Lana Wood Johnson has written her new novel, Technically, You Started It, entirely in text message exchanges between two high school juniors: Haley Hancock and Martin Munroe II. Because the two teens share many things in common, they bond during these communications, realizing that they’d rather have their texting relationship “than nothing at all” (298). Martin, who is handsome, rich, famous, charming, and clever, is named after his financial genius grandfather who has funded most of the advances in science and technology.  His father is not only a big risk-taker but someone who can’t “wait more than a second before getting remarried” (74), so heRead More →

In Small Spaces, the prequel to Katherine Arden’s newest book Dead Voices, Coco Zintner, Olivia Adler, and Brian Battersby were alone, lost, and running from Seth, also known as the smiling man, and from living scarecrows who hunted in a dark corn maze and who tried to drag them off and turn them into scarecrows, too, Good at playing chess and making plans, Coco is a careful and nervous girl.    Ollie, Coco’s best friend who lost her mother in an airplane accident, excels at math and wishes to be as fierce, reckless and brilliant as her mother the math professor and adventurer had been—“always laughing,Read More →

At eighteen years old, Selah is the seneschal-elect of Potomac, which implies that she will soon be the steward of her province’s resources, as well as the person to oversee its courts, its militia, and its administration.  However, as a woman in the historical time in which the Anna Bright’s novel The Beholder is set, Selah will need a man by her side to help her rule, despite her keen mind and kind heart. As her fiancé, Selah has chosen Peter Janesley, who is brilliant at math and at sports.  However, this smart, earnest, and kind young man rejects the extended marriage proposal.  Given Selah’sRead More →