Reviews written by Christina Franke

What Left Me Wanting More: Let’s get the detraction out of the way first. Last year at BEA, I got a copy of Caroline Carlson’s Magic Marks the Spot and absolutely loved it. That book is about a girl who wants to be a pirate, even though the pirate...

What I Liked: The publisher calls In a Handful of Dust a companion, but it actually spoils the events of the first book, so be careful about that. It took me a while to get into In a Handful of Dust, but it was ultimately similarly satisfying and bleak....

What I Liked: One Man Guy is much like Mary Poppins, in that it’s practically perfect in every way, though obviously not otherwise much like Mary Poppins at all. (I saw the musical recently, in case you’re wondering why this randomness is happening.) One Man Guy is like the...

What I Liked: Sandy Hall, rather than telling the romance from the perspectives of one or both people involved in the romances, chooses to use pretty much every other perspective possible. This technique could easily fail, but Hall pulls it off. You know that quote about how it takes...

What I Loved: This book is beautiful. I just cannot even with how amazing this book actually is. If you loved The Sky Is Everywhere, I think that you’ll love I’ll Give You the Sun too. Nelson’s working through a lot of the same subject matter in this one:...

What I Liked: Rachel DeWoskin’s Blind was a book I was curious about, but I wasn’t so sure it would be my sort of book. The blurb somehow made it sound like it would be a murder mystery, but, honestly, that’s really misleading. Blind really is not that. If...

What I Loved: As soon as you hear the premise of lesbians of different races falling in love during desegregation, you know that Lies We Tell Ourselves is going to be really fluffy and hilarious. NOT. Basically, it’s very obvious that Robin Talley has prepared a soul-punching. Lies We...

"As she doesn’t look like trouble, she can have all the sex she wants and still have friends." Two things I think can be counted on when embarking on a Haydu book: 1) the main character probably won’t always be the most sympathetic character in the world...

In My Soul to Keep, Kaylee, Nash and Tod get wrapped up in yet another mystery, once again not soliciting any help from the grownups. Every time, they all talk about it and they’re like “but our parents would get mad at us” and decide it will be better from...

The first thing you guys need to know is that Heir of Fire is a lot slower than I was anticipating. It’s over five hundred pages and they do not go incredibly quickly. For all that there was a lot of world building in Crown of Midnight, there is ever...

What I Liked: Some narrative voices just pop to life for me immediately. Gemma’s does this. On page one, I knew that I would probably love this book, barring some sort of plotberg nonsense, which thankfully did not happen. To be honest, Gemma’s not the most likable character. I...

What I Liked: In my review of book one, I made some Harry Potter comparisons. What’s just occurred to me is