I'm kind of sad that this author never wrote any more YA books after this one, because this was fantastic. Despite being published in 2006, it really doesn't feel dated. Reviews for this one are mixed, but weirdly, people seem to be taking issue with the exact things I loved about it. HOW IT'S DONE is one of those cautionary sorts of stories, about a sheltered girl with religious trauma, who escapes from her fundie parents by running right into the arms of a sophisticated older man.
I remember reading this as a teen and thinking Michael, the college professor, seemed hot. Now, reading this as a middle-aged woman, I just thought he was gross. The way he gaslit Grace and was constantly trying to Pygmalion her into being what he wanted was so brilliantly done, but it was also really hard to read. Grace also has a toxic relationship with her friend, Liv, who is poorer and desperate to escape her abusive family situation. They were close when they were younger but their diverging paths have created rifts in their relationship that have led to resentment, jealousy, and even a little cruelty.
HOW IT'S DONE never shies from its difficult subjects, and the writing is spare and beautiful and emotional. I know some people criticized the heroine for being too naive, but a fundie girl in the 2000s with the internet still in its infancy, and her only real knowledge of relationships coming from pilfered bodice-rippers? Yeah, I think her naivete makes sense. Just like how it also made sense that her strict religious upbringing and home environment ended up creating the perfect storm of self-blame and internalized misogyny that unfortunately made her so vulnerable to a predatory older man.
This is not an easy read but it is a good one, and I loved it as a coming of age story as well as a teen girl's ultimate triumph over her own oppression.
I've never read a book about synesthesia before. One of my psychology professors recommended this book in a cognition class a long, long time ago, and the concept sounded so fresh and exciting that the title of the book (which is a great title) stayed in my head rent-free all these years. I thrifted this book, which ended up being an additional joy, because my copy was annotated by the teen who read it before I did, and they were funny AF. I started keeping an eye out for their little notes in the margins because they were always on point. It felt like we were having a buddy-read.
Also, speaking of, I got to buddy-read this book with my friend, Ari!
Now that I've finished the book, I'm a little disappointed. I can tell the book did a lot of research into synesthesia, but I'm not sure how much of it is still true or relevant. For example, in this book, the heroine, Mia, can "see" other people's emotions and sense their pheromones as a color trail (why does that give me the ick). When I Googled this, the first thing that came up was the author's website, and the second was some kind of new age-looking website. I was immediately leery of this, because I feel like a lot of pseudoscience hypes up pheromones, and while it's been a while since my introductory neuroscience class, I remember my professor telling us that in most animals, chemoreception is done through the vomeronasal organ, which is considered a "vestigial" organ in humans (I seem to remember most people don't even have one).
Synesthesia in this book is also treated like a disability, with Mia's parents asking about cures and how it will affect her study. She gets bullied for it at at school and talks a lot about how it makes it difficult to function in certain situations from sensory overstimulation. I was looking through the reviews and it seems like synesthetes and neurodivergents took issue with this representation. (So did the little annotator of my book). This book came out in the aughts and a lot of these "single issue" YA and MG books were written like afterschool specials, not written so much for representation so much as to inform a normative audience (sometimes with unfortunate and now-dated stereotyping) that this reputation exists. When I think about some of the aughts era books with trans rep that I read, for example, it was always clear that the audience wasn't trans kids so much as cisgendered kids, because usually these stories were written from the perspective of a cisgendered kid who needed to learn that "trans kids, they're just like us." Synesthetes: when they're not stabbing themselves with acupuncture needles to experience a color high, they're just like us (oh yeah, THAT happened).
Also, this book is really sad. All the adults are mean helicopter parents who are like BUT SEEING COLORS WILL KEEP MY KID FROM GETTING INTO YALE, Mia's friends are pretty unsupportive, the cute boy with synesthesia that she meets only wants her for bad reasons (and she's THIRTEEN, ugh), and both animals in this book die in pretty traumatically descriptive scenes. I cried both times, for the dog and the cat. Two animal deaths feels excessive for a middle grade book that was supposed to be a fun journey about a kid who sees colors with words, numbers, and sounds.
WHEN WE WERE MAGIC is kind of like The Craft meets Lisa Frankenstein, but delightfully queer and strangely surreal. The book literally opens with the heroine, Alexis, accidentally murdering a guy during a hookup by making his dick explode with magic. Desperate, she calls in her squad of five friends to help her. They're all kinda sorta witches, and their original plan is to bring him back to life with magic. Instead, they separate his body into pieces, including his heart.
