YA

Book Review: Stars Beyond Realms

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Stars Beyond Realms
The Chronicles of the Starborne Cadets #1
by Marie-Hélène Lebeault

My rating: 2 / 5
Genre: YA sci-fi

Young cadets at a space academy are tapped for a mission to explore an alternate reality.

I received this book as a digital ARC, but I had no idea that it would be so short—72 pages. It’s not exactly a length I would expect for something billed as space opera. And indeed, the story and world-building are pretty shallow. The four cadets have a little characterization, but not a lot. They’re mostly relegated to their different skillsets. A few things made me scratch my head. For example, why did so many cadets get invited to the briefing during which Alex and his friends are told they’ve been selected for this special mission? Why does the alternative earth have a purple sky and 2 moons? Why do the cadets struggle so much with aspects of the mission that seem to me like they should have been part of their intensive training?

This book has every appearance (to me) of being self-published, but if it is, the author did a lot of work to keep it from known. If this is traditionally published, though, I don’t really know how an editor/publisher didn’t request for this to be expanded on. It really is more like the idea for a novel that is ready to be filled in more, and I can see potential in the author’s ideas if she were to go into more depth with it. As it is, it did not grab my attention enough for me to want to continue the series.

I received a free review copy from the publisher in exchange for my honest unedited feedback.

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Book Review: Criminal Destiny

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Criminal Destiny
Masterminds #2
by Gordon Korman

My rating: 5 / 5
Genre: YA sci-fi adventure, suspense

Spoiler notice: The following review will contain some spoilers for the first books in the series, Masterminds.

Broken out and on the run, the four teens from Serenity, New Mexico, the happiest town on earth, have to learn about the real world that their “parents” kept from them all their lives if they want to stay free. 

This book continues the action-packed story started in the previous. The angle of the kids trying to get a handle on the outside world while also figuring out what they want for their lives is often humorous. Not knowing who they can trust, but needing to trust someone, makes their plan to shine the light on Project Osiris all the more difficult. But at least they know they can trust each other…or can they?

Like the previous book, each teen’s perspective is shown at different times, all in 1st person. While I don’t usually appreciate that kind of storytelling, Korman pulls it off much better than most, as their voices are all unique enough to keep me from being confused (for the most part). This book takes the teens all over the Rocky Mountain area of the US (or somewhere in there) as they question their own actions and motives. This is turning into one of my favorite middle-grade suspense/adventure series, and I can’t wait to see how it turns out in the final book. I highly recommend this book for teens and even adults who enjoy suspenseful teen books (though definitely start at the beginning).

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Book Review: Dragon and Herdsman

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Dragon and Herdsman
Dragonback #4
by Timothy Zahn

My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: YA sci-fi adventure

As Jack continues to try to help Draycos, the dragon-like symbiont that uses him for a host, track down who killed his people, the pair’s next attempt to track down information lands them in a cell. But when they’re broken out by an unlikely rescuer, Draycos is shocked and dismayed to find a primitive herd of his own race on the planet they escape to.

Though this installment of the series didn’t really further the overall plot much, the discovery of the Phookas (the primitive K’da) was an intriguing enough departure for me, considering that Draycos was supposedly the first of his kind to come to the area. Though in the end, I’m not entirely sure what Zahn was going for with these creatures or if they will come into play at all in the future, the progression from completely primitive to something more drives the story well enough. I’m definitely no fan of Alison Kayna’s now (she’s the one who rescues them early in the book), and really hope to learn more about her and soon. However, the next book looks like it will also be quite the departure, which is baffling, considering that there’s only one book left in the series after that. Fortunately, the books are fairly quick and simple reads, especially for sci-fi, because at this point, all I can do is keep going and hope that the next book has at least some answers after all. I don’t mean to imply that this book was bad, though, since I did give it 4 stars. Maybe just not as satisfying as I would hope for at this point in the series.

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Book Review: The Battlemage (re-read)

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The Battlemage
Summoner Trilogy #3
 by Taran Matharu

My rating: 5 / 5
Genre: YA Fantasy

See original review here.

