young adult | Reading Backwards book reviews

Me on Jezebel on The Song of the Lioness I’m not a fan of Jezebel.com, though I do wind up there sometimes. Sreya sent me a very me-oriented link, however: Alanna: The First Adventure: For The Crossdressing Knight In Every Girl. Jezebel takes a look at YA lit they loved as kids, and evaluate them now. (Not a new concept, but something that does [...] Full Story	Ella Enchanted By Gail Carson Levine Read: Repeatedly since 1997. Most recently, April 2010 Rating: J’adore Some books are like old friends. It doesn’t matter where you left off, or how long it’s been, you fall right back into friendship as soon as you meet up. Ella Enchanted is one of my favorite books. I can still [...] Full Story	Summers at Castle Auburn By Sharon Shinn Read: Again and again, starting in 2002, now April 2010 Rating: LOVE I love, love, love this book. It is one of the first Shinn books I ever read, and it was serendipitous the way I found it. We were on vacation in California, and the only redeeming quality of the crappy [...] Full Story
Rapunzel: The One With The Hair By Wendy Mass Read: April 2010 Rating: Sweet This is a really cute book, best for younger readers. Disney’s new Rapunzel movie, Tangled, is coming out in a year or so, making this a timely choice. It’s told in diary form, which allows the kids to speak like kids. Rapunzel has grown up with her [...] Full Story	Princess Academy By Shannon Hale Read: April 2010 Rating: Really sweet I’ve been wanting to read this for a long while, but never enough to get around to buying it. Luckily, my bestie had a copy she let me borrow. Very, very glad I got to read it at last. Miri lives with her family on top [...] Full Story	Graceling By Kristin Cashore Read: Feb/Mar 2010 Rating: Worthy Graceling was a gift, from someone who swore it was excellent. It should be, it has the endorsement of Tamora Pierce. It is a good book, with a good world, and enough momentum to keep one reading. I won’t say I adored it, but it was very [...] Full Story
Tithe By Holly Black Read: February 2010 Rating: REAL As someone who tends toward fantasy, I’ve heard over and over again that in order to make the fantastic seem believable, you have to ground it in the real. I never expected to find a book, any book, that would seem to mimic my own life so [...] Full Story	Movie vs. Book: Ella Enchanted Once upon a time, I discovered a wonderful, wonderful book. Gail Carson Levine’s Ella Enchanted is immerses you in Ella’s world, giving you a best friend as well as an adventure. Then Hollywood got their hands on it. And THEY RAPED IT. Below is an off-the-cuff rant I wrote in 2004, before the movie was [...] Full Story	Beyond Safe Boundaries By Margaret Sacks Read: February 2010 Rating: Hmm I want to talk about this book in two capacities–as a story, and as a representation of South Africa. My bestie gave it to me for Xmas, and it looks like a pretty rare find to me. I had no idea there were kids books about SA [...] Full Story
Louder Than Words: Marni By Marni Bates HCI Teens Louder Than Words is a series aimed at teenagers about teenage experiences. Atypically, the volumes are also written by teenagers. It may seem bizarre to ask teenagers to write memoirs—as Marni says, her siblings laughed—but Louder Than Words is dedicated to “reinforce[ing] the message that the experiences of teenagers and [...] Full Story	Racing the Dark Reviewed for the Feminist Review By Alaya Dawn Johnson Bolden Racing the Dark is unique among fantasy books. The world draws upon Pacific Island and East Asian cultures to create a rich blend very different from fantasy canon—an island nation with an animist religion centering on sacrifice and binding. Though a young adult novel, Johnson [...] Full Story	The Blue Lotus By Hergé Read: September 2009 Rating: This was the very first Tintin book I ever got my hands on. So there’s nostalgic attachment to it. Published in 1936, the squabbling countries make speeches to… The League of Nations! Funnily enough, there’s not mention of communism, at all. But I suppose that wasn’t so much on [...] Full Story
The Cigars of the Pharoah By Hergé Read: September 2009 Rating: Transitional One can definitely feel the transitional quality of this volume. It FEELS like a Tintin book, but the story is quite choppy, and for good reason–originally, it was running as a serial. There is a consistent story arc, but it’s not like later books where everything is geared [...] Full Story	Silent To the Bone By E.L. Konigsburg Read: July 2009 Rating: Excelsior Ok, this was bloody good. There’s only one thing that bothered me at all, and the rest was really good. Our narrator’s best friend, Branwell, is witness to–or perpetrator of–a horrible crime. He is so deeply affected by it that he cannot speak. The crime is the [...] Full Story	General Winston’s Daughter By Sharon Shinn Read : June 2009 Rating: Ho hum? Well, it wasn’t terrible. There were some good points, but it certainly wasn’t Shinn’s best. (It’s feeling a little redundant saying that…) Essentially, it’s a story of imperialism, told for a young adult audience with a penchant for romance. Averie’s father is a general in [...] Full Story
