Synopsis:
Sent to a teen boot camp for falling in love with his teacher, Garrett fights to keep his integrity through beatings and psychological torture, while planning his escape.
Review:
Boot Camp was titillating and highly readable, but I don’t know that I’d recommend it. It just felt so extreme, not just in its depiction of the boot camp but in the characterizations and plot. It definitely kept me hooked in, but when it was over I didn’t feel like it rocked my world.
Synopsis:
A teen girl’s new boyfriend isn’t the gentleman he seems to be, but she alienates her two best friends when they try to intervene, with violent results.
Review:
Bitter End is an insightful look at the psychology of a teen girl in love with an abusive boy. I thought that Jennifer Brown‘s execution was perceptive, risky, and emotionally honest. It was hard to watch Alex push her friends away, hard to see her put up with excuses and apologies, but I understood every choice she made from the inside out.
Synopsis:
Her boyfriend shot up the school then shot himself, and now Val has to make it through senior year.
Review:
Wow. I am so impressed with the execution in Hate List, a book that could’ve gone wrong in so many ways, but ended up getting everything right. Val’s predicament as the girlfriend of a school shooter tore me to pieces. I could see her point of view and wished I could send her in a better direction, even though I knew she had to learn her lessons the hard way. And I cried at the end!
Synopsis:
After signing up for a psychology experiment, a young woman finds herself in a dangerous “arena” where she may lose her life trying to find her way out.
Review:
Arena is an allegory for the Christian walk of faith, something I knew when I bought the book but then forgot until about halfway through. I think that’s a pretty good sign that the book mostly escapes being on-the-nose and heavy handed in its plot execution and character development.
Callie is an ordinary girl who wants more from life but doesn’t know how to get it. Her best friend signs them both up for a psychology experiment where they’re told they will have their decision making abilities tested. Callie is then dropped unceremoniously into a harsh, dangerous, deserted landscape with nothing but a backpack filled with strange objects and an instruction manual she can’t comprehend. Told to stay on the white path, Callie falls off and finds herself menaced by a frightening monster. She’s rescued by Pierce, a handsomely grizzled man who says he’s been in the Arena for five years and doesn’t think there’s any way out. He warns her of the many dangers in the Arena and takes her to meet his band of allies. As Callie and her new friends/enemies make their way through the Arena, they are tested, threatened, and challenged beyond all imagining.
What surprised me about Arena was that it was not afraid to get dark, much darker than Christian fiction usually does. I really appreciated that. The risks all felt real and dangerous and I did question whether the characters would make it out of the Arena. The second half got a little didactic but I still felt that the author pushed the envelope in a surprising way.
Synopsis:
A mom studying to be a mage wakes up and finds herself imprisoned by people who insist that they are dragons–and that she is one, too.
Review:
Love in the Time of Dragons is just what the title suggests–a romance novel with dragons. The dragons themselves are shapeshifters who often take human form. The dragons holding Tully tell her she’s an ancient dragon named Ysolde, and her dreams are beginning to reveal that they may be right. But her memories of her present life are cloudy, and her husband Gareth isn’t forthcoming. And who’s this Baltic who haunts her memories yet seems to be a deadly threat?
I liked the conceit of this book, but it was a bit too much romance for my tastes. It’s also part of a larger series, and I think I was missing a lot of necessary backstory from previous books. I actually ended up losing interest about halfway through, and opted not to finish it.
Many thanks to Hodder for the review copy.
Synopsis:
When Peter Pan and his Lost Boys descend on a chic Manhattan boarding school, a brother and sister become embroiled in his plan to reclaim 5 ancient mummies who hold the secret to eternal life.
Review:
In the interest of full disclosure, I sometimes work with Daniel Nayeri, and have even had him and his lovely wife over to my house for dinner. So please don’t expect anything resembling objectivity. I’m a big fan of Daniel and his sister Dina’s unique brand of classic retellings, and I’d love for everyone to buy Another Pan.
