Books and Sensibility

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Book Reviews

The Art of Secrets by James Klise

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  • Release Date: April 22nd 2014
  • Genre: Contemporary / Mystery
  • Pages: 272 
  • Publisher: Algonquin For Young Readers

I first heard about The Art of Secrets in January and was instantly intrigued. I really like what Algonquin For Young Readers is doing in terms of diversity and narratives in YA . I’ve also been into art books and non-traditional narratives so this was a perfect fit!

A fire, a painting and secrets are the fuel for The Art of Secrets. The novel opens with a news clipping from The Chicago Tribune about Saba Kahn and her family coming home to find their apartment burned to the ground by an arsonist. The family is quickly showered with generosity from the parents at Saba’s exclusive private school, there is even a charity auction set up. But when a piece of art at the auction is discovered to be worth half a million dollars it is stolen and now everyone is a suspect….

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Charm & Strange by Stephanie Kuehn

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  • Release Date: June 11, 2013
  • Pages: 216
  • Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin

 

I honestly have no idea how to begin reviewing a book like Charm & Strange. The entire story is told through the often fuzzy lens of an unreliable narrator, so you never really know what is going on. However by the time I got to the end I was  impressed with this debut novel from Stephanie Kuehn. Charm & Strange has to be the most unique YA I’ve read in a long time, it challenges so many of the ideas of what a YA novel can be.…

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Audiobook Review : Lexicon by Max Barry

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  • Release Date: June 18th 2013
  • Publisher: Penguin
  • Genre: Thriller
  • Length: 12 hours 36 minutes 

At an exclusive training school at an undisclosed location outside Washington, D.C., students are taught to control minds, to wield words as weapons. The very best graduate as “poets” and enter a nameless organization of unknown purpose. Recruited off the street, whip-smart Emily Ruff quickly learns the one key rule: never allow another person to truly know you. Emily becomes the school’s most talented prodigy, until she makes [a] catastrophic mistake 


…

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This Star Won’t Go Out by Esther Earl with Lori and Wayne Earl

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  • Release Date: January 28th 2014
  • Genre: YA Nonfiction / Memoir
  • Pages: 428
  • Publisher: Dutton (Penguin)

Synopsis: In full color and illustrated with art and photographs, this is a collection of the journals, fiction, letters, and sketches of the late Esther Grace Earl, who passed away in 2010 at the age of 16. Essays by family and friends help to tell Esther’s story along with an introduction by award-winning author John Green who dedicated his #1 bestselling novel The Fault in Our Stars to her.

This book debuted around the time I finished Fault in Our Stars (I know… super late to the party) but I had no intention of reading it. Then  I saw it on the shelf at the library and decided why not? I had seen some of Esther’s videos on YouTube, visited her family’s foundation website when she first passed, and I thought I knew most of  Esther Earl’s story. 



Well, that turned out to be completely wrong.…

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Days of David Levithan: Lover’s Dictionary and Realm of Possibility

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Between 2013-2014 I attempt to read a large selection of David Levithan novels.
 See the full list here

We are kind of skipping around in publication order because I think these two Levithan novels have a lot in common as they are both love stories written in nontraditional prose.

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Book Review : Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer

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  • Release Date : 2006
  • Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • Pages : 337
  • Genre : Science Fiction/Survivalist/Contemporary

I picked this book up for my book club 
not knowing anything about it. I was interested in it because it was
discussed as being Dystopian and I hadn’t read a Dystopian in a while.  However, I found this less Dystopic and more of a small-scale survivalist story. This isn’t the story about how a teen is going to save the end of the world.
. . But how she is going to survive it.
Life As We Knew It will have you thinking twice about what it means to survive and the importance of family. A great read if you are looking a more realistic ‘end of the world’ YA novel.

Life As We knew It
is the gripping tale of a family’s survival in the midst of a global disaster. Told through the diary of 16-year-old 
Miranda, each day presents the challenges that come with daily survival for  her brothers and Mom after a surprise astrological
event changes the world as they knew it.

…

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