Category: YA

Death Prefers Blonds by Caleb Roehrig

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Holy crap this book is amazing! I can’t handle the book hangover I am currently experiencing.  Hamlet meets drag queens who are also incredibly teenage thieves.  What more could you want?

Margo Manning is a rich, LA socialite with a secret.  In her spare time, she dresses up in drag with a group of her guy friends and pulls of incredible heists.  But while her social life is full of intrigue, her family life is falling apart.  Her father is sick and her mom lives in Italy.  What is a girl to do?

Roehrig has created amazing characters who you root for the entire time, even when they are doing things that are less than legal.  And boy oh boy is this book stormy.  I just want someone to look at me the way these characters look at each other.  This book is such a delight to read.  I can’t even handle how much I love this book.  I wish it was longer because I didn’t want it to end.  Make sure to pick this one up the second it comes out on January 29th.

(Want a signed copy?  Order it HERE and put what name you want it signed to in the comments!)

5-stars

Scream All Night by Derek Milman

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I requested this at the library after seeing it on a bunch of lists, which I don’t usually do because I have so much other stuff to read that I already own. But I am so glad that I did. Scream All Night is a completely unique concept, pulling the reader into the bizarre world of cult horror films. Milman’s writing is great. I can’t count the amount of times I laughed out loud and said “This is SO GOOD!” more times than I can count. While the situations in the book are completely unique, they are somehow also incredibly relatable. I love these characters, this setting, and the writing. I just want more.

4-stars

Genesis by Brendan Reichs

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Nemesis left me hanging and so I inhaled Genesis.  And this book is so much more intense than I ever imagined it could be.  I love this series.  Set in our real world, Reichs messes with the reality around us and speculates a way in which the world could survive a horrible disaster.  If you haven’t read the first one yet, go out and get it as well as Genesis because you will need to read it immediately after.

The characters change and grow in this book more than they did in the first one.  Morals are questioned, status is commented on, and everyone is tested.  I breezed though this long book because I needed answers.  And now I need the next one!  What more could possibly happen to these characters?!?

4-stars

Relative Strangers by Paula Garner

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I read this one for the Chicago Young Adult Book Festival and was shocked to find that my college, Lawrence University, was in this book!  That was such a great surprise in a great book.  Paula Garner deals with questions of identity in such an interesting way, telling the story of a teen girl who learns that she lived in foster care as a child.  Her adventure to find these lost years brings up questions of what really makes a family.  Plus, there is some impossible romance, which always is fun to read in a way that hurts at the same time.

4-stars

Love a la Mode by Stephanie Kate Strohm

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Have I told you all how much I love Stephanie Strohm?!? So much love for her and her books. This is a great and very Stephanie book. Taking place in Paris at a cooking school for teenagers, Love a la Mode is filled with love, love-triangles, jokes, and so so so many sweet treats. I don’t think I stopped smiling the entire time I was reading this book (except when I was worried for the characters and who in the triangle they were going to choose). The characters are such real teens and I am pretty sure that I could taste every food item from just reading Stephanie’s great descriptions. I can’t wait to see this book turned into a cake (a cake ON A CAKE) at Stephanie’s launch!

5-stars

American Panda by Gloria Chao

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Don’t let the cover fool you.  This is not a light, fluffy read that will make you feel like you are smiling and drinking a hot chocolate.  American Panda tells the story of Mei, a 17 year-old who finds herself as a freshman at MIT.  As well as starting at a new school, she is dealing with the fact that her brother has been kicked out of the family due to the woman he has decided to marry.  On top of all that, Mei finds herself confronted with her culture and her parents who want her to go to school, marry a nice Taiwanese boy, and become a doctor.  But Mei doesn’t want any part of that life.  She wants to dance and avoid germs.  She wants to date the cute boy she sees around campus.

This book is so out of my realm of experience but it was fascinating to get to read it and enter this world for a while.  I have met Gloria and she writes from a very real place.  This book walks through a lot of things she dealt with growing up and she allows Mei to say the things she was never able to.  (She was a dentist, y’all.)

Gloria’s writing is wonderful and she has really created a three dimensional world that I enjoyed climbing into.  Each character has a full range of emotions and a backstory.  When she wants to be funny, she’s hilarious, and when she wants you to feel emotions, she makes you cry.   So grab a hot chocolate and curl up with this book.

4-stars

The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen Wang

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Words cannot explain how much I love this book!  When I saw it was about a prince who secretly puts on dresses, I was hooked.  Jen Wang has created a beautiful and powerful story.  It is a story of friendship, of acceptance, and of bravery.  This book has been a hit with everyone I have given it to.  This book made me cry so many different kinds of tears throughout the course of reading it.  Don’t even think about skipping this one.

