Reviews written by Christina Franke

What I Liked: Ruby Red is a really fast-paced, light, humorous read and I was flipping pages like a mad woman to find out what would happen next. Generally, time travel stories make me crazy, because they end up being super complex or just off the...

What I Loved: Though World War II era fiction of just about any sort has a high level of appeal for me, I’m wary of these “what if?” stories. It seems there are so many ways in which they could go wrong. In this case, I needn’t have worried,...

What I Liked: Red takes place in the fictional town of Scarletville, Iowa, the National Redhead Sanctuary. Turns out that redheads are diminishing, as the gene for that hair color is recessive, so this town has been established for redheads to live together away from the ginger slurs of...

What I Liked: Marie Antoinette, Serial Killer starts off a bit rockily, and I feared that I would have to hate Colette, the main character. At the outset, she’s vapid, selfish, rude, and hangs out with girls she dislikes just to be popular. She also does that whole “I’m...

What I Liked: Though Skylark didn’t achieve a ranking among my very favorite books, I was quite impressed with Spooner’s descriptions and, above all, unique world building. That tradition continues in Shadowlark with the addition of stronger character arcs. At the end of Skylark, Lark left...

What I Loved: About a year ago, I couldn’t get enough of the dystopian and post-apocalyptic novels that were flooding the market. However, the sub-par offerings wore me down, and now I’m very wary of reading any of them. Positive reviews of Not a Drop to Drink convinced me...

What I Liked: Luke Riley falls into the category of fairly average boys. He’s a bit sweeter, smarter and more nervous than the usual, but I wouldn’t say his in the realm of genius. Luke’s family has been on edge ever since his mother’s death, which has left Luke...

What I Liked: In general, mysteries are one of the few genres that fail to interest me. Just like crime dramas, I generally find them really repetitive, and there’s often not enough character development to really get me engaged in the story. I do, however, make an exception for...

What I Liked: As ever, where Brandon Sanderson shines is in the world building. Sanderson has a real knack for creating unique worlds that run on different principles, following that logic through. This world, while not as disparate as his epic fantasies, compels the imagination. Superhero stories have always...

What I Liked: Kat Zhang’s What’s Left of Me blew my mind with its creativity. The concept of the hybrids, of two souls inhabiting a single body, fascinates me with its complications. The fact that Zhang produced such a well-written, philosophically and emotionally complex novel before the age of...

What I Liked: When I was in elementary school, I distinctly remember how popular Jon Scieszka’s The Stinky Cheese Man: And Other Fairly Stupid Tales was. Managing to get a hold of it at the school library was pretty much impossible, because everyone wanted to read it. I can...

What I Loved: Trish Doller’s debut novel wasn’t one that I ordinarily would have picked out or been particularly interested in, but the reviews convinced me to give Something Like Normal a try. That was a wonderful bookish decision, because, though the topic itself didn’t appeal to me, Doller...

What I Loved: In my experience, YA novels written by romance novelists generally go one of two ways: awesomely or atrociously. Now, this may not be the case for most, but, personally, I go to a romance novel and a YA novel for totally different reasons, and I don't...

What I Liked: There's a life lesson in this series for me. Much as I think I'm going to love the books that retell favorites, I'm probably actually going to prefer the ones that retell books I didn't like or that I haven't read. The latter is the case...

What I liked: The Dark Unwinding enchanted and delighted me, so, upon the news that there would in fact be a sequel, I was thrilled, even though such surprise sequels generally result in angry Twitter rants. Of course, sequels to books that were closed enough that you didn't know...