Books shelved under “Young Adult”

Juno is a fun movie. Elliot Page nails it as the title character, conveying exactly the intended idea that a lot of the weirdness about teen pregnancy comes from our hang-ups, as a society, about young women/girls. In the movie’s desire to concentrate on how Juno navigates this brave new world, however, Michael Cera’s character—the babydaddy—plays only a minor role. That’s fine for the story Juno wants to tell. But I basically think now of …

The titles of Animorphs novels might seem mundane, but they are always appropriate. The Change begins as another supposedly simple Animorphs versus Yeerks plot. It turns out to be so much more. Still, an alternative and equally appropriate title might have been The Hope.

Following the revelations from The Andalite Chronicles, Applegate finally returns to the perspective of the most marginalized Animorph, Tobias. Trapped in hawk morph, a nothlit, Tobias can’t exactly contribute…

I don’t really know how to start this review, because this is a very important topic for me. It should be an important topic for anyone who loves books. Although Pirate Cinema concerns not-so-exaggerated attempts to stop people from copying and remixing movies, much of the same rhetoric around copyright has been applied to books. Libraries pay insanely inflated prices for ebooks because publishers are freaked out that electronic files exist and can be…

So … yeah. This book made me cry, at the end.

I remember reading the hard copy version of this as a kid and marvelling at how much thicker it was than your typical Animorphs novel. Don’t get me wrong—by that age I was already mainlining The Lord of the Rings and Dune, so I was already acquainted with long novels. Until now, though, Applegate had intentionally been keeping her stories not just short,…

I wasn’t sure how Kasie West could follow up Pivot Point. The dual, parallel narrative structure of the first novel was neat, but I didn’t think it would be as interesting a second time. Fortunately, West approaches the story differently. This time the narrative is split between Addie and Laila.

Since I found Laila an interesting character in the first book, I welcomed the opportunity to get inside her head and learn more about…

World War I is not the sexier World War. The technology isn’t advanced; it didn’t end with a noisy double atomic bang; and it lacks the grandiose operatic tragedy of the Holocaust to offer a thematic background. Indeed, the political quagmire of nationalism and militarism that precipitated and fuelled the Great War might be interesting to historians, but to bored schoolkids, it just prompted us to wonder what we had done so wrong to deserve…

When it comes right down to it, Animorphs plots are pretty silly. I mean, they kind of have to be, for a bunch of kids to stymie Visser Three on a regular basis. He is only slightly more competent than Dr. Drakken.

(I’m just going to pause here for a moment so you can envision the gloriousness that would be an Animorphs/Kim Possible crossover. That’s right. How awesome would that be?)

Fortunately, Applegate…

Picked this up off the New Books shelf at the library and decided to take a chance. As I’ve said before, this is why I love libraries. I have no interest in heavy metal, and the back cover copy is somewhat vague in communicating what this book is about. But what’s the worst that could happen? I don’t like it, and I have to return in a few weeks. Libraries are awesome for letting you…

Addison Coleman, or Addie, is a mutant Tomorrow Person—damn it, she’s got mind powers, mmkay? But not floaty-move-stuff-with-your-mind powers—that’s Telekinetics—or memory-erasing powers—that’s Erasing—she can see the two possible paths that branch from a choice she has to make—Discerning, or Divergence, or whatever. The names aren’t that important. This is the Tomorrow People if the Tomorrow People were led by adults and not afraid for their lives because they’re all safe in a Compound in…

I love that truth—in this case, history—is often stranger than fiction. Take Razorhurst. The year 1932, and in a run down section of Sydney, Australia, gangs of men rove the streets, scarring each other with razor blades.

Cool alternate history, right? Wrong. That’s true facts. Justine Larbalestier might have created some composite characters based on real people from that era, but the setting is real. These razor gangs of Surry Hills were real. That’s…

It’s time … to travel … in time.

Animorphs played with time travel once before, in #7: The Stranger, but that was at the hands of the Ellimist. This time, the Animorphs accidentally create a Sario Rip—technobabble for “hole in space-time,” which is technobabble for … well … you know … stuff—when the Dracon beams they fired from a stolen Bug fighter intersected with the Dracon beams from Visser Three’s Blade ship, and—

—what?…

The Android is an excellent example of the greatness of the Animorphs series. If you were going to jump in to this series rather than start from the first book, you could do worse than start here. In addition to the now-boilerplate introduction required to get such new readers up to speed, Applegate continues to expand the mythology of the series. We meet the Chee, programmed to be peaceful by the joy-loving but now extinct…

Growing up in Canada and watching American TV shows, one becomes familiar with Americanisms that nevertheless are not applicable in Canada. For instance, two initialisms that are a big deal to American students and have no bearing on Canadians (unless we want to go to an American university): SATs and GPAs. Don’t exist here, for the most part. (Some schools require SAT-like tests for admissions, and most universities calculate a GPA statistic—but it doesn’t have…

So we begin the Second Age—dare I say, the Silver Age?—of Animorphs with The Secret. Applegate combines one of the ongoing themes of environmentalism with a personal look at the tolls this secret war takes on Cassie, the most empathetic of the Animorphs.

See what I did there? These titles, simplistic though they might seem, are always multi-faceted. The eponymous secret could be so many things. It could be the Yeerk invasion. It could…

The Alien represents the end of the First Age of Animorphs. It is Ax’s first time as narrator, and so with this book, all of the six Animorphs have had a chance to tell their story. As with the introductions to each of the human Animorphs, this book lets us hear in Ax’s own words why he is fighting the Yeerks. Thanks to his knowledge as an Andalite, he also allows Applegate to share more…

Seven books into the Animorphs series, and K.A. Applegate has a problem. The series is popular. Too popular. See, it’s so popular that its sales are already so high that any improvement is not only unlikely but mathematically impossible … unless she can come up with some way to make the series even bigger, even crazier. Something so wild that it transforms a horizontal asymptote on that time versus sales graph into a vertical one.

…

Another YA book from my 2009 days that I’ve taken forever to read. Well worth the wait, though: Cracked Up to Be is all it’s cracked up to be, in that it is a ripping good yarn about how high school is a messed up place. Courtney Summers manages to convey some of the issues that some teenagers face without trivializing them or wrapping them up in a neat little bow at the end. In…

I very quickly decided I did not like Jill McTeague very much. In fact, my dislike of her was exceeded only by my dislike of her mother (but we’ll get to that). I thought Jill was shallow, rude, and selfish in the way she handles her monthly transformation into Jack.

And I was right.

And that’s one reason why Cycler is a powerful book. Although Jill is one of the protagonists and one of the…

Are you ready for this?

Guys, are you ready for this?

It doesn’t matter what you answered. You are not ready for this. None of the preceding five books could prepare us for The Capture.

See, the Yeerks have built a shiny new hospital that they have staffed with Controllers. That way, they can infect the people who go there for treatment—including powerful people, like the state governor, who might one day be the…

We arrive at the last of the introductions to the original five Animorphs: Marco, no last name (as usual). He is, in our Animorph boy band, the Funny One (not the Pretty One, though he might try to sell you on that). (Debate which of the other Animorphs are which boy band stereotype in the comments!) He has spent the past four novels providing comic relief, sometimes at the most inopportune times, and generally…