Reviews written by Molly Lewis

Jessica Warman's Beautiful Lies came out in August, and I haven't heard much about it since. Which I'm sure is my own fault, though I'd like to blame the unremarkable cover design. The novel tells the story of two identical twin sisters, Rachel and Alice, so...

I knew one thing about Rae Carson's The Crown of Embers going into it. Without discussing the details of the story, every reader I stumbled across who'd read it before me mentioned the romance. On more than one occasion, it was even called "steamy." Considering the disastrous romances of The...

There's a category of fantasy that seems particular to YA fiction. It requires no sequel or series (note: it may have them anyway), though it builds a world rich and complete enough to sustain epics. It's built on fairy tales and legends, or the sense of them, and combines romance...

First, it's a perfect book. By perfect, I don't mean "best," because that's totally up to you. No, by perfect, I mean that it's a self-contained, no-word-wasted, deliberately character driven story that works on some level for everyone. If you don't like Miri, the main character (though why on earth...

Every time I come across a book by Shannon Hale that I haven't read yet (there's now only one, and I'm saving it), I get this inward, magical excitement. Like I've just seen a leprechaun or something. Palace of Stone picks up about six months after...

This book has been winning fans and followers since its release, and small wonder. It's refreshing, for one thing, to see a YA book garnering so much attention without having anything to do with the paranormal, or romance, or sequels. It's historical, too, and it's about time we celebrated a...

Veronica Roth's second novel, Insurgent, came out yesterday. And if you don't know that already, you and I live in very different worlds. Divergent was my favorite book of last year, so I had very high expectations. To be honest, I had high expectations of the last one. I'd followed...

Lauren Oliver's Pandemonium follows hard on the heels of its prequel, Delirium. For those who haven't read the first book, read no further. In fact, do yourself a favor and wait to read the first till the whole series is done. Because you will not be satisfied with Pandemonium's conclusion....

After several volumes of dystopian fiction, it's refreshing to come across something that's simply fantasy. Though there's nothing "simple" about The Girl of Fire and Thorns, a book set in a kingdom on the brink of a war they know they can't win, told in the voice of the king's...

Prince Albert and the Doomsday Device is an excellent introduction to the steampunk subgenre of scifi/fantasy. It's more alternative history than anything else, and the steampunky gadgets never take precedence over good storytelling. Jack White is a boy on his own, searching for his father in an alternative Victorian London....

I was just reminded yesterday that the sequel to Megan McCafferty's novel, Bumped, will be out in April. For those of you who read Bumped when it first came out, I pity you the wait. Having only just read it recently, I'm relieved to only have four months 'til the...

The simplest way to tell you what I thought of it is to assure you that I'll be reading the sequel. I will be reading it, come hell or high water. The end left me hanging, as the first of a trilogy ought. I also like love...

There's something about mermaids and the suspension of disbelief that is harder than other paranormal literary endeavors. Despite that, mermaids are absolutely in right now. They have been for a while (ever since, I believe, Stephenie Meyer announced she'd been sitting on a thousand page mermaid manuscript at home), and...

I have been wary of the angel genre of YA fiction for a variety of reasons. For one, I find many interpretations of angels to be rather lame. Weak, pretty, feathery... not much else. It's sort of noxious. UNEARTHLY was an excellent antidote to my hesitations. The first in an...

The first book in any series has the advantage of novelty. By the second book, whether or not the characters can shoot darts from their ears or speak to the dead has become a rule of the narrative rather than the narrative itself. Something else must be made of the...