stillness is a lie, my dear
Disclosure: This review is based on a copy provided by the publisher. No other consideration was offered. Sarah Dessen’s Saint Anything is a fascinating contemporary YA novel with an interesting narrative structure. I found myself winding through the book with a sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop, living in wound-up narrative tension, and while […]
When Elanor Moss moves with her family for a fresh start after an unsuccessful suicide attempt, she thinks this will be a new beginning, a chance to shed the Old Elanor for the New Elanor and strike out on her own. Unfortunately, a catastrophic car accident intervenes, and sends her off into a spiraling catastrophe […]
When I read Rowell’s Eleanor and Park, I knew I had something special in my hands. An absolutely outstanding and brilliantly crafted book with amazing characters, deft text, and a wrenching story so intense that I read it in one sitting because I had to know what happened next. This is usually not an issue […]
This book came highly recommended by pretty much everyone I know when it first came out; it seemed like everywhere I looked, people were talking up Eleanor & Park with great enthusiasm, so I was definitely excited to read it. I don’t read a significant amount of straight contemporary YA (I tend more towards urban […]
Ilsa J. Bick’s The Sin Eater’s Confession is a dark, thoughtful look into the heart of homophobia in the US, and the ways in which it can warp the lives of the people around it, not just the immediate victims. It’s also a book that is quite simply fantastic, with clear, lyrical, elegant language, a […]
Readers have been talking up a storm about The Miseducation of Cameron Post, emily m. danforth’s debut novel about a lesbian teen and a series of events that brings her on a collision course with hateful social attitudes before she finds her freedom, and her own voice. Once I finally had a chance to read […]
Amy McNamara’s Lovely, Dark and Deep is in serious contention for being the best book I’ve read this year. Yes, already. It’s amazing, and I would highly strongly seriously overwhelmingly recommend it to you if you haven’t read it, with one caveat: this is a seriously dark and intense book about grief, mental illness, and […]
Certain tropes tend to come up again and again in young adult fiction, and there’s one in particular that makes me positively aflame with irritation: the heroine who must become beautiful as part of her journey and transformation into a fully realised character. Beauty, in this setting and framing, becomes an essential part of what […]