The place: outer space. The time: the future. The situation: the class divide that we see in present-day America magnified to a ludicrous, outlandish degree, where robots (or in the world of Andrew Smith’s Rabbit and Robot, “cogs”) have taken…
Book Review: “You Are the Everything” by Karen Rivers
With the exception of some poems and a few fanfics with song lyrics for titles, I have rarely encountered the second person used well and never within the context of a full-length novel. It’s a risky style to use for…
Review: The Future Will Be B.S. Free
The Future Will Be B.S. Free asks the remarkably prescient question: what if the only hope for a dystopian America was a bunch of smart, realistically petty teenagers? It’s not the destruction environment that’s ruined us, but simple fascism: in…
Review: The Seven Torments of Amy and Craig by Don Zolidis
I’m now several years into feeling slightly sheepish whenever I tiptoe into the Young Adult fiction section of the bookstore, I naturally find myself having opportunities to read more and more books geared towards teenagers. And I consistently find that…
Review: The Seclusion by Jacqui Castle
The world presented to us in Jacqui Castle’s The Seclusion is a strange mixture of the horror of a future fascist America by way of 1984 and Brave New World. Spelling out the general world-building might make it seem a…
Review: BRIGHTLY BURNING by Alexa Donne
Brightly Burning is Jane Eyre in space. That’s the one-sentence pitch and summary of the novel, but it’s smart enough in what it keeps and sheds from the source text that it largely stands on its own. To put it…
THE CITY OF BRASS is a Promising #OwnVoices Debut
Nahri, an orphaned con artist living in eighteenth-century Cairo and the protagonist of S.A. Chakraborty’s debut The City of Brass, doesn’t know who she is, who her parents are, or why she can harness magic to heal people. She certainly…
