Young Adult Fiction

Audiobook Review: Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard

February 22, 2016 Leave a Comment

So, you know how people think most fantasy/dystopian YA is just a thinly veiled allegory for high school ? Well the Red Queen on it’s surface is pretty much that.

We’ve got Mare Barrow another brunette YA heroine who hates her hair and wishes she was more like her sister Gisa who is pretty, talented and basically put up on a pedestal.

In Mare’s world what separates the oppressed Reds from the elite Silvers. . . is their blood. The Silver’s blood silver blood gives them abilities like controlling elements, strength and mind control.

Mare soon discovers that even though she is Red, she has abilities like a Silver. A threat to the Silver way of life, The Silvers whisk her away to live among them until they can figure out what she is.

…

Read this Post

Audiobook Review: An Ember in The Ashes by Sabaa Tahir

February 17, 2016 Leave a Comment

The popularity of this book seemed to come out of nowhere. I just remember seeing it on an endcap one day in Barnes and Nobles and the next things I knew is was blowing up.

Ember in the Ashes takes place in The Empire, a vaguely middle ages fictional land with some vaguely Arabic influences. Elias (who by the way is 20 years old….which feels oddly old for YA) is a student at Blackcliff, a ruthless academy that trains Masks, the Empire’s deadliest soldiers. Laia is a Scholar, the conquered class, who goes undercover as a slave at Blackcliff for the Resistance to help her brother.

I don’t really have much to say about this book, which is weird since the audiobook is over 15 hours long. It wasn’t bad, it just didn’t click with me. I finished this book and I wasn’t amped for the next one. Thinking about the only other YA fantasies I’ve read; Daughter of Smoke and Bone and The Young Elites, I think what this book is missing is characters with skin in the game. Elias and Laia are just kind of going with the flow all the time.

…

Read this Post

The Cost of All Things by Maggie Lehrman

January 28, 2016 Leave a Comment

Release Date: May 12, 2015

Pages: 407

Genre: Magical Realism/ Contemporary

Publisher: Balzer + Bray (Harper Collins)

The Cost Of All Things exists in a world pretty much like our own except spells are real and can be created by women known as hekamists. When a group of high school students in Cape Code start buying spells to cope with their insecurities…it doesn’t go well. I went into this book excited because it had blurbs from so many award winning YA authors and the premise sounded so fascinating. But overall this book didn’t work for me.

The magic system never felt fully developed and it’s existence within the world didn’t feel real . One thing that bothered me is that being a hekamist is illegal, but there doesn’t seem to be any illegality with buying a spell–which feels like the opposite of what should be happen.There were also very little stakes, the book sets up the death of one character , Win, as being a main plot point but he has a POV, so it takes some of the mystery out. I think what kept me reading was that I thought there would be a twist ending but there really wasn’t.

…

Read this Post

After by Anna Todd

December 17, 2015 Leave a Comment

Release Date:October 1, 2014

Genre:Contemporary Romance / New Adult

Pages:592

Publisher:Gallery Books (Simon and Schuster)

I’ve been known to do a bit of hate reading of NA, but since starting the romance blog(shameless self promotion is shameless) I’ve rounded a corner and have learned to understand and appreciate some of the genre’s tropes. I’m prepared to visit a generically named-idyllic-college with its brooding alpha rich boy-manwhore heroes and ingenue virgin heroines. But After seemed to take those tropes to a whole new level….It honestly felt like it tried to be bad on purpose. This book was just so bizarre.

As many of you know this was originally One Direction fanfiction (er, real person fic ? bandfic ?) that got crazy popular on Wattpad. I actually started this on Wattpad after hearing about Todd getting a 3 book deal. I didn’t think it’d be my speed, but I figured it would be unrealistic contemporary crack fun. It seemed like there had to be some kind of hook that garnered this story 6 million views and pushed this book to well over 500 pages.

Needless to say, I was wrong.

…

Read this Post

City of Fallen Angels (The Mortal Instruments #4)

December 7, 2015 Leave a Comment

I have been meaning to get to this book for years. YEARS. The Mortal Instrument series has the honor of being one of the first series we reviewed and looking back on some of the older reviews I feel like we didn’t give it a fair shake. I mean people love this series and The Powers That Be have so much faith in the story it’s getting a TV show after the movie bombed.With all that in mind I decided to go into this book with positive intentions. Did it work ? Ehhhhhhhh….nope.

…

Read this Post

Fairest Review: In Gifs!

November 2, 2015 Leave a Comment

So…I finally listened to Fairest, the story of the Lunar Chronicles’ villain, Queen Levana. I expected some Once Upon A Time -never-love-anything-it-will-not-end-well level flashbacks and that’s basically what I got….

Read this Post