"Texas Gothic," by Rosemary Clement-Moore

I was a bit ashamed to pick this novel up from my shelf, only to realize it was an ARC dated back to 2011. Oops. I was busy, okay!

Amy Goodnight is the one non-witchy girl in a family full of witches and so she's made it her job to keep her kooky female relatives from letting their various magical cats out of their respective magical bags. Even though her own sister, Phin, could give two bagged-cat farts about the secrecy of her witchcraft-related experiments.

Anyhoo, Amy and Phin are spending the summer taking care of their Aunt Hyacinth's farm (she's a botanical soap witch, for reals), when Amy runs afoul of the Hot Cowboy Neighbour, Ben McCulloch. Rumours of a ghost on his property have been hurting his family business (especially after a few of his workers are mysteriously injured on the job) so of course he blames the witchy Goodnight family for spreading those rumours.

The only problem? Amy spots a real ghost, and when her paranormal encounter coincides with the discovery of human remains on the McCulloch land, she realizes all the weird accidents that have been happening to Ben's workers might not be so accidental. She just has to convince Ben the ghost is real, and enlist her witch sister's magical help, all the while trying to hide the fact that magic is real.

While this novel was charmingly written (Amy has a hilariously cynical narrative voice), it turned out to be lighter than expected. In several ways. First of all, the story is not as dark as the description led me to believe. It's very much in the Nancy Drew/Scooby Doo vein of Meddling Kids vs. Incompetent Adults. Secondly, for a novel whose protagonist is from a family of witches, there's not that much magic in it. There's a potion or two, one hilarious scene with a magical bottle of shampoo, and a ghost-detecting machine that Phin builds, but the fantasy in this story is strangely absent and doesn't really affect the plot. Most of the plot happens due to non-magical teenage detective work, which was a bit of a let down.

It's not terribly written, and the pacing is decent, but the back cover copy promises a story that the novel just doesn't deliver. It's light-hearted fluff, so if that's your thing, go ahead.

Do Not Read If: You expect an actually dark and gothic novel; you're looking for an explicitly magical plot involving spells; you hate Hot Teen Cowboys; you hate dogs; you hate ghosts; you hate goats; you hate storylines that hinge on someone hearing "goats" when the speaker meant "ghosts."

C

"Lair of Dreams," by Libba Bray

Lair of Dreams is the long-awaited sequel to Libba Bray's absolutely mah-velous 1920s-set fantasy, The Diviners. The characters are just as engrossing, the rat-a-tat screwball dialogue is as sharp and as nonstop as ever, and the gruesomely dark mystery at this novel's heart is as shiver-inducing - perhaps even more so - than the one in The Diviners.

So was Lair of Dreams better than The Diviners? Not quite.

The Diviners had a diverse and rambunctious cast, and while Lair of Dreams returns to most of them, their stories are unevenly organized and paced, and they're too scattered to really function as a team until the very end. The sad thing is, half the reason the mystery takes so long to solve is because many of the characters barely take the time to talk to each other because they're too engrossed in their own problems.

It's still a whip-smart and entertaining novel, but the all-too-frequent "whoops I didn't tell this character an important tidbit because I magically forgot about it when I picked up the phone" coincidences can become frustrating.

But let's get to the plot, shall we? Ever since Evie O'Neill went public about being a Diviner and using her powers to save the city from Naughty John in the previous novel, New York has been swept up with Diviner fever. People are hosting Diviner parties. Ziegfeld is choreographing a Diviner Dancers Revue. And Evie is now a bona fide celebrity with her own radio show, the Sweetheart Seer.

But beneath all the glitz and glamour, trouble is brewing. After a group of construction workers fall mysteriously ill after discovering a buried subway station in Chinatown, the ensuing Sleeping Sickness awakens a rising tide of bigotry and paranoia as more and more people fall asleep and never wake up. The frightened populace has to point a finger somewhere. Who to blame? The Chinese? The immigrants? Or those strange Diviners?

Through it all, Bray concocts a heady and addictive sense of setting and period, from the sparkling dustbowl dialogue, to the sumptuous descriptions of jiving dance halls and rebellious hotel room parties. Each of our major players has their own narrative arc that settles them squarely within their time period while also making them relatable, interesting, and a little bit magical. Along with that, Bray continues to tease us with increasing hints at a series-long arc involving "Project Buffalo," a secret government Diviner program. Whatever this book's faults, they are minimal compared to the successful narrative plate-spinning Bray achieves with her blending of glamorous time period, bloody horror, timeless teen drama, old-school humour, and social justice.

Lair of Dreams is a worthy successor to The Diviners. I can't wait to read what comes next.

Do Not Read If: You don't like ghosts; you absolutely cannot stand horror or the jeepers creepers in any way, shape, or form; if you dislike Pears Soap and all those who advocate for it; diversity makes you ill, you creepy bigot; you hate fun.
A-

"Guy in Real Life," by Steve Brezenoff

Okay, so I'm going to start this review with two warnings:

Warning the First: I had no interest in reading this book, no desire to pick it up at all, and the only reason I did was because it's FYA Book Club's April pick. So I may have gone into it with a bit of resentment at being "forced" to read it.

Warning the Second: I ended up skimming this novel sometime after the halfway mark.

But guys, this book sucked.

It starts out with an interesting idea - after black-clad metalhead Lesh gets grounded by his parents for coming home drunk from a concert, he gets suckered into signing up for a World of Warcraft-style MMO by his nerd friend, Greg.

Lesh initially signs up as a meathead orc warrior at Greg's behest, but is soon bored - until he decides to create a female elf healer because the avatar reminds him of a new girl at school that he can't get off his mind. Of course, it's not long before Lesh realizes that other players treat him differently when they think he's a girl. But for some reason, he really enjoys embodying a female character on a vast fantasy adventure.

Meanwhile, the girl he's crushing on, Svetlana, is an anti-social artist who's heavily invested in tabletop, Dungeons and Dragons gaming. She starts hanging out with him when she realizes he can help her shake an infuriatingly persistent (and unwanted) suitor, but starts realizing there's more to him than meets the eye.

Doesn't this sound good? Nope. I decided to make a list of the things that annoyed me - and it's a long one.

1. This book isn't finished. It throws out a bunch of ideas like so much spaghetti at a refrigerator, but it doesn't stick around to clean any of it up or explore it in any depth. Lesh's adventures as a female character, Svetlana's attempts to keep her D and D club at school from being disbanded, Lesh's fracturing relationship with his truly hateful "friend" Greg, and Svetlana's increasing disgust and frustration with unwanted male attention - none of it gets resolved in a meaningful way. Maybe the real ending will come out in a future DLC?

2. Svetlana is primarily treated as Obsession!Bait. Almost every major male character in the novel is obsessed with her. There's family friend Fry, who becomes increasingly violent and bullying towards her (and her friends!) when she refuses his advances. There's Abraham, who quits the D and D club because ... she dates someone else, thereby refusing his advances. There's a Creepy Online Stalker who targets her and sends her weird gifts because he confuses her for the character Lesh plays online (for reals). Her storyline is focused almost entirely on how all these dudes are obsessed with her and make decisions of varying levels of inappropriateness because she turns them down.

And...am I forgetting someone? Oh right - LESH, who's SO obsessed with her from the very first minute that he creates a lookalike avatar of her so he can pretend to be close to her. HOW IS THAT OKAY? The novel never explains this theme - if all these men are irrationally fixated on this one girl, what makes Lesh the "good" one? His plot line is like the G-rated online version of that Buffalo Bill dude from Silence of the Lambs.

Long story short - the most important female character is reduced to a damsel who's constantly beating off hordes of angry thwarted males with her 12-sided die.

3. The actual gamer characters in this book are almost uniformly awful, cliched, shallow, bigoted turds - and the book never explores or deals with it. Yes, some of them need to be turds. This novel's main (if poorly-handled) theme is on sexism in gaming. It's about a tough-looking rocker dude who enjoys playing as a delicate lady elf, but discovers that playing a female character inspires other gamers to behave like total asshats.

Except - Lesh never explores deeper than, "Man, that sucks." Take his "friendship" with Greg - a venomous douchenerd who spits homophobic slurs like a malfunctioning sprinkler. I would have liked to see Lesh actually internalize what Greg says and realize that it's not okay. I would have liked to see him tell Greg off, stand up for himself and reveal Greg for the bully he is. Except - it never happens. Greg throws a mild hissy fit when he finds out Lesh is a G.I.R.L. (Guy In Real Life - get it?) and then vanishes from the novel completely. No resolution. No exploration of theme.

