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Leander Watts’ novel, Beautiful City of the Dead, reminds me of those amazing albums where great bands use their songs to tell a complex, multi-dimensional story.  Each classic song stands alone, brilliant and enchanting, but when interwoven with the others on the album, makes something deeper, wider and more powerful as the listener lets him/her-self be enveloped in the band’s vision. Of course this interpretation isn’t highly original, since on the surface the story is about a teenage “ghost metal” band – four friends who come together through their music and find meaning and power in their awkward teenage years.  But the way Watts weaves a supernatural, other-wordly elements into theRead More →

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Action, adventure, mythology and high-tech crime are packed into Stephen Cole’s Thieves Like Us.  The first book in an explosive series, Thieves Like Us, introduces us to a crew of brilliant teens whose skill and ambition are harnessed by a criminal mastermind, Coldheart, making them an almost unstoppable band of high-end thieves.  First we meet Jonah Wish, an ultra-talented computer programmer as he’s serving the second month of a year-long incarceration for illegal computer hacking and multi-million dollar theft.  Jonah’s as surprised as the reader when a commotion breaks out in the jail and he’s spirited away by some well-trained, technologically savvy teens to aRead More →

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15-year old Zeeta’s life with her free-spirited mother, Layla, is anything but normal. Every year Layla picks another country she wants to live in  – this summer they’re in Ecuador, while Zeeta longs for a “normal” life in the American suburbs. Zeeta makes friends with vendors at the town market and begs them to think of upstanding, “normal” men to set up with Layla. There, Zeeta meets Wendell who was born nearby, but adopted by an American family. His one wish is to find his birth parents, and Zeeta agrees to help him. Their quest takes them to an idealized indigenous village, through jungles, crystalRead More →

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Prophecy of the Sisters by Michelle Zink will release from Little, Brown in August 2009.  In it, readers are taken to late 19th-century Upstate New York where we meet wealthy heiress Lia, whose father has just died under mysterious circumstances.  16 year old Lia, along with her twin sister Alice and younger brother Henry, are left under the guardianship of their spinster Aunt in their family mansion.  Soon after her father’s death, Lia’s life takes a sharp turn for the worse as she discovers that she is caught up in a prophecy that has spanned generations of her family, and it may now be theRead More →

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When Thomas wakes up in a dark lift, headed upwards to who knows where, all he can remember is his first name. He has no idea where he came from, who he is, or how he got where he is. When the door above him opens, he discovers he’s “welcomed” by other teen boys, in a large expanse, called The Glade, surrounded by tall stone walls.  The Gladers also have no memories of their lives before – they only know they’ve been virtual prisoners in the maze for about 2 years.  They know that every morning, the large stone doors open and runners head out into the mazeRead More →

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In: Middle Grade Reviews, Romance (YA), Supernatural & Horror, Supernatural & Horror (YA), Young Adult Book Reviews
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Shiver is the perfect title for Maggie Stiefvater’s romance due out from Scholastic in August 2009.  In the literal sense, of course, because it’s the cold that forces Sam into wolf form and pulls him away from his one true love, Grace. But in the figurative sense as well because both Sam & Grace, and readers, will shiver throughout this book with delight, anticipation, yearning, fear and delicious sexual tension.   Grace is a 17 year old girl who yearns for something other than her middle class existence – escape; passion; an uninhibited life – something embodied in the wolves she watches every winter in the woods behindRead More →

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Chris Woodingcontinues his exploration of deep, dark, scary otherworlds in his latest book for young adults, Malice, due from Scholastic in October 2009. Like all good urban legends, it’s the thrill of the unknown that draws kids in: gather some odds & ends, chant a phrase 6 times, and then wait to see if Tall Jake comes for you.  And then there’s a creepy, hard-to-find comic called Malice that details erratically horrifying snipets of kids trapped in a dangerous underworld, most of whom meet gruesome ends. When one of their friends goes missing and then appears to die in the pages of Malice, Seth andRead More →

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“I will have to travel from district to district, to stand before cheering crowds who secretly loathe me, to look into the faces of the families who children I have killed…” By page four of Catching Fire I am swept away with emotion.   When I left the heroine of The Hunger Games, Katniss, I thought I could easily hold it together until she returned in its sequel.  How wrong I was.  When I was able to read an advanced copy, I found myself pinned to the couch, taking only time to eat one meal…forcing myself to stop at 1am with 40 pages to go.  Why? Read More →

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In screenwriter Greg Taylor’s first novel, Killer Pizza, 14 year old Toby just landed a great job for a guy who dreams of being a celebrity chef – in the kitchen of a cool new franchise, Killer Pizza.  Along with his teen co-workers, Strobe and Annabel, Toby soon discovers the pizza shop is actually a front for a nationwide network of monster hunters – wait?! Monster Hunters? Yep, monsters!  They quickly accept the reality that fearsome monsters exist in their midst, and undergo weeks of combat, technical, and weapons training in order to discover and defeat them. The main ingredient in this recipe is action, action, and more action.  It’s like aRead More →