This was my most anticipated book of 2015 and I am so pleased to say that it lived up to my excitement. Ee created a wonderful and terrifying angel apocalypse and then used it to show how humanity – both the good and bad of it- continue on after a catastrophe. Since neither of the…
Two things led me to read this book: the hype and the fact that it was billed as Magical Realism. I heard multiple authors crow about how wonderful it is, and saw a stunning number of positive reviews. I’m a huge fan of Young Adult and Magical Realism, so how could I resist? The description…
The blurb on this book says “For readers of A Game of Thrones and The Hunger Games comes an epic new series.” Sounds awesome, right? Someday I will remember that blurbs are written to sell me books and trust them a bit less. Quin Kincaid is ready to take her Oath and become what she…
Julie Cross’s Whatever Life Throws At You straddles the line between Young Adult (the heroine is only seventeen) and New Adult (the characters have sex), making it hard to categorize. A wonky ending and a bit of slow pacing kept it from being an A read for me, but I can still recommend it for…
The Romeo and Juliet story has been done to death. So it was quite refreshing to pick up Magnolia by Kristi Cook, a story that promised Romeo and Juliet in reverse. And despite a heroine and hero who are a little too close to perfect, this book delivered on that promise. In the town of…
Jane Austen’s books are so timeless and classic, it’s easy to forget that many of her characters’ problems and the stories’ plots are based on the social mores of a specific time and place in history. It’s only when reading Diana Peterfreund’s Persuasion-inspired For Darkness Shows the Stars that I came to realize how critical…
Isla Martin has been in love with Joshua Wasserstein since she first saw him in ninth grade, but between Isla’s shyness and Josh’s misunderstanding of her relationship with her best friend Kurt, the two never managed to get on the same page. Suddenly it’s senior year, and these bicultural New Yorker/Parisians have started to figure…
It’s 1941, but in India, the oppressors are the English, not the Axis. Fifteen-year-old Vidya’s progressive father shields her from most unpleasantness, promising her an education rather than an early marriage. But when tragedy sends Vidya to live in the traditional and very conservative family home, her future looks lost. This coming-of-age story with romantic…
Dystopian young adult novels are thick on the ground right now. Some, like The Hunger Games and Divergent, set the standard. Others, like Ann Aguirre’s Enclave and Pierce Brown’s Red Rising, show that following a trend can still produce a good product. Then there are those books that make us regret the trend was ever…
This anthology is a new look at the classic tales (or stories told in the style of the classic tales ) of the Brothers Grimm. There are seventeen tales altogether. Some are good, some are bad, some are just there. It’s unfortunate that the bad and mediocre tales pull the overall grade of the anthology…