There’s something to be said for young adult books that are actually written the way a teen might actually talk…and then there’s something to be said for young adult books that assume all teens are incapable of articulating themselves well. I’m not sure if the latter is where Jennifer Brown actually falls, but this book definitely suffered from being written as if it was trying to mimic a teen voice. The basic plot of the novel is that Valerie, our main character, is a survivor […]
A Worthy Follow-Up to a Classic
I’ll have to admit that I’m somewhat biased here, because Jane Yolen is one of my favorite young adult authors and her two other novels about the Holocaust (the dreamlike Briar Rose and the memorably earnest The Devil’s Arithmetic) are books I found beautiful. I was just browsing my local library’s YA section randomly and saw this book: I didn’t even know she had written another novel about the Holocaust. While Briar Rose transposed its story into a fairy tale and The Devil’s Arithmetic read like […]
An Extremely Difficult and Important Read
Trigger warning for the entire review (and book) as it discusses rape and rape culture. As a proud Angry Feminist, I’ve read a lot of books about rape culture. Considering that most women are harassed, abused, sexually assaulted, or raped in their lifetimes, it is of course a subject rife for feminist discussion and analysis. I won’t say that Not That Bad adds anything hugely revolutionary to the genre (aside from the fact that it remains a revolutionary act to frankly discuss rape and rape […]
The Rare YA Sequels That Didn’t Disappoint
As I said in my review of Illuminae, the first book in this series, I always worry about young adult trilogies going off the rails in their second or third books, because I’ve been burned by this so many times. If the plot doesn’t get downright silly, standard tropes are thrown in that kill the suspense because I know exactly what’s coming next, or characters become completely one-dimensional and only exist to move the plot forward. Not so with the second book in this series, […]
Actually Unpredictable YA
I used to read a lot of young adult fiction. I still read it relatively often for a 35-year-old woman. And as much as there’s a ton of genuinely great young adult fiction out there, a lot of it is rote and predictable. This holds especially true, unfortunately, for both sci-fi and fantasy and is often even more true for a series in either genre. You can guess at so many elements that will appear: a love triangle, a mysteriously reappearing parent, the list goes […]
Crivens! The Start of One of the Best Discworld Subseries
A note: this review, or any review I write of a Terry Pratchett book, will be biased. That’s because Terry Pratchett is my favorite writer of all time. This note is especially true for my favorite subseries of the Discworld books, which is a tie between Tiffany Aching and the Watch books. I share a deep kinship with Tiffany Aching, you see. She is so much like me when I was a child, and plenty like me now, too. A bit in love with words […]
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