By day, Karou is a striking seventeen-year-old art student in Prague, sporting blue hair, tattooed palms, and a killer sketchbook that even Picasso would be jealous of. By night, she is an errand girl for a lonely, gentle monster named Brimstone who lives behind a hidden alley door and collects teeth for reasons known only to himself. All Karou can remember is growing up at Brimstone’s hairy knee and helping him collect the human and animal molars and incisors that he strings together into endless ropes of morbid charms. Where does she come from? Who was her mother? Is Brimstone her father? And what in the world does he do with all those teeth? No matter how much she asks, the taciturn monster refuses to reveal anything about her origins. Resigned, Karou keeps her shadow life secret from her school friends as she continues to go around the world, using Brimstone’s disguised portals to collect his grisly ornaments. Until the day she notices the scorched hand prints appearing on all of Brimstone’s supposedly secret doors. Until the day she is attacked by a furious seraph who nearly kills her. Until the day she discovers she is part of a centuries-old otherworldly war. Until the day…she falls in love. This lush, brilliantly constructed fantasy by master storyteller Laini Taylor is gradually and skillfully told backward, until readers would practically give their own teeth to discover Karou’s true identity. And yet, Taylor’s luxurious use of language makes you want to linger over every sentence. Like this description of Karou: “Creamy and leggy, with long azure hair and the eyes of a silent-movie star, she moved like a poem and smiled like a sphinx.” Or this account of the city of Prague: “Baroque cupolas were the soft green of antique copper, and Gothic steeples stood ready to impale fallen angels. The wind carried the memory of magic, revolution, violins, and the cobbled lanes meandered like creeks.” There is great satisfaction in finding out Karou’s past the same moment she does, and equally great frustration when Taylor leaves K’s future in question, obviously to be addressed in a sequel. Short, action-packed chapters that raise questions about the tenacity of hope, the futileness of war, and the enduring power of love make this book both a pleasure to read and a heart-pounding page turner at the same time.
Gen-X Files
Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor
05.15
Chime by Franny Billingsley
03.15
Delirium by Lauren Oliver
12.15
What if you lived in a world where love was classified as a disease? Known in seventeen-year-old Lena’s futuristic society as “amor deliria nervosa,” it is something to be feared more than anything else. To catch amor deliria is to lose control, to forget to eat, sleep or work. It even drives some people to their death. That’s why Lena can’t wait to have the procedure that is administered to all teenagers on their eighteen birthdays, a simple operation that divorces you from any feelings of fear and pain. Even though it also stifles excitement, joy and causes some to lose their memories of loved ones, Lena doesn’t care. She’d rather feel nothing than end up like her mother, an emotional woman who, after three procedures, still couldn’t stop exhibiting the terrifying symptoms of love. So she committed suicide rather than go through the operation again. Now Lena’s procedure is coming up. And unlike her mother, she can’t wait to feel safe forever. Then she meets Alex, a boy with “crazy golden brown” eyes who challenges everything she’s ever known to be true about her world. She discovers a hidden society of light and warmth below the cold gray existence she’s been living, and a horrible secret that threatens to tear her very identity apart. And worst of all, she catches amor deliria nervosa. But instead of being terrible, it’s the most wonderful thing she’s ever experienced. Now Lena has to decide if she can continue to live in a world without love. While this title didn’t hit me right here *thumps heart with fist* quite as hard as the author’s debut, Oliver’s prose is still lush, the concept is fascinating and the romance is EPIC. Classics fans will also find thematic shades of The Giver and Brave New World within the pages. The climactic end is both heart-pounding and heart breaking, making it a perfect choice for for sweetie reading around February 2011, when it will be making it’s way into libraries and bookstores.