There's a little bit of The Telltale Heart with this book, too, as the pieces of the boy haunt each girl as they're forced to dispose of the body, while also reckoning with how his disappearance/murder impacts the community, their relationships, and their magic. I think the beginning was stronger than the middle and the end, which felt a little unsatisfying to me. Especially since I know Gailey can do better. I'm reading one of their adult novels right now, JUST LIKE HOME, and it positively drips atmosphere and character development.
One of my friends said that this would make a better movie than it would a book and I see what she means. It would be a good visually arresting artsy horror movie, like Lisa Frankenstein or Velvet Buzzsaw. Not bad, though.
I have historically had very mixed thoughts about Green's work, most of it not favorable, but I'd heard the anxiety rep in TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN was fantastic and that made me really want to read it... and it did not disappoint! Honestly, this is the first time that I have ever felt so seen with my crazy. The invasive thoughts, people thinking you're unlikable because you bring down the vibe, the spirals and the obsession and the despair. It was brilliantly done, I loved it. He either has firsthand experience with anxiety disorders or he did a fuckton of research. It was so validating. Also we love a book that shows the benefits of therapy to teens.
***MILD SPOILERS TO FOLLOW***
The premise of this story is pretty bonkers, though. Aza, still mourning the death of her dad, and dealing with her intense anxiety, finds out that her childhood billionaire friend, Davis, has a missing dad. He skipped town after doing bad stuff and there's a $100,000 reward for information that leads to his arrest. Aza's friend, Daisy, wants that money, and tells Aza that she should rekindle her friendship with Davis to get closer to him to see if they can get any information that might help them tip off the police (Daisy is kind of gross).
As the story goes on, and Aza starts talking to Davis, we learn that his billionaire dad is a huge asshole. He's a crazy biohacker who has left all of his money to his possibly illicitly-obtained pet tuatara, convinced that the long-lifed living fossil will be the ticket to his immortal life. SO Davis actually isn't all that keen on his dad and would probably be first in line to tip off the police... if he knew anything. But to Aza's pleasant surprise, Davis is actually a super chill softboi and she and him start hanging out.
I was a little torn on how to rate this because I loved the rep, and excuse me, a SHOUT-OUT for Jupiter Ascending, one of my favorite and much-maligned movies? HELL YES I WOULD. But this book also had some of the things that put me off Green's books sometimes, too, like unrealistically pretentious beleaguered-academic-style dialogue between the teens (why do all his characters sound like grumpy old European men arguing in a coffee shop?) and a romance that lacked chemistry. I also thought Daisy was a TERRIBLE friend. When I found out that she turned Aza into a character in her fanfic exaggerating her mental illness for rage bait and comedy, which she and her thousands of fans then basically made fun of together, I felt sick. It was believable mean girl behavior, but honestly, what wasn't believable was that they stayed friends. After all that? I mean, REALLY. That's yeet-to-the-moon behavior, right there. Daisy was also pretty terrible for using Aza to exploit Davis for one hundred grand, and it really bothered me that Aza was basically forced to apologize for not paying enough attention to Daisy and her problems while she is literally drinking hand sanitizer until she gets physically ill because she thinks that she needs to kill the bacteria mutating in her stomach.
After reading out all my thoughts, and being like, "Well, the rep and the fangirl culture and the lizard inheritance were great, but the romance and ultimate resolution of the mental health stuff were eh," I'm going with a three-star rating. I did like this book, and I didn't hate anything about it, but for a book where romance was so integral to the core story, I wanted more emotional connection. I also wanted more Daisy punishments. It is definitely very true that mental illness can make people self-centered in their pain, so that is a valid call out, but some things are definitely unforgivable.
I found this while cleaning and must have bought it ages ago when I was still in my YA phase because I don't remember getting it at all. A BRIEF CHAPTER IN MY IMPOSSIBLE LIFE is a 2000s-era YA about a girl whose parents are both very into politics: her mother is a lawyer for the ACLU and her father is a political cartoonist. One day, they drop a huge bombshell: Simone's parents aren't her biological parents at all. She's the adopted daughter of a Hasidic Jewish woman who gave her up for adoption at sixteen.