I don’t normally write a new review when I read a book I already reviewed on my blog, but sometimes I like a book more on the re-read and want to raise the rating. The first time I read this book, I gave it 4 stars, which is still good, but reading through my review on the book, I had some specific contradictions of feeling this time through. The main difference is that I must have been more caught up in the story in general, feeling every victory and loss more deeply than I think I did the first time I read the series. And I was less bothered by the battle scenes in the last third this time, appreciating the different displays of ingenuity Fletcher displays throughout the fighting. Even the ending, which I felt was a little lacking last time, I had no issues with this time. Sure, it left a few fairly minor things open, but I wouldn’t say it felt anti-climactic this time, like I said in my original review. It’s a nice conclusion to the series.

Overall, I enjoyed this series the first time I read it, enough to read it again a few years later, but I think I enjoyed the whole thing a little more this time. I’m sure that’s partly due to already knowing how things are going to go, but I think it also has to do with me as a reader. I read this series at the very beginning of my push to getting back into reading regularly, after losing the habit for close to 20 years. I’ve now been reading daily for almost 4 years, and I think my own tastes and how I enjoy a story have changed. Either way, I still recommend this series to fans of magical fantasy books, especially for teen/YA audiences.

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Book Review: Good Girl, Bad Blood

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Good Girl, Bad Blood
A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder #2
by Holly Jackson

My rating: 4.5 / 5
Genre: YA mystery, suspense

After solving the mystery of Andie Bell’s and Sal Singh’s deaths, Pip and Ravi create a limited-run podcast to share their discoveries. Due to the podcast’s success, when Jamie Reynolds, the brother of one of Pip’s close friends, goes missing, his family asks her to use her audience to try to find him. Pip is resistant at first, not wanting to get caught up in another investigation, given how damaging the last one had been for her and those around her, but since the police don’t consider the disappearance a priority, Pip knows she can’t leave her friend and his family without answers.

I liked this book a tad more than the previous, I think because it felt a little more focused than the first one, with so many paths Pip went down to get to the real truth. I liked the merger of the updates from the previous investigation with the new case at hand. I have to admit that I pegged the main bad guy really early in the book, which is not normal to me, but I honestly don’t know if it was majorly telegraphed or if I just took a guess based on tropes of the genre. I think there was at least one thing that happened that wasn’t explained, which I wish had been. And the reader is definitely not given a chance to figure out the motive in advance, but then again, this isn’t exactly a cozy mystery, so I think that’s okay.

I still get serious Veronica Mars vibes from this series (in a good way). I take issue with some of the ethical and legal lines Pip is willing to cross in this book, with no consequences, though they may come about in the next book. For those who want to know about content, there is some language and references to drug use and rape, though nothing explicit. If you’re concerned, I’d definitely recommend reading it before your teen does (especially a younger teen). I’ve enjoyed this series thus far and look forward to the conclusion.

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Book Review: Masterminds

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Masterminds
Book #1
by Gordon Korman

My rating: 5 / 5
Genre: YA sci-fi adventure

Serenity, New Mexico may seem like the perfect small town, but five teenagers are about to discover that there’s a lot more going on, both in their town and in the rest of the world, than they ever knew. 

This is the kind of book that is difficult to explain the premise of without giving too much away. There are five main teenagers, and each of them has their turn as the POV character. That is a lot of different perspectives to keep straight, and while so often that many doesn’t work out, Korman did a good job of keeping them all different. In fact, the story is in 1st-person from each of these perspectives, yet their voices are all unique enough to keep me from being confused (for the most part). I really enjoyed the way everything played out, though, and how the five teens got started on their investigation. While the main catalyst for the teens’ investigations comes from the main character, Eli, having bizarre symptoms when he rode his bike out of town with his friend, the other teens basically start on their own questioning and digging in other ways. When their individual quests come together, the story really picks up. The synopsis compares the book to Stranger Things, and unlike the last book I read that had that comparison, this one works.

