Tag: young adult

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The Girl

Title: The Girl

Author: Victory Witherkeigh

Genre: YA Fantasy

Thank you, NetGalley, for this book.

I’m not a huge YA fantasy fan, but I’m all in when a good one comes along. This was not it. I skimmed the last 25% just to get this one over. There is a place for teen drama in books, but this one couldn’t decide if it was about teen drama or fantasy or abuse or one of the other many genres it touches on.

From Goodreads: The parents knew it had been a mistake to have a girl. At birth, the girl’s long, elegant fingers wriggled and grasped forward, motioning to strangle the very air from her mother’s lungs. As she grew older, she grew more like her father, whose ancestors would dream of those soon to die. She walked and talked in her sleep, and her parents warded themselves, telling the girl that she was evil, unlovable, their burden to bear only until her eighteenth birthday released them. 

The average person on the streets of Los Angeles would look at the girl and see a young woman with dark chocolate eyes, curly long hair, and tanned skin of her Filipina heritage. Her teachers praised her for her scholarly achievements and extracurricular activities, from academic decathlon to cheer. 

The girl knew she was different, especially as she grew to accept that the other children’s parents didn’t despise them. Her parents whispered about their pact as odd and disturbing occurrences continued to happen around her. The girl thought being an evil demon should require the skies to bleed, the ground to tremble, an animal sacrifice to seal the bargain, or at least cause some general mayhem. Did other demons work so hard to find friends, do well on their homework, and protect their spoiled younger brother? 

The demon was patient. It could afford to wait, to remind the girl when she was hurt that power was hers to take. She needed only embrace it. It could wait. The girl’s parents were doing much of its work already.

If this were what the book was about, that would be a MUCH better book than it ended up being. But this was maybe 1/3 of the book. The rest was just unwarranted parental abuse and teenage drama. The reader isn’t clued into that abuse until over halfway through the book. And the abuse is a lot. Very verbal, emotional trauma. But the drama, oh my gosh, the drama. Whoooo… cares…..??? Sure, YA books are targeted to teens, but the drama felt so out of place in this book. It had the potential to be so much more. What a disappointment.

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Tradition

Title: Tradition

Author: Brendan Kiely

Genre: YA fiction

I’m not sure how this book ended up on my radar, but I was definitely expecting more. The entire “smash the patriarchy” genre is critical these days, but this book just falls short, which is really disappointing. The characters were really flat, and I never really connected with any of them. The dialogue was stilted, and the plot was too subdued for the importance of this subject. All that said, the events of the book reflect society, but society is a hundred times worse than these events.

From Goodreads: Jules Devereux just wants to keep her head down, avoid distractions, and get into the right college, so she can leave Fullbrook and its old-boy social codes behind. She wants freedom, but ex-boyfriends and ex-best friends are determined to keep her in place. Jamie Baxter feels like an imposter at Fullbrook, but the hockey scholarship that got him in has given him a chance to escape his past and fulfill the dreams of his parents and coaches, whose mantra rings in his ears: Don’t disappoint us.

When Jamie and Jules meet, they recognize in each other a similar instinct for survival, but at a school where girls in the student handbook are rated by their looks, athletes stack hockey pucks in dorm room windows like notches on a bedpost, and school-sponsored dances push first year girls out into the night with senior boys, the stakes for safe sex, real love, and true friendship couldn’t be higher.

As Jules and Jamie’s lives intertwine, and the pressures to play by the rules and remain silent about the school’s secrets intensify, they see Fullbrook for what it really is. That tradition, a word Fullbrook hides behind, can be ugly, even violent. Ultimately, Jules and Jamie are faced with the difficult question: can they stand together against classmates—and an institution—who believe they can do no wrong?

The senior athletic boys are just garbage humans. They have zero redeeming qualities and prey upon all the females. Jules is just “the crazy girl” and is dismissed by just about all staff and students. Jamie is expected to live up to the jock standard, but doesn’t want to. And the way they rebel at the end was just so lame. At one point Jules is assaulted (probably not a TW because it’s stopped almost as it starts) and then rumors spread, of course. But instead of turning to her friends, she just shuts them out and wallows in sadness. This might be a realistic reaction, but it’s not much of a helpful one for girls reading this. If I wanted my teenage kids to read something realistic about how awful the world of high school can be, this one just didn’t cut it.

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books and reading

Six of Crows

Title: Six of Crows

Author: Leigh Bardugo

Genre: YA fantasy

I’ve been meaning to enter the Grishaverse for awhile. Once I saw it was a Netflix show, I consulted a friend who told me that the show covers both Shadow and Bone and Six of Crows, sort of. She recommended reading both before the show just to avoid small spoilers. I recommend this as well, because enough of Six of Crows’ characters are in the show that meeting them in the book is a lot more fun. And while I enjoyed the plot of Shadow and Bone more, maybe because it was my entry into the books, I LOVE the characters in this one. Every single crow is fantastic, but Jesper is hands down my favorite.

From Goodreads:

Ketterdam: a bustling hub of international trade where anything can be had for the right price—and no one knows that better than criminal prodigy Kaz Brekker. Kaz is offered a chance at a deadly heist that could make him rich beyond his wildest dreams. But he can’t pull it off alone. . . .

A convict with a thirst for revenge
A sharpshooter who can’t walk away from a wager
A runaway with a privileged past
A spy known as the Wraith
A Heartrender using her magic to survive the slums
A thief with a gift for unlikely escapes

Kaz’s crew is the only thing that might stand between the world and destruction—if they don’t kill each other first.

This book is actually a prequel of Shadow and Bone, so it’s perfectly fine to read it first. Either entry into the world would work. They both explain what Grisha are in a way that assumes the reader is unfamiliar. The events in this book are entirely unrelated to those in S&B, also. Now, the Netflix show puts them on the same timeline and gives the crows something to do in regards to the plot of S&B. I didn’t mind the change because it was so delightful seeing the crows. The person cast as Jesper is PERFECT, which just increased my love of the character. I’m always skeptical when it comes to YA fantasy, because it’s just not my thing, but these are excellent, and I will be reading more.