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Readers will likely relate to the popularity food chain and power plays that transpire in junior high school. This social dynamic is the focus of Tae Keller’s middle grade novel Jennifer Chan Is Not Alone. With this book, Keller takes readers to the seventh grade classroom of Gibbons Academy in Florida and explores themes like identity, anxiety, friendship, bullying, and redemption. She also invites us to wonder whether we are truly alone in the universe and whether other life might exist beyond Earth. Mallory Moss is struggling to define herself—is she a fun, brave, and trustworthy friend or a timid, insecure, and fearful follower? BelievingRead More →

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In: General Book Reviews, Multicultural (YA), Romance (YA), Sci-Fi & Fantasy (YA), Young Adult Book Reviews
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Alechia Dow writes an intriguing speculative story with her novel The Kindred. Her two protagonists—as is everyone else in the Monchuri system—have been linked with since birth. The Kindred program was created after The Second Chaos, a revolution in which the poor rose up demanding that their voices be heard by the rich. Maru’s top scientists created the mind pairing idea as a solution. Because those who are paired come to know each other’s thoughts so intimately, they often marry. However, in the case of Joy Abara and Felix Hamdi, a pairing is unlikely since he’s of royal blood and in line for the throneRead More →

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In: Action & Adventure (YA), Sci-Fi & Fantasy (YA), Young Adult Book Reviews
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Readers looking for a thrilling, action-packed story from the future will find satisfaction in Brandon Sanderson’s Skyward, the first in what promises to be a series with a plotline similar to that used by Orson Scott Card in Ender’s Game. In Sanderson’s futuristic novel, seventeen-year-old Spensa Nightshade loves to explore and to hunt rats in the caverns of Igneous where no one lurks to mock, to stare, or to whisper insults about Chaser, the cowardly pilot, forcing her to defend her father and her family’s honor. Here, she also dreams of becoming a pilot and flying a starfighter for the Defiant League to fight mysteriousRead More →

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Just in time for the General debate of the sixty-seventh and sixty-eighth sessions of the General Assembly of the United Nations this September, Malinda Lo’s novel Inheritance, a sequel to Adaptation will release for publication.  Lo’s book explores the adaptation abilities of two seventeen-year-old debate partners, David Li and Reese Holloway, who are abducted from Noe Valley, California, by Imrians, aliens from the planet Kurra.  Although a car accident after a debate match renders them brain dead, Imrian scientist Dr. Evelyn Brand not only saves their lives but alters them to become what some consider “hybrid monsters.”  After their adaptation, David and Reese are ableRead More →