Posts Tagged "Young Adult books"

Pyromania: A mental derangement, excitement or excessive enthusiasm for fire.
Having celebrity parents isn’t as hot as it sounds. Yes, there’s money to burn, fame and some totally smoking guys…But when your dad’s more interested in blazing a trail to the top of the charts than why you got kicked out of school, again, it can make you seriously angry. And if there’s one thing Ember knows, it’s that the smallest spark of anger can ignite a whole heap of trouble…

Ember has the whole teen angst thing going for her. You see, her mother died a little while ago and her father … well, he’s never around much. He’s famous and so is his new wife – Ember’s step mother – and they both live in L.A. Ember doesn’t. Ember lives in London. At a boarding school. Until she gets kicked out. Why did she get kicked out? Well, they don’t call her Ember for no reason…

So she’s shipped to the US for the summer and embarks on a unintentional journey of self discovery. And what better way to help you learn more about yourself than a summer fling. This is a summer fling with a twist, though, and readers should prepare themselves for a nasty twist. Nothing is as it seems and Ember is about to learn the biggest lesson so far. Is a loved-up resolution imminent? Maybe, maybe not. That’s something you’ll need to read and figure out for yourself.

Ember Fury has something going for it that not a lot of other young adult releases do: it’s a mash of prose and pictures, coupled together to tell the story. Like comics or graphic novels? Then I reckon you’re going to love this book. While not strictly a graphic novel, Ember Fury is what I like to call an illustrated novel. The pictures don’t tell the story, but they certainly add a new dimension to the way the characters are perceived, while adding humor and a light-heartedness to all the drama. The illustrations are outstanding, and without them, this novel wouldn’t stand as tall as it does.

Will Ember’s journey take her to a place of good, or will it push her back into a deeper pit of darkness? Get ready for a roller-coaster ride of troubled teen angst at its best.

While the story is a little on the predictable side, the whole concept of the novel isn’t. I reckon that this one is going to be interesting enough that readers will want to check it out – and you should. It’s definitely worth a look in.

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This time, we’ve got one for the Aussies. Courtesy of Scribe, we’re giving away four competition packs for Australian readers only. Each pack will contain one copy of Peter Cameron’s Someday This Pain Will be Useful to You and one copy of Allegra Goodman’s The Other Side of the Island.

From New York Times bestselling author Allegra Goodman comes a post apocalyptic novel about love, loss, and the power of human choice.

Honor and her parents have been reassigned to live on Island 365 in the Tranquil Sea. Life is peaceful there—the color of the sky is regulated by Earth Mother, a corporation that controls New Weather, and it almost never rains. Everyone fits into their rightful and predictable place. . . .

Except Honor. She doesn’t fit in, but then she meets Helix, a boy with a big heart and a keen sense for the world around them. Slowly, Honor and Helix begin to uncover a terrible truth about life on the Island: Sooner or later, those who are unpredictable disappear . . . and they don’t ever come back.

Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is the story of James Sveck, a sophisticated, vulnerable young man with a deep appreciation for the world and no idea how to live in it. James is eighteen, the child of divorced parents living in Manhattan. Articulate, sensitive, and cynical, he rejects all of the assumptions that govern the adult world around him–including the expectation that he will go to college in the fall. he would prefer to move to an old house in a small town somewhere in the Midwest. Someday This Pain Will BE Useful to You takes place over a few broiling days in the summer of 2003 as James confides in his sympathetic grandmother, stymies his canny therapist, deplores his pretentious sister, and devises a fake online identity in order to pursue his crush on a much older coworker. Nothing turns out how he’d expected.

To enter, all you need to do is leave you name at the bottom of this post in the comments box. Competition is open until September 30. Just a reminder, this is open to Australian residents only.

Maggie Stiefvater’s Shiver is our Book of the Month here at yaReads. When Maggie took time our from her ridiculously busy schedule to write us a guest review, she confirmed our suspicions that she’s a real life Wonder Woman. She chose a book called Magic Under Glass by debut author Jaclyn Dolamore. Enjoy!

The audience didn’t understand a word we sang. They came to see our legs. As the posters said TROUSER GIRLS FROM THE LAND OF TASSIM! We were billed just underneath the acrobats and the trained dogs.

So begins Magic Under Glass, a debut novel by Jaclyn Dolamore (Bloomsbury, Dec ’09). It follows Nimira, a music hall girl, a dark-skinned oddity in light-skinned Lorinar, as she leaves the security of the music hall for employment with the mysterious and dashing Hollins Parry. Mr. Parry wishes to retain her services to sing with a handsome automaton — a man-shaped clockwork machine that plays the piano when wound (sexy, right?). Apparently Mr. Parry has had some problems with retaining girls in the past as they insist the automaton is haunted. They claim it mumbles to them, which is admittedly terrifying, and then they run away.

