...I talk about Brian Conaghan's When Mr. Dog Bites:
He’s a fan of wordplay, and has developed his own personal slang, a creative combination of stream-of-consciousness, cockney rhyming, pop-culture references, and plain-old Scottish teenager. All that, when peppered with the unintentional vocalizations that fly when he’s nervous or upset, guarantees that you’ve never read anyone quite like him.
|
| | |
...I wrote about Lucy Saxon's Take Back the Skies:
A couple of weeks back, I put together a list of stories about airships. Included on the list was Lucy Saxon’s Take Back the Skies, which is one I’ve been looking forward to for quite some time. It’s about a girl who disguises herself as a boy and stows away on a smuggler’s airship to escape her abusive father and avoid an arranged marriage. Romance, steampunk adventure, and SAVING THE COUNTRY all figure in. Sounds fun, right?
Well.
|
| | |
...I put together a list of upcoming YA romances that I've got my eye on.
Anything I should add to it?
|
| | |
...I wrote about Jex Malone, a book I thought I would like a whole lot more than I did:
But, as Kirkus and I don’t always agree, I went ahead and read it anyway. The premise ALONE demanded that I read it; knowing it included quotes from famous girl detectives ranging from Jessica Fletcher to V.I. Warshawski to Jane Marple to Nancy Drew was just icing on the cake. Sadly, underneath that lovely frosting, the cake was lumpy and underdone. As I have a tendency to let metaphors get away from me, I’ll just say it flat-out: Kirkus was right about this one.
|
| | |
...I wrote about Jennifer Donnelly's Deep Blue, which, well, I hated:
In reading the Prologue to Jennifer Donnelly’s Deep Blue—a description of a group of water witches swimming around, chanting rhyming couplets about six chosen ones with disparate talents who will have to band together to save the world—I got the distinct impression that not only had the book been specifically written with a film adaptation in mind, but that I had already SEEN said movie many, many times before.
It's rare for me to walk away from a book without anything nice to say.
Sadly, this is one of those times.
|
| | |
...I wrote about Shannon Hale's Dangerous:
Shannon Hale has written nuanced, complex re-imaginings of fairy tales, she has written hilarious adult romance, she has written original fantasy, and with Dangerous, she has proved that she’s perfectly capable of writing a cracking SF yarn as well. It’s funny, it’s smart, it’s emotionally complex, it’s super-ultra-action-packed, and it features a cast of characters that is diverse ethnically, culturally, physically, experientially, and economically.
|
| | |
...I wrote about the first in a new series (specifically a trilogy, I think):
Katie Finn’s Broken Hearts, Fences, and Other Things to Mend has humor, strong dialogue, a decent romance and a complicated emotional core. It also has a serious, whiplash-inducing—when the switch happened, my jaw literally dropped—identity crisis.
|
| | |