I didn’t realize this was the start of the series until I got to the end, and while it’s not an outright cliffhanger, it definitely left me wanting more! My 13-year-old daughter read this book before me, and she and I are both excited to continue the series. We also both recommend this book for teens and even adults who enjoy suspenseful teen books.

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Book Review: The Traitor

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The Traitor
Michael Vey #9
by Richard Paul Evans

My rating: 1 / 5
Genre: YA sci-fi adventure

Spoiler notice: The following review may contain some spoilers for the previous books in the series, starting with The Prisoner of Cell 25.

The Electroclan has to decide how to stop the Chasqui from destroying a town, free their friends, and deal with their friend who betrayed them.

I can’t pretend to know Evans’s motivation in opening this series back up again after a clear ending, but this book in particular made me feel like he doesn’t really care about the series anymore. The bad guy has (no surprise) turned out to be pretty much a slightly different version of Hatch. Multiple major side characters die, which might not seem like a big deal, but it’s quite different for this series. And the big kicker, to me, is that it appears that Evans completely forgot that he’d killed off an entire tribe of people way back in book #3. While, yes, the news that the Amacarra tribe had been wiped out could have been false, it has never been revealed to us that any (or apparently all) of them survived. Yet when they suddenly appear again in this book, no one is surprised, confused, happy, anything (except me). To me, that kind of huge continuity issue smacks of apathy.

Books 1-7 of this series have an overarching plot—the Electroclan trying to stop Hatch’s schemes and eventually bring down the Elgen. Whatever issues I had with those books, the desire to see the Electroclan triumph was basically what kept me going through 7 books. No matter what the real reason is that Evans continued the series after neatly wrapping it up, after only 2 books, I’ve lost my motivation to keep reading. I don’t care enough about the new bad guy, because he’s far too much like the old bad guy (plus, spoiler, he’s already stopped by the end of this 2nd book), and the new threat just doesn’t seem as globally dangerous. 

Rather than continue to complain about style issues, Evans’s weird pacing decisions, and other things that I’ve mentioned in multiple previous reviews already, I’m just going to say that this is the end for me, and be done with it. This is the last published book to date, but since it came out only 4 months ago, given what was left hanging, I assume at least one more is planned. I won’t put myself through the frustration of reading any further, though. As for recommendations, though I mildly enjoyed much of the first 7 books, I don’t know that I’d recommend this series, especially for adults. Teens are probably better able to overlook some of the shallow characterization and style issues I had with it.

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Book Review: Once a Queen

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Once a Queen
by Sarah Arthur

My rating: 3 / 5
Genre: YA fantasy

When fourteen-year-old Eva Joyce visits her grandmother in England with her mom who’d left home after getting married and never returned before now, she doesn’t expect to find out that her grandmother might have been the subject of one of Eva’s favorite fairy tales growing up. The manor might even contain a portal to another world, but no one is willing to talk about it much, her grandmother least of all. Tragedy in her grandmother’s past overshadows the wonder and magic, and Eva begins to believe it’s her job to help her grandmother heal.

Packaged as a portal fantasy, this book is more about Eva’s grandmother’s past trauma, after losing someone close to her when she was a young adult. It’s difficult to separate what is part of the fantastical element of the other world(s) and what is just a reflection of the grandmother’s brokenness. There are questions about all of that that I never really understood and questions about whether Eva’s mom believed any of the tales or not, considering that she doesn’t want to talk about it now, doesn’t seem to believe it now, yet Eva grew up with the stories.