And the depictions of almost all the gamers (with a few exceptions with Svetlana's D and D crew) are laughably stereotyped. They're nerds who are good at math who hunch over their screens with bad posture and bad skin, their hands poised like claws above their keyboards. The only thing missing is a pair of taped-up, thick-rimmed Coke bottle glasses to settle the depiction of gamers firmly back in the 1980s.

4. The description of the MMO itself makes no sense. First of all, the author inserts truly laughable attempts at epic fantasy to describe the world of the game. Brezenoff is no Tolkien. He's not even a Tracy Hickman. Moreover, there are a number of "questionable" events that happen in the game - for instance, poor Lesh gets molested and drenched in beer by a pack of dwarves and needs to be rescued. Um, I'm sorry - are there fantasy games out there where avatars are allowed to rape or sexually assault other player characters? Who would design a game like that?

I get the sense Brezenoff is attempting to highlight the sexism that female players often endure in gaming - but instead of focusing on the very real, very common ways girls are ostracized in games, he decides to make up some exaggerated, cartoonish bullshit that would NEVER HAPPEN in a popular MMO because no game dev in his right mind would put a rape feature in his game unless he wanted to endure a billion lawsuits.

5. Our two main protagonists barely spend any time together.
Seriously, even if the rest of the book had been fine, Guy in Real Life would still have fallen flat because its two romantic protagonists barely talk to each other. Sure, Lesh obsesses over Svetlana all the time, but Svetlana has her own life, and their scenes apart are far more numerous, important, and interesting than their scenes together. I still don't understand what they have in common or how their romance works - and ultimately the whole stalker storyline muddies the waters even further.

My opinion? Avoid this sloppily-plotted, creepy, and ultimately pointless novel in favour of novels that aim for a higher level (ha!) of story telling and theme structure.

C-

"White Cat," by Holly Black

The Protagonist: Cassel Sharpe. The only non-magical dud in a family of curse workers, he ought to be able to live a normal life.
The Rub: His family's magic might not run in his blood, but their propensity for mischief does.

Secondary Characters:

Phillip: Cassel's oldest brother. A body worker for the Zacharov crime family.

Barron: Cassel's second oldest brother, a luck worker who dated the only girl Cassel ever loved. How's that for luck?

Sam: Cassel's boarding school roommate and eventual, reluctant partner-in-crime.

Lila: The daughter of the powerful Zacharov crime family, and Cassel's best friend - and murder victim. Cassel's family was forced to hide the evidence to protect them from mob vengeance, but Cassel can't quite get her out of his mind.

YA Trope Checklist:

• Unattainable Female Love Interest
• Screwed Up Parents
• The "Normal" Best Friend
• Private School Angst

The Word: Why have I never read Holly Black before? This is obviously an unconscionable oversight, and shall be corrected immediately.

With a few deft strokes, Black creates a rich, vibrant world that is like our own, but not quite. Everyone wears gloves. People carry enchanted pieces of stone around their necks to protect them. And almost everyone at Cassel Sharpe's boarding school holds him under suspicion due to his unsavoury family connections and mysterious sleepwalking.

In this world, magic (or "working") was outlawed along with alcohol during Prohibition, and like Prohibition, outlawing magic didn't make the workers disappear - it just made them all outlaws. The world is now riddled with massive magical crime families who can make people forget things, lose at craps, or fall in love - for the right price. And God help you if you can't pay it. All it takes to work a curse is skin-to-skin contact - that's why everyone wears gloves in public.

Cassel Sharpe, our hero, goes through life haunted by three facts: 1) he comes from a family of magical criminals and con artists, 2) of that family, he is the only one with no magical talent, and 3) he is a murderer. Three years ago, he killed Lila Zacharov - his best friend, first love, and the daughter of the Zacharov crime boss. Even worse, he has no idea how or why he did it, but his worker brothers rallied around him to cover it up and protect the family from Daddy Zacharov's vengeance.

However, when he starts experiencing powerful, dangerous dreams involving a white cat demanding he remove a curse, Cassel begins to wonder if his understanding of those three basic facts - hell, of his entire reality - is all that it seems. But to do that, he will have to dive into the worker underworld despite having no powers of his own.

The world building in this novel is so fresh and interesting. The idea of magic users forming this immensely powerful criminal underground is fascinating and opens up so many narrative possibilities that the author takes full advantage of. Not only that, but the magic itself is cool - there are dozens of different types of workers, and each one experiences a particular type of "blowback" when they overuse their magic. Memory workers forget things, death workers develop necrosis, emotion workers lose emotional stability, that sort of thing.

The underground aspect adds a sly subtlety to our teenage hero, Cassel. Despite being magic-less, he's still inherited his family's con artistry and he has trouble trusting people without analyzing how they fit into a particular con or plot. He's intriguing but also tragic - because he trusts himself as little as he trusts other people. He murdered his best friend three years ago and he still has no idea why, only that there must be something in him, something hidden, that made him do it. What if it wakes up again?

I don't want to give anything more away, because half the fun of this original, addictive novel is the sense of discovery as Holly Black continually stirs more delight into this potent stew of con men, magic, lies, politics, and family drama. I've never read a full-length Holly Black novel before, but White Cat will not be the last. Not by a long shot.
A+

"The Winner's Curse," by Marie Rutkoski

The Protagonist: Kestral Trajan. The daughter of Valorian's most celebrated general, she's under extreme pressure to either marry or enlist in the military. Her life is hard.
The Rub: But not quite as hard as those of the slaves she owns. Awkward.

YA Tropes Checklist:

• Parents Who Just Don't Understand
• 1 Poor Little Rich Girl
• 1 Boy From the Wrong Side of the Tracks Chains
• 1 Airhead Best Friend
• 2 Underappreciated Musical Talents
• 1 Romantically Lacklustre Rival
• 2 Villains Who Want to Bang the Heroine
• Love Made Me Do It

The Word: I underestimated this novel. Blame it on the woozy, swoony prom-dress cover. Poor little blond girl in a ball gown, whatever shall you do? What love triangles shall you muck up? What doorways will you adorably trip through to be caught by the hero? This cover is terrible, no doubt about it. However, The Winner's Curse pulls fewer punches and hides sharper edges of commentary than I would have guessed. 

Kestral is the pampered-but-unsatisifed daughter of a successful Valorian general living in the occupied Herrani capital city. Ten years ago, the warlike Valorians conquered the artistic, sophisticated Herrani and the survivors of that war now work as slaves in the houses they once owned. 

While out walking, Kestral accidentally winds up at the slave auction, where a slave named Smith is being sold. Intrigued by his spirit and misery that seem to mirror her own, she defies her better judgement and purchases him at an exaggeratedly high price. Despite being remarkably snarky, defiant, and disobedient for a slave, Smith (whose real name is Arin) becomes almost like a friend to Kestral, as they each learn more about each others' people. 

However, unbeknownst to Kestral, Arin is an agent for the underground Herrani revolution working to overthrow the brutal Valorian yoke and restore Herrani freedom once and for all. Can these two crazy kids overcome their teeny tiny ideological differences?

I was quite impressed by the way this novel handled slavery. Kestral is depicted as someone who, while uncomfortable when confronted by the realities of slavery, continues to benefit from it. Ideologically she recognizes that slavery probably sucks, but she can't imagine a life without it and often catches herself ignoring or downplaying it in order to make herself feel better. When we live in a world where fruit is picked by underpaid migrant workers and sneakers are made by child labour and iPods are assembled by starving factory workers - are we any different?

When Kestral's freed nanny-slave Enai dies, Arin mocks her grief by demanding if she even knew who Enai's real family, real children were. Kestral doesn't - she was too afraid to even ask. I appreciated that the author never made the heroine a naive saint who was always good to her slaves. People who contribute to an abusive system still possess the capacity for individual good, and the capacity to eventually wake up and overthrow the abusive system. But that capacity doesn't whitewash their flaws. 

I also loved that Kestral wasn't a super-heroic Katniss character who is miraculously adept at scaling walls and killing bad guys. Instead of being a warrior, she's a strategist - an underused role for women in YA. I really appreciated this - she uses her power in more subtle and original ways.

Rutkoski uses a deft hand that highlights points of insight without getting mired in rhetoric, and the story moves swiftly and smoothly, but I could perhaps have preferred a little more depth to the worldbuilding and the history. Instead, the author uses coding (the Valorians are Romans, the Herrani Greeks) to do her worldbuilding for her, and that felt like a cheat.

All in all, a surprisingly solid read.

B

Reread Rollout: "The Giver" by Lois Lowry

So, for the first book on my Reread Rollout, I decided to reread that life-ruiner of required school reading: The Giver.

