Reboot

“She was cyborg, and she would never go to the ball.” Laugh if you want. I admit to a chuckle upon reading that sentence early on in Cinder, Marissa Meyer’s first novel, a YA SF reboot (sorry, couldn’t resist) of the familiar fairy tale. It’s an inventive adventure, but most of the humor is inadvertent. Meyers [...]

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Paranormal activity

Paranormal is the new normal, especially in teen fiction. Ask teens if they’ve read any good books lately, and nine times out of 10, they’ll name a fantasy. Make that 10 out of 10. For this year’s recent Teen Read Week, 9,000 teens across the country voted at their local libraries for the 2011 Teens’ Top Ten, http://tinyurl.com/3hwnpy Steampunk, dystopia, [...]

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Dead of the class

Are your memories of high school heavenly, or are they hellish? Perhaps a bit of both, which is why high school often feels like limbo, the necessary way station before whatever happens next. The students in Dead Rules, Randy Russell’s killer YA debut, can relate. Their lives interrupted by sudden death, these teens find themselves at a [...]

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White glove wars

I picked up Katie Crouch’s YA novel The Magnolia League thinking it sounded something like last year’s Saving Cee Cee Honeycutt by Beth Hoffman. Forget that. Despite a similarity in plot — motherless girls whisked away to genteel Savannah — Hoffman’s coming-of-age tale is sweetly conventional. Not so with Crouch’s spicy story, in which 16-year-old [...]

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Gothic girls

The three Bronte sisters wrote only a handful of books between them, but their influence is legion. Add in their peculiar lives in a Yorkshire parsonage, and you have the stuff of novels. Imagine moldering mansions, lonely children, crazy kin, starcrossed lovers, brooding heroes, poverty-stricken heroines, family secrets, a legacy of lies. The Brontes have been there, done that. There even [...]

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Off the road

Unlike Carl Hiaasen, who uses Day-Glo colors in his almost-black comedies of Florida, John Brandon goes for the dark side of the palette in his second novel, Citrus County. This disquieting tale of adolescent crimes of the heart and worse plays out in a off-the-road, middle-of-nowhere world of muddy browns and greens, mosquitoes, mushrooms and mildew.  This is [...]

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Before Sex and the City

Even back when she is a 17-year-old senior at a Connecticut high school circa 1980, Carrie Bradshaw is a budding fashionista, hoping clothes will help define her. “But who am I?” she asks herself as she packs for her college interview at Brown: a beaded ’50s sweater, a plaid skirt, a wide belt, and a [...]

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It’s About Time

It was a dark and stormy night. Really. The rain and the wind woke me up Thursday night, and I knew what I wanted to write about as my first post on my new blog. Many of you know that Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton opened his 1830 novel Paul Clifford with the stirring phrase ”It was [...]

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