For the time this was written, this tackles a lot of interesting subjects. The heroine and her family are non-religious (agnostics, I believe). Her biological mother is dying from terminal ovarian cancer. It talks about the realities of what it means to be pro-choice, and how the decisions to give up a child you can't take care of are never easy. It also discusses sex in a fairly non-judgmental way for the time. Simone's best friend Cleo is very sexually active and more developed, and Simone is jealous but not super shamey, which I liked.
There wasn't a lot of interesting conflict in this book and it was pretty sad, even though I would say the ending is more life-affirming than tragic. It also captures the way people talked in the 2000s pretty well, which means that sometimes the language is un-PC, like Simone jokingly calls her gay best friend a "h*mo." I probably wouldn't recommend this to most people, unless they were looking for a YA that does a really good job with current issues, but man, what a brave and daring debut.
DEEP AND DARK AND DANGEROUS is a fantastic middle grade gothic ghost story about a girl who goes to the lake for the summer, only to find out that her mother and her aunt are harboring a dark and terrible secret. It all starts when Ali finds a picture in one of her mother's old books of three girls: her mother, her aunt, and a mysterious girl whose face has mostly been torn away.
When she asks her mother about it, she shuts down. So she wants until her aunt comes to visit and her aunt acts just as strange. With the persistence only a kid can summon, she manages to convince her aunt to take her to the lake for the summer along with her small young cousin, Emma. And at first, it's beautiful and picturesque, but the lake creates its own foggy weather and all of the locals have warnings about how dark and deep it is. A body could get lost down there.
Maybe a body already has.
If you like the vibe of those old 70s gothics, you'll love Hahn's work. She basically writes the kid versions of them, and she does a great job. Some middle grade feels like you're being sat down and taught a lesson, but Hahn writes her kids in all of their bratty precocious glory, and I love that about her work. I honestly think the kids reading this will, too. Kids are a lot smarter than adults give them credit for. They know when they're being patronized.
This haunting, beautiful, creepy story is going to be living rent-free in my head for a while. Thank goodness I don't have any creepy lakes or creepy little girls in my backyard.
I'm going through all of my books and trying to decide what to keep and what to get rid of. SO FAR FROM HOME was an old fave when I was a kid. My mom had gotten it for me because it's about an Irish girl who leaves Cork County for America because of the potato famine, and she ends up working as a mill girl in Massachusetts. Now that I've read it, I have a lot of big feelings, and those feelings involve spoilers, so BE FOREWARNED.
***WARNING: SPOILERS TO COME***
This book lingered on in my consciousness for a while because I was traumatized by the scene in this book where one of the other girls is fatally scalped when her hair gets caught in the machine. And then they just drag her dead body out and start everything up again, whaaaaat. Also a little boy loses a finger.
Mills were no joke.
Apart from the fatal-to-children accidents, the book also touches upon the discrimination that the Irish faced in the 1800s, with "you're not like other Irish" remarks, people getting hated on for being Irish, the NINA (no Irish need apply) signs, and various other forms of anti-Irish sentiment. Which makes it sound like this book is super crazy, but it's actually pretty boring. Also, the author works double-time trying to make everything sound super Irish by injecting a 'twill, 'twould, or 'tis literally at least once per page. This was almost as traumatic as the mill scalping.
But the WORST thing about this book is the epilogue when the author is like "lolz, guess what bitches? two years later, that heroine you were rooting for dies of cholera." I'm getting flashbacks to the fucking Divergent series all over again lol. When I read this book as a kid, I remember thinking, WTF. On the one hand, I admire the ballsiness. But on the other, wow, what a bummer for the readers.
Some of the books in the Diaries series still hold up, but this isn't one of them imo.
This book made me miss the dystopian boom. I liked the creativeness of the story. It kind of reminds me of both HOLES and the Alex Rider series, but way grungier and creepier. Escape from Furnace is a series about a dystopian society where boys are slapped into a maximum security prison for even the smallest of crimes. But it seems like maybe there aren't enough criminals to fill quota because boys like our main character, Alex, are being framed.