Kids either hate this book or love this book, but few, I suspect, ever forget reading it.

BECAUSE IT'S A LIFE RUINER.

The Giver is the great-grandma of the current dystopian YA trend. Our hero, Jonas, is a 12-year-old boy who lives in an idyllic Community where everyone has their proper place. There is no starvation, no poverty, no strife, and once a member of the Community turns twelve, their career is chosen for them based on careful study of their interests and skills. Lowry uses only a few succinct chapters to craft the idea of this "perfect" world where everyone is taken care of.

This lasts until Jonas turns twelve and is chosen to become the next Receiver of Memories, and has to watch as his perfect world is torn apart piece by piece. The Receiver's job is to remember all the messy, wonderful, unpleasant, chaotic crap the Community intentionally forgot/did away with in order to preserve order. As Jonas learns more, he eventually learns the darker ways in which the Community preserves order. Oh God, the scene with Jonas' dad and the box. THE BOX. If you've read the book, you know the scene I'm talking about.

I'm pleased to say The Giver is every bit as potent as it was when I read it as a young adult. The recent deluge of Hunger Games and The Knife of Never Letting Gos and Divergents have done nothing to dull the surprising razor-slash of revelation halfway through this book. The Giver is dark and horrifying without being explicit, and ambiguous without being unsatisfying. I ached for Jonas - ridiculously young by today's YA standards - and everything he had to suffer and learn.

And the decades have tarnished none of this novel's relevancy, either. The only thing scarier than what the founders of the Community gave up is knowing what the current members are giving up without even knowing it. It makes you think about the sacrifices we allow others to make for us in the name of safety and order.

So yeah, The Giver ruined my life again. It still packs a punch.

Don't watch the movie.
A-

I'm Late! I'm Late! Drive-By Reviewings

Okay, my bad.

I fell a little behind on reviewing. Okay, a lot behind. For several reasons, some of which weren't my fault but most of which totally were.

I was promoted to a new position at work (the day job), I've become (officially!) an editorial assistant at Entangled (a second job), I signed up for NaNoWriMo, and I discovered obsessively-absorbing role-playing video games.

The result: not a lot of time or inclination to review. After a stressful day of new-job training and reading manuscripts, I was more in the mood to explode darkspawn and romance knights in Dragon Age (which I will also be reviewing soon!). Now that NaNo is over and I have a bit more time on my hands, I'm just in time for my Annual Re-Reading Month.

But for now, let's recap the books I did read in October and November that aren't super-special enough to merit their own reviews:

Just Listen, by Sarah Dessen.

Yes, I finally read my first Sarah Dessen. From what my YA-focused blogger friends tell me, she's kind of the First Lady of Contemporary YA.

My first impression wasn't wholly strong - her language seemed too bare and simple for my taste, but she slowly and surely hooked me in so by the midpoint, I was pretty strongly invested in her heroine.

Our protagonist, Annabel, is someone incapable of speaking her mind for fear of hurting others. She experienced a terrible trauma at the end of the previous school year, but she can't tell her family - with them so focused on her older sister's recovery from an eating disorder, and her mother's history of depression, she can't bear to add to their burden or risk undoing her mother's progress. But the truth is eating her up inside.

The novel is all about truth-telling, and believing you're important enough to be heard, and Dessen aptly conveys how difficult it is for Annabel to speak up for herself and put herself above (or at least on the same level as) others. The novel has a deceptively simple start that reveals itself as more layered later on. However, it wasn't a perfect book. I felt the romantic interest's obsession with honesty was a little over-the-top and unreasonable, even with the novel's theme, and the treatment of rape and rape victims seemed a bit simplified by the novel's end, but otherwise, I understand where Dessen's fans are coming from.

The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender, by Leslye Walton.

I had to read this novel for the FYA Bookclub, and let's just say this book sparked a lot of ... debate. And by debate, I mean rage.

The story explores three generations of women all leading to Ava Lavender, a girl born with wings. The story meanders along through unreliable narrators and magical realism - Alice Hoffman levels of magical realism. Spells, ghosts, girls with bird parts, all that jazz.

Walton is a splendid writer, and 90% of the novel is fine, if unfocused and a bit derivative. The ending, however, absolutely kills this novel - spoiler and trigger warning: the climax (not the conflict, but the climax) of the novel comes when Ava is brutally raped and mutilated by an obsessed stalker. And all of her family's  problems are solved by how they rally around and care for her.

Nothing in this novel - not the story, not the tone, not the theme - suggested or fit with a brutal rape. That event doesn't fit organically within the plot at all. Moreover, the rape is used as a disgusting plot device to better the lives of other characters, not the actual victim. Ava's character doesn't change or progress. In fact, she recovers and gets a boyfriend within the span of the epilogue and gets magical new white wings FOR SOME REASON. WTF. Mindbendingly stupid and offensive garbage.

Please, please, let's not make Magical Rape a trope.

Ravishing the Heiress, by Sherry Thomas

I'm still a general fan of Sherry Thomas, and this novel wasn't terrible, but that's about it.

This novel - wasn't terrible. It was interesting enough but it didn't grab and wow me like her earlier novels. Our heroine, Millie, is a merchant-class heiress whose parents arrange for her to marry a debt-ridden earl named Fitz. Millie falls for Fitz immediately, but discovers Fitz is deeply, passionately in love with another woman - someone he now has to give up in order to save his family from ruin.

Fitz ... does not take this well. He's such a flamboyant ass about what a terrible SACRIFICE he had to make by marrying Millie, that Millie spends the next six years of their marriage keeping her feelings under wraps and allowing him to pursue his various emotionless, extramarital flings. However, when Fitz learns that the former love of his life is now widowed, he plans to leave Millie to set up a household with his ladylove - but not before "fulfilling his end of the bargain" and giving Millie a baby.

There were certain things I liked - Fitz finds it difficult to reconnect with his former love as he slowly comes to understand how meaningful the last six years of marriage with Millie have been to him. His attraction to Millie grows out of their deep and abiding friendship rather than instant lust. But their actual romantic development is remarkably spare on the page, and Millie is almost pathological in her emotional repression (not that I can blame her). It was a pleasant and even a relatively original romance, but I feel the romance was lacking.

The False Prince, by Jennifer Nielsen

Here was another extremely-hyped novel that just underwhelmed me. Sage is an orphan who's picked up off the street along with two other orphans by an unscrupulous, obsessed noble determined to save his nation at any cost.

The nobleman reveals that the king, queen and crown prince were recently poisoned by an unknown party. The truth of their deaths is not publicly known yet, but once it gets out, their nation's enemies will waste no time in taking advantage of the political chaos. However, if another viable heir to the throne is discovered in time, the crisis may be averted. The noblemen chose orphans who best resembled the long-lost second prince who was supposedly killed by pirates years before, and he plans to train them to impersonate the kingdom's last heir. The most convincing fraud will accompany him to the capital - but the other two will become dangerous loose ends.

None of the characters here were particularly interesting. Sage was kind of a smarmy know-it-all, and the "twist" near the end of the novel had me rolling my eyes at the ridiculousness of it. The novel was just boring from beginning to end and there's not much else I can say about it - I read it a while ago and nothing else remained memorable enough for me to recall today.

And that's it for now! More reviews to come later.

"Untold," by Sarah Rees Brennan

The Protagonist: Kami Glass. A budding investigative reporter whose sleuthing uncovered the fact that her town is full of resentful sorcerers waiting for a good excuse to come back into power.
Her Angst: She has no true idea who's a sorcerer and who's not, and no longer knows who to trust. On top of that, Jared is giving her the cold shoulder for breaking their magical bond.

The Secondary Cast:

Jared: An entitled, navel-gazing, self-absorbed whiny loser with low self-esteem who deals with this by being a dick to everyone. He's supposed to be attractive for some reason?

Ash: An entitled, navel-gazing, self-absorbed whiny loser with low self-esteem who nevertheless finds healthy ways to deal with his issues and other people. Why is he not the hero?

Angela: Kami's best friend who's coming to grips with her crush on Holly.

Holly: Friend to both Kami and Angela, who's struggling to come to grips with Angela's sexual orientation - and maybe her own?

Lillian: Ash's mum, Jared's aunt, and official Head Bitch In Charge of Sorry-in-the-Vale. Determined to hold on to her crown by any means necessary.

Rob: Ash's dad, Jared's uncle (?), who's determined to return sorcerers to power and make the humans of Sorry-in-the-Vale his rightful serfs.

