Category: Young Adult
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The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
Rating: 4/5, good Diverse Reading Challenge #4 This book was originally published in 1984 and it’s been a standard in classrooms. I’ve definitely seen it around, though I was never assigned it. We did read Sandra Cisneros’s story “Eleven” in class in 7th grade, and I loved that story. I think The House on Mango…
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The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
Rating: 5/5, excellent Diverse Reading Challenge #3 I don’t know why I slept on this book so long. It came out February 8th, 2017 and it was a huge hit, with a movie adaptation that came out in 2018. I’ve heard so many great things about it, and it 100% lives up to the hype!…
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Want by Cindy Pon
Rating: 2, bad I almost put this book down at 15%, but I powered through for the sake of my scifi book club. Want is about a teenage boy named Zhou living in futuristic Taiwan where the air is so polluted most people die by the age of 50. The only people who live long…
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Red Rising by Pierce Brown
Rating: 2/5, bad If Red Rising were food, it would be a bloody steak. Partly because much of its appeal is in the prolific and clever violence, but also because it’s left a little undercooked. Red Rising is about a young man named Darrow, a Red miner, who is tasked with becoming a Gold elite…
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It’s Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini
Mental-health memoirs are my guilty-pleasure reading for 5 reasons: Reason 1: They’re relatable. It’s comforting if you have a mental illness (or even if you just get moody sometimes) to know that someone else has had the same experiences. Reason 2: They provide insights into how to deal with mental illness. You get to follow…
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All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders
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Rating: ☆☆☆☆✮ January 2016 I’ve been following Charlie Jane Anders’ career for a couple of years now, and so I was super excited when I heard that she released a science fiction/fantasy novel. She was a writer and editor at i09, a science, science fiction, and pop culture news blog. Charlie Jane Anders is also the host…
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“When Did You See Her Last?”
Welcome to Stain’d-by-the-Sea, where all the children are sharp, all the adults are foolish, and all the people are peculiar. My brother suggested I read “When Did You See Her Last?” while I was visiting family in Milwaukee. Since I haven’t read anything by Daniel Handler (alias Lemony Snicket) since the Unfortunate Events series, I…
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The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
I’m a little late to the party on this one, as it came out in 2005 and was fairly popular when I first heard about it in 2009. By that time I was a senior in high school and not really interested in YA fiction as much, so I ignored the hype, but… a book group…