If you like modern-day steampunk horror, like the Bioshock franchise, you'll love this. It definitely feels like a book that's marketed to teen boys first and foremost but I think that there's a lot in here that would appeal to adult readers of horror, too. I know it's the first book in the series but I had SO MANY QUESTIONS that weren't answered, and that was frustrating. Like, I know, I know, first in a series. But give me something! And it ends on a wicked cliffhanger, too. I can't imagine being a teen reading this in 2009 and being like where's the rest
I loved the idea behind this: a girl leveraging social media to find the serial killer who murdered her mother? I'm happy to report that the execution was good, too.
Jess's mother was murdered by the Magpie Man when she was just seven years old, creating a wound that never healed. When the opportunity to be on a reality TV show with vlogs shows up, she thinks it might be a way to provoke the killer into doing something stupid and outing himself once and for all. Or, at the very least, a way to reach someone who knows something.
I liked this book a lot. It was fast-paced and tightly plotted. There wasn't a ton of substance to it but I was engaged the whole time. If they played up the romance a little more this would make a great CW TV show lol. There's even a bit of "is he the bad guy or just a hot man who's into me?" which is always my favorite trope.
This was a buddy-read with my friend Corvina. WALK OF THE SPIRITS has been on my TBR for a while because Richie Tankersley Cusick is one of my favorite horror/thriller books of all time. Most of her books are YA but she has two adult titles. Her adult titles are among her best work, I think because she had to dial stuff way down for her YA publishers. Even so, her older stuff tends to be wilder than her newer books. WALK OF THE SPIRITS is so mild that it could probably be on the Disney channel.
There's a lot about this book I did like, though. Nobody does atmosphere like this author. I also thought the heroine was bland but fine (surprised by how many people were calling her obnoxious in the reviews; she's almost ridiculously inoffensive). Also, one of the other girls talks about how she's had casual sex and the heroine is super unjudgemental about it, which is a rarity for the 00s. I also liked the Louisiana ghost culture elements and the fact that one of the love interests was a hot, dangerous Cajun guy.
Where this book fell apart was that it foreshadowed creepy stuff but then it didn't pay off. I had an idea of how this book would end and when I wasn't even close, I was mad, because I liked my idea better. The ending was ridiculous. Apparently, there's a sequel, so some of the open-endedness made sense, but my issues with the main storyline remain.
I still love this author but I won't be recommending WALK OF THE SPIRITS to anyone.
This was purely an impulse buy but I still think it's the best Vampire Academy adaptation out there, based on the original books. They managed to cram the entire first novel into a comic book that's under 200 pages, and they honestly did a pretty decent job. I mean, it's still basically the Reader's Digest of a YA novel, but I liked it.
Also, every time Dimitri tells Rose he'd throw himself in front of her during a Strigoi attack instead of Lissa, I swoon a little.
It hits just the same in this graphic novel.
(Though gosh, I forgot how edgelord 2000s this book was-- cutting and self-harm, slut-shaming, mean girls, and everyone obsessed with who's sleeping with whom. I loved it. It was toxic BUT I LOVED IT. I was still a teenager myself when I was reading these books, okay?? Everyone needs a YA 'ho phase.)
Also this is literally the only student x teacher romance I'll allow.
Don't read this if you don't love the original series, but if you love the original series, this will basically cement your love for it even further, I think. Just, you know, don't get *too* attached. Apparently they stopped making the graphic novels after book three because they weren't selling well. I guess other people didn't find the uncanny valley manga look of these comics as charming as I did. But some people just don't have taste.
HUSHED has been on my Kindle for a while but I wasn't in the right mental state to read it. Now that I've finished, I'm glad I waited, because this is one of those risk-taking books that kind of challenges the constraints of the genre its written in, and it does it for the best.
Archer is a stoic and damaged young man who is just starting college. He's incredibly withdrawn and depressed, and reads a little like an incel but without the sexism that goes hand in hand with that. He's desperately in love with his childhood friend, Vivian, an emotionally manipulative young woman who keeps getting into bad relationships where Archer ends up sidelined until she drops the guy and decides she needs him again. This is the forever cycle the two of them are locked into until Archer meets another guy named Evan.
This love triangle from hell would be toxic enough if Archer weren't also a murderer. Because he and Vivian basically grew up as brother and sister, and when they were still both kids, Archer saw Vivian's brother and all his friends sexually assault Viv. Now he's been slowly killing them off, one by one. And if Vivian-- or Evan-- ever finds out what he's been doing, there might be hell to pay.
