Reviews

We're Sweet on Sour Author: Michael Harlan Turkell This post is sponsored by Abrams Books, as part of the Abrams Dinner Party. I adore balsamic vinegar -- the stronger, the better! You should never let me be in charge of pouring oil and vinegar for your bread, because I'll dump out a pool of balsamic with a teeny tiny droplet of olive oil on top. So I figured Acid Trip, a book-length love letter to vinegar, would be perfect for me. To start with, it’s a handsome book, nicely designed and full of beautiful photos of delicious-looking food, giant vinegar [...]

Fly Away Home Author: Vic James   After you’ve read a few million YA novels, they all kind of start to run together. IN A WORLD of unbelievable grimness and arbitrary sorting of the population, One Special Teen Girl has a magical gift that could change the world… if only she weren’t so distracted by the romantic attentions of a Nice Boy and a Bad Boy. How refreshing it is to read a YA fantasy like Gilded Cage, by Vic James, that at least tries to deliver a more credible world-building experience! The story is set in present-day England, in [...]

An Unlikely Apocalypse Author: Joe Hart By now, I think I’ve read just about every kind of futuristic dystopian scenario that a young adult novelist can dream up, so I was just glad that The Last Girl did not involve any sort of gladiatorial teen tournament imposed by a cruel government. Still, following in the footsteps of classics like The Handmaid’s Tale gives you some pretty big shoes to fill (pardon the mixed metaphor). Does this new, woman-centric apocalypse adventure add something new to the conversation? The plot: 25 years ago, some sort of global epidemic reduced the birthrate of [...]