New YA: January 1-10.
New hardbacks:
Deep Sea, by Annika Thor:
Quiet story about family and friends and life choices and differences in culture and belief. I definitely see why there are comparisons to Anne of Green Gables, though this one deals with more difficult topics than Anne: the effect of refugee status and gender on one's ability to seek higher education, teen pregnancy, the Holocaust. I'm planning on ILLing the first two in the quartet first thing tomorrow. Translated from Swedish.
Hold Tight, Don't Let Go, by Laura Rose Wagner:
Hold Tight, Don’t Let Go is a survival story, but it’s not a survival story like The Hunger Games or Ship Breaker. It’s less about action-oriented survival—the moments in which Magda faces physical danger are brief and rare (though that doesn’t make them any less harrowing)—than it is about emotional survival, about working one’s way through grief, and about choosing to make your own way forward instead of waiting for life to work its way back towards the familiar.
Hellhole, by Gina Damico
A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me, by Jason Schmidt
Vivian Apple at the End of the World, by Katie Coyle
X: A Novel, by Ilyasah Shabazz and Kekla Magoon
Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom: My Story of the Selma Voting Rights March, by Elspeth Leacock and Susan Buckley
Audacity, by Melanie Crowder
The Law of Loving Others, by Kate Axelrod
Firefight (The Reckoners), by Brandon Sanderson
Tracers, by J. J. Howard
Monkey Wars, by Richard Kurti
Who Is Mackie Spence?, by Lin Kaymer
Unlovely, by Celeste Conway
Dead of Winter (The Arcana Chronicles), by Kresley Cole
Ensnared: Splintered Book Three, by A. G. Howard
Waterfire Saga, Book Two: Rogue Wave (A Waterfire Saga Novel), by Jennifer Donnelly
All the Bright Places, by Jennifer Niven
Willowgrove: A Hemlock Novel, by Kathleen Peacock
The Art of Being Normal, by Lisa Williamson
The Door That Led to Where, by Sally Gardner
City 1 (Revolution 19), by Gregg Rosenblum
The Boy in the Black Suit, by Jason Reynolds:
Really outstanding book about different ways of dealing with grief, about independence, friendship, and about becoming a man. I loved it for the intergenerational friendship; for showing that one event can be life-changing for many different people in many different ways; I loved that the friendship between Matt and Chris is an important, grounding force in his life, but not the focus of the story; and I loved that while his romance with Lovey is a life-changing, healing force, it's also an eye-opening one that promotes growth for BOTH characters.
There Will Be Lies, by Nick Lake:
Of the two storylines—straight-up realism during the day, and a fairy tale laced with Native American imagery at night—the daytime story is far more compelling, but even that only really picks up about two-thirds of the way through the book. In brief, There Will Be Lies is bloated; the eventual emotional and intellectual payoff doesn’t remotely make the slogging journey feel worthwhile.
Frostfire (The Kanin Chronicles), by Amanda Hocking
Love or Something Like It (Mostly Miserable Life of April Sinclair), by Laurie B. Friedman
New paperbacks:
Shattering Glass, by Gail Giles
Liv, Forever, by Amy Talkington:
It’s a mostly solid book—I awarded it bonus points for Talkington’s portrayal of the tension that arises in a trio of friends when one has to constantly translate for the other two, but also subtracted some for being excessively adverb-y—but there’s nothing particularly memorable here, nothing that makes it stand apart from any number of other romantic paranormals. Mystery-wise, if you’ve seen Reptile Boy from the second season of Buffy, you’ll have figured it all out before you even read the first page. (Well, minus the giant snake thing.)
Previously: