The Midnight Twins is by Jacquelyn Mitchard, who wrote The Deep End of the Ocean (and a lot of other books, of course), and it's the first of a series about sisters named Meredith and Mallory, who come from a long line of psychic twins. Born two minutes before midnight and two minutes after on New Year's Eve, one sees the past and one the future. In this book, they discover their powers and have to solve a mystery and foil a bad guy.
The Replacement falls into a category with a lot of recent teen fiction about the world of faerie, but is quite superior to many of those. It's the first novel by Brenna Yovanoff, and after reading this, I look forward to seeing what she comes up with next. The protagonist is one of those changelings left behind when the faeries steal the human child from the cradle. This changeling, however, has parents and a loving sister who know what he is and raise him as if he was their real child anyway. The book opens when Malcolm is a teenager, struggling with his health in a world full of iron and blood. A little girl has just died in their town, but her older sister, a classmate of Malcolm's, insists that the child they buried wasn't her sister Natalie, and Malcolm, who has a good idea who (or what) the child was, struggles with his emotions as he tries to stay under the radar of the suspicious townsfolk while helping the girl he likes get her sister back before it's too late.
These were kind of a cheat, artistically, because I was in a hurry and because I was working against the light on my patio (I keep forgetting that it gets dark now at 6:15 instead of at 8:00!). I propped the book on the left up against my coffee mug, so they are not on the same plain, but the background doesn't reflect that, which it should. I also went in after with a pen and tweaked a bunch of stuff because I was so sloppy when I painted. So, not the greatest illustration, but enough to use to feature these two entertaining and slightly creepy books.
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