A Debut with a Flair for the Grotesque

Although I write about YA books almost exclusively in this column, I do, extremely occasionally—the last time was in 2011, for David Levithan’s The Lover’s Dictionary—branch out. As I’m a huge sucker for stories about boarding schools for prodigies—geniuses, criminals, musicians, you name it—I’m making one of my rare exceptions for M. M. Vaughan’s middle-grade debut.

According to The Ability, 12-year-olds have a special gift: They can use 100% of their brain, which allows for accelerated learning and, in some very special cases, abilities like telekinesis and telepathy. During World War ...

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YA Paranormal, Angst Free

When Isobel Brannick’s mother gives her her first solo assignment, Izzy can’t help feeling a bit insulted: After all, she’s a BRANNICK. As the youngest in a long line of monster hunters, she’s had training, training and more training, and she’s capable of dealing with stuff WAY MORE HARDCORE than a measly haunted high school. Sure, she recently almost got drained by a vampire, but there TOTALLY were extenuating circumstances! It wasn’t HER fault that he read her mind and distracted her by talking about the mysterious disappearance of her older sister! That would ...

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Young Emily Dickinson, Mystery Solver

I’m nobody! Who are you? / Are you nobody too?

Fifteen-year-old Emily is only somewhat embarrassed when a handsome young stranger finds her lying in a field of wildflowers trying to convince a bee to land on her nose. He quickly sets her at her ease, though, and while they never exchange names—they call each other Mr. and Miss Nobody—it’s quite clear from the first moment that they are kindred spirits, and she very much looks forward to seeing him again soon.

A few days later, he is found dead in a nearby pond.

So begins Michaela ...

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'The Eternity Cure's Vampire Apocalypse

Since delivering her human companions to the only known safe haven for humans, vampire Allison Sekemoto has been traveling solo, searching for her sire and the sadistic creature who is holding him captive. As it has the same strengths and weaknesses of its predecessor, Julie Kagawa’s The Eternity Cure—book two in her Blood of Eden series, after The Immortal Rules—isn’t likely to win over any detractors, but it will very definitely please fans of the original.

Things that work:

The cinematic action. Kagawa’s wicked flair for this is evident from the very first scene, in ...

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Ride a Magical Submarine to 'Emilie and the Hollow World'

Martha Wells’ Emilie and the Hollow World is so entertaining, so compelling, SO MUCH FUN that it made me do something that I haven’t done since the fourth grade: When my lunch break was over, I just kept on reading by super-stealthily hiding my book under the desk. Which would have been less obvious if I’d been sitting in my office rather than the library’s circulation desk. Happily, judging by all of the smirks I caught, my patrons apparently approve of the appearance of my (usually Inner) Bad Librarian.

And as this is totally a book that ...

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Strangelets' Mysterious Vortex

Sophie Page is almost relieved to be near death: Her body has been so ravaged by lymphoma that every move she makes causes her pain, and she’d rather that her family would be out in the world living than staying at her bedside, watching her slowly die. Just as she takes her final breath, though, time seems to stop, a swirling vortex appears at the foot of her bed...and engulfs her.

On the other side of the world, Declan Murphy has been cornered in a Galway alley by two huge Russian thugs. He attempts to return the box ...

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The Girl Behind the Paper Doll

For the past 10 years—ever since the man she now calls “Father” smuggled her out of the high-security science facility that created and imprisoned her—Ariane Tucker, formerly known only as GTX-F-107, has lived by the following rules:

1. Never trust anyone.

2. Remember they are always searching.

3. Don’t get involved.

4. Keep your head down.

5. Don’t fall in love.

Project Paper Doll was ultrasecret and ultraexpensive, and Ariane’s disappearance represented the loss of years of research and millions of dollars, so her father hid her in plain sight: right under GTX’s nose ...

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Make Room On Your Shelf for Another YA Dystopia

I’ve been dystopia-ed out for well over a year now. Can you blame me? Ever since the explosive popularity of The Hunger Games, every third book I pick up is set in a vision of our near future in which the world’s population has been disastrously affected by the cataclysmic version of a nightly news issue (climate change, bee extinction*, genetic engineering gone wrong) leading to some form of authoritarian government that strips away the civil liberties of the remaining populace and violently enforces new cultural constraints; in which the protagonist fights said new world order; and, if ...

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'Mojo' Gets Our Respect

At page two, I laughed out loud.

At page six, I vowed to go back and read everything that Tim Tharp has ever written.

At page eight, I was completely and irrevocably in love with Mojo, and more specifically, with the voice of its narrator, high school junior Dylan Jones. I didn’t fall in lurrrve with the boy himself—instead, I developed something far more rare: a sort of awe at what a fully realized character he is. I believed in him unreservedly from the very first page—through crazy situations and plot twists—and, even as I watched ...

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A Gothic Missing Thrills and Chills

On my new list of Top Five Things I Wouldn’t Want to Hear When Moving into a New Household:

“Your youth is to your advantage. You’re moldable and not at all like . . . some people.”

I was so excited to read Jane Nickerson’s Strands of Bronze and Gold. After all, it’s a reimagining of Bluebeard! Set in 1855, just a few years before the Civil War, in a centuries-old English abbey that the richer-than-rich, handsome, captivating Monsieur Bernard de Cressac moved to Mississippi 25 years ago stone by stone! Starring 17-year-old Sophia Petheram, a heroine who—as ...