YA Angst Checklist:

• I Know Way Too Many People Who Are Suddenly Okay With Human Sacrifice
• Child-snatching
• ANGST ANGST ANGST
• Why can't all these people see I'm acting like a Giant Tool because I'm starved for Love?
• Emotional Independence
• Bad Moms

The Word: I'd heard the hype about Unspoken, but I didn't truly get it until I opened the book and fell headfirst into a richly layered gothic fantasy that's serious, but not too serious to take itself too seriously. If that make sense. It used time-tested YA tropes, but in a fresh, self-aware way that made them entertaining instead of tiresome.

Needless to say, I was excited about the sequel. Untold picks up where Unspoken left off - that is, In A Very Bad Place. Kami's investigations from the previous novel uncovered the fact that the Lynburns are sorcerers and her town of Sorry-in-the-Vale is riddled with other magic-using families. Even worse, Rob Lynburn (Jared's uncle, Ash's father) had been secretly recruiting these local sorcerers in order to forcibly return the town to the Old Ways - the human-sacrifice kind.

So on top of coming to grips with the fact that people she's known her entire life are suddenly okay with murdering people, Kami has to stop Rob and his cronies from fulfilling their promise to sacrifice a human on the Winter Solstice to solidify their rule over the town. This means Kami and her friends have to team up with Lillian Lynburn, who stands in opposition to Rob - not because she opposes the murder of peasants, but because they are her peasants and that's rude. Yeah, Lillian's the worst.

I did enjoy this book, really, but it does suffer from a pretty severe case of middle-book-itis. It's heavy on character development, and really, really light on plot. The book layers on the description and the internal monologuing and the angst, but most of the novel is just a countdown to the Solstice.

Oh, and angsty tantrums from Jared. So many angsty tantrums. I put up with Jared in the previous novel because Kami was such a strong character and didn't put up with his pressuring. At the end of the previous novel, Kami actually severed their magical bond because she was (rightly) terrified about what it was doing to her emotional health and independence. Well, that action sends Jared spiralling into an insufferable, whiny, self-loathing angst-spiral for the rest of this damn book and I just couldn't stand him. He spends a good 70% of the novel being a total asshole to people who care about him while crying that "nobody wuvs me, I am so dark and unwuvable and broken, I cannot handle the feels!"

GET OVER YOURSELF, JARED.

The novel beats the dead horse that is Jared's Tortured Feels over and over, but at least other characters (like Ash and Holly) also get some spectacular development. Untold spends time examining the pieces on this particular chessboard rather than making any significant plays, but thankfully (most of) the characters (who are not named Jared) are interesting and multifaceted enough to hold my attention.

Yeah, it's a middle book, but it keeps a firm enough hold on the reigns to keep me excited for the final novel.
B

"The Naturals," by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

The Protagonist: Cassie Hobbes. A teenage girl with an astounding ability to profile people who is recruited by the FBI to help solve cold cases.

Her Angst: Her mother was murdered and the killer was never found - could the FBI help her find out who did it?

Secondary Cast:

Michael: A preppy trust fund kid capable of reading people's emotions.

Lia: A bratty Asian punk girl who's a human lie detector.

Sloane: A hyperactive blond capable of memorizing data and analyzing patterns.

Dean: A brooding loner who, like Cassie, is an expert profiler.

Agent Locke: One of the FBI agents who helps train the Naturals in reinterpreting evidence.

Agent Briggs: The head of the Naturals Program.

Angst Checklist:

• Dead parents
• Overprotective Italian families
• Child neglect
• Child exploitation
• Child abuse
• Serial killers
• Victimization of women
• I embody serial killers for a living - but, like, not in a creepy way

The Word: Cassie has a gift. Thanks to her mother's training, she can look at people, assess their details, and successfully determine their backgrounds and guess their future decisions. Cassie also has a curse. Her mother - who travelled the country using her profiling skills to pose as a psychic - was brutally murdered by an unknown assailant when Cassie was twelve, and she's never truly gotten over it. 

Now seventeen, Cassie's approached by a mysterious boy who leaves a business card from the FBI. The FBI has started an experimental program that involves recruiting teenagers with raw, miraculous crime-solving gifts (dubbed Naturals) to help solve cold cases. A human lie detector and an emotion reader count among their recent recruits. Cassie agrees to join the program - partly to help people, but also to look for a chance to use FBI resources to find her mother's killer. 

As Cassie starts practicing her abilities and getting to know the deeply weird, deeply troubled fellow Naturals in the program, a mysterious serial killer with ties to Cassie's past starts stalking prey closer and closer to the Naturals' home base, making it difficult for Cassie and her pals to stay uninvolved.

I was hooked on The Naturals from beginning to end. It has an original and highly interesting concept (teenagers hired by the FBI to solve cold cases) that's backed up with a well-developed setting, entertaining background details, and razor-sharp pacing. The nature of the "Naturals" (teenagers with preternatural detection skills) also provides oodles of angst and dark pasts to go around. None of these teenagers developed their abilities in the happiest of environments, but it is incredibly fun to watch how Cassie and Dean determine a stranger's personality just by looking at her parked car.

That being said, the author doesn't spend time developing all these characters equally. Cassie is a wonderful and unusual protagonist. Despite being taken in by her father's loud and affectionate clan, she has trouble connecting to people, always feeling one step removed from the ability to return the love they lavish on her. She worries that she's too broken by her tragedy to love anyone back. Michael and Dean, the two other points of the novel's standard-issue Love Triangle, also get some backstories, but the other members of the team don't get much more than an introduction and a few scenes to air out their unique quirks. But there's every chance we'll get to learn more in the sequel.

There's also some pretty graphic violence - and sadly, it's all directed against women. Women are constantly victimized in this book. And while I realize that it's common enough in serial killer narratives to be a cliche, I wish the author had tried something different. Finally, while the big reveal is a nice surprise, it doesn't really hold up when put to severe questioning.

All told, however, The Naturals is a whip-smart, incredibly fun and original YA mystery.
A

"The Raven Boys," by Maggie Stiefvater

The Protagonist: Blue Sargent. A non-psychic in a family of gifted seers, her own gift is the ability to amplify already-existing magic.
Angst: When some rich white dudes want to find a sleeping Welsh king, she sees an opportunity to be an active participant in an adventure instead of a passive supporter.

The Secondary Cast:

Gansey: It's tough out there for a rich white dude. Hopefully, finding this dead rich white dude with magical powers will finally make people take me seriously. If you need me, I'll be sulking about how unfair life is in the renovated factory I bought and turned into my own personal Batcave.

Ronan: Grrr! Ronan angry! Ronan mean! Ronan miss his dead dad! Feelings scare Ronan! LOVE RONAN!

Noah: I am shy and quiet and I pet people's hair and this makes me endearing for some reason.

Adam: I'm the Poor One. But I work hard! And I don't take any charity! I ... you gonna eat that? No?

Angst Checklist:

• Magic
• Poverty
• Child Abuse
• Being Dead
• Daddy Issues
• Whiny Rich People
• Ravens
• Aunts who are Weird in a Good Way
• Aunts who are Weird in a Bad Way

The Word: I didn't like this novel.

Let's just get this out of the way. I realize this novel and its characters (*cough* its male characters) are beloved in the YA blogging community in general, but me? I just didn't get it.

Our protagonist (sort of...) is Blue, a non-psychic from a family of psychics whose main source of income comes from dropping Cryptic Hints That Prove Relevant to the Plot Later On - which becomes pretty convenient as the book continues. Is it bad character development if they're written as people who spout random dialogue and have no background or motivation?

Anyway, Blue's helping her visiting aunt Neeve in a ritual to identify people who are going to die in the next year in an old graveyard (as one does), when she spots the future ghost of a boy wearing the uniform of the nearby Aglionby prep school. Blue's never been able to see ghosts (past or future) before, and Neeve tells her this means she might be the one who kills him. Or he might be her true love. So easy to get those two confused. The future ghost identifies himself only as Gansey.

Meanwhile, the actual Gansey turns up in the next scene, and he and his Raven Boys (nicknamed so by the resentful town for the raven emblem of their school) are searching for an ancient Welsh king who's buried somewhere in Virginia because hey we're all white dudes and crazy rich (except for the Not Rich One), so why not?

They're set up a bit like a boy band, where every Raven Boy gets his own accessories (relevant female protagonist sold separately). You have Batman With Parents (Gansey), Tim Riggins (Ronan), Pigpen (Noah), and The Not Rich One Who's Slightly More Interesting (Adam). Fate (or convenient plotting) has them meet up with Blue and her Phenomenal Not-Psychic Powers and they all jump into the Mystery Machine Gansey's broken-down Camaro because ancient Welsh kings aren't going to wake themselves.