Impossible By Nancy Werlin Read: June 2009 Rating: Excellent There must have been some great turnover in the AuthorSphere. Newer YA writers–ie., books published after I stopped reading them (around age… 13?)–are clearly onto something. I mean, really, really onto something. It’s not just The Disreputable History. It’s How I Live Now and Libba Bray and [...] Full Story	The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks By E. Lockhart Read: May 2009 Rating: Brilliant Wow. This is one of the coolest books I’ve picked up in quite a while. Somehow a hardcover wound up on the Bargain table at Borders, and when I learned that A) Frankie was a girl, B) She was leading the Loyal Order of Basset Hounds, and [...] Full Story	Thorn By Amy Mebberson Status: On Hiatus, Storylines Complete http://www.mimisgrotto.com/thorn It took a little while for me to notice that my RSS feed had stopped updating… and that Thorn really had gone on hiatus/retired. Thorn was a labor of love for its artist, an attempt to get syndicated, and I really wish it had. Now that [...] Full Story
The War at Ellsmere By Faith Erin Hicks Read: April 2009 Rating: Squee Not as good as Demonology 101, but by no means awful. It’s very rare to find someone who has a natural talent for very long works, but Faith Erin Hicks is one of them. Her long projects, like D101, are fantastic. This book is 156 pages, and [...] Full Story	Lioness Rampant By Tamora Pierce Read: First time in 6th grade? Multiple re-readings thereafter. January 2009. Rating: Immortal. I love Alanna. I love, love, love, love, LOVE her. I think I was about 12… possibly 10 or 11… when I found In The Hand of the Goddess at the public library. It was exactly what I had [...] Full Story	Sirena By Donna Jo Napoli Read: 1998, October 2008 Rating: Provocative I still remember seeing Sirena on display at our school library, when it first came out. I was perhaps in 6th grade. It was on a special shelf, for the library’s special reader program–those readers got first pick of the new titles and were supposed [...] Full Story
The Subtle Knife By Philip Pullman Read: August 2008 Rating: Disappointing Gentle readers, it is a sad day for my bookshelf. I am usually very good about finishing the books I pick up, I hate stopping partway, unless they’re really trash. Even when something becomes mediocre, I see it through, if only to see how bad it gets. [...] Full Story	The Golden Compass(es) By Philip Pullman Read: August 2008 Rating: Intense I totally missed the boat on this one. It’s a real shame, because I think I would have quite liked it at the time it was published, and I was just ten years old. At 22, I’m much more critical of some things, and less easy to [...] Full Story	Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O’Brien Read: Middle school?, July 2008 Rating: J’adore If you have never read about Mrs. Frisby, you are missing are a wonderful, crucial piece of childhood. I was given the movie, The Secret of NIMH (also reviewed below, when I was really, really young. Both my parents enjoyed watching it with me, [...] Full Story
The Big Pink By Ann Pilling Out of print. Read: Initially, age 8/9. Reread Jan 2008. Rating: Humn. Once upon a time, when I was eight, we went on a trip to our homeland, South Africa. And there we went to a used bookstore (of course, this is MY family we’re talking about), and there I bought some [...] Full Story	Angel Moxie By Dan Hess Books at Lulu.com WWW: http://www.venisproductions.com/angelmoxie/ Read: February 2007 Rating: Qute Genre: Magical Girl, Parody, Humor Format: Four panels Style: Grayscale Published: In 3 volumes, or a compilation (link above) If you always thought Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura were too saccharine, look no further. AM is not your typical Magical Girl comic. [...] Full Story	Feeling Sorry For Celia By Jaclyn Moriarty Read: January 2007 Rating: Wonderful I was wandering around Strand, in desperate need of something to replace The Captain’s Caress (blech), and just when I’d given up hope, I found this. Somebody up in the Big Library of Time And Space loves me. Elizabeth Clarrey lives in Sydney with her mother, and [...] Full Story