Have you ever seen the movie Total Recall? It’s a cheesy but fun sci-fi action adventure film about the planet Mars after humanity has settled there. Due to improper protection from radiation leaks a certain portion of the population has developed mutations. Most didn’t receive the cool X-Men kind but have scars, extra hands, cyclops…
Did you ever watch the TV show Jericho? It’s a dystopian tale about what happens when a group of people use small nuclear devices to set off minor atomic bombs (as if there is such a thing!) in numerous areas of the U.S. The resultant chaos leads to three separate countries forming out of the…
The story of Persephone is one of the more passionate of the Greek myths. Demeter, the original Tiger Mother, hovers over her daughter Persephone, refusing all offers of marriage. Hades, like many of the Greek male deities, is mightily in love with the beautiful young Persephone. He appeals to her father to recommend a way…
Growing pains can be a horrible thing, especially when those growing pains are experienced by hundreds of people. The birth of a new government, a new style of leading can also be terrible. On the star ship Godspeed, both things are happening simultaneously. As people grow more and more aware of themselves and each other,…
If you’ve entered a bookstore in the past three years, you’ll probably know about the Hunger Games; it is quite possibly the biggest young adult publishing phenom since Harry Potter. After finally reading the dystopian trilogy, I had a hard time making a judgment: Certainly, they are good. But are they great? Part of my…
A good ghost story requires ambiance, and what better location for ambiance can there be than London, England? It is a city so rich in history that every inch of it has a tale to tell. It has hundreds of famous ghosts. When you add in those cool, foggy nights for which it is renowned,…
Some books just luck out in the cover department and I think this is definitely one of them. The lush dress, the castle, the maze, the young girl who looks like she is on the verge of running – it all makes for an enchanted, fairy tale feel. Which is appropriate given that this novel…
I love dragon novels. There is something about dragons that epitomizes the fantasy genre, a style of book I love. In romance we have been fortunate to have an excellent dragon series in Shana Abe’s Drakons. Alas, it looks like I am still searching for a truly terrific YA dragon series – because this one…
Earth that was could no longer sustain us, we had messed it up so badly. Oh wait, that’s a paraphrase of the start of Joss Whedon’s Serenity. And the premise of Pixar’s Wall-E. Shrug. I’m going with it, it works here, too. So Earth could no longer sustain us and we were headed off to…
Have I mentioned lately how much I am loving the current YA market? While not every book I am picking up is a winner (I recently finished a crop of C/C- novels that left me wondering if the days of the greats were behind us), this genre continues to surprise, amaze and delight. And novels…