Books shelved under “Young Adult”

Cherie Dimaline in her author’s note says she didn’t anticipate writing a sequel to The Marrow Thieves, and I understand why. French’s story of finding a new family in a post-apocalyptic world where Indigenous people’s bone marrow is being harvested to give non-Indigenous people back their dreams is quite a powerful tale on its own. There isn’t a need for a sequel … or at least, there wasn’t. Now that Dimaline has given…

This book perplexed yet also entertained me. The Glass Sentence feels like a novel from a different era, a pulpy young adult adventure story that would already have been turned into a movie of questionable quality by the time I was still too young to appreciate it. Perhaps this is appropriate for a story that is about different eras! S.E. Grove’s storytelling is rich and creative in many ways that I will be happy to…

Media tie-in novels aren’t my thing. I have a form of aphantasia that makes it nearly impossible for me to visualize events as I read, and as a result, novels about characters I know from screen tend to fall flat because I can’t imagine the actors portraying those characters. Nevertheless, I have long been a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and in 2021 I started a rewatch podcast, Prophecy Girls with a friend.…

I have rather slept on Kendare Blake up until now. However, I applied to read her tie-in novel for Buffy the Vampire Slayer on NetGalley (because I have a Buffy rewatch podcast). Because I am generally more critical of tie-in novels, I wanted to try some of Blake’s original fantasy fiction to get a feel for her writing. Unfortunately, Three Dark Crowns left me wanting—not in a good way.

On the island of Fennbirn,…

Talk about a compelling narrative! Melissa Bashardoust isn’t fooling around. From page 1, Girl, Serpent, Thorn is a wild ride. Soraya is the twin sister to the new shah. She is also poison: her touch is deadly to all living things save plants. Her mother raised her to believe this was a curse from a div (a demon), and as a result, Soraya has been raised apart from the court. Different and distant, she discovers…

This book had me at its opening scene, set in a tea store, where Darius talks to us for the first of many times about his love for properly steeped looseleaf teas. But then it had to go and introduce frequent, detailed allusions to Star Trek: The Next Generation, complete with Darius declaring that Captain Picard is the best captain, and … reader, at that point, I would have hid a dead body for…

Hey, it’s your girl Kara, reading the sequel to a book four years after I read the first book, and the real tragedy is that this is not unusual for me! So when you hear me say that I struggled to get into Shadowhouse Fall, it’s not because of the book itself. Rather, I literally forgot everything about the plot of the first book and had to lean on my review and some…

I guess it’s the summer of Kara reading sequels to books she read 3 or more years ago! I just barely remember Nyxia, but the good news is that most of that memory is of how excited I felt after reading the book. It was good young adult science fiction. Scott Reintgen balanced an anti-corporation message with adventure, teamwork, the bonds of friendship and family. There was a lot to recommend about it, and…

Major spoilers in this review, because it’s more of an autopsy. I think After the Fall was dead on arrival for me.

The cover copy promises a kind of love triangle in which Raychel is sleeping with 2 brothers, Matt and Andrew. Now, I know that authors usually don’t write the cover copy, so I won’t blame Kate Hart for this. But I feel misled. Raychel is sleeping with Matt in the sense that sometimes…

I pre-ordered this based on how much I enjoyed Camryn Garrett’s first novel, Full Disclosure, and Off the Record didn’t disappoint. From beginning to end, Garrett catapults us into an adventure of racism, sexism, and the price of fame, all from the point of view of a teenager with social anxiety and a way with words.

Josie is a journalist. She’s still in high school, but she has published articles for actual magazines, and…

Every novel by Holly Bourne breaks me, yet each breaks me in its own unique way. And I never see the devastation coming. I expected The Yearbook to be more about, well, the creation of a school yearbook than anything else. But really this is a book about abuse. Whether it’s under the guise of high school bullying or parental or marital relationships, abuse is a pernicious monster, difficult to name and more difficult still…

All of you should know by now that heist novels are my jam, and a fantasy heist novel? Bring me the fainting couch and smelling salts, for surely, I swoon! Suffice it to say that when I discovered this hidden gem, the highly underrated Six of Crows by unknown author Leigh Bardugo, I was anticipating a good time.

Kaz Brekker runs with the Dregs, a group of street criminals in the slums of Ketterdam. Kaz…

This book was recommended to me by Esmè, who wrote into my Buffy rewatch podcast, Prophecy Girls. Some of our comments on the show about how strange life at Sunnydale High must be for students who aren’t in the know about Buffy’s life reminded Esmè of The Rest of Us Just Live Here. Indeed, it sounds like a great choice for me: I love “meta” books that deconstruct literary tropes like this…

This is my 1700th review per my website’s official count (counts on other places, like Goodreads and The StoryGraph, might be slightly off because of import issues/what gets counted as a “review”)!! I didn’t choose Bookishly Ever After for my 1700th review on purpose, but I couldn’t think of a more deserving book for this arbitrary milestone. Lucy Powrie concludes the trilogy began in The Paper & Hearts Society and furthered in Read with Pride…

I put this book down at the start of Chapter 6, where one of the supposed protagonists (a 15-year-old girl) is sexually assaulting a kidnapped 15-year-old boy she idolizes. I don’t care why it’s happening or what justification there is—Kill the Boy Band had already tried my patience with some other red flags as well as Goldy Moldavsky’s style; I was already mulling over DNFing it despite being less than 50 pages in. As…

Could we teach this book in schools instead of Lord of the Flies? Pretty please? I say this even though I didn’t particularly like Wilder Girls, which just goes to show how unenthusiastic I remain about the idea that, 67 years and how many gender revolutions later, we’re still claiming there are no better books out there to teach to children. Wilder Girls hits me in the same place, but I think in…

I don’t really know what I just read. The Accident Season is a supernatural YA thriller that purports to have a mystery at the heart of it. Yet the deeper we go into the story, the more that mystery unravels into almost a bait-and-switch. Populated by the barest hints of ghosts, fairies, changelings, and other such spirits, this book tugs at your brain in a pleasing way, but I’m not sure, in the end, it…

So excited to read this new YA novel from Charlie Jane Anders. Previously I read her debut, All the Birds in the Sky, which I thought was full of fun, quirky writing and good ideas but whose ending didn’t quite gel. Victories Greater Than Death, I was hoping, would deliver the same kind of quirky entertainment but with an overall plot that was more focused and more satisfying. In this sense, it succeeds.…

A few years ago, I read The Hate U Give and liked it enough that I have multiple copies of it (various special editions). Angie Thomas then followed it up with On The Come Up, a spin-off set in the same neighbourhood but with a different cast and a focus on hip-hop, something Thomas cares about deeply on a personal level. Now we have a third novel that is clearly the result of a…

Although Pet crossed my book radar a few times, I probably wouldn’t have picked it up if it hadn’t been recommended to me by my friend Emeline. The descriptions of the book, despite its promise of a trans main character, didn’t leave me with the impression that it would be my jam. Indeed, for the first third or so, that was my initial conclusion: that I could understand Pet’s appeal for other readers, but…