Nimira, however, is no wimp. So when the clockwork man does his mumbling thing for her, she doesn’t go running to Mr. Parry. Instead, in a completely refreshing sequence where she doesn’t spend pages agonizing over what she really saw (a pet peeve of mine in fantasy), she gets over her shock and disbelief and settles down to business: finding out what . . . or who . . . the automaton is. And what he is a angst-puppy trapped in cogs and springs. In other words, my brand of fun.

The result is a whimsical, smart novel that is sort of like a cross between Howl’s Moving Castle and Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell. The details are lovely, the voice consistent, the characters complex. And Nimira is refreshingly clever throughout. The ending is a bit muddled and weirdly paced, but it wasn’t enough to put me off my game. My biggest complaint was how short the book was — I could’ve been happily entertained for twice as long.

My verdict? I really enjoyed this novel now, but I have to tell you that, as a teen, I would’ve married this thing and had little clockwork babies. Highly recommended.

It’s the first day of Term One, and Luke and Anna are on opposite sides of the student-teacher divide. School is the last thing Luke feels like – how can he feel halfway to good when his father is sick, his mother is sad and his older brother is painfully present?

Anna’s life still revolves around love, friendship and homework, but she’s a graduate teacher now. Can she cope with a bullying co-worker, a persistent ex-boyfriend and a class of unforgiving Year Elevens, and still find time to help Luke?

Luke is one depressed teenager, but if you ask me, he’s got pretty good reasons to be so down. His dad is sick – really sick – and life at their place just isn’t as peachy as it used to be. But that’s not where it stops. Luke has other problems, too, he just can’t figure out what they are. He’s got this awesome girlfriend, but he doesn’t want to be with her anymore. Why? No one knows – not even Luke. He’s got these awesome friends, but he keeps shutting them out. Why? No one knows – not even Luke.

Anna is graduate teacher, fresh out of university. Of course she’s worried about her first full time teaching position, but she never anticipated as many stumbling blocks as she encounters. For absolutely no reason at all, one of Anna’s superiors takes an instant disliking to her and does everything she can to ensure Anna’s first year on the job is anything but easy. Luckily for Anna, she’s got a wicked mentor assigned to her, who becomes more like a best friend than a colleague.

Then there’s the whole thing with Anna’s ex-boyfriend. He left town – and her – a while ago, but now he’s back. He’s back, and he wants Anna back too. Anna’s head screams run but he heart… well her heart tells her to stay. What does one do, when presented with such a scenario, especially when he hurt her so badly before?

Luke and Anna’s worlds collide when Luke walks into English at the beginning of the year. She’s his teacher, but by the end of the novel, they’ll mean more to each other than simply student and teacher. In a bizarre twist of fate, Anna’s sister is marrying Luke’s brother. Being intimately linked like that is weird for them at first, especially Luke, but as he gets to know Anna more, he stops thinking of her as his teacher and starts thinking of her as someone he could grow to trust, someone he could grow to care about.

Halfway to Good is narrated through both character’s perspectives. The advantage that this novel has over singularly narrated novels is that the dual narration concept leaves nothing to the imagination. Readers don’t need to assume anything because both stories are sprawled on the pages for all to see. It’s fantastic to see how Luke and Anna impact on each other’s lives, and I loved not having to draw my own conclusions for once. Interestingly, because Anna is older than Luke, her perspective provides a different kind of slant to the story, adds a certain depth that is sometimes lacking in regular YA fiction. I still think that teenage readers will be able to relate to Anna, though. She’s only a first year teacher and her thinking patterns aren’t too ancient that the kids wont get where she’s coming from.

Halfway too Good is a solid read, and one that enthusiasts of general, contemporary young adult fiction will love. I fell in love with both Luke and Anna, and I wanted so badly to help heal their aching souls. Narrated through both a male and a female perspective, this is one of those universal novels that I reckon both boys and gals will get into. Can’t get much better than that.

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As part of our Book of the Month promotion for September, we’re giving away one hardcover copy of Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater and one audiobook of the same title.

Just to clarify that we’re all on the same page here, there will be two winners for this competition – one will receive the book and the other will receive the audiobook. Please don’t ask for one or the other as we’ll be drawing this one via an online randomiser. We believe that this is the fairest method in circumstances like these.

Competition is open until Wednesday September 30, and is – unfortunately – open to US residents only.