There are a lot of interesting ideas in this book - too many, which is my main problem with The Raven Boys. Hear me out. There's so much Deeply Important Magical Nonsense crammed into this one book that it was impossible to stay interested or invested in any of it. Alfred Hitchcock once explained the concept of the MacGuffin: the MacGuffin is something that matters very deeply to the characters of a fictional narrative and very little to those reading or watching that narrative. We, the reader, care about the MacGuffin when we start to care about the characters who are pursuing it.

The Welsh King is The Raven Boys' boring-ass, meaningless MacGuffin because, in a novel stuffed with dream thieves, psychic hotlines, aunts who might be evil (on a good day?), magic mirrors, corpse roads, secret ghosts, mysterious father murders, grape juice scrying and baby animals, there is precious little time spent developing the actual characters, much less their gossamer-thin reasons for caring about a mythical wish-granting European monarch.

The characters are defined by one or two attributes apiece, cherry-picked for their YA-lit popularity - Ronan is Angry (and hot) because of his father's mysterious death. Adam is Independent (and hot) because he refuses to take his friends' charity to leave his abusive father. He Will Live Life on His Own Terms and Without Handouts - unless you're a magical wish-granting king. Then it's totally cool. Handout away!

The author tries - there are some marvellously insightful passages here and there, in between the untidy heaps of supernatural window dressing. But there's simply not enough.

And then there's Gansey. This privileged little asshole is the "hero" of our story and the one "destined" for Blue. He really is Batman with Parents - all the wealthy ego-stroking manipulativeness, none of the understanding of real-world misery. He lives in his own refurbished factory/Batcave. He decides to call Blue "Jane" because her real name is weird, but throws a stink eye at anyone who calls him by his real name (Dick, appropriately enough).

He's dedicated his life (and the lives of his friends) to finding this Welsh King because his amazing wealth and privilege is such a horrific burden to his dreams of being The Specialest Snowflake. It's so much harder to be recognized as a brilliant individual when you're busy tripping over all your daddy's money. He drives an old, beloved, broken-down Camaro to show you that he's deep - unless the road is rocky, in which case he'll just fly his sister's helicopter (for reals). If only his life could be more like Adam's, then people would value his accomplishments and his life would have meaning. Yes - Adam, who works three jobs while getting daily beatings from his trailer-trash father.

Why the hell should I give a shit if Gansey finds that damn Welsh King or not? You see what I mean about MacGuffins?

And don't even get me started on Blue. Seriously, don't - because I shut the book with only the haziest of impressions of her character. She was - nice. I guess. Didn't get in the way too much. She and Adam were cute but she's "obviously destined" for Gansey.

Honestly, if the contents of this book had been stretched out over a trilogy, with enough character development and build-up and layers and interaction in between, The Raven Boys could have been as good as the Fionavar Tapestry. The book's well-written and cobbles together an interesting mythology. As it was, I was overwhelmed by the fantasy aspects and underwhelmed by the human ones.
C-

"The Truth about Alice," by Jennifer Mathieu

The Main Cast:

Alice: A sorta-kinda-popular girl who is outcast when she's accused of promiscuity and blamed for a popular quarterback's death. Who is the real girl behind the rumours?

Elaine: The most popular girl in school, who believes and happily spreads the rumours about Alice.

Josh: The best friend of the dead quarterback who is the only one who really knows what went on in that car before it crashed.

Kurt: The class nerd who has longed after Alice for years.

Kelsie: Alice's former best friend, who decides to use the scandal to enact her long-repressed desire for vengeance.

Angst Checklist:

• Slut-shaming
• Repressed sexuality
• Bullying
• Being a Lying Liar who Lies, YOU LIAR (KELSIE!)
• Best Friends
• Absolutely Failing At Being a Best Friend (KELSIE)
• Grief
• Perception
• Male privilege

The Word: This novel is what 13 Reasons Why tried and ultimately failed to be: a novel about perception and rumour and how a mixture of malice from a few and ambivalent enabling from many can completely assassinate a normal person's character.

There are two major "truths" about Alice Franklin. The first is that she slept with two guys at a high school party - college boy Tommy and popular quarterback Brandon. The second is that she was sexting Brandon the night he lost control of his car and fatally crashed. All the characters live in Healy, a small Texas football town, and with the loss of its Golden Boy Football Hero, everyone is quick to blame the loner slut from a broken home, turning Alice into a despised outcast.

This novel is told from five alternating viewpoints (with Alice's concluding the book). Each perspective is skewed in its own way, and reveals more about the perceiver than it does the perceived.  I found this storytelling device incredibly effective, as each character's examination of Alice's situation gives them insight into their own lives and problems.

First, there's Elaine, the Queen Bee whose party Alice allegedly double-dipped at, and my favourite character. Her personal history with Alice gives her plenty of reasons to believe the rumours and few reasons to care if they're not true. She's also honest about pretty much everything, even herself and her own blind spots, privileges, and limitations. She's the town Mean Girl and she's pretty happy with her lot in life, and I kind of loved her acceptance of herself.

Next is Kurt, the socially ostracized nerd who's worshipped Alice from afar, and only really gets the courage to reach out to her after she's been tarred and feathered by the rest of the town. Kurt's obsessiveness about her is a little creepy, but his perspective is interesting. He thinks Alice is the closest humanity will ever come to producing a Perfect Human Being, but by actually hanging out with her, he discovers she's more than a fantasy or an Unattainable Hot Girl to stare at.

We also get the perspective of Josh, Brandon's best friend who was in the passenger seat when Brandon crashed his car. While Elaine's and Kurt's POVs paint Brandon in a pretty asstastic light, Josh helps show the other side of that. Brandon still comes across as an entitled, privileged asshole, but he was human. He had friends that he liked and family that he loved - friends and family who are legitimately devastated that he's gone. Of course, Josh is also the source of the story that Alice sexted Brandon the night he was killed - and getting to the heart of that whole mess is the other point of Josh's POV.

Last, and certainly least, we get Kelsie. Formerly Alice's best friend, she abandons her once the scandal breaks to avoid losing her coveted spot at the popular table. That, in itself, would be understandable enough. High school can be a jungle. The further in we get, the more we realize that Kelsie is a spineless, hypocritical, obsessive, venomous little parasite who has secretly resented Alice for over a year for wildly irrational reasons.

If anyone deserves to be the outright antagonist of this novel (other than Brandon, RIP) it's her. Elaine is an enabler, Kurt is blinded by lust/adoration, Josh lies to cover up his own tangled feelings of love and guilt - but Kelsie is really the only one of the four who intentionally hurts Alice out of a desire to hurt Alice. And I kind of wanted her to suffer some really heinous karmic punishment. She doesn't (that's not really the novel's point), but I hated her enough to wish that she did. Hell, I'd read a sequel if it was all about how everyone found out what a toxic social remora she is and shunned her forever.

OTHER THAN THAT, however, The Truth About Alice was an intense, quick read with some excellent characterization.
B+

"Unspoken," by Sarah Rees Brennan

The Protagonist: Kami Glass. An investigative report-in-training, she's always looking for the next big story to blow wide open, in her small English town.
Her Angst: The return of the infamous Lynburn family looks like the perfect scoop - until she learns she has a secret bond with Jared, the Lynburn black sheep.

The Secondary Cast:

Angela: Kami's ornery BFF who's happy to help with Kami's adventures, so long as they doesn't involve Annoying People or interfere with her naps.

Jared: The "voice" who has conversed with Kami in her head for the better part of her life. The good news? He's real and so are his abs! The bad news - he's real, and knows all of her innermost secrets.

Ash: The cute and helpful son of Lillian Lynburn. Jared's cousin. Genuinely likes Kami, and worries about her connection to his "dangerous" cousin.

Rosalind: Jared's awful mother. Just awful. The worst.

Lillian: Rosalind's icy sister and Ash's mother. Less awful to Jared, but not exactly welcoming, either.

Uncle Rob: Lillian's husband and Ash's dad. The only member of the Lynburn family who's openly loving to Jared.

Angst Checklist:

• Racism and Xenophobia
• Class Divides
• Slut Shaming
• Rich Hot Angsty Boy Shaming (for MYSTERIOUS REASONS)
• Relationship Boundaries
• Awkward Love Triangles
• My Best Friend Can Literally Read My Thoughts and That Is Not Helpful At All
• LGBT Issues
• Child Abuse
• Jealous Sisters
• Sssssecretsssss

The Word: Kami Glass has lived her whole life in Sorry-in-the-Vale, a bucolic little English village with roots going back hundreds of years. Despite being born there, she's always been a little bit of an outcast - partly because of her Asian heritage and partly because she regularly holds conversations in her head with an imaginary boy named Jared.

