Parenthetical

Carina Chocano’s New York Times article “A Plague of Strong Female Characters” gets at most of my issues with this trope: “Strong female character” is one of those shorthand memes that has leached into the cultural groundwater and spawned all kinds of cinematic clichés: alpha professionals whose laserlike focus on career advancement has turned them [...]

[Read more →]

My badass colleague Arianna and her friend Anna, the Wandering Librarians, wandered to the American Library Association conference in New Orleans this week to present on great graphic novels for girls. I hear everything went well; yay! (Insert ALA-attendee envy here. But I’m sitting in my house without A/C and am not a sweaty puddle?) [...]

[Read more →]

4 out of 5! When the king comes for a surprise visit to Evie’s tiny village, she gets the chance of a lifetime: to go to university in the capitol, where she can study to become a healer like her parents were. Her grandfather is devastated to lose her, but he lets her go… provided [...]

[Read more →]

Callie Tate lives on a wealthy farm of pecan trees and too many brothers in turn-of-the-century Texas. One day she gathers the courage to ask her intimidating grandfather about the two different kinds of grasshoppers she sees in the fields, and he tells her to figure it out herself. From her eureka moment — they’re [...]

[Read more →]

Another very complicated story by the author of one of my recent favorites, Jellicoe Road. She’s trying out fantasy this time: when Finnikin, son of the captain of the guard of Lumatere, is a child, the ruling family is murdered and the city occupied. It’s also sealed off, Sleeping Beauty-style, by the dying curse of [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 with the [...]

[Read more →]

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 liked Catching Fire [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 survivor. [...]

[Read more →]