killing most of the adults on board.  The story then goes back and forth between Waverly's experience on the new ship and Kieran's experience trying to run the other ship without any adults.

I thought the books were excellent.  I will warn that there is some violence (not as explicit as the Hunger Games) and the kids have to deal with some adult situations on the new ship.  I would rate them a PG-13.  They reminded me a lot of Lord of the Flies, with the kids trying to govern themselves and the way they handle situations new to them.

Happy reading!