Books and Sensibility

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YA Dystopian

Audiobook Review : Cress By Marrisa Meyer

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  • Release Date: February 4th, 2014
  • Genre: Sci-Fi/Adventure
  • Audiobook length: 15 hours 40 minutes
  • Publisher: Macmillan

Cress is the third book in Marrisa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles Series. In this book, we get introduced to Cress who briefly appears at the end of Cinder. Cress is a highly imaginative teenage girl who has spent most of her life in isolation aboard a satellite. When the chance comes for her to embark on a real adventure with the crew from the previous novels; her will, smarts and survival skills are put to the test….

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Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith

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So, by the time I finished Grasshopper Jungle I was like:

Which I believe is the only correct response to this book. How do I know this? Because when I Google Image Searched for this meme I found it on Writer For Wrongs review of the same book.It also shows up in pretty much every review of this book.

 


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The Summer Prince by Alaya Dawn Johnson

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  • Release Date: March 1, 2013
  • Pages: 289
  • Genre: Science Fiction
  • Publisher: Arthur A. Levine (Scholastic)

June Costa is the best artist in Palmares Três, the lush futuristic pyramid city built a midst a post post-apocalyptic South America. June’s art has always been about expressing herself and the things she loves, but her street art takes on new heights when she teams up with Enki, the 17-year-old reigning summer king of Palarmes Três who, as dictated by tradition, will be sacrificed at the end of the year. 

The Summer Prince is a fairly complex novel, there is just so much going on in this world and society I don’t even know where to begin. The world building can be a bit tough to get into, especially for someone like me coming from a Western world. Johnson’s  world  is so far from anything analogous to American society. The driving force of this novel is the tradition of the summer king; Palmares Três matriarchal society elects one boy to serve as the summer king alongside the Queen and he is sacrificed at the end of the year. The reasoning behind this tradition is a little fuzzy in the book, but this is based on some ancient South American traditions.

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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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Book Review: The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

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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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This is How The World Ends: 2013 Book Series Enders

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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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