Icon Tag: Young Adult

Review: The Dream Thieves – Maggie Stiefvater

Review: The Dream Thieves – Maggie Stiefvater

The Dream Thieves is a darkly beautiful story, with intricate, full-grown characters who continue to grow and evolve throughout the various plot-lines. As always, when reading a Stiefvater novel, I was immediately transported to another world, with vivid characters, a dark but promising story, a mystery and plot-lines that slowly but surely got weaved together to make a whole picture. I couldn’t even say what’s my favorite part of her writing – I love that the characters are so well developed, and that they keep evolving and changing as the story and the plot is moved forward. The Dream Thieves is both character driven and plot-driven, both are important, and play together to show the complexity of all that is […]

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Review: Tell the Wind and Fire – Sarah Rees Brennan

Review: Tell the Wind and Fire – Sarah Rees Brennan

Tell the Wind and Fire made me believe in Rees Brennan’s brilliant story-telling once more! A dark world, in which segregation is paramount, but characters who are willing to bend the borders in order to obtain justice. I loved how Lucie was so strong in many ways, mostly perceptive, too, but that she was still somehow at a loss when it came to some people. Tell the Wind and Fire starts out with a day at a beach, where Ethan and Lucie can sunbathe, spend time together and just be a young couple in love. The day doesn’t end on the same kind of sweet note, though, as the couple misses their train, and have to take on that isn’t […]

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Review: A Walk in the Sun – Michelle Zink

Review: A Walk in the Sun – Michelle Zink

A Walk in the Sun made me feel the feels! Rose was a strong, young woman, one who didn’t realize her strength until the end of the story One of the main themes of A Walk in the Sun is how grief can change us! Our outlook on life, our plans, our wants even, up to a point, our needs. After Rose’s mother passed away, her father became a shell of his former self, and the only person left to take care of the ranch, the animals and the house – on top of finishing high school – was Rose. She worked herself hard, and while she was tired more often than not, she also felt some kind of satisfaction […]

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Review: Finding Audrey – Sophie Kinsella

Review: Finding Audrey – Sophie Kinsella

Finding Audrey is the brilliantly narrated story about Audrey – who suffers from social anxiety after something very bad happened to her at her school. Because Finding Audrey is narrated by the eponymous heroine herself, in first person present tense – but with some scenes filmed by her camera – reading this story was like living with her for a while. While I don’t have any experience with mental illness myself, Audrey’s story felt very realistic to me, from the way she was hiding in the den, always wearing dark sunglasses, and not able to interact with many people at all. In the middle of a slightly chaotic family, and with her therapist’s help, she was slowly breaking out of her […]

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Review : Firespell – Chloe Neill

Review : Firespell – Chloe Neill

Firespell was intriguing enough to keep me reading, and the ending also made me want to find out what happens next. Firespell was a bit like other YA fantasy series, where the young protagonist is sent away from home, enters a new school and finds out that there is more to the world around her than she first thought. Lily is a likeable character, she’s not drama queen, and she deals with her parents going to Germany for a sabbatical without her, and being sent from New York to Chicago quite well. The dynamics of the students in her new school is similar to that of most other stories taking place in high-school, there are the snobs, the brats, the […]

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Review: The Rest of Us Just Live Here – Patrick Ness

Review: The Rest of Us Just Live Here – Patrick Ness

The Rest of Us Just Live Here is simply brilliant! Well written, going very deep into the coming of age theme, and with a very diverse cast, as well as diversity in other ways as well. With all the paranormal young adult novels out there, The Rest of Us Just Live Here takes a completely different perspective. It’s like a meta-story of a paranormal novel, because the main characters are ‘just’ the normal people. The ones the usual heroes don’t really care about, because they’re off fighting the vampires or the fae or the dangerous shapeshifters. Here, we get to follow the teens who are aware of the paranormal aspect of their world, but how aren’t really special. They talk […]

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Review: Another Day – David Levithan

Review: Another Day – David Levithan

Another Day is the other side of Every Day, the story seen from Rhiannon’s perspective, and all that happens after she meets A. While Another Day is mostly the same story as Every Day, there are some differences as well, as the readers see some of the things that happen to Rhiannon when she’s not with A. All her self-doubts and the choices she makes made more sense to me when I was inside her head, as opposed to reading everything from A’s perspective. I didn’t enjoy Rhiannon as much as I enjoyed A, though, and I think that may be because where A was selfless most of the time, Rhiannon was much more selfish. Not all the time, but […]

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Review: Every Day – David Levithan

Review: Every Day – David Levithan

Every Day is a unique story in which A wakes up in a new body every day, and has to live the life of that person for one day. Every Day is well written, and it is more than just A’s story, because A is like just a consciousness, no gender. And getting to know A is like getting to know someone who doesn’t see the world the same way most people do, both because of changing every day, and also because of not knowing why this happens, how to deal with it, or if it’s possible to stop moving around from body to body each day. The story is both a love story and a mystery, and once A […]

Posted 24 February, 2016 by Linda @ (un)Conventional Bookworms in Reviews / 35 Comments
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Review: Firstlife – Gena Showalter

Review: Firstlife – Gena Showalter

Firstlife is set in a unique world with very strong mythology and factions fighting each other for power over the realms, not only in the first life, but in the ever life as well. In the very complex universe of Firstlife, there is a lot of darkness, and Ten’s story starts with horror. She’s a prisoner in an asylum, where her parents have sent her in order to make her sign her everlife with Myriad. She, however, wants to make her own choice, and she still isn’t sure if Myriad or Troika will be the best place to spend the rest of her existence. War between the two realms doesn’t make her decision any easier, and even in the asylum, […]

Posted 22 February, 2016 by Linda @ (un)Conventional Bookworms in Reviews / 21 Comments
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Review: This Is Where It Ends – Marieke Nijkamp

Review: This Is Where It Ends – Marieke Nijkamp

This Is Where It Ends is an intimate account of what happens in a high school in Opportunity when a former student comes back and locks all his friends and teachers in the auditorium before he opens fire. In the news, school shootings are far too common, and it becomes like a media circus, both while it is happening, and in the aftermath. This Is Where It Ends manages to tell the story of a school shooting from four different students’ point of view, three of them on the inside of the school, and one just outside, training for track instead of being at the assembly. The fact that the story is told in these different perspectives, each in first […]

Posted 12 January, 2016 by Linda @ (un)Conventional Bookworms in Reviews / 28 Comments
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