• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Home
  • About
  • Contact Us
  • Blogs We Heart
  • Nav Social Menu

    • Bloglovin
    • Email
    • Pinterest
    • Twitter

Books and Sensibility

We're an Open Book

  • Reviews
    • Young Adult Fiction
    • Young Adult Nonfiction
    • Adult Fiction
    • Adult Nonfiction
  • Features
  • Diverse Reads
    • Asian Stories
    • Black Stories
    • Latinx Stories
    • LGBTQIA Stories
  • Year End Stats

YA

The Rose Society by Marie Lu

March 5, 2017      Leave a Comment

  • Release Date: October 13th 2015
  • Audiobook Hours: 11 hours 7 minutes
  • Genre: Historical Fantasy
  • Publisher: G.P. Putnam’s Son (Penguin)

Child sex trafficking, slave camps, genocide and a one sided love triangle ?

Yep, I must be reading a fantasy YA novel !

We’re back in Marie Lu’s vaguely Italian 12th century where the scarred children who survived a blood fever are known as malfettos and some malfettos known young elites have developed special powers. After the events of the last book all malfettos have been banned  from the city and forced into refugee camps for the safety of the city (stop me if you’ve heard this one). There is a lot going on in this book but most we follow along while our heroine Adelina Amouteru goes off to find other young elites outside the city.

The Rose Society has to be one of the most subversive and creative YA books I’ve ever read. I liked the first book in this series but this second book has really hooked me. Marie Lu is breaking a lot of the typical YA fiction rules and I am here for it.

…

Read this Post

Heartless by Marissa Meyer

December 22, 2016      Leave a Comment

  • Release Date: 11/08/16
  • Audiobook Length :  14 Hours 34 Minutes
  • Genre: Fairytale
  • Publisher:Macmillan Audio / Feiwel & Friends

Katherine Pinkerton knows better than dream of owning her own bakery baker, she knows her destiny lies in becoming the queen of a wacky, quirky, surreal little Kingdom of Hearts. On the night she is to be betrothed she sets eyes on the handsome court joker, who has more than cards up his sleeves.

Unlike the Lunar Chronicles where the fairytale aspects are subtext and set in a modern world, Heartless is an overt-played-straight prequel to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Meyer digs into the Kingdom of Hearts and all its little oddities. It’s a place where animals talk, playing cards are courtier and if one bring something back from a dream. . . well then so be it. 

What we don’t really get to dig into in this novel is the plot. Plot points in the novel are hung like painting with no nails, there are a lot of them, you want to see them. . . but they have a tendency to fall off. One of the many plot in this book is about a forbidden romance that never really started for me. There is also a beta romance, a monster, intrigue,  war and magic. . . but we never get fully invested in any of it.

…

Read this Post

The Sun is Also A Star by Nicola Yoon

December 6, 2016      Leave a Comment

  • Release Date: November 1, 2016
  • Pages: 384
  • Genre: Contemporary
  • Publisher: Crown (Random House)

Tasha Kingston’s family is 24 hours away from being deported to Jamaica after her father drunkenly tells a police officer they’ve been in the country for over a decade on expired travel visas. Tasha isn’t ready to leave America, she has a fake social security number and was prepared to go to college and become a data scientist. She resolves to spend her last day doing everything she can to find a way to delay the deportation. What she doesn’t plan on is meeting Daniel Bae, the idealistic aspiring poet  who believes their meeting was an act of faith. Tasha is pragmatic and doesn’t believe in fate or soul mates but as they spend the day together Daniel starts to change her mind and get inside her heart. But what does any of it mean when in 24 hours she won’t be allowed back in the United States ?

Honestly, I was kind of lukewarm on the romance, I just have a hard time investing in romances in such a condensed timeline. To me the most interesting thing about this book is how the story is structured. Not only do we get Daniel and Tasha’s POVs we also get these mini sections called “brief histories” that give you a minor characters past and future or give you a history on a certain subject. I liked the way these sections broadened the 24 hour timeline a little bit.

…

Read this Post

The Wrath And The Dawn by Renee Adieh

November 4, 2016      Leave a Comment


May 12th 2015 | Pages: 388  | Genre: Historical/Fantasy | Publisher : Penguin Random house

I’m going to go ahead and reuse a .gif from my Red Queen Review

I mean we have the cold boy king Khalid, his protective cousin Jalal, the boyfriend Tariq  and then his best friend Rahim.

Let me back up here. This YA novel is an adaption of  the Arabian story of Scheherazade, a woman who tells the king a captivating story  for 1001 nights to keep him from killing her and they eventually fall in love. You know kind of a Netflix and chill situation.

…

Read this Post

Spontaneous by Aaron Starmer

September 11, 2016      Leave a Comment

  • Release Date: August 23, 2016
  • Pages:368
  • Genre: Contemporary-ish
  • Publisher: Dutton Books for Young Readers (Penguin)

This book probably had the easiest elevator pitch ever; students at a New Jersey high school start spontaneously combusting. The entire town, and eventually the entire world starts looking for answers including senior class member Mara Carlyle, the snarky, foul-mouthed, irreverent narrator who takes us through this story.

I have read a lot of weird YA. I’m talking giant man-eating grasshopper YAand girls-drink-bat-and-sees-future-anti-feminist hellscape weird. But this book takes the Kafkaesque cake.

I was so morbidly curious about this book after hearing about it a BEA because I wanted to see how they handled the combustion. Do the students go poof gone or it is something more gruesome? Well, let me put it this way, when it first happens people assume it was a suicide bomb. So, it mentions blood but it never gets too gross. Starmer focuses more on how students react to what is…leftover.

…

Read this Post

Wink Poppy Midnight by April Genevieve Tucholke

August 12, 2016      Leave a Comment

Um… So….This Book….Yeah, I think it’s time to borrow this meme from my Grasshopper Jungle review:

I got this audiobook from my library because I got it confused with some other book and thought it was about Victorian-era spies. But, since the audio was only 5 hours I figured I could knock it out in a week.

…

Read this Post

  • « Go to Previous Page
  • Go to page 1
  • Go to page 2
  • Go to page 3
  • Go to page 4
  • Go to page 5
  • Go to Next Page »

Primary Sidebar

Hello !

Welcome! Here you’ll find book reviews, features and a glimpse into the bookish life of two sisters because here–we’re an open book !

Subscribe

We Review Romance

Reviews by Rating

  • ★
  • ★★
  • ★★★
  • ★★★★
  • ★★★★★

Archives

Grab Our Button

Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org

Copyright © 2022 · Wordpress Theme by Hello Yay!