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Forbidden romance – as old as the hills, right?  As timeless as the human condition indeed.  And in Ann Brashares‘ forthcoming The Here and the Now, reimagined in a mesmerizing, thrilling way. 17 year old Prenna James’ life is controlled by a strict set of rules, a community whose leaders know all about her movements and activities, and a deeply unsettling fear of exposure.  While she and the other community members partake in average, everyday American life in their Upstate New York town, they are nonetheless separate and secretive, limiting the ways in which they interact with “the natives.”  At first one assumes Prenna isRead More →

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18 years after a seemingly harmless virus was introduced at a theme park, all that remains of the United States east of the Mississippi River is a desolate, abandoned wasteland know as The Feral Zone.  No one knows what happened to anyone who was unlucky enough to have either been infected by the Ferae virus or left behind in the mass exodus West since a great wall separates The West from the Feral Zone, although rumors do circulate about exiled criminals, hideous man-beasts, and other nightmarish creatures. 17 year old Lane, who has lived her entire life in the West, is mildly curious about what’sRead More →

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More questions than answers. At the end of the book, that’s what I’m left with.  Who are SYLO? What is The Ruby?  What are those strange flying ships? Why is Pemberwick Island under quarantine? Who are all the people suddenly on the island?  What do Tucker’s parents know that they aren’t telling him?  What happened on the mainland?  Is there anyone Tucker can trust? Every single time you think you’ve figured something out, another mystery appears, confounding, frustrating, and driving you on in the vain hope that you can have at least one answer before the end.  But it is not to be.  Both theRead More →

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Early on in James Dashner‘s newest The Eye of the Minds, I jotted down: “Matrix“;  then a little later, “The Maze Runner,” and finally “The Truman Show.”  Dashner combines these and more pop culture influences in an imaginative, if not a wholly original, way to create a world within a world full of shadows, illusions, and shifting realities. VirtNet is an all-immersive virtual reality game.  After physically connecting to the interface, a player climbs into a “coffin,” the gateway into the VirtNet that induces a sleeplike state that keeps the player in suspended animation while inside the game.  Everything about Virtnet is programmed to beRead More →

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“A long time ago in  galaxy far, far away… there was a boy named Roman Novachez … who was destined to attend Pilot Academy Middle School and become the GREATEST Star pilot in the GALAXY. Until everything went TOTALLY and COMPLETELY WRONG…” (1)  And so begins a funny trip across the galaxy from Tatooine to Corsucant with a kid who feels  unprepared for the adventure that is middle school. Roman has been looking forward to following in his big brother’s footsteps and attending the galaxy’s renowned Pilot Academy Middle School where he can train to be a star fighter pilot.  But instead of being acceptedRead More →

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A sequel to Tuesdays in the Castle, Wednesdays in the Tower by Jessica Day George again features the escapades of Princess Cecelia, who lives at Castle Glower in the country of Sleyne.  In this installment, the Castle leads Celie to a Tower that houses a flame-orange egg, which the princess suspects might be that of a dragon or a Roc.  Under Celie’s care, the egg hatches to produce a snapping, snuffling, and snarling anomaly, a creature she is told doesn’t exist, so she must keep secret the hatchling’s existence.  Wild and fragile, frightening and loveable, the creature attaches itself to Celie who names the beast Rufus,Read More →

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I’m not sure what to say about Matt de la Pena’s The Living.  I’ve been wrestling with how to review this book for a couple of weeks now and I still haven’t really found a place to start.  The blurb on the back of the ARC says “genre-bending” and I think that’s the best I can come up with too; that’s not because I wasn’t engaged by the story, didn’t care about the characters, and wasn’t thinking about Shy and his unbelievable 8 days long after I closed the back cover, it’s just that The Living is . . . different. Shy’s taken a jobRead More →

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In a barren and dusty world, 17 year old Banyan is a tree builder.  Using metal, twinkle lights and other junk, he creates forests like there used to be more than a century ago, before The Darkness, before the locust plagues.  Barely surviving, Banyan travels from town to town working for rich people who want to recapture something of a world that no longer exists.  Before he disappeared, Banyan’s father was a master tree builder and he passed on an art with scrap that makes Banyan’s forests really something to see. Working for some “rich freaks”, Banyan unexpectedly meets a strange woman with a remarkable tattooRead More →

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Creative narration, as it colors perspective, can add to a book’s appeal.  Just as Death narrates Markus Zuzak’s The Book Thief, which offers a perspective on the Jewish holocaust, and God narrates Alan Lightman’s Mr. g, a hypothesis about the universe’s creation, the ghost of Jacob Grimm narrates Tom McNeal’s new book, Far Far Away. Although the story doesn’t begin “once upon a time” or “in a land far, far away,” McNeal’s recent release is a fairy tale. Set in the parochial village, Never Better, Far Far Away features heroes and heroines, villains and ogres, horrors and cruelties, as well as lessons for and truthsRead More →