I can’t approach this book as a member of the target audience, but I can use my imagination and decide if I would recommend it to a kid sister. In a word: No. Elsha is one of the Quelled who have been enslaved by the Chosen to mine firestones, the sole source of heat in…
Thanks to the success of the Twilight books, the young adult shelves are filled with paranormals with a romantic element. Yes, Meridian is about a heroine who finds herself part of a new world and meets a love interest. At the same time, it’s not the same old song. No vampires and werewolves here. Meridian…
I haven’t read much this summer. I haven’t been slumping, I’ve been busy, but somehow the habit of not reading snuck up on me. I needed something light and entertaining to ease myself back in, and Psych Major Syndrome was a good choice. Leigh Nolan is a freshman at a laissez faire liberal arts school…
The September Sisters is YA Fiction of the grim realistic variety. It’s the story of what happens in a family after a child goes missing. Specifically, what happens to the child who is left behind. Abigail Reed goes to sleep one summer night after a fight with her sister Becky, and when she wakes up…
The Awakening is the second book in Armstrong’s Darkest Powers trilogy. This is an incredibly fun young adult series featuring a young necromancer and her supernatural friends. If you haven’t read the first book, you should stop reading here, because there’s really no way to talk about what happens in this book without revealing spoilers…
Since I really like paranormals, I’ve been meaning to get into Kelley Armstrong’s Women of the Otherworld series for quite some time. However, my first taste of her paranormal works came from The Summoning, the first book in her young adult trilogy. I got it from the library in preparation for reviewing the second book…
In her introduction to this new edition, Ms. Smith states that her original fear was that readers would not be able to sympathize with her heroine, “with all her prickles and stings.” Prickles? Stings? My foot. Our Lady Meliara is a bloody porcupine. With venom at the tips. And a serious ulcer. But more about…
It begins with a glass of orange juice at breakfast. Harry Crewe, orphan Homelander and newly come to the northernmost Homelander border patrol station, has nothing to do. Her new home is lovely, her guardians are everything that is kind, and the officers are friendly. But she has always been an octagonal peg (a very…
Before Twilight, there was L. J. Smith’s The Vampire Diaries series. This was the original “teen vampire” series, published during the wave of YA horror novels. Harper has reissued the original four books in two omnibuses, and a new hardback in the series came out in 2009.
When I was in middle and high school, I read plenty of YA books. In fact, I still do. One thing I appreciate now is that there seem to be more heroines out there who aren’t perfect – and who really are not trying to be. The unforgettable narrator of Going Too Far is one…
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