Now hear me out.

More than anything, Kami wants to be an investigative journalist, and sussing out the town's myriad secrets is her life's ambition. She thinks she's hit the jackpot when she learns the town's founding family, the Lynburns (two surviving sisters, a cousin, and their respective sons Jared and Ash) have returned to Sorry-in-the-Vale after a long absence in America. They're rich and live in a mansion. Everyone in town lives in fear of them, but refuses to explain why. And the two Lynburn boys are ridiculously hot, angsty, and mysterious. Kami can't wait to interview them and find out what all the fuss is about.

Hear me out! Just give me a minute!

When Kami runs into angry, mistreated Jared Lynburn, she discovers that he's the boy she's secretly conversed with her entire conscious life. Her imaginary boy is real, and neither knows what to do about their psychic connection, or what it means with regards to the Lynburns' dark history with Sorry-in-the-Vale.

Okay, now, I can see you side-eying this review already. Instant bonds, a Love Triangle with Angsty Angry Loner Boys, a quirky heroine too nosy for her own good. The perfect ingredients for One Hot-Ass Mess of a Book.

Except.

Except this book is actually kind of ... good? Amazingly good, even. One of the best things I've read this year, if you want to be specific. Yes, Unspoken trades on a lot of popular YA tropes that have been beaten into glue by previous and less-skilled authors, but Unspoken does it in an incredibly intelligent and self-aware way.

Kami does have an instant bond with Jared, but it's not a source of fuzzy duckling feelings that eschew reality. Rather, their connection is embarrassing and unpleasant and awkward. It's one thing to believe in a "real" imaginary friend - it's an entirely different thing to discover you've placed the quotation marks on the wrong word and you have very little privacy or independence for your own thoughts. Their bond is a source of (rather than a cheap solution to) conflict.

The story is not all about the guys, either. I mean, they're important - the Lyburn boys do live in a decrepit, thunderstorm-prone mansion drenched in sssssecretssss - but the novel spends just as much time with Kami and her friends Angela and Holly. One of the more interesting subplots involves Kami re-thinking her dismissive opinion of Holly as a boy-crazy flirt - thanks, in part, to Jared calling her on her close-mindedness.

Kami is such a dynamic character. I loved her. She's confident and take charge, and refuses to lower her expectations for anyone else. I loved her righteous search for the truth - even as she learns that some truths are ugly and painful and can erode her trust in the social structures in which she's lived her whole life. Even then, she never gives up her trust in herself. Take her bond with Jared - she's fine with using it for their friendship, but it makes the prospect of a romantic relationship deeply uncomfortable to her and she refuses to give in to Jared's pressuring. Yes, she genuinely likes and trusts Jared, but she respects herself enough to set boundaries and stick by them.

In fact, Kami's strength and confidence are the reason Jared doesn't look like a complete asshole in comparison. He's a very angry, broody, demanding character with more than just a few crazy wives locked up in his attic (metaphorically speaking!). He had an extremely lonely and painful childhood thanks to an abusive father and a selfishly uninterested mother, and even his aunt and cousin don't treat him much better.

His bond with Kami is pretty much the only positive relationship in his entire life and it's entirely understandable, from a character development standpoint, why he wants to hold onto it and develop it. But he's very aggressive about the bond, and constantly pressures Kami to deepen it. If Kami had been one of those submissive, doormat characters who treat the hero's Sad Past as a free pass to be an ass (hey, I rhymed!), Jared could have been a horrific character. However, Kami is constantly fighting back with her own strength and forcing Jared to back down and rethink himself, and because of this equal balance, I was able to enjoy and understand Jared more. And even so, I felt his angry tantrums got a little repetitive towards the end.

All of these elements, brewed together, creates a delicious, seething cauldron of Gothic mystery that keeps the reader guessing. Something is definitely amiss with the Lynburns and their connection to the town. However, as Kami discovers, her town is is plenty amiss all on its own. With developed female characters, a great mystery, lots of small-town secrets, and swift pacing, Unspoken is a fantastic addition to my YA bookshelf.
A

"We Were Liars," by E. Lockhart

The Protagonist: Cadence "Cady" Sinclair Eastman. The eldest grandchild of wealthy tycoon Harris Sinclair, she spends every summer on a private island with her grandfather, aunts, and cousins until an accident occurs during her fifteenth summer.
Her Angst: Now seventeen, she returns to the island to find out the truth. Too bad she belongs to a family of liars.

The Secondary Cast:

Johnny: Cady's cousin and the eldest Sinclair grandson. Wacky and humorous.

Mirren: Another cousin - sweet and supportive. Still, after the accident, she doesn't return Cady's e-mails.

Gat: Cady's crush and the nephew of Johnny's stepdad. Ambitious and angry, he loves her but also challenges her to look beyond her narrow worldview.

Harris Sinclair: Cady's wealthy grandfather who owns the island. Determined to teach his descendants how to uphold the Sinclair family name.

Angst Checklist:

• Privilege
• Brain Injury
• Racism
• Divorce
• Amnesia
• Family Secrets

The Word: Once upon a time, there was a rich man named Harris Sinclair, and he had three daughters. This man was rich enough to buy himself his own private island by Martha's Vineyard, and rich enough to build a house for each of his grown daughters so that they and their children could come and live together on the island every summer.

Of those grandchildren, the oldest three formed a club called the Liars, comprised of Cady, Johnny, Mirren - and Gat, the nephew of Johnny's stepdad. Every summer, they congregate on the island to play tennis, go snorkelling, make homemade ice cream, and eat big gourmet dinners out on the deck, the whole Sinclair family together. It's loving and idyllic, and even Cady's angst over her growing affection for Gat can't strip the magic from the place.

Until the summer when the Liars are all fifteen, and something goes wrong.

Cady sustains a brain injury and nearly drowns - only she can't remember how it happened. Two years later, she still suffers from horrific migraines that have ruined her grades and caused her to withdraw from sports and clubs. She hasn't been back to the island since Summer Fifteen, and she misses the Liars, none of whom have ever been good about staying in touch beyond the summer months. Despite her mother's misgivings, she begs to return to the island to spend a normal summer with her granddad, her aunts, and her cousins.

Yes, part of her wants to return to the summers she missed, when she was normal and pain-med free. But part of her also wants to find out what really happened during Summer Fifteen, and why her family refuses to tell her the truth.

This novel is as slender, sharp, and effective as a stiletto. With a few efficient brushstrokes, Lockhart creates a gorgeous and evocative setting that appears, at first, like heaven. Imagine spending the summer with your family on your own sunny private island - with tennis courts, board games, family movie nights in front of the flatscreen, and an efficient staff of cooks and housekeepers to clean up after you.

But nothing is perfect. We Were Liars is about the unreliability of memory - especially nostalgia and its tendency to gloss over flaws and arguments. Unwittingly rendered an outsider due to her illness and her amnesia regarding her accident, Cady starts to see her family from the outside in, and her interpretations of the events of Summer Fifteen begin to unravel as she uncovers a darker side to the Sinclair family's manipulative dynamic.

We Were Liars is also a novel about privilege. Cady starts to learn more about what it means to be privileged through her interactions with Gat. Gat and Johnny's stepdad are Indian - a fact which hasn't (and has never) gone unnoticed by the other (white, beautiful, blond) Sinclairs. Cady and the other Liars have always considered Gat one of them, so it's a shock to learn that Gat has not always felt the same way - and with good reason.

Finally, We Were Liars is about innocence that, once lost, can never be regained. About truths that, once learned, cannot be unlearned. The characterization in this novel is superb. This is a novel without villains - only antagonists. And no one in the Sinclair family is the antagonist. Rather, its their combined flaws - their fear, their grief, their greed, their pride, their prejudice, their entitlement - that rise up to destroy themselves and the people around them. It's mesmerizing.

This powerful, layered novel is not to be missed.
A+

"Dreams of Gods and Monsters," by Laini Taylor

The Principal Cast:

Karou: It's up to her to help the chimaera ally themselves with the exiled seraphim to bring peace to Eretz.

Akiva: He might be the only one with the experience and charisma to convince his fellow seraphim to rebel against the Empire - but can he convince Karou to forgive him?

Liraz: Akiva's angry, shamed sister, who believes she's too damaged by war to be any good in peacetime.

Ziri: A young chimaera who sacrifices his body to help impersonate Thiago to bring peace to his people.