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Calling the Circus Home

I never daydreamed about running off to join the circus. I’d like to say it was because I was too practical and even-keeled, but truth be told, it’s because I was too lazy. (Still am.) Even daydreaming about doing anything that could be termed “exercise”—the trapeze, the tightrope, shoveling elephant manure—was (is still) wholly unattractive to me. Reading about someone else doing it, though, is more than completely fine, so reading J. J. Howard’s debut That Time I Joined the Circus was an entirely enjoyable experience.

When Lexi Ryan’s father dies suddenly, she has ...

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'17 & Gone': An Elegy to All Who Are Lost

Going into Nova Ren Suma’s 17 & Gone, all I knew—beyond the basic premise, which sounded to me like Meg Cabot’s 1-800-Where-R-U series as imagined by Lisa McMann—was that it had been enjoying a decent of buzz. Buzz, in and of itself, doesn’t necessarily mean one thing or another: It can be born of genuine enthusiasm, but it can also be created by publicists. (For the former, see Grave Mercy; for the latter, the Theodore Boone series.)

The story begins with a missing person poster. Seventeen-year-old Lauren Woodman reads it, sees Abby Sinclair’s face, her ...

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'The Holders': Paranormal Fare from Promising Teen Imprint

Earlier this year, I wrote about Soho’s new Teen imprint and how excited it has me. And my excitement continues! I’ve read two of their three titles—so far they’re batting a thousand—and I’m very much looking forward to next month’s Strangelets. (Blurbed by Robin Wasserman, no less: Be still, my heart!)

Soho Teen isn’t the only new teen imprint that has me doing a happy dance, though: Last September, Angry Robot launched Strange Chemistry, which is dedicated to “modern young-adult science fiction, fantasy and everything in between.” Like Soho Teen, they’re ...

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'Being Henry David': A Search for Lost Identity at Walden Pond

Never in a zillion years would I have guessed that a novel that quoted heavily from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden would—could, even—be fast-paced. But, here I am, writing about Cal Armistead’s Being Henry David after reading the entire thing in a single sitting.

“The last thing I remember is now,” it begins. Which is a great hook, as well as being a completely accurate description of the narrator’s predicament: He opens his eyes, and he doesn’t know where he is, why he’s there, and most disturbing of all, who he is. Until he ...

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The Introspective Narrator from 'Under Shifting Glass'

When was the last time you read a book that reminded you of David Almond’s Skellig*? Pretty much never, right? Well, let me introduce you to Under Shifting Glass by Nicky Singer.

Jess Walton—no one calls her “Jessica” unless she’s in trouble—is about to go from only child to oldest sibling, from step-daughter to half-sister. She’s terrified, and not only because of her understandable-but-prosaic fears about how her family’s dynamics will change: She’s scared because, 19 weeks into her mother’s pregnancy, the doctors realized that the twin boys were conjoined. Since Jess ...

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The Entertaining Mystery at the Heart of 'Escape Theory'

Remember when Veronica Mars planted a bugged stapler in her school counselor’s office and then spent the rest of the episode listening in on all of the supposedly private sessions of her various suspects? That’s pretty much Margaux Froley’s Escape Theory in a nutshell, except that in Froley’s book, 16-year-old Devon Mackintosh is actually sitting in the counselor’s chair.

The book opens with the obituary of one Jason “Hutch” Hutchins, an (apparently) universally beloved young man who died of an (apparently) deliberate drug overdose.

The problem is, anyone who knew Hutch knows that both suicide ...

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Bookshelves of Doom: 'Dualed' to the Death

If you’re looking for an upbeat, happy-go-lucky sort of read, you aren’t going to find it in Elsie Chapman’s Dualed. The cover art alone should make that abundantly clear, but if not, the first few pages will: It’s generally not a good sign when a 15-year-old’s funeral attire is well-worn. Or when she introduces herself by saying, “I’ve buried nearly everyone I love.”

Our heroine, West, lives in the walled city of Kersh. It’s lauded as the last “war-free zone” on the planet, but that’s not entirely true. Every resident has an ...

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Strange Shipwreck

I’ve had a copy of Gordon Dahlquist’s The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters on my To Be Read shelf for years. Literally. I haven’t been actively avoiding it—it sounds, after all, completely bananas in a super-fun way—but...you know how it is. There’s always something new and shiny to look at, and sometimes books get unfairly relegated to the Also Ran pile. When I saw that he’d written The Different Girl, a book for the teen audience, though, I snapped it right up.

For as long as she can remember, our narrator ...

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'Shades of Earth': A Worthy Finale to a Smart Space Opera

A few weeks back, I mentioned how happy it made me that the second book in Beth Revis’ Across the Universe trilogy was just as good—if not better, actually—than the first. Now, after reading the last book in the trilogy, Shades of Earth, I can unreservedly state three things:

1. A Million Suns is still my favorite book in the series.

2. Even though it didn’t quite reach the heights of A Million Suns, Shades of Earth is a totally worthy finale to a space opera that is smart and thoughtful, fabulously entertaining and completely engrossing.

3 ...

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Never Say Die!

Gregory Galloway’s The 39 Deaths of Adam Strand is not an easy book. I almost gave up on it a third of the way through, and as I’ve said, that’s a rarity for me. Despite the high-interest hook of the premise—16-year-old Adam Strand kills himself again and again, but keeps coming back to life—some readers will be put off by Adam himself. For almost a full 100 pages, Adam reads like a humorless nihilist, a person so disconnected with and disinterested in life that he makes Holden Caulfield look happy-go-lucky. While his voice might be ...

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