Parenthetical

Anya Balanchine has a lot of responsibilities. As the orphaned oldest daughter of a mafiya boss, with only her bedridden grandmother for a guardian, she is surrogate mother for her brain-damaged older brother Leo and younger sister Natty. She tries to keep all of them out of the family business, but of course she can’t [...]

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For years, ever since right before her parents’ death, Emerson has seen ghosts. She can interact with them, but no one else sees them and they pop if she touches them. Desperate to help, her much-older brother/guardian Thomas sends her to one last specialist: the young, mysterious, and (surprise) devastatingly sexy Michael Weaver. Man. I [...]

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Sick of taking a backseat to the endless rivalry between her school’s soccer and football teams, Lissa, the quarterback’s girlfriend, convinces other athletes’ girlfriends to join her in a sex strike. (Whew! I love a book with a one-sentence premise.) Lissa’s a little bossy and overly organized (she even works at the library! …um), but [...]

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Akata is a derogatory Nigerian word for an African-American — like Sunny, who moved from New York to Nigeria with her Nigerian parents a few years ago, when she was nine. One day she sees a frightening image of the future in a candle, and discovers that she is a witch born to Muggle parents [...]

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After her best friend Julia’s accidental death, Cass is at loose ends. She hangs out on the edges of the Julia’s theater crowd but feels like she doesn’t belong. Cass only reluctantly agrees to participate when they throw themselves into producing Julia’s final effort, a half-finished musical called Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad. When they [...]

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Rose’s parents, the heads of the most powerful corporation in the universe, have put her in stasis periodically her whole life. Usually just for a few months, but it adds up — her best friend Xavier, who was born when she was 7, eventually caught up in age and became her boyfriend. But then Rose [...]

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In the third book about differences in perception, Mia is not autistic but synesthetic. Her whole life she’s seen letters and numbers in particular colors, and seen colored shapes when she hears loud noises. She learned to hide it at a young age, but now that she’s thirteen she wants to be honest about who [...]

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I’ve just read three books about kids with different ways of perceiving the world, and because they’re thematically linked (also to catch up on reviews quicker) I’ll review two together: Al Capone Does My Shirts by Gennifer Choldenko, and Anything But Typical by Nora Raleigh Baskin. Al Capone, my favorite of the two, takes place [...]

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Amy and her parents are frozen cargo aboard a generation ship bound for Centauri-Earth. In 350 years they will be awakened to build humanity’s first colony on a new planet. 300 years into the voyage, the crew — many generations born and raised and died on the ship — are led by a series of [...]

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The bones of this story are pretty standard YA. Unable to deal with a baby, Hope’s mom Deena dumps her with Deena’s big sister Addie. Addie is a transient diner cook, so Hope grows up working in restaurants up and down the east coast. At the beginning of the book, Hope and Addie are about [...]

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