We're an Open Book
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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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- 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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- Release Date: September 2009
- Pages: 479
- Genre: Dystopian/Science Fiction
- Publisher: Candlewick (US)
In his debut YA series, Patrick Ness, takes us to Prentisstown; an isolated settlement where the thoughts of men, boys and animals( known as the Noise) are constantly broadcast for everyone to hear. Women don’t give off the Noise, but that’s no matter because there are no more women. They were all killed by the virus that created the Noise. Or so 12-year-old Todd Hewitt, the youngest boy in Prentisstown, has been lead to believe. Weeks away from turning thirteen and becoming a man, Todd has to run for his life and discovers nothing is at all what he knew.
I picked up and put down this book a couple of times, I really had a to adjust to the setup. Right from the first page Todd’s dog Manchee is talking to him which was just weird, but I kept coming back because I had heard amazing things about this novel. Then it turned out the meat of this book falls into my least favorite category of YA fiction, the “kids in the woods” variety. I just can’t get into the survivalist fiction, these stories never do it for me. But the world and questions Ness built into the story kept me so captivated that I was racing to the the end.
Also, that cliffhanger.
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I did it! I’m on a mission to read the most hyped YA books and I finally made it to TFiOS. I’m not going to review this in the traditional sense, but here are my impressions and thoughts on one of the most buzzed books of the last 2 years.
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- Release Date: December 2, 2010
- Publisher: Dutton (Penguin)
- Pages: 372
- Genre: Contemporary
This book has been on my to-read list since I saw this video where John Green practically gushed about it. I finally bought it in 2012 and its one of those books that sat on my shelf for so long I forgot about. I ended up picking this out of the TBR book jarand I figured it was about time, especially since book three in this series comes out later this year.
The titular Anna is the daughter of a Nicholas Sparks expy who decides that for Anna’s senior year she is going to The School of America in Paris, an American boarding school right in the city of love. There she joins up with a close knit group of friends and Étienne St. Clair, the American boy with a French name and English accent. Yes, you read that right.
Now, I’ve read a lot of contemporary YAs and Anna and The French Kiss hits all the usual marks:
Girl who is pretty, but doesn’t see it ? Check
Nice, hot guy, everyone likes ? Check
Mean girl ? Check
References to literature and philosophical concepts that call back to the plot ? Check
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In 2011 we were newbie book bloggers not sure where to start in the new world of YA fiction. Soon we got swept up into four debut YA series that have followed us on our blogging journey. As Books and Sensibility grew these series continued to keep us guessing at how it was going to end.
Reviewing third books is hard, so we are going to review these final books as they relate to the series as a whole and give a final verdict on if we think the series is worth getting the whole box set or stopping book 1. And of course, these will be SPOILER FREE REVIEWS.
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