Lizabeth Zindel: A Girl, A Ghost, and the Hollywood Hills

Holly has problems. Her mom died, and her dad has taken up with her mom’s sister, Claudia, which is pretty oogy. Something that may or may not be her mom’s ghost is crying out for vengeance, and Holly doesn’t know whether to trust it or not. Everyone in Holly’s life has names that start with

Amber Benson: Death’s Daughter

On the positive side, Death’s Daughter has an intriguing milieu that’s quite different from any other paranormal/urban fantasy I’ve bumped into. It’s a little reminiscent of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics and Piers Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality novels, but not unduly so. Benson also offers a few moments of genuine wit and some perceptive descriptions. On

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

Suzanne Collins: The Hunger Games

I struggle with how useful it is for me to comment on popular works. A lot of people obviously love this book. I’m statistically quite unlikely to ever write anything as many people pay attention to, what gives me the right to judge it? But maybe it’s useful for me to explore whether this is

Jonathan Stroud: The Amulet of Samarkand

The Amulet of Smarkand demonstrated that it’s a book with the wherewithal to totally sidestep my critical sensibilities on its very first page. It opens with a description of a magician summoning a supernatural entity that is nicely atmospheric, but that will feel comfortable, even familiar, to readers familiar with the genre tropes — and

Tanith Lee: Wolf Tower

This young adult novel, told in the protagonist’s diary entries, mostly detailing a flight across a hostile land in the company of a handsome prince, offers many opportunities for Lee to play with and subvert assorted fairy tale conventions. This ranges from minor details — female characters who are overweight, old, and/or bald are described

Patricia C. Wrede: Dealing with Dragons

Dealing with Dragons shares several traits with the fantasies of Dianna Wynne Jones. It assumes familiarity with fairytale conventions and tropes, and reworks and subverts them, with a particular focus on excising sexism and adding subtle metatextual humor. Princess Cimorene is the sort of strong, quick-witted, and self-reliant protagonist who could easily be at home

Robert Louis Stevenson: Treasure Island

I’m keen to read Sara Levine’s Treasure Island!!! and I thought I should probably acquaint myself with Stevenson’s classic first, to catch any references there might be. I’d never read any Stevenson before; his prose was a bit richer than I was expecting, with some evocative and economical descriptions, particularly of his harsh and unlovely

Lou Beach: 420 Characters

I expected that limiting the length of a short story to 420 characters — as counted by Facebook’s software, spaces and punctuation included — would come off as a gimmick rather than an artistic constraint, but this collection of a hundred and fiftyish micro-stories is pretty amazing, in several dimensions. The first thing I noticed

Rachel Cohn and David Levithan: Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List

I absolutely adored Cohn and Levithan’s Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares, a young adult romance partly set in The Strand, with a hefty epistolary component and a dash of screwball comedy. I didn’t enjoy Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List nearly as much, partly due to mismatched expectations. This was a rare case where