Booktalk #1

Do you think your parents overbearing? Jerks? Or just really, really, really annoying?

[wait for responses]

Teenagers Alex, Karolina, Gert, Chase, Molly, and Nico, would probably agree—sometimes—but mostly mom and dad are just, well, parents, and they love them.
They're typical teenagers: goth chick, smart kid, jock—and they mostly get along because their parents are friends.

So it's a bit of shock when they attend what's supposed to be a dinner party thing—a boring "just parents" get-together and they witness mom and dad murdering someone—and not just murder—human sacrifice.

Mom and dad aren't just kind of irritating. They're greedy, overbearing—and EVIL.

What do you do? Pretend you don't know anything? What if you let something slip? What if their parents were only pretending to care about them, and they actually plan to use their kids in some completely evil scheme—?

Alex, Karolina, Gert, Chase, Molly, and Nico have to run away. And of course their parents—and their evil henchmen—come after them. Luckily for these teenagers, they're no more "normal" than their parents, and life on the run brings out strange new talents. Mutants, aliens, werewolves—their whole world has gone crazy and they're in the middle of it.

What do you do when you discover your parents are super-villains?

Read Runaways: Volume 1, "Pride and Joy" and find out!
Booktalk by Matt Laxton, Lynnwood Library & K. Edwards, King County Library System  Washington Evergreen Young Adult Book Award nominee, 2006-2007

Booktalk #2

The ultimate gift from your parents, their legacy, your inheritence, usually is welcomed and appreciated. So, why would these teenagers conspire to runaway from their parents? Discovering that the legacy is pure evil, and that their parents are definitely not mild-mannered and clueless, forces the kids to rebel and attempt to bring their parents to justice.

Booktalk #3

Bored with having to entertain each other, the idea of spying on their collective parents’ annual gathering might be amusing. Instead, the teenagers discover that all of their parents are definitely not what they seem. Rebeling against a legacy of evil, the teens conspire to runaway and expose their parents’ evilness; but who’ll listen to kids?

Booktalks by Lyla Anderson Washington Evergreen Young Adult Book Award nominee, 2006-2007

Booktalk #4

Alex hates his parents yearly dinner parties.  Once a year he and 5 other kids have to sit together in a room while their parents gab.  It’s all the same boring thing until they discover – their parents are doing less gabbing and more human sacrificing.  They’re a supervillian group called the Pride!  The six kids, fearing for their lives, run away.  While on the lam they discover hidden powers, including magic, a mind controlled velaciraptor and super strength.  How long can six wanna-be superheroes hide before they are discovered by the cops, or worse, their parents?  (Georgia Peach Book Award for Teen Readers, 2007-2008)

SUBJECTS:    Runaway children -- Fiction.
                        Parent-child relationship -- Fiction.
                        Good and evil -- Fiction.
                        Teenagers -- Fiction.
                        Comic books, strips, etc.
                        Graphic novels.

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