Books shelved under “Young Adult”

It has been almost exactly two years since I gave Zenn Scarlett a rather mediocre review. In fact, I almost didn’t bother reading Under Nameless Stars. I’m glad I gave it a chance though! Although I don’t remember much about the first book, this sequel feels punchier, faster-paced, and more interesting than that one.

This book picks up where the first left off, so spoilers for the first book but no spoilers for Under…

Some books don’t work for me even as they leave me stunned, impressed, or moved. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe is one such book. Benjamin Alire Sáenz makes me cry at points with his writing, which is definitely beautiful. Yet neither the story itself nor the characters end up doing much for me.

Aristotle (Ari, he calls himself) is a Mexican–American teenager growing up in the 1980s. One summer he meets…

Well, here we are. Almost four years ago I started re-reading Animorphs. I had been wanting to do this for a while, and then my Goodreads friend and occasional Twitter DM enthusiast Julie started her own, finally galvanizing me to just do it, as Shia Le Nike says. (You should also read Julie’s review of #54: The Beginning as well!) It has taken me considerably longer than Julie to finish re-reading this series, but…

I read #53: The Answer and #54: The Beginning back-to-back because this book ends on a cliffhanger. Like the rest of my reviews of Animorphs, I’m not really flagging this as having spoilers despite discussing the plot, because I figure that if you’re reading this review of the end of a 50-book series 20 years later, then you probably don’t care that much about spoilers.

ALSO, weirdly enough, very specific spoiler for Buffy season…

This was a birthday book from my friend Rebecca, who smartly picked it off my mammoth to-read list. Unfortunately, it turns out that this is not a book for me. It’s awesome to see Deaf and queer characters represented in fiction and particularly YA, and for what it’s worth as a “hearie” commenting on this, I really enjoyed the way that the Deaf characters’ communication was portrayed here. Nevertheless, Julia never clicks for me as…

This really hit the spot. I’ve been craving some good, old-fashioned fantasy—the kind of stuff I mainlined as a kid, you know, the high fantasy stuff with dragons and wizards. But I find that when I go back and try to revisit the fantasy from my youth, when I read it with the more critical eyes of a modern feminist adult, there’s just too much problematic stuff in there for me to enjoy it as…

Because there’s nothing like reading some Animorphs books out of order …

#51: The Absolute is where the proverbial manure hits the air redistribution machine. I mean, I haven’t generally been marking these reviews with spoiler alerts, because I feel like if you’re reading a review for book 51, you’re either in way too deep or you don’t care about being spoiled. But I had to flag this review, because this …

… this…

Funny status update concerning this book and my friend hoping to give it to me as a present. But ever since I kicked off my year with Alice Oseman’s sublime Radio Silence, I was ready to pre-order I Was Born for This. I was slightly more hesitant to dive in after being disappointed by Solitaire, so let me start by saying that Oseman has won me back over. This is a great…

Sara Barnard continues to tell great stories. Her characters are relatable, and their situations have just the right scope. Goodbye, Perfect is about dealing with disruption and discomfort in your life caused by people close to you—especially when part of that disruption is re-evaluating what you know about a person. It’s about the nature of loyalty, family, and friendship. There’s a lot going on with the main character, and even though this is a fairly…

So, um, owing to a clerical error on my part, I read this before reading #51: The Absolute. Oops! I will definitely go back and read that before going on, but just keep this fact in mind while reading this otherwise perfect review of #52: The Sacrifice.

Ax has kind of had it with humans in this book, at least at first. Cassie gave up the morphing cube on purpose, and now…

It is with no small amount of regret that I announce I have never been mistaken for a fearsome space pirate. On the other hand, that’s probably for the best. I’m not going to be sent to space army school like Ia Cōcha in Ignite the Stars. The result is an intense story from Maura Milan about divided loyalties and the necessity of questioning authority in the face of injustice.

Ia is seventeen years…

Although To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before was on my radar for a while, thanks to Twitter hype, I actually watched the movie first, and it definitely motivated me to read the book. I adore the movie. I think it’s so well shot that it’s nearly frame perfect. While I don’t think this is one of those cases of “the movie is better than the book”, I do think it’s a case where the…

It’s time for another Holly Bourne book, and if you’ve been following along my reviews, then you know what to expect by now: incisive, excellent narration from a teenage girl who is at a turning point in her life, some kind of crisis moment, and a lot of honest discussions about mental health, sex, romance, and friendship. In other words, it’s an epitome of a subgenre of YA in which Bourne has carved out a…

Sherlock Holmes was, unsurprisingly, my jam when I was a kid. I preferred Poirot, even then (just something about Christie’s writing or the Belgian detective’s emphasis on his “little grey cells”), but Sherlock was cool too. I love reading stories that try to put a new spin on the Conan Doyle adventures, whether it’s transposing them to the 22nd century, hiring Ian McKellen to play a dementia-ridden Holmes, or gender-swapping Holmes and sending her to…

I picked Textrovert up on a whim because the premise looked interesting. The premise is interesting, and I liked many of the individual elements of the story … yet it just didn’t come together for me. Lindsey Summers has a fantastic idea of a story and competent writing, but there’s something missing.

Keeley thinks she has lost her phone; when she retrieves it, she learns it is actually another student’s phone, and he is away…

Imagine you live in a world where a significant percentage of the population has a simple but necessary job: they sit in a booth, and every so often, a light comes on, and when it does, they push a button in front of them, and the light goes out. As long as they do that, all day every day, we have electricity and fuel and plastics and all these conveniences we rely on in our…

My friend Rebecca gave this to me as a birthday gift last year. This was a really tough week for me, so I finally picked it up off the shelf because I knew she had inscribed it (as I do with my book gifts!), and I wanted to reread the lovely, lengthy message from her and then dive into a YA book. Whether it’s fluffier or heavier, there is something about YA I find very…

Last Cassie book is best Cassie book.

#50: The Ultimate is, quite simply, vicious. In its final arc the Animorphs series discards any pretense that this is anything less than a series about children being at war. Cassie, Jake, and the other Animorphs are the de facto leaders of a resistance comprising some free Hork Bajir, pacifistic Chee, and their parents (and maybe a peaceful group of Yeerks, but we haven’t heard from them…

I was feeling rather emotional over the weekend while I read this, and … I’m not sure if this helped. There were a couple of points where I nearly or did burst into tears from what was happening. The Heartbeats of Wing Jones is an earnest, heart-warming book about a teenager trying to find herself in the face of an incredible family tragedy. The feels are real with this one, and Katherine Webber’s writing is…

This is not a drill.

I repeat: NOT A DRILL.

Yes, Caitlin Moran has written a sequel to the sublime How to Build a Girl. I never expected this, never asked for this … and I definitely don’t deserve it, but young women do. This sequel is arguably better, brighter, more brilliant than the first book. I devoured it in a day, and I already want to go back and re-read it, underline it,…