Young Adult Archives - Page 15 of 16

Vampire Rising by Jason Henderson: Book Review

Alex Van Helsing has heard it thousands of times before. Yes, his last name is really Van Helsing. No, not like that Van Helsing. No, he doesn't kill monsters. To paraphrase his father, that kind of thing doesn't happen. Except when it does. What a fun, action-packed story! It begins with Alex running toward a scream in the woods and ends on a very brooding scene that feels like a pause. Which isn't to say that this book feels incomplete; for the first in the series, it stands very well on its own. I know more is coming, I have one or two questions, but I'm happy with the way things ended. Alex is the most fully fleshed-out character and I liked him. He's had some trouble in the past and he's still having trouble in the present but he's doing his best. His whole world has just shifted but he's dealing with it. The other characters were fun, but they weren't developed all that well. I am curious about Minhi, Mr. Sangster, and Sid. I hope I'll learn more about them in other books. As an older reader, I appreciated the way the classics like Dracula and the background story to Frankenstein were worked in. For younger readers who might not have been exposed to these books yet, the necessary references were explained well and the unnecessary ones were just bonuses for those in the know. There wasn't really anything new added to the vampire myth, but it was still fun. Kids who haven't read quite so much will probably love this. There were some gadgets that I even thought were very cool, and I'm not into gadgets! These vampires are not the seductive, tormented vampires that we've seen so much of lately. These guys are baddies through and…

The Prince of Mist by Carlos Ruiz Zafón: Book Review

When Max's family moves to the beach to avoid being caught in the city during a war, they don't realize that worse trouble is going to find them. First of all, I think the name Roland should be retired from fiction forever. It is impossible for me to read it without seeing The Gunslinger. When the character is supposed to be a normal seventeen-year-old boy, you see the problem I had. Anyway, I found it hard to pinpoint the age group of this book's audience. I didn't realize it wasn't for adults until I started reading it. The writing itself is easy enough for a middle-grade book. But there are a few things that happen that pushed it up into YA territory for me. I don't have kids though, so maybe I'm just naive about what kids read. If I'm not, I'm afraid this will struggle to find the right market. Not realizing this wasn't an adult book, I was disappointed when I didn't find Ruiz Zafón's gorgeous prose inside. I just adore his writing. The story itself was suspenseful and engaging. I was curious what was going on almost from the beginning and found myself reading more and more just to try to get to the bottom of things. I think kids who aren't too afraid of things that go bump in the night will enjoy it. As an adult reader, there were a few things that happened that I just didn't buy. I don't know any seventeen-year-old boy who is going to willingly start hanging out with a thirteen-year-old. Not without seeing his sister first. :-) I don't think the kids would have been left alone like they were. And I had problems with the story line surrounding Roland. As always, hats off to Lucia Graves for an…

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank: Book Review

Any kind of synopsis feels extremely redundant, but I'll write one anyway. Anne Frank is a young Jewish girl in hiding in Amsterdam during WWII. I don't know how I made it to be 31 years old without reading The Diary of Anne Frank. I'm glad I finally got to it though. I think Anne's diary made the Holocaust real to me in a way that other books haven't because she is a typical teenage girl in a lot of ways. She's growing up, she dislikes her family and "roommates" one day and adores them the next. She's dreaming about the future, love, a career, and what she really wants out of life. She was funny, she was sad, she was introspective, she was growing, she was intelligent, she was scared, she was brave. She was a great big bundle of glorious possibilities. I wouldn't go back to my teenage years, but I remember feeling all the things she describes. SPOILERS IF YOU SOMEHOW DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THIS BOOK As I read, especially the older Anne got, I just kept mourning her. I thought she was a talented writer, especially for her age. She had such strong ideas about a woman's life and career and family. I really felt like, at least in a small way and maybe in a big way, the world lost something special when we lost her. I know that's the case with all the Holocaust victims, but I just felt it more with Anne since I spent so much time in her head. She had it in her to make a mark on this world. I truly believe that. I kept reading slower and slower, the closer to the end I got. I knew what was coming, but I somehow felt that if I…

