Book review: The Walled City by Ryan Graudin

the walled cityTitle: The Walled City

Author: Ryan Graudin

Publisher: Little, Brown

Genre: YA

Release Date: November4, 2014

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley.

Blurb:

There are three rules in the Walled City: Run fast. Trust no one. Always carry your knife. Right now, my life depends completely on the first. Run, run, run.

Jin, Mei Yee, and Dai all live in the Walled City, a lawless labyrinth run by crime lords and overrun by street gangs. Teens there traffic drugs or work in brothels–or, like Jin, hide under the radar. But when Dai offers Jin a chance to find her lost sister, Mei Yee, she begins a breathtaking race against the clock to escape the Walled City itself.

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Book review: Some Fine Day by Kat Ross

some fine day coverSome Fine Day

Author: Kat Ross

Genre: YA SF

Publisher: Strange Chemistry/Angry Robot

Release Date: July 1, 2014 (North America and digital); Jul 3, 2014 (UK)

Note: this book was provided by the publisher via NetGalley

Blurb:

Sixteen-year-old Jansin Nordqvist is on the verge of graduating from the black ops factory known as the Academy. She’s smart and deadly and knows three things with absolute certainty.

She knows that when the world flooded and civilization retreated deep underground, there was no one left on the surface.

She knows that the only species to thrive there are the toads, a primate/amphibian hybrid with a serious mean streak.

Most of all, she knows there’s no place on Earth where you can hide from the hypercanes, continent-sized storms that have raged for decades.

Jansin has been lied to. On all counts. Faced with the truth in the form of a charismatic young survivor named Will, Jansin vows that her former masters will regret making her what she is…

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Book review: The Kiss of Deception by Mary E. Pearson

kiss of deception coverThe Kiss of Deception

Author: Mary E. Pearson

Genre: YA Fantasy

Publisher: Holt/Macmillan Children’s

Release Date: July 15, 2014

Note: this book was provided by the publisher via NetGalley.

Blurb:

In a society steeped in tradition, Princess Lia’s life follows a preordained course. As First Daughter, she is expected to have the revered gift of sight—but she doesn’t—and she knows her parents are perpetrating a sham when they arrange her marriage to secure an alliance with a neighboring kingdom—to a prince she has never met.

On the morning of her wedding, Lia flees to a distant village. She settles into a new life, hopeful when two mysterious and handsome strangers arrive—and unaware that one is the jilted prince and the other an assassin sent to kill her. In The Kiss of Deception by Mary E. Pearson, deception abounds, and Lia finds herself on the brink of unlocking perilous secrets—even as she finds herself falling in love.

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Book review: The Unbidden Magic series by Marilee Brothers

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Unbidden Magic Series, by Marilee Brothers (Moonstone, Moon Rise, Moon Spun, Shadow Moon). Published by Bell Bridge Books.

Review copies were provided by Bell Bridge Books.

This review covers a series of four books, so I’m not going to write the blurb for each of them. That would just take too long.

Here’s the background: 15 year old Allie Emerson is given a moonstone necklace by her friend and sometime guardian, Kizzy (who is a Romany Gypsy, but everyone calls her a witch). Allie’s mother, Faye, is pretending to have fibromyalgia to get out of working.

So, okay. The moonstone necklace. It’s pretty, it’s a necklace, it has special powers. (I KNOW.)

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Book Review: Starters, By Lissa Price

[1. Review copy provided by Random House Childrens Books]

Callie lost her parents when the Spore Wars wiped out everyone between the ages of twenty and sixty. She and her little brother, Tyler, go on the run, living as squatters with their friend Michael and fighting off renegades who would kill them for a cookie. Callie’s only hope is Prime Destinations, a disturbing place in Beverly Hills run by a mysterious figure known as the Old Man. He hires teens to rent their bodies to Enders—seniors who want to be young again. Callie, desperate for the money that will keep her, Tyler, and Michael alive, agrees to be a donor. But the neurochip they place in Callie’s head malfunctions and she wakes up in the life of her renter, living in her mansion, driving her cars, and going out with a senator’s grandson.

It feels almost like a fairy tale, until Callie discovers that her renter intends to do more than party—and that Prime Destinations’ plans are more evil than Callie could ever have imagined. . . .

Starters is a great YA. The story is complex (though not too complex) the characters believable and likeable, and the dystopia shown in the work is disturbing.

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