Books shelved under “Young Adult”

In what might be one of the most efficient stories in the series, The Diversion delivers an emotionally intense blow to the Animorphs as Applegate hammers home to her readers that nothing will ever be the same.

In Tobias’ last solo turn as narrator, we learn that the Yeerks have finally clued into the possibility that these Andalite bandits are actually humans. So they’ve begun a massive project of sifting through DNA samples, trying…

Sometimes we get so caught up in the swells of epic fantasy that it’s nice to take a break and come back down to earth with something a little more folk fantasy. The Boneshaker is set in 1914, in a Missouri town just near a crossroads—and we all know what happens there. Kate Milford, along with some fantastic illustrations by Andrea Offermann, spins us a yarn about a travelling medicine show, deals with the Devil,…

I enjoyed Storm Glass more than I thought I would when I first started. For whatever reason, I’m not aboard the young adult fantasy train right now, which is a shame, because there’s plenty of young adult fantasy I want to read, but I’m hesitant to go into it until I’m in the right mood! Still, I received this from NetGalley in exchange for a review, so a reading and a review it will get!

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So I read this book nearly a month ago but am only now getting around to writing a review, because I have literally spent all my free time knitting a SEKRIT PROJECT because I want to give it to my friend Amanda, who has been away and out of contact for a month. Project is almost done, and so now I can resume my regular reading and reviewing, just in time for summer! However, my…

We really might have hit some kind of Singularity, because this novel was published in 2014, and I am having a hard time caring not because it’s bad but just because certain elements of what’s happening right now seem like they’re out of the worst-conceived conspiracy theories ever. The Doubt Factory is an attempt by Paolo Bacigalupi to distill the dangerous, pay-to-play nature of many industries into a thriller for young adults. He examines the…

Decidedly mixed feelings about this one! The Return asks some important questions about Rachel and her attitude towards fighting this war against the Yeerks. It also features the much-anticipated … uh, return … of David, one-time Animorph. Yet, like many Animorphs books, I find that the actual story/plot doesn’t bear up under the weight of the themes the series is trying to explore.

This is a deep cut, even for this series, but I’m really…

It took me a while, but I figured out why it took me so long to read this book: the typeface.

That might seem picky, or petty, but it's true. This small, heavyweight, sans serif typeface just did not appeal to me. I trucked on—because this book is definitely reading—but I did not, alas, enjoy the actual experience of reading it. Your mileage will probably vary, but typography is something I’m sensitive to.

Anyway,…

I am really ambivalent about Some Boys, y’all. (Pun intended!) I can see why this has garnered split opinions when it comes to reviews. Some people love it, some people hate it, and others, like me, are finding things both to love and to hate about the book. Patty Blount’s story of what happens after a young woman accuses one of her peers of rape is a roller coaster of emotions and a stinging…

Sometimes the right kind of sad can help, even when you yourself are sad. I kept seeing this one bandied about on Twitter, and it turns out my library has a copy, so I was able to get to it sooner rather than later. I’m glad I did. The Miseducation of Cameron Post is a bittersweet book, definitely a coming-of-age story, about the eponymous character’s struggle with being a lesbian in a rural, conservative Christian…

Here we are, the last of the Animorphs Chronicles books. The impending conclusion of the series feels a lot more real having read this, and not just because the book opens with the Ellimist alluding to one of the Animorphs dying!!111.

Despite the book being set during the final battle of the last book, however, this book was published following #47: The Resistance. Julie, my guru of all things Animorphs, did everything short…

Reading Beautiful Broken Things made me really want to re-read A Quiet Kind of Thunder. I don’t know—this one was just so good that I was reminded of how much I enjoyed the other, which I think is a much more heartwarming story than this one. And that’s not to say that this one is bad, but there are moods for things. Parts of this story made me cry. Parts of it made my…

The Woken Gods has a wicked premise: what if the deities of various ancient mythologies were real entities, but at some point in time, for reasons lost to us, they were put asleep or fell asleep? What happens, then, if they wake up and return with a vengeance, and the only people who can stand against them are a shadowy secret society called the Society of the Sun that just happens to have made it…

Mike Heath is back at it again with that great cover art. Ugh. That angled title. Yes.

Yes yes yes yes yes.

Oh, and A.J. Hartley wrote a book that goes between these covers. It’s pretty good too.

What, you want more? OK, fine.

Firebrand is one of those sequels that comes out swinging, delivering more of what you loved about the first book without any of that messy “middle book” syndrome that so often…

“And then … AND THEN … THEN THEY HAVE TO TURN INTO BEAVERS—fucking beavers!—to save the day. By building a DAM. Because they’re BEAVERS.”

Occasionally I like to imagine how a book might have been pitched if the pitch meeting involved lots of drinking. (Disclaimer: I have never been drunk. Maybe beavers are inherently sobering.)

The Resistance is such a weird instalment in the Animorphs series. On the one hand, the fate of the…

Oof. Honestly, still trying to work out how I feel about this book, so this review might be a little rough. Radio Silence was one of the best books I will have read this year, hands down, even though it was like the second book I read this year. I recognize some of that Alice Oseman in Solitaire, but reading this after reading the incredible Radio Silence was a real letdown. This book…

Some books are meant to be sipped and savoured over the course of many days. You have to engage with them gradually, wade into them and wait for their temperature to feel comfortable against your mind. Other books demand to be devoured in a single sitting. I’ve determined that, for me, Holly Bourne’s books are the latter. Once I start reading them, I can’t put them down. I started What’s a Girl Gotta Do? on…

I read young adult, or YA, for a lot of reasons. As I’ve said before, I read it to keep me young, or at least to keep me connected to the ideas and feelings of younger adults. It’s natural, as we grow older, to lose touch with those perspectives, especially as the world around us changes. Reading YA inoculates me, to some extent, against that. Moreover, YA novels often display so much courage. By…

Last year I reviewed A Tyranny of Petticoats, which came on my radar because I received it in a Book Mail box from Book Riot. When I saw The Radical Element on NetGalley, I wanted to see how the second volume of this anthology series compared. Thanks to NetGalley and Candlewick Press for the eARC! I adored this book for what it is, and while I didn’t love every story, it was a great…

I want to start by listing a few critiques of Nyxia, any one of which I can understand would make you like the book less. Then I’ll explain why, despite these issues, I still loved this book so much.

Warning: there is a spoiler in the very last paragraph of this review regarding the death of a character. The rest of the review is spoiler-free.

First, this is absolutely a “set up” novel. The…

Previously, on Animorphs…

The Animorphs have literally just succeeded in contacting the Andalite command. The Deception picks up with no time passing. The conversation goes about as poorly as you might expect. After the Animorphs narrowly escape with their lives, they discover that the former Visser Three is now Visser One (!!!!!) and there’s a new Visser Two in town who wants to fuck everyone up by starting a nuclear war.

So what do our…