Parenthetical.net

Ah, vampires. Sexy, powerful, immortal vampires. What if you achieved immortality at your dorkiest? Would you be stuck an awkward high school boy forever?
While we’re asking questions, what if you were sick to death of vampires, but the author of The True Meaning of Smekday, one of the most brilliant pieces of children’s fiction in [...]

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This is the next book by the author of Marcelo in the Real World. I wanted to adore this as much as I adored Marcelo, but it didn’t quite come together for me.
Pancho is a troubled young man with one goal: to avenge the mysterious death of his sister. She was his legal [...]

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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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I’m not even going to try to summarize this one, except to say: interweaving of Snow White & Rose Red, Rumpelstiltskin, and probably some other tales into a lyrical novel with the most sexual creepiness I have had the misfortune to encounter in awhile. This is an excellent example of a book marketed to [...]

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Yes, I read a zombie novel! Call it YA science fiction and you can get me to read anything. In this version of the zombiepocalypse, the dead Returned and the world was overrun generations ago. Mary’s village beat back the zombies — the Unconsecrated, as they call them — far enough to [...]

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Another conference speaker with whom I was unfamiliar. She’s also a jazz singer, and gave us a lovely impromptu a capella performance (just reinforcing the sense that I was at a folk festival).
I’ll admit, I found her book tiresome. The prose is lovely, I guess, but it was a Woman’s Sexual Awakening and [...]

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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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I was rather torn between wanting to love this book (evocative title, colleague recommendation, a flap that begins “In re: James Sveck — eighteen-year-old New Yorker, charming, precocious, confused, doesn’t quite fit in (doesn’t really want to)”) and expecting to hate it (how very much the reviews, and the book itself, want it to be [...]

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