An advanced copy of this book was received from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review. I’m a sucker for a good premise and a good cover. This book has both. It takes place over the course of an hour, on the first day of the last semester of a school year. Just after the principal finishes her speech, people try to leave the auditorium but find the doors locked. Almost the entire student body is trapped. That’s when the shooting starts. Gripping, […]
I think the book should have been about Ben or Radar instead
Quentin “Q” Jacobsen is a fairly average, if overly anxious teenager. He has lived next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman for most of his life, and been in love with her for as long as he can remember. Margo is one of the most popular girls in school, has a nearly legendary reputation. Of course, she also barely seems to know that Quentin or his friends Ben and Radar exist, but that doesn’t stop Quentin from dreaming of her from afar. So when Margo climbs […]
Shut up, Juliette
Shatter Me is a silly, overblown book that reads like the literary journal the kids in your 1990’s middle school published out of the public library and distributed in front of a local Hot Topic. I’m not going into a lot of plot detail here, because if you’ve read any dystopian YA novel in the past five years, you’ve read this one. I’m also going to be mildly spoiling the book, so, you know, beware. Juliette has been locked up in a solitary psych ward […]
More Like Suburban Fantasy than Urban Fantasy
A joint-review of Tithe and Ironside by Holly Black: I asked my friend for some recommendations of books, and found these two thrust into my hands. Apparently there is actually another book that comes in between them in the series (Valiant), but that it is about other characters whereas Ironside is more like a direct sequel to Tithe. But anyways, that’s a bit of a side note. I will start this off by saying that as a kid growing up, I love love LOVED anything […]
A YA novel about death and first love
Sometimes, my YA reads are self-selected, and other times, students encourage me to read books that will help me enter conversations with them. Gayle Forman’s If I Stay falls into the latter category. I didn’t know if I would like the book or not, and I certainly did not plan to see the movie without reading the book first. One of my students chose this for her book report last fall and recommended it to me. So I decided it was high time I pick […]
To sleep, perchance to dream
Night Beach (4.5 stars) is about a one very simple thing. A girl surfer-slash-artist has a crush on a boy surfer who sees her — sometimes. But it’s also about a few other very complicated, possibly unreal things, which make this book overall very hard to define. Abbie likes Kane; this much is clear. In fact, she’s obsessed with him, in that painfully teenage way that grovels for the tiniest morsel of acknowledgement and acceptance. This kid, Kane, is a few years older, stays in […]
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