Eliza: A human woman on the run from a mysterious heritage who's haunted by visions of angels and beasts.

Angst Checklist:

• Life is Hard
• Like, Really Hard
• Did I mention Life is Hard?
• Also War
• And Hope
• And a lot of other Abstract Concepts
• Evil Grandmas
• Gullible Christians
• Douchey Research Fellows

The Word: I love candy, but in moderation. Eating too many turns the saliva in my mouth to acidic syrup, burning my tongue until I can't even really taste the sweetness anymore.

That's the reaction I had to Dreams of Gods and Monsters. The eagerly-awaited follow-up to Laini Taylor's endlessly inventive Daughter of Smoke and Bone and Days of Blood and Starlight taught me nothing so much as, this: Sorry Zuzana, but there is such a thing as too much cake.

Since the last book, Akiva and his Misbegotten seraphim brethren have fled the Empire to try and make an alliance with the remaining chimaera. To his surprise, Thiago, the notoriously violent chimaera general, is willing to put aside his people's hostility to consider an uneasy partnership.

Unbeknownst to Akiva - Thiago isn't exactly in his right mind. Or right body, I should say. Karou was forced to kill the general in the previous book when he tried to rape her, but she resurrected his body - with the soul of her dear friend, Ziri, inside. Karou and Ziri know the only way to keep the chimaera under control is to keep up the charade that their trusted general Thiago is still alive. But will the gentle-hearted Ziri be able to successfully impersonate the brutal White Wolf?

Meanwhile, Jael, Akiva's monstrous uncle who has assumed the mantle of Emperor, has travelled to Earth in order to exploit Judeo-Christian symbolism in order to acquire human weapons of mass destruction. If it looks like an angel, carries a harp like an angel, and speaks Latin - well, then let's hand over our nukes!

This all sounds fascinating, right? Unfortunately, Gods and Monsters is a chocolate cake with too much icing. The cake itself is delicious and dark and layered and creative, there's no doubt about it - but you have to wade through so much sticky, sugary angst prose to get to it that it's almost not worth it.

There is no reason for Gods ands Monsters to be 600 pages long. I've always liked Laini Taylor's gorgeous writing - when it's applied economically. Here, a single act of magic will take five pages to describe. There are pages and pages of repetitive angsty inner monologues from both Karou and Akiva about how Everything is Dark and Bleak and Hopeless. Why do difficult things, when complaining about how difficult things are to do is so much easier?

The novel is rather haphazardly paced as a result. Karou will waste paragraphs dithering about the precise mechanics of Akiva's smile and what it means For Their Future, but the Big Giant Bad Guys are dispatched with rather hilarious (and overly-convenient) swiftness. Oh, and there's the sudden, out-of-nowhere Extra Adventure tacked on at the end to gum up the narrative in the name of Plugging a Sequel Series.

This novel reads better when it's skimmed. Taylor's language is beautiful, but it's the application of the language that matters. I'm frankly disappointed that such a promising first novel would get bogged down by increasingly bloated, bleak, self-indulgent sequels.
B-

"Cinder," by Marissa Meyer

The Protagonist: Linh Cinder. A cyborg mechanic forced to fix cars and robots to support the disdainful stepfamily that owns her.
Her Angst: On top of being part machine, she has a huge crush on the son of the Emperor. While his feelings may be mutual, will they remain so once he finds out she can't pass through any metal detectors at the airport?

Secondary Cast:

Prince Kai: The heir to the kingdom. Fights to preserve his commonwealth from the depredations of pestilence, famine, and psychotic evil queens from the moon.

Dr. Erlhard: A scientist who experiments on cyborgs to produce a cure for the plague that's tearing the planet apart - and he discovers that something about Cinder might just hold the key to the planet's stability.

Andri: Cinder's evil stepmother.

Pearl: Cinder's evil stepsister.

Peony: Cinder's rather nice stepsister, who falls ill with the plague.

Queen Levana: Psychotic evil queen from the moon. Uses her psychic powers to convince other people she's beautiful.

Angst Checklist:

• "What do you expect, Mother? I'M HALF MACHINE!!!"
• Moon Queens be crazy
• I love him but we're from two different worlds
• I love him but my stepmum stole my foot
• Parental Expectations
• Secret Royalty
• The Needs of the Many Versus the Needs of the Few

The Word: Right after reading A Long Long Sleep, a sci-fi retelling of Sleeping Beauty that I appreciated more than I liked, I picked up Cinder - a sci-fi retelling of Cinderella that I did appreciate and like. Well, how about that!

It's not a flawless novel, to be sure, but it has a much more likeable protagonist, a truly original and interesting setting, and it incorporates the elements of the original fairytale in highly amusing and clever ways (the pumpkin!).

Cinder lives in New Beijing, the Imperial City of the new Asian Commonwealth in a futuristic time far removed from ours. She toils as a mechanic in order to support her stepsisters Pearl and Peony, as well as her vicious stepmother Andri. Andri hates Cinder because her husband got sick and died on the trip he made to adopt the orphaned girl, and also because Cinder is a cyborg: significant parts of her (a hand, a leg) were replaced with robotic parts when she was eleven.

Cinder's not too wild about being a cyborg either. Since the country they live in considers cyborgs little better than legal property, she risks imprisonment and death if she tries to escape her unpleasant living situation. The only bright spot in her life is Prince Kai, the earnest heir to the commonwealth who asks her to fix a tutor android carrying sensitive state information. This Prince Charming has his own problems - his father the Emperor is dying of the same plague that is cutting a swath through his country's population, and an avaricious foreign Queen is looking to conquer his weakened kingdom by any means necessary.

When Cinder's kind stepsister Peony comes down with the plague, an unhinged Andri blames Cinder and signs her up for medical experimentation against her will. When Cinder is dragged to the Imperial laboratories, however, she becomes involved in a complex conspiracy involving the Prince, the mysterious and incurable plague, and the sinister Queen of the Moon.

Cinder's freakin' awesome y'all. She's got a lot of reasons to angst, but she's incredibly capable and forward thinking. While she struggles with a fair bit of self-loathing over her cyborg parts, she never lets it sway her into believing she's deserving of the ill treatment she receives. She fights for herself and she's a problem solver. I also really love how her inner monologue incorporates her adjustment to being part machine without ever seeming unrealistic, cutesy-clever or "punny."

And Prince Kai is, well, a VNYM. A Very Nice Young Man. He's earnest and well-meaning and righteous and RULING A KINGDOM IS HARD Y'ALL and Evil Psychic Moon Queens be trippin', but he's also not terribly interesting. Which he shouldn't be, to be fair. It's Cinder's book. But, well - he's a nice guy and he works hard but he really never does anything remotely unpredictable.

But now we're starting to get into the book's flaws. There aren't too many - but one of the major ones is the romance between Kai and Cinder. I just don't buy it - and not because of the class differences. Because they don't actually spend that much time together. They always seem to see each other in passing, a few minutes at a time, and suddenly Kai is asking her to be his date for the Super Important Political Ball, and it never seems like anything but the most Random of Choices. Like asking your pizza delivery guy if he'd squire you to your sister's wedding.

I also had a problem with the villain of the novel (and likely the series) - Levana, the Queen of the Lunar Kingdom (the moon). The way the Lunar people were introduced set me up to actually feel for them. The Earthens distrust them because it's rumoured they have psychic powers and chop off people's feet and set people on fire and kill babies and all I heard was, "They live far away on a tiny rock in the sky and look and act different from us, therefore they are EEEEVIL." Perhaps this is just my own reading expectations, but I felt like I was being led to believe they were simply misunderstood thanks to prejudice and ignorance.

But, as we soon learn, Levana really is just that mind-controlling, baby-killing, foot-chopping-off, niece-immolating evil, and the Moon is North Korea in Space. Levana is depicted as so obviously, over-the-top evil that she clashes with the more well-drawn and complexly flawed characters in the novel. Even Andri the Evil Stepmother has nuance and depth and grief that make her a person and not a cartoon. I get that Levana is intended as the series' ultimate antagonist, and that she represents the amalgamation of every Evil Queen figure from Brothers Grimm central casting, but girl needs to tone it down a notch.

Otherwise, though, Cinder is a finely-paced, creative novel with a fantastic, unconventional setting and a cheeky loyalty to the source material.
B+

"A Long, Long Sleep," by Annie Sheehan

The Protagonist: Rosalinda "Rose" Fitzroy. An heiress who wakes up after spending 62 years in frozen stasis.
Her Angst: Her entire life as she knows it is gone - her parents and friends are dead, and the world has changed in unfathomable ways. Her enemies, however, may still be alive...

Secondary Cast:

Xavier: Rose's childhood friend and first love. Rose met him as an infant, but as her parents put her back into stasis, their ages soon started to match up.

Bren: The boy who accidentally wakes Rose up from her frozen sleep, and one of the few friends she makes in this uncertain future.

Otto: An alien-hybrid boy who attends school with Rose and Bren, he commiserates with Rose on their shared weirdness and outcast status.

Mr. Guillory: The CEO of Rose's parent's company - a shady character who is not happy that this pretty popsicle has stolen his company out from under his nose.

Angst Checklist:

• Being an Outcast
• Scientific Ethics
• Underperforming in School
• I Changed My Boyfriend's Diapers At One Point - But That's Not Creepy, Is It?
• Child Abuse
• Self-Hatred
• Corpse Robots

The Word: I checked this book out from the library after reading an effusively positive review of it from the Book Smugglers. However, I found myself supremely annoyed with the novel and its protagonist. And yet - the ending turned the book around for me, and made me question my own reaction to it.

In this futuristic re-telling of Sleeping Beauty, 16-year-old Rosalinda Fitzroy wakes up from stasis to find a strange boy giving her mouth-to-mouth (the CPR kind, not the non-consensual sexytimes kind). To her horror, she discovers she's woken up 62 years in the future. Her wealthy parents bought a state-of-the-art stasis tube for Rose's protection and preservation, but died in a helicopter crash before they could thaw her out or tell anyone about her whereabouts. For six decades, her tube has been mouldering in a forgotten subbasement of her parents' condo.

Now she's awake, with a serious case of freezer-burn, and has unexpectedly inherited her parents' enormously powerful company, UniCorp. As Rose struggles to adjust to a strange future, grieve her deceased parents and boyfriend (a neighbour boy named Xavier), and tentatively develop friendships with the boy who woke her up (Bren) and the classmate who relates to her (Otto) - someone else isn't happy about her reappearance, and would just as soon put her back to sleep. Permanently. 

For the majority of this book, I hated Rose. She was a cowering, snivelling, useless, foolish, self-loathing, doormat martyr of a heroine who stumbles around around in tears whining about how worthless she is while the men in the story tell her she's pretty and take care of her. She's ignored by her foster parents, exploited by her guardian Mr. Guillory, and attacked by a corpse-robot (for reals) and she has to be squeezed like a lemon before she'll even tell anyone she's unhappy or, you know, in mortal danger. What a moron. I couldn't stand her.

But then we start getting into her backstory. I suppose it is a kind of a spoiler, but for the purposes of my review I want to address it, so you've been warned.

I initially thought Rose was put into stasis for her own protection, or because her parents were hiding a high-tech secret life from her, but the answer was far more mundane, and saddening, than I'd anticipated: Rose's parents used stasis to abuse her. Wealthy and entitled, her mother and father would bring her out of stasis to play at being parents with birthday parties and champagne breakfasts and shopping trips - then put her back in whenever she acted out, or disobeyed, or parenting actually got hard.

They weren't interested in having actual offspring. They wanted a permanent child to worship and obey them. And when it looked like she was growing up, despite their most dedicated efforts to keep her childlike and cowed, they left her in the toy chest for good.

The ordinariness (in a sense) of this explanation, and the surprisingly clever way it was slowly unravelled throughout the story, saved this novel for me. Even the most melodramatic and portentous science fictional technology can and will be misused by petty, small people to solve their petty, small problems.

And it (finally) explains Rose's behaviour to a tee. Her intense dislike of herself, her tendency to shoulder blame for every bad experience, her refusal to complain about mistreatment or point fingers at people who are hurting her, it all makes sense because she's been raised to believe her life deserves to be put on "Pause." As much as I dislike Rose as a protagonist, she's a realistic reaction to trauma and abuse. It's also more than a little fascinating to watch Rose's painstakingly slow realization that she even was a victim of abuse.

I still didn't like this book. The heroine was just too passive and whiny for me - but, looking back on my experience reading this novel, that was more due to my own reading preferences than a literary failing on the novel's part. Rose's character is well-developed and realistic. The narrative doesn't push her too far or end her story with a too-soon love interest (which is nice, because her entire relationship with Xavier squicked me the fuck out). The science-fictional setting was detailed and rounded out - almost too detailed, with a lot of elements that weren't completely relevant to the story.

As a book about the insidious nature of emotional and parental abuse, A Long, Long, Sleep was clever and detailed. I didn't like it because, frankly, I don't like reading modern/futuristic fairy tale retellings where the heroines are further victimized. But to each their own. Consider your own reading preferences - if yours are anything like mine, I'd steer clear.
B-

"Ask the Passengers," by A.S. King

The Protagonist: Astrid Jones. As the outsider in a close-knit small-town, she's never been one of the crowd.
Her Angst: When she realizes she's in love with a girl, she fears becoming even more of an outcast.

Secondary Characters:

Kristina: Astrid's best friend, one of the most popular girls in Unity Valley, and a closet lesbian. While she pushes Astrid to be open about herself, she's more in love with the small-town limelight than she's let on.

Justin: Astrid's other best friend and Kristina's beard boyfriend. He and Kristina try to involve Astrid in more activities.

Dee: An open lesbian from another school district, she works with Astrid at a catering company and is love with her - although she wants to get more physical than Astrid is comfortable with.

Ellis: Astrid's little sister, who has totally glommed on to small-town life - including the bigoted aspects.

Astrid's Mum (because she's not worthy of a first name right now): A vain, superficial, gossip-obsessed agoraphobe who cares more about what other people think than how her daughters feel.

Astrid's Dad (ditto): A loser deadbeat who's decided he'd rather "secretly" smoke pot in the attic than be a parent to his kids.

Angst Checklist:

• Sexuality
• Peer Pressure
• Small Town Values
• Homophobia
• Racism
• The First Amendment Right to be a Homophobic Racist Holocaust Denier
• Gossip

The Word: Although I'd been asked to read this as the March Book for the Forever Young Adult Book Club, this book had already been on my TBR for a while thanks to the feverishly positive reviews from several bloggers I respect. 

When Astrid was nine, she and her her family moved from New York City to Unity Valley - a small town that is small in All Of The Ways - including small-minded. In such a deeply-conservative town glued together by malicious gossip and dusty tradition, Astrid has never truly fit in - even without revealing the secret she's been hiding from everyone. 

And her family is useless - her little sister Ellis has firmly embedded herself in townie life and her superficial, unloving mother Claire is too busy attempting (and failing) to do the same thing to involve herself with Astrid's problems. Astrid's father, meanwhile, has decided to check out of being a father and husband by developing a drug habit. The last thing Astrid wants is to trust any of them with her secret - "tolerant" is how they want to be perceived, not how they really are. 

You see, Astrid's secret is that she is love with a girl - a feisty hockey player named Dee.

Astrid's not exactly scared of being gay - rather, she's scared of being shoved into the "Gay Box."  She's scared of having other people decide who she is and what that means before she has a chance to, which is why she still hasn't told her best friends Kristina and Justin, even though they've been each other's mutual beards as Unity Valley's Homecoming Couple for years. She's scared that "coming out" will irrevocably label and define her before she's really sure who and what she is. Does being in love with one girl make you gay? What if you don't feel this way forever? What if you change you mind? And shouldn't people care that there's more to you than who you're in love with? 

It's a fascinating argument that reminds me strongly of Openly Straight - only I think Ask the Passengers handles the angst of your identity being defined entirely by your sexuality in a much more nuanced way. A.S. King is a master at showing both sides of Astrid's insecurity - on the one hand, she's scared of people making decisions for her. On the other, she's just as terrified of making decisions for herself. 

She'd much rather coast along in limbo with her head down and let the cards fall where they may, but that's just a decision to not decide, and it comes with consequences the same as any other choice. So when Dee pressures Astrid to come out - I can see that she's pushing Astrid on something that should be Astrid's choice, but I also understand that Astrid's unwillingness to commit is hurtful. 

It's really a testament to A.S. King's characterization that Astrid never comes across as wishy-washy or passive as she slowly grows brave enough to decide to decide. Part of that, I think is Astrid's habit of "asking the passengers." To fight her own feelings of being unloved and judged, her favourite pastime is lying on the picnic table in her backyard and sending love to the passengers in the planes that pass by. Her attempt to fight indifference with intentional feelings of love says so much about her, especially when she silently sends love to her family even after they humiliate or ignore her. 

All in all, this was a thoroughly insightful book with an intriguing protagonist.

B+