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Readers of Tracy Wolff and Ava Reid will likely appreciate Jennifer Donnelly’s fascinating twist on a fairy tale, Beastly Beauty.  In her version, Donnelly flips the script by creating a handsome man and a beast of a woman. Thrust together by fate or magic, these two young people have complicated pasts, so they carry heavy emotional pain. In a foreword, Donnelly tells readers that her story “isn’t for the heroes, shining knights, and princesses but for the screw-ups, for those who never get it right. The ones who say too much, or not enough. . . . It’s a story of hardship. And heart. AndRead More →

Cover image for Your Blood, My Bones

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Your Blood, My Bones by Kelly Andrew is a paranormal YA novel full of sinister things that will drag the reader into dark places. Protagonist Wyatt Westlock has always been kept away from the darkest parts of the legacy she inherited as one of the Westlock guardians of Willow Heath. Growing up on her family’s forest surrounded land, she is content to run wild with James and Peter, her childhood friends. She doesn’t question the dark rituals her father and his guildsman conduct in the dead of night, or why one of her best friends never seems to belong. After a tragic night, Wyatt’s motherRead More →

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In her novel The Whispering Dark, Kelly Andrew explores the question, to what extremes does love drive us? To tell her tale, Andrew creates seventeen-year-old Delaney Meyer-Petrov as her female lead and twenty-one year old Colton Price as her male lead. In this telling, there is also a villain: the Apostle. As a young girl, Delaney endured a near-death episode that left her hearing impaired and rendered her parents overly attentive. With her hearing gone, Delaney personifies the darkness and imagines it alive and restless. Lane whispers her secrets to the shadows. Wishing to be defined by the sum of her achievements and her abilitiesRead More →

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Anyone who likes a good ghost story will likely enjoy Dan Poblocki’s newest novel for middle grade readers, Liars’ Room. The twelve-year-old Hill twins, Stella and Alex have moved to the country in Frost Valley, New York, with their mother and her new husband, Charlie Kidd. Charlie’s ten-year-old son Simon is now part of the family, although Simon’s older brother Zachary had to stay behind in Ohio because of some trouble he encountered. A lover of scary things and scary stories, Simon is prone to exaggeration and seeks attention. So, when he concocts a story about ghosts, neither Stella nor Alex are inclined to believeRead More →

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Young readers looking for a good ghost story with adventure and history stirred in will find it in Bridge of Souls by Victoria Schwab.  In this third volume in the City of Ghosts series, Schwab features twelve-year-old Cassidy Blake whose parents are the Inspecters: World-traveling, ghost-hunting, paranormal investigators. As they travel the world to produce film accounts of their findings, Cassidy tags along from Paris to Edinburgh and beyond.  This episode has the family filming in New Orleans, a place where color, style, and sound collide; a place of contradictions. Although Cassidy has always had a brain that doodles, helping to show her things thatRead More →

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A descendent of the Sun god, twelve-year-old Cecelia Rios grew up hearing the legends of the criaturas. Of all the legends, she likes Coyote’s the best. How was she to know that some day their stories would intertwine? Cece has soft eyes and a compassionate heart, but in the desert of Tierra del Sol, criaturas are dangerous and must be destroyed. In order to survive, according to Mamá, weakness invites death, so she tells her daughter: “You cannot let your tears make you more water than fire” (9). But Cece has a soul of water, not of fire—so she rescues Tzizimitl, a criatura the townspeopleRead More →

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“Nothing is quieter, or has more secrets . . . than a book that’s closed” (233), writes Avi in his newest novel, School of the Dead.  With each turn of the page, the book whispers its secrets about why Uncle Charlie is so different, why Jessica Richards walks with a limp, and how Tony Gilbert gets in to Penda School, a private school in San Francisco, so easily. Uncle Charlie may be eccentric, but he is the best friend of sixth grader Tony Gilbert, who hates fakery—especially adults who pretend to enjoy adolescent pastimes.  But Uncle Charlie loves kids’ stuff like video games, spooky stories, andRead More →