reviews

Delirium (Lauren Oliver)

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Delirium Lauren Oliver   I picked up this book based on what I’d read of Raven; one of the novellas in the Delirium universe. I was sucked in by the writing and decided to start at the beginning. Unfortunately, that proved to be somewhat of a slog, because Delirium has the traditional slow ramp-up of YA dystopia. I’d write that off as a occupational hazard (so to speak) of the genre, but counterexamples such as Susan Ee’s Angelfall come to mind.   Angelfall came to mind as a comparison often while reading Delirium, actually, perhaps due to the prominence of […]

Airborn (Kenneth Oppel)

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Airborn Kenneth Oppel I'm really glad I read this instead of just turning it back in to the library. Often books sit on my shelf and I renew them until I exceed the limit and have to turn them back in. But I discovered I had ONE more renewal to eke out. And once I started reading, I finished it in one sitting. The technology of the airship was fascinating and in-depth enough that I had to go Google to confirm that hydrium was a fictional invention. The book proceeds at a breathtaking pace, leaping from disaster to brilliant solution […]

Some Quiet Place (Kelsey Sutton)

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Some Quiet Place Kelsey Sutton In my opinion, personifying Emotions and Elements never gets old. Even I have a short ten-minute play in my past where a girl has to face her own Arrogance, Tedium, Morbidity, Fear, Desire, Malice, and finally Hope. Ran at a student playwriting festival back in 2004. One woman came up to me afterward and told me in heartfelt tones that I had described her life. After all, it's so much easier when you can condense Emotions from something tangled and abstract into a person. You can relate with a person, argue with a person, fall […]

The Angel Experiment (James Patterson) 1

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Maximum Ride: The Angel ExperimentJames Patterson Continuing with my YA reading… I got 54 pages into this book before I started skimming.The pros: Max, the Maximum of the title, is actually a girl. And it’s not a big deal, just slipped in detail by detail. The cons: "Yes, you, standing there leafing through these pages. Do not put this book down. I’m dead serious–your life could depend on it." Does that sound familiar? Like, 54-book series familiar? Even now, when I can laugh at the clunky writing of the Animorphs series, I never forget how heartbreaking they are. In comparison, this book seems […]

Shiver (Maggie Stiefvater)

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ShiverMaggie Stiefvater I haven’t read any YA in a while. (I finally got a public library card this week, and man, why did I wait so long? I forgot how amazing public libraries are.) But I seem to remember that even when I was in that target age range, I had trouble not with the complexity of abstract ideas but the language in which they were expressed. In other words, if you explain things simply enough, YA readers can grasp more hard science than adults might think. Writing for YA, you might minimize your linguistic contortions, but you don’t shortchange […]

Dead to Me (Anton Strout)

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Dead to Me Anton Strout Is it just me, or is there serious sexual tension between Simon and Connor? Ever since the scene early on when an antiques hawker takes them for a couple and Connor plays along, I could feel the undercurrents. Even while Simon is developing his heterosexual relationship with Jane, whenever he’s thinking about Jane, Connor isn’t far behind in his thoughts. Then there’s this symbolic moment at the end, where Simon’s ribs are so injured that he can’t walk, and needs help: "I can help you get through the theater at the very least."Though Jane still […]