John Green: The Fault in Our Stars

I read The Fault in Our Stars with no clear idea of what it was about, because several people whose judgment I trusted said I really ought to. If I had known what it was about, I doubt I would’ve read it, because the bones of the plot sound maudlin, heavy-handed, and more than a

E. Nesbit: Five Children and It

I learned about E. Nesbit and Five Children and It from Delia Sherman’s The Freedom Maze, which predisposed me to wonder if the reason I didn’t know Nesbit’s name while I did know the names Baum, Barrie, Lofting, Grahame, etc. was rooted in sexism. (Then again, I did know the names Travers and Norton.) After

Rainbow Rowell: Fangirl

Fangirl has a soundbite to make it easy to describe: it’s the YA novel about the girl who writes fanfic. Like most soundbites this is terribly and unfairly reductive; it’s about a whole lot of other things, like growing up, coping with your own neuroses and your family’s unique miseries. It’s nuanced and surprising, often

Dave Simpson: The Fallen – Searching for the Missing Members of The Fall

The Fallen has been on my to-read shelf for a while, but it was The Fall’s new release, Re-Mit that made me actually pick it up. Variously storming and shambling, Re-Mit forcibly recalls legendary BBC DJ John Peel’s oft-quoted praise of the band, “always different, always the same.” Lead single “Sir William Wray” sounds like

Walter R. Brooks: Freddy Goes Camping

I was compelled to read Freddy Goes Camping by Mari Ness’s appreciation Pigs! With! Ghosts! at tor.com, which covers pretty much everything that struck me about this book — the who-knows-where-it-will-veer-nextness of the plot, the slight accidental (I think) creepiness (Pig! Eating! Bacon! / Very! Ill-advised! DDT protocols!), the odd mix of mild instruction (both

Jess Walter: The Financial Lives of the Poets

After the first couple of chapters I thought I knew what I was in for (and was onboard) — a well-executed, but fairly standard, dark-humored, mildly-delusional-early-21st-century-guy’s-life-in-freefall story along the lines of David Gates or Donald Antrim, but less incisive and less boundary-pushing. You know, the sort of book where complaining about a hard-to-swallow plot element

Kevin Wilson: The Family Fang

There were a lot of things I really liked about The Family Fang, which is mostly about Annie and Buster, the somewhat damaged children of Caleb and Camille Fang, a pair of notorious conceptual artists. Somewhere in the middle I was struck by how Wilson’s characters reminded me of filmmaker Wes Anderson’s — I felt

Jay Asher, Carolyn Mackler: The Future of Us

The Future of Us has a cool conceit: two teen friends in 1996, Emma and Josh, install a magical AOL CD-ROM that lets them log into Emma’s Facebook account from 15 years in the future. There’s a dash of social satire, some of which is executed with a heavy hand (I get that for much

John Warner: The Funny Man

There’s a lot of craft I admire in The Funny Man. Initially, chapters alternate between the titular character’s first-person narration of his manslaughter trial in the present, and third-person narration of the funny man’s career arc. (For a while I was mildly irritated by the funny man’s namelessness, but it’s eventually justified; the novel is

Tony DiTerlizzi, Holly Black: The Field Guide

I’ve enjoyed Black’s fiction for adult and young adult readers, and The Field Guide, the first volume of “The Spiderwick Chronicles,” demonstrates a similar playful attitude toward well-established tropes. At the outset the Graces are moving into a spooky new house, but in contrast to more traditional fare, the Graces have recently become a single-parent