Wildwood Dancing by Juliet Marillier: Book Review

Loosely based on The Twelve Dancing Princesses, among other fairy tales, Wildwood Dancing is the story of five sisters who disappear into The Other Kingdom for a fairy revel every full moon night. But when their father leaves them alone to spend the winter in another city, their cousin, Cezar, realizes something is going on and starts making their lives difficult. So maybe there's nothing deep or thought-provoking here. This was still a hugely fun book. It's pretty obvious that this is a re-telling of The Twelve Dancing Princesses, but there are some other fairy tales thrown in. I enjoyed seeing how all of them fit together to make this tale. Jena is the second-oldest sister and the narrator of the book. I loved her. I have noticed in Marillier's other books that her female characters rock, and this one isn't any different. She's intelligent, capable, caring, but also maybe a little blind and naive about some things. Her sisters are a little bit of a disappointment. They don't really have huge roles to play, so they fall more into stereotypes. The pretty one. The smart one. The flirt. The baby. But for me, that just fell right into the spirit of a fairy tale. If you really think about it, aren't they generally peopled with stereotypes that prevent a lot of needless explanation? Cezar was bad enough for me to really despise him, but he didn't cross this weird line I have where I hate the bad guy too much. He was an insufferable, chauvinist prick who infuriated me, but at the same time I loved it. Go figure. Once I realized that there were so many stories being woven together to make this one, I started to worry a little that there was no good way to wrap…

Hush, Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick: Book Review

I know a lot of you are going to disagree with me, but here goes.... Nora Grey is forced to sit next to the new guy, Patch, in biology class one day. He knows more about her than he should, and trouble starts to follow her around. I should have listened to Misty at Book Rat. I still haven't read her spoilery rant, but I will be hitting that as soon as I finish here. This was compulsively readable, I have to admit that. I read it in one shift at work. But, oh my gosh, I mostly loathed these characters. Nora is basically the girl in the horror movie who manages to run the wrong way at every turn, even if there's a door standing wide open in front of her, until she eventually gets herself caught in a dead end. You know how frustrating it is to watch that, yelling at the screen, "Don't go down to the deserted basement! Run out the freaking door!" Yeah, that was me reading about Nora. Vee, Nora's best friend, was just looking for trouble, and she definitely found it. Patch. Ugh, Patch. He pushed all kinds of the wrong buttons for me. I know a lot of girls love this bad boy, but I couldn't stand him. Bad boys should have a touch of sweet underneath everything. I never quite found that. Oh, at the very end, he comes through, but he's been such a jerk throughout everything that it was way too late for me. I didn't like the way that he was constantly teasing Nora, keeping her off balance, laughing at her, and disrespecting her boundaries. And, girls, let me just say that if a guy who says he loves you ever slams you on the bed and traps…

The Fetch by Laura Whitcomb: Book Review

Calder is a Fetch, a soul who escorts people on their journey to heaven. One day he shows up at a Death Scene, waiting to see if an infant chooses to die or not. The woman holding the baby takes his breath away. She's beautiful and has a kind, caring, sad face. He can't get her out of his thoughts, and his work begins to suffer for it. The Fetch was okay, I just felt like I never really connected with anyone. I'm beginning to wonder if I really don't like third-person narratives and just never noticed before. Here, I just felt like I was told a lot of stuff and not really shown anything. I'm told that Calder has always felt like he shouldn't be a Fetch because he has trouble with obedience, but the little I see before the story really starts shows a guy who honestly tries his best. Eventually I was told that he's in love with someone, but I didn't really see it happening. Maybe the author was trying to keep the story short, but I felt like this book should have been longer to show me everything that was happening rather than just telling me and hoping that I accepted it. At the beginning, Alexis is a whiny, bratty teenager. I freely admit that if I'd gone through what he'd gone through, I would have easily out-whined him. But I have very, very little tolerance for angsty teenagers, so he really turned me off. There were times that I just wanted to shake Calder and tell him to start thinking. He finds out that there are two things he has to do. One of them was obvious to me from the beginning. It took him forever to figure it out. Calder ends up on…

Ash by Malinda Lo: Book Review

Ash is a re-telling of Cinderella, with more fairies and no fairy godmother. The style this is written in is not a style for me. It feels true to what I remember of the original Grimm's fairy tales, but that doesn't mean I like it. It's all third person, watching Ash do her thing, with very little dialog. I like my characters to talk more than that. I did like the twist on the tale, but I think that if you call yourself a conservative, you will dislike it a lot. No judgment, I'm just sayin'. And I think that's really all I have to say. It was okay, but I've honestly already forgotten most of it and I just finished it last night.

Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld: Book Review

Aleksandr Ferdinand is the son of the Archduke of the Austro-Hungarian empire. He finds himself on the run one night with a few loyal men and a Stormwalker, a two-legged machine that sounds like something out of Star Wars. Deryn Sharp is a girl who loved to fly with her father. Now that he's dead, her only hope of flying again is to disguise herself as a boy and join the British Air Service. I loved this world that Westerfeld created. The Star Wars type machines of the Clankers set against the fantastical animals created by the Darwinists was just a lot of fun. Who doesn't love the idea of a whale that's evolved to fly? It was all just so whimsical that I loved it. And then to choose to set these people down smack at the beginning of World War I rather than in the future really just tickled me. I loved the illustrations too. The detailed pencil drawings added the perfect touch to the story for me. Alek and Deryn were great characters. They were both about fifteen or sixteen and they already had strong personalities, but I liked watching them grow and learn throughout the book. There was one point where I got pretty upset with Deryn, and I can't decide if I think she acted out of character or if people who blindly follow orders without any thought of their own just irritate the heck out of me. Either way, I got past it and she did too. For the record, I was not a huge fan of Westerfeld's Uglies, but I really did love this book. So if you didn't really care for his earlier book either, don't let that turn you off this new series. It was a great adventure story with amazing…

Cybele’s Secret by Juliet Marillier: Book Review

Paula is accompanying her father to Constantinople on a trading trip. She might “only” be a seventeen-year-old girl, but she’s an intelligent, able assistant. They’re in search of an ancient religious artifact, Cybele’s Gift. Once in Constantinople, Paula starts seeing strange visions, visions that she feels sure are coming from the Other Kingdom, the fairy tale world next to ours. She learns that it’s her turn to go on a quest. Can she accomplish the task set for her? I am so torn in rating this book. The beginning felt like it was at least a hundred pages too long. I don’t know exactly what could have been cut, I’m just left with the feeling that a lot of it was unnecessary. It was all character development and setup for the quest, but it got a little boring and I was feeling disappointed that this wasn’t as good as Wildwood Dancing. It was interesting to read the descriptions of Constantinople, but there should be a limit to setup. I read 200 pages before I really got into it, but once the story got going, it was a fantastic fairy tale with impossible challenges, riddles, dangerous pursuit, and all the stuff that make us love the old stories. I finished the rest in one sitting, on the edge of my seat, waiting to find out what happened next. Three stars for the first half, five stars for the second half, and we’ll average it out at four. Paula is a woman ahead of her time. She loves to read and dreams of opening her own book trading business. She sometimes gets a little too lost in her own head though, and needs to be reminded that there is a whole real life to be lived outside of books. She also has…

Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia: Book Review

Sixteen-year-old Ethan Wate has been having nightmares for months. In his dreams, he's unsuccessfully trying to save a girl. Then Lena Duchannes, the first new girl to move into his small South Carolina town in years, shows up. He recognizes her as the girl from his dreams, and things only get more complicated from there. Wow. That's probably the most coherent, non-spoilery thing I have to say about this. I was intrigued at first, wondering what was going on, but about a hundred pages in, this hooked me and didn't let go. It was kind of like going down the rabbit hole. The more I found out, the more questions I had and the more I needed to get answers. Sometimes that kind of thing can feel a little like the author is cheating, withholding information for the sole purpose of making you read more against your will, but Garcia and Stohl got it right. Ethan tells the story, and he's just as clueless as the reader, so the way the story unfolds felt very natural. Lena was a fantastic character! I am loving these strong female characters that I'm finding in YA lately. She's stressed out, she's outcast, she never fits in, but she never gives up. It would be easy for her to wall herself off from the world, but she keeps going out there and opening herself up for more hurt, trying to have a life. She's not at all an average girl, but I think a lot of girls will relate to her. Unfortunately. We can't all be Miss Popularity at school. I also loved Link, Ethan's best friend, and Macon, Lena's eccentric uncle. Link is unquestioningly loyal to Ethan and accepting of Lena, when it would be a lot easier to drop both of them…