It’s clear that the author is heavily influenced by The Chronicles of Narnia books, though she makes no secret that she’s a major fan. I’ve only just recently read all of that series for the first time, and I saw some pretty obvious parallels. This book takes place almost exclusively in our world, though, with references to the other world(s), which wasn’t what I was expecting at all. Some history from the other world is told between chapters, but I wasn’t completely sure how much of it was important. In the end, this feels a lot more like a book for older teens or adults than teens around 14, with more of an emphasis on grief and trauma than fantasy adventure. The writing is poetic and elegant (and dialog and history related to the other world(s) is basically KJV-type writing, to put it simply), which is not really my preferred style and might be lost on the teens it’s meant for. Considering that the book is in 1st-person from the perspective of a 14-year-old girl, I question the style choice; perhaps if the narrator were to mention that she wrote down her memories decades after it happened, it would make more sense when she describes old manor houses using terminology I’d be surprised an American teen would know. The language also added to the slow feeling of the book as a whole. In the end, not much really happens, and while it sets up a series, it didn’t leave me wanting more. However, the other reviews for this book are generally positive, so please check them out if you’re interested. I wonder if people who have long been fans of Narnia would enjoy this more than I did or if they’d actually enjoy it less.

Thank you to Netgalley and WaterBrook & Multnomah for providing me a copy of this book to review.
Publication date: January 30, 2024

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Book Review: Not If I Save You First

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Not If I Save You First
by Ally Carter

My rating: 1.5 / 5
Genre: YA romance

When Maddie’s dad is injured in an attempt to kidnap the president’s wife, he leaves the Secret Service and moves to the middle of nowhere in Alaska with Maddie, forcing Maddie to leave behind her best friend Logan, the president’s son. After six years, a trouble-making, 16-year-old Logan is sent to stay with Maddie and her dad in Alaska, which is especially awkward for Maddie, since she hasn’t heard from Logan in those six years. But before she’s able to hash things out with him, Logan comes under threat from a mysterious assailant, and Maddie might be the only one who can help him.

I hate rating a book this low, but when I looked through the notes I took while reading this book, I couldn’t see giving it a higher rating. The premise was interesting, and the setting was pretty immersive, but that’s about all I can say for it. The characters are inconsistent and flat, and I particularly didn’t like Maddie and her extreme girliness. Simply by virtue of being the daughter of a once-Secret Service agent and living for six whole years in the wilds of Alaska, she manages to stay completely cool and even make silly quips in the face of a murderer. And I’m all for Maddie and Logan working out their issues, but the romance between them is unbelievable and overdramatic.

Then there’s the plot, which has so many holes and unbelievable bits that it feels like it was cobbled together just to drive the romance forward. Everyone makes stupid decisions along the way, and motivations tend to make no sense at all. Most of the examples I could give would be spoilers, but I will at least mention that I don’t understand why Logan wouldn’t be given at least a brief explanation about how things work in this tiny shack where he’s going to be staying when he first arrives, like where the bathroom is or where the actual room for taking baths is and that if the curtain in front of the kitchen is shut, it means someone’s naked in there! I guess the scene where Logan walks in on Maddie taking a bath is suppose to be romantic? Or funny? Maybe both? To me, it was incredibly cringe-worthy.

My 13-year-old daughter is currently about halfway through the book, and just tonight she told me that she was on the edge of her seat. I have a feeling she’ll like it more than I did, which is fine, because she’s actually closer to the target audience for the book. But I think that teenagers deserve better.

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Book Review: Dragon and Slave

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Dragon and Slave
Dragonback #3
by Timothy Zahn

My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: YA sci-fi adventure

In an attempt to help Draycos, the dragon-like symbiont that uses him for a host, track down who killed his people, Jack willingly sells himself to a wealthy slavemaster. Even though Draycos is a warrior brimming with power, Jack has to endure terrible conditions in order to keep his cover. But will it be worth it in the end?

Draycos and his unbending K’da warrior-poet ethics really shine in this book. Meanwhile, Uncle Virge, Jack’s spaceship’s AI based on his late uncle’s personality, is constantly trying to pull Jack the other direction—toward selfishness and greed. Jack’s inner battle to do good but also to accomplish his goal and save himself is a driving theme in these books. The intrigue and suspense, though, come from the question of who is working with K’da’s enemies to slaughter all of Draycos’s people, and that story takes a jump forward in this book. There are other questions left open, including one from the previous book, but it’s clear that this series is one long story that has to be read in succession. The books are short enough, Zahn’s writing style is easy enough to read (even for sci-fi,) and I’ve been enjoying the story so far, so I’m happy to keep going!

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