Another Pan is an intriguing mash up of Peter Pan and ancient Egyptian mythology, all set in a deliciously snooty boarding school. It’s not as tidy as some other YA retellings I’ve read, and I like that about it. The Nayeri siblings are ambitious storytellers with a high regard for the intelligence of their readers. They’re also damn good writers. (Yes, I’m a bit jealous.)
Many thanks to Candlewick for the review copy.
Synopsis:
When the body of his first love is discovered 22 years after she failed to show up and elope to England, undercover detective Frank Mackey is sucked back into his dysfunctional and dangerous family.
Review:
Faithful Place is yet another perfect read from Tana French. As Frank navigates the crime scene, even after being ordered to stay away from the case, his grief, nostalgia, and brokenness threaten to consume him. Nobody does bittersweet regret like Tana French. My heart ached for all these poor lost characters, whose dreams were all thwarted by the accident of birth and the ties of family.
I did guess the murderer’s identity pretty early on, but I think that was the point, to place us completely in Frank’s point of view. He missed it, even if I didn’t, and that says volumes about who he is. A romantic to the end, when he says that he and Rosie Daly lost the chance to be the happiest two people on earth, you believe him utterly.
I also have to give props to Tana French for her exquisitely musical dialogue. Her use of slang, profanity, and imagery perfectly limns the subtle class distinctions between her characters, which is another huge part of the story.
Synopsis:
The saga of a Welsh family haunted by submerged passions and unfulfilled desire.
Review:
I was hooked on The Wheel of Fortune from the first pages. It’s juicy, lush, psychologically complex, and keenly observed.
The story opens with Robert, scion of the Godwin family, heir to Oxmoon, lusting after his second cousin Ginevra, on the night that she elopes with an Irish rake, Connor Kinsella. When, in pure tragic form, Robert is able to consummate his desire, a chain of events unfolds that scars the family for generations.
Like I said, I was really, really enjoying this book, until I hit Tragedy Fatigue. Now, I adore long books–the longer the better, I often say–but I just couldn’t find it in me to move on to point of view #4 of 6. The story structure started to feel tediously cyclical, and I gave up on page 313. I will give Howatch another try because she’s been so highly recommended, but this is the second of her books that hasn’t really done it for me.
Synopsis:
A real, live wizard cloaks his magic in the trappings of homelessness on the streets of modern-day Seattle, as a dark evil stalks him and threatens to destroy him.
Review:
Wizard of the Pigeons really needs to come back into print. It’s a wonderful character study filled with subtlety, ambiguity, and plain old-fashioned good storytelling.
Wizard lives on the streets, but his homelessness is just a disguise for his powerful magic. He is able to Know the truth about people and tell them the words they need to hear to effect positive change in their lives. A dark force seems to be stalking him and threatening him by tempting him to break the rules of his magic, and all of Seattle may fall if he gives in.
This is not a straightforward urban fantasy; nothing is as it seems. Everyone, not just wise Cassie, is some kind of shapeshifter, either literally or metaphorically, and Lindholm explores every facet of that concept to wonderful effect. The book is thought-provoking and doesn’t yield its secrets easily, and the fantasy elements aren’t meant to be taken at face value. If you can get your hands on a copy, you’re in for a real treat.
Synopsis:
The tragic tale of Túrin Túrambar, master of doom by doom mastered, who sought to fight evil but was undone by his own impetuousness and self-aggrandizement.
Review:
The Children of Húrin is a retelling in novel form of the chapter in Tolkien’s Silmarillion called Túrin Túrambar. I should’ve waited to read this for a year or two, because about halfway through I burned out on all the epic language and tragic plotting.
My experience aside, it’s a fantastic story, one of the best ever devised, filled with treachery and nobility and fate and will and foretelling and hindsight–everything you want from a tragedy that has both Greek and Norse flavors.
And did I mention the dragon?
