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Delirium (Lauren Oliver)

 in Blog  tagged dystopia / lauren oliver / reviews / ya by (updated 3218 days ago)

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 […]

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 […]