HUSHED is a great book. It's one of the darker YA books I've ever read, which keeps the content from being darker than it probably would have been if it were an adult novel. The psychological elements are really well done and I was really impressed at how all of the characters were drawn. The whole thing is plotted like a movie, and I'm honestly shocked it doesn't have more ratings than it does. Any of the dark romance girlies who are also into M/M are going to LOVE this book. It has all the same beats.
I read this book for the first time when I was in middle school, I think. It used to be one of my favorite stories. Maybe this is the lens of nostalgia speaking, but one of the things I love about older YA is that I feel like it was allowed to be crazier. Social media wasn't dictating trends and tropes back then, so authors could come up with the craziest concepts without worrying about how well it would do in the Goodreads Choice Awards or on TikTok.
I don't want to say too much about RUNNING OUT OF TIME, but basically, the heroine, Jessie, lives in an 19th century frontier village. A very minimal kind where they live hand to mouth, learn in a one-room schoolhouse, and forage and farm for their food. It's a hardscrabble life with the usual ups and downs until kids start getting sick, and her mother reveals to her a devastating truth that explains some of the other weird shit going on: haunted trees, strange tablets, and forbidden words that nobody else is allowed to speak.
I read this in less than a day. It holds up pretty well. Jessie is a strong and relatable female protagonist and she isn't too perfect. Sometimes, she's allowed to be mean or cowardly. I liked that nuance. There's some pretty obvious plot holes but then I remind myself that this was published in the 90s, and social media has made us all purveyors of the information super highway. Also, it was published in the 90s, so there's a lot of really random fat shaming that doesn't seem to serve any purpose. The 90s, ammirite?
WITH SHIELD AND INK AND BONE was a Stuff Your Kindle selection. As soon as I found out it was about vikings, I was like, "Done and done." The beginning is super good and highly action-packed, starting with Liv's initial trauma and how it turned her into an instrument of a gods. For a while, I thought this was going to be a five-star read, but I feel like it has a pacing issue. The middle and end of this book drag, moving so slowly that it loses the momentum it built from the beginning and actually becomes a little boring in places (I'm sorry).
I also would not consider this book a fantasy romance. It is more of a straightforward older YA fantasy with romance elements. I only bring this up because it was in the romance SYK list, and the actual love interest doesn't come into play for a long while (at least after a quarter in). Most of the focus on the book is as Liv's development as a shield maiden avenging the murder of her loved ones. So I actually think this would be a great starting point for people who prefer straight fantasy and are just getting into romantasy as a genre because it feels like a nice stepping stone between fantasy fantasy and romance fantasy.
Overall, though, I quite enjoyed this book. The writing is strong, the hero is swoony (and ever the gentleman) and kind of gives off the same "I trust you to be strong in your own right as a woman because I am totally confident in my ability to respect the shit out of you" vibes as Peeta from the Hunger Games. It also felt quite well researched and I liked the blend of historical and fantasy. I'm definitely going to check out more from this author-- she's fantastic.
This is one of my favorite YA titles I've read this year. I actually don't really like horror that much, but apparently I do like horror as long as it's folk horror and the dog doesn't die. WHAT WE HARVEST is a gorgeous, lyrical novel about four magical founding farming families: one of them raises red horses and dogs, one ghost melons that glow in the dark, one glittering golden yams, and the last, a field of rainbow wheat that each has its own distinct flavor.
For years, they've been the toast of the farming community, world-renowned and celebrated, but Hollow's End holds a dark secret. A mysterious quicksilver blight has overtaken the crops and whatever it touches doesn't come back the same. Strange animals watch from the woods with glowing white eyes, tinged by rot. If Wren and her family can't figure out how to hold the blight at bay, their farm and their loved ones will all fall into corrupt and blackened ruin.
I loved this book so much. There were things about it that pushed my suspension of disbelief a little, but the story was so good that I didn't care. It has all the elements I love: magic-realism, dark family secrets, childhood friends to lovers, angst, sinister rituals, and high stakes danger. Some YA feels like it's pandering to the parents, rather than its teen readers, but this book was beautifully teen, whether it was the wistful longings for adulthood, or the mistakes we make while impetuously trying to be adults.
I can't wait to read more from this author. This was an INCREDIBLE debut.
Nenia ✨ I yeet my books back and forth ✨
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