Young Adult Fiction

Happily Ever Afters by Elise Bryant

May 23, 2021 Leave a Comment

10 Hours 19 Mins | Harper Audio | Contemporary YA | 1/05/2021

16-year-old Tessa Johnson loves to write romance. When her family relocates to Long Beach she gets to attend a writing conservatory. But during her first writing class, all her story ideas vanish. She decides the best course of action to jumpstart her romance writing mojo is by falling in love IRL.

Tessa sets her eyes on Nico, the brooding dark-haired, rich boy who looks like he walked out of one of her stories while being completely oblivious to Sam, the goofy boy next door who drives her to school everyday.

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These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong

April 15, 2021 Leave a Comment

14 Hours 4 Mins | Margaret K. McElderry | Historical/Sci-Fi/Horror | 1/26/2021

These Violent Delights is a Historical (sci-fi ?. .horror ?) YA set in the dangerous and dazzling city of Shanghai during the roaring 20s Shanghai. The novel is an homage (read: Not a retelling. Not even a little bit) to Romeo and Juliet and follows rival gang heirs Juliette the cutthroat fierce heir to the Scarlett Gang and Roma the stalworth Russian heir to the White Flowers, as they hunt down the source of a maddening disease sweeping the city

Going in I didn’t know much about Shanghai’s history as an international (read colonized) port. It’s the perfect setting for this dark and mysterious mystery the main characters find themselves in. I’m curious to read more book set during this time period.

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Bookish and The Beast by Ashley Poston

April 10, 2021 2 Comments

7 hours 21 minutes | Quirk Books | Contemporary YA | 8/4/2020

This was such a clever retelling of Beauty in the Beast.

Bookish high school senior Rosie Thorne inherited her love of the Starfield franchise from her mother. Little does she know Vance Reigns–the bad-boy star of the Starfield movie– has been banished to her backwoods North Carolina town until his 18th birthday.

When Rosie accidentally ruins a book in the library she agrees to catalog the house’s massive science fiction library. Vance brings the expected grumpy broodiness from the Beast archetype but he’s also just kind of full of regret -much like the Beast in the Disney movie.

This is is the third book in the Once Upon A Con series but each book takes place a year apart so, while there are some cameos and references, I think it can be read as a standalone.

I did a lot of this on audio. Narrator Caitlin Kelly is one of my favorites and the main reason I picked this up. She has such a great YA voice and range of characters. This was my first time hearing Curry Whitmire–he does a great British teenager even though I think he’s American. However, I found it so odd that they pronounced Vance Reigns’ last name with a hard “G”. I have never heard of this pronunciation.

Skyhunter by Marie Lu

December 30, 2020 Leave a Comment

11 hours 58 minutes| Macmillan Audio| Dystopian| Release Date: 9/29/2020

Skyhunter feels like a follow-up to Legend (which is almost a decade old at this point). It has all of the things that made Legend such an enticing read; betrayal, biological warfare, experimentation, and coats. Lu loves to write characters in sweeping coats…though there are noticeable fewer epaulets in this one.

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Everything I Thought I Knew by Shannon Takaoka

December 27, 2020 Leave a Comment

320 pages | Candlewick Press| Contemporary | Release Date: 10/13/2020

On the blog, Kat and I sometimes refer to slice-of-life books that don’t make it into the hype rotation as “the quietest YA to ever quiet” and that’s how I feel about Everything I Thought I Knew. It’s the low-stakes story of Chloe, whose senior year is thrown off balance when she discovers she needs a heart transplant. Soon someone else’s tragedy becomes her miracle and after the transplant, Chole begins to see flashes of her donor’s life and begins a journey to give them closure.

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You Should See Me In A Crown by Leah Johnson

December 19, 2020 Leave a Comment

336 pages | Scholastic Press| Contemporary | 06/2/2020

17-year-old Liz Lighty is an unconventional candidate for Campbell County, Indiana’s prom queen–but she needs the scholarship money that comes with the crown if she wants to attend her dream college next fall. Lucky for Liz, she has a dream team of friends ready to help her rock the competition.

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