The Replacement by Brenna Yovanoff
10.25
Once there was a town that made a deal. The deal was made when the town was just a village, a hamlet, a collection of hovels. Now the town is a middle class suburb called Gentry. But the deal still holds. In exchange for prosperity and health, the town agrees not to notice that every seven years, one of their children disappears and is replaced by a sickly thing that is not human and doesn’t live for long. “We take for granted that sometimes you lose a child. And sometimes everyone else gets hit by the recession. Everyone else’s unemployment skyrockets…but not ours. Never ours because if you feed the ground, the ground feeds you back.” Except one time, one of them lives to grow up. Mackie knows he’s different, but his friends and family love him anyway. The problem is, he can’t love himself, not when he knows what he is. Not when he knows who’s rightful place he took. A human boy who’s blood was spilled so he could live. Now Mackie has the chance to save another small soul that will be sacrificed so the town can prosper. But with friends and family in both worlds, is he strong enough to make the ultimate choice that will decide the future of Gentry? Haunting and melancholy, this debut horror novel is full of small, perfect moments of exquisite foreboding that almost made me hum with pleasure (you know if you read this blog regularly how much I love me some scaretasticness) I wish I could tell you more, but I’m afraid of giving away the sick little secrets at the rotten heart of this darkly gorgeous gem. I did feel like newbie author Brenna Yovanoff pulled a few punches at the end when it came to a gruesome character called The Cutter, but other than that, I was wholly satisfied. And while I saw interesting elements of books like The Last Days
Behemoth by Scott Westerfeld
10.15
In this steaming, clanking sequel to Leviathan
Picture the Dead by Adele Griffin and Lisa Brown
08.05
Jennie Lovell is one sad little spinster. Her parents are dead and the Civil War has taken both her brother Toby and her betrothed Will, leaving her at the mercy of her stuffy aunt and uncle’s reluctant charity. Now she has nothing to look forward to except a slow slide into servitude in her cold relatives’ dark house, which feels filled with ghosts. Then Will’s brother Quinn returns from the horrific Andersonville prison camp wounded in more ways than one. He has lost both an eye and the ability to feel anything but anger and contempt. Jennie tries to break through his sullen silence because she can sense he’s hiding a secret about her lost love, but Quinn refuses to speak. When the grieving family poses for a photograph at a spiritualist’s studio to try and commune with Will, Jennie is struck by a feeling so strong it could only be the ghost of her fiancée trying to beak through from the other side. With Will’s spirit as her guide, Jennie unearth clues like a broken locket, a lost letter and a ruined photograph that begin to tell the awful story of Will’s demise. There’s only one piece missing, and that’s Quinn himself. Can Jennie convince Quinn to tell her the truth of what actually happened to his brother? And does she really want to know if it means the memory of her beloved Will is tainted forever? Hugely under the radar author Adele Griffin (whose fab literary fiction I adore) skillfully bakes the brutal history of the Civil War, the creepy Spiritualism movement and America’s fascination with the new science of photography into a tasty gothic treat that is guaranteed to give you welcome chills in the middle of the August heat! Sumptuously illustrated by Lisa Brown, this eerie little ghost story just begs to be read up in your favorite tree or the top of your summer camp bunk.
Fat Vampire by Adam Rex
07.15
What if your adolescent baby fat turned out to be a permanent situation? That’s our dude Doug’s issue. He’s fifteen and pudgy, and now that he’s been turned into a vampire, he’s destined to be fifteen and pudgy forever. He’s also dealing with his clueless best friend Jay’s complete lack of social skillz and an impossible crush on a gorgeous Indian exchange student named Sejal. And then there’s that nagging itch in his gums that says his fangs are out and it’s time to feed. The problem is, because of his lack of Edward-Cullen sparkle, Doug’s having a hard time getting close enough to a girl to kiss her, let alone take a sip from her jugular. So he’s reduced to sinking his fangs into the local dairy cows, but that’s like hitting Mickey D’s when you really want filet mignon. Doug’s gonna have to figure out how get some high octane Type O pronto, or his vampire a** is grass. Adam Rex’s first teen novel reminds me a lot of funnyman Christopher Moore’s paranormal comedies. I laughed my way through Doug & Jay’s serious awe at attending their first Comic Con (“…this goblin market at the nexus of all realities where a circa 1980s Iron Man and an original 1963 Iron Man and Naruto and Sherlock Holmes could all be waiting for the same bathroom. Would it convey the scale of the thing to know that there was a person who elected to dress as the Kool-Aid Man? Would it convey it better to know there were two?”) and their run-in with some hecklers at a Rocky Horror Picture Show midnight showing. At first I thought I was reading a nerderiffic anti-Twilight. But Rex shifts gears about half way through as Doug starts to come into his own as a vamp. The jokes get a little darker around the edges as Doug tries to hold on to his goofy humanity as his heart relentlessly grows colder and colder. This two-for-the-price-of-one comedy angst-fest comes with an out-of-the-box ending that’ll either leave you shaking your head or cheering on Rex’s refusal to be nailed down when it comes to deciding Doug’s fate. Either way, I’d love to know what you think–please come back and post! (And can we give it up for what just might be the best cover art of the year?!)
Zombies VS. Unicorns edited by Holly Black and Justine Larbalestier
07.06
Unicorns and zombies battle for supremacy in this ultra cool collection of short stories edited by YA rock stars Black and Larbalestier. The rival authors engage in a fervent back-and-forth argument before every story, each claiming that her supernatural creature is the more badass of the two. But the spectacular stories the two editors have assembled make it very hard to choose between Team Zombie and Team Unicorn. Among my favorites were Garth Nix’s inspired opener “The Highest Justice,” a medieval tale that includes both a zombie AND a unicorn, Alaya Dawn Johnson’s surprisingly touching zombie romance “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” and Margo Lanagan’s tragic story of an unholy union between unicorn and maiden in “A Thousand Flowers.” Maureen Johnson brings the funny with “The Children of the Revolution,” a story of celebrity zombies that almost made me pee my pants laughing, and Meg Cabot also keeps it light with “Princess Prettypants,” about a rainbow-colored, flower-scented farting unicorn who can also kick butt when necessary. More serious are Carrie Ryan’s, Scott Westerfeld’s and Libba Bray’s darker visions of a future America where frightened and cynical teens must abandon the adult rules of the world before the zombie apocalypse and create their own new societies from scratch. There’s even more, but I leave the rest for you to discover when this unique collection comes galloping/shambling into your local library or bookstore. And what team am I on? Well, it was hard to decide since many of my fav author peeps swing the other way, but since I am ultimately an optimist and romantic at heart, I could always only be firmly in this camp:
(Sorry, Justine!)