Parenthetical.net

The premise is pretty cool: unicorns are vicious killers which were wiped out several generations ago… but now they seem to be back, attacking people in the modern world. Our heroine joins up with a group of… Slayers, basically, who all have a Great Destiny (blech) to send the unicorns back to extinction.
In the [...]

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Oh, read it read it read it! If you liked The Hunger Games, you must absolutely read this book. And that means that you should skip everything past the “spoilers” cut, because you really don’t want to be spoiled.
Basically, Prentisstown is a human settlement on an alien planet. There was a war [...]

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Oof. Just when you think this story has gotten as fucked up as it can possibly get… it gets worse. Over and over. And I do mean that in the best possible way: The Hunger Games is one of the most intense, intelligent books I’ve read in a long time, and I [...]

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Three three-dimensional best friends, families that genuinely love each other, disability and homosexuality just tossed in like the normal parts of life they are, and it’s even set in Boston! Sold.
The plot is complicated — there’s a deaf kid, a theater production, a wacky road trip to New York (does it count as a [...]

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On his way back from the Boys’ Island to his coming-of-age feast, Mau survives the giant tidal wave that wipes out his entire Nation. On her way to join her father at his new island governorship, Daphne’s ship is caught in the same wave and runs aground on Mau’s island; she is the only [...]

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Boyfriend E, video game fan extraordinaire, caught sight of this lying on my coffee table and cracked up. He played the original game as a kid, of course (if someone wants to fix that Wikipedia page, by the way, it could apparently use some fixing), and expected from the cover that this would be [...]

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The subtitle pretty much says it all: “Tales of Daring Women Dressed as Men for Love, Freedom and Adventure.” This is graphic non-fiction, though the stories are fictionalized, and some were legends rather than history to start with. The women run the gamut from Hatshepsut, female Pharaoh, to Ellen Craft, a slave who [...]

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(Janes in Love is the nominated book, but I went back and read The Plain Janes first, so I’ll review them together. It’s not necessary background, but it certainly helped.)
PJ opens with a terrorist bomb going off in Metro City, killing a number of people, and injuring more — including Jane. She’s fine, [...]

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Emi was always kind of a geek by default, but this summer her geeky friends have headed off to a “young executives retreat.” Emi decides that’s not her scene, so she’s stuck at home in the Toronto ‘burbs, baby-sitting for her American neighbors, the Cutheberts. (The dad is big and blond; his grin [...]

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