5-stars

My Plain Jane by The Lady Janies

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I loved My Lady Jane and Jane Eyre is my favorite classic so this book felt like it was made for me.  I was nervous going in because My Lady Jane was so great but My Plain Jane did not disappoint.  Filled with even more references than the first one, The Lady Janies had me laughing out loud so many times.  (Their Trump jokes are amazing.  Absolutely amazing.)  Don’t worry if you haven’t read Jane Eyre, you can still enjoy this book.  The plot is so incredibly different from the source material that you will catch certain jokes if you have already read it but you don’t need any knowledge going in to have a fun time reading this book.

These women are amazing and I can’t wait to see what they have thought up next.

5-stars

Love, Hate and Other Filters by Samira Ahmed

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I am so excited for the Chicago Young Adult Book Festival this year because I am absolutely loving the books by this year’s authors.

I am going to start by saying that this was a book I don’t relate to at all.  I come from a very supportive family who let both my brother and I follow our passions and major in theatre in college so I didn’t grow up in a world at all like Maya’s.

Samira Ahmed is a great new voice in YA literature.  She has managed to craft a book that deals with hard and heavy subjects while still managing to stay a fun and goofy romance at heart.  Even though I couldn’t relate to Maya’s specific experiences, she is a very relatable teenager, talking with a very believable teen voice.  Ahmed also makes sure to shine light on hate crimes, something that I think is so incredibly important.  The world is scary and we need more stories of acceptance.  This book is a good addition to the YA world.

4-stars

Satellite by Lauren Emily Whalen

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I love when I have to read books for work and end up loving them! (Because when the other direction happens, it is so incredibly heartbreaking.)  Satellite, Whalen’s first YA novel, is a great piece of realistic YA fiction.  She deals with first love, family dynamics, as well as confusion as to what it means to be a person.  Her characters sound like real teenagers, smart yet still confused in certain aspects of the world.  Quite a few YA novels these days aren’t able to do that and it breaks my heart.  Thankfully, Whalen has nailed their voices.  She also also managed to create a family mystery that kept me hooked from the very beginning.  The novel is short but packed full of entertainment.  No word or page is wasted.  I even read the whole thing on the computer because I needed to know what was going to happen (which isn’t a normal thing because I have a hard time reading off computer screens and they hurt my eyes).  A well crafted, fun (yet quite sad at times) read.

If you are in Chicago on Friday, join us at The Book Cellar for Lauren’s launch party at 7pm!  There will be cake!

4-stars

The Sweetest Kind of Fate by Crystal Cestari

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I absolutely loved The Best Kind of Magic and have been gazing longly at The Sweetest Kind of Fate on my bookshelf for months, saving it for a time when I really needed it.  And that time finally came.

I absolutely love Amber Sand and the fun world that Cestari has created.  When I met her for the launch of the first book, I said to her, “Everyone has been describing it as Buffy meets Gilmore Girls but it is really more Buffy meets Veronica Mars” to which she very much agreed with me.  This book had both Veronica Mars and Buffy references and my heart was so incredibly happy.

This book is filled with some much humor while also dealing with heavier topics.  She looks into the complexity of what makes a person, not allowing any character to fall into a terrible stereotype.  (She made me like Ivy, which I didn’t think was possible after the first book.)  I love living in Chicago but reading these books makes me wish that I could live in Amber’s magical Chicago.

These books are so great.  I love them so much and need more of them in my life.

5-stars

I have been lucky enough to host both of Crystal’s launch parties and she is just the greatest.  Really, read these books.  And, if you are in Chicago, come see her and many other awesome YA authors at the Chicago Young Adult Book Festival on April 14th!

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I love these books and absolutely adore the author.  She is the sweetest human alive.

Warcross by Marie Lu

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I have to admit, this is a book I judged by its cover and I said, “No thank you!” But I had heard such good things about it so when the audiobook was an ALC on Libro.FM, I decided to give it a chance.

This book was great. Lu has created a fascinating world that isn’t very different from our own, making it easy to connect to the action of the characters. She has assembled an incredibly diverse cast of characters to tell a story that I think is very important to to the world today, namely privacy in a world of technology. (I am drawn to this kind of book, like The Circle by Dave Eggars and so I was glad to see one geared at teens.) Emika is an incredibly powerful female protagonist who shows everyone that girls can be just as good at things such as science and technology as boys. The plot is filled with twists and turns (even though I did see one of the big ones coming) and it made me want to go places and do things just so I could listen to the audiobook. Definitely worth checking out.

4-stars