Spells Trouble by P.C. and Kristin Cast begins in the 1600s where we meet Sarah Goode and her daughter. They are locked in the town jail because Sarah has been accused of being a witch. The twist, however, is that unlike most who were accused of witchcraft, Sarah actually was a witch, and a pretty...

The Sapiens Run Trilogy is the story of a teenager named Cass that takes place in the year 2055. She grew up in a Sapiens enclave, a community for people who do not believe in cybernetic enhancements. People who get such enhancements are called "subs," to imply they are subhuman. Her father is an important...

Wow. I really enjoyed A Dark and Hollow Star. A nice surprise. This is an Urban Fantasy about the Fae community in Toronto and conflicts between the Mortal and Immortal realms. One of the main characters is Nausicaä, who was one of the three Furies. "Was," because she was exiled from the Immortal realm for...

Children of Eden is a dystopian novel about a future time when the earth has suffered the Ecofail and the remainder of humanity lives within the EcoPanopticon, an artificial bubble city largely run by computers. Here humanity must stay until the earth is able to heal itself. The main protagonist of the story is a...

I Come with Knives starts without any preamble. We are thrown into a flashback or telling of something that happened in the past. At first I was a bit surprised and I was scrambling to remember the characters from the first volume. I had been nine months since I read Burn the Dark. Then as...

Spoiler warning - this review contains details about the story that are revealed hundreds of pages in. The book is that slow. Carve the Mark is the first in a two book series by Veronica Roth, the author of the Divergent series. In the book two peoples share a planet. The Shotet are a warrior...

The Chosen One by Carol Lynch Williams is a story about Kyra, a girl who is 13 and lives in a polygamous sect in Utah. Her father has three wives and she has 20 brothers and sisters. She loves her mother and father and siblings and has grown up in a sheltered environment where there is...

Luka Kane is a normal 16 year old who is in a Juvenile prison called "The Loop." He is on death row. He knows that he won't be going home, but he can delay his execution by agreeing, every 6 months, to participate in a medical experiment. Sometimes these experiments, or "delays," are innocuous, but...

The God Game by Danny Tobey is about a group of high school friends who are in a computer club together.  They decide to play an online game, the God Game.  The game is the result of some computer scientists feeding into an artificial intelligence all of the available information about religion, all religions.  The...

Two Can Keep A Secret is about a twin brother and sister, Ellery and Ezra, who are sent to their mom's home town, Echo Ridge, for their senior year of high school. It is a very small town where everyone knows everyone else ... and their business.  Ellery is into true crime books and movies...

The Emperor's Blades is the story of three royal siblings, two princes and a princess, whose lives are thrown into chaos when their father, the king, is assassinated.  The eldest, Kaden, the heir to the throne, was sent away to a remote mountain monastery at the far reaches of the kingdom.  There he has endured...

Daughter of Smoke and Bone is the story of a 17 year old art student, Karou, who lives in Prague.  When she gets together with her friends they share the art they have been working on,  Karou has wonderful drawings of fantastical creators in her journal that tell stories about them.  They are wonderful half-animal,...

I really liked Wildlife by Fiona Wood. It is about two 16 year old girls, Sib and Lou, whose school has a "term in the woods" program.  Lou is new.  She just transferred in.  Her boyfriend died in an accident and she is trying to cope with her grief.  Lou is no-nonsense, understandably withdrawn, and...

The Red Knight by Miles Cameron is a sword and magic type of fantasy story. The Red Knight is a bit of a mysterious character. He is the leader of a mercenary company and is unusually young to hold that position. In the early part of the book we know that he comes from a...

Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi is a pretty amazing book.  It is a story that takes place in a dystonian future and is about Juliette, who has survived alone in prison without seeing another person.  This isn't a story of someone wrongly accused.  Juliette is in for murder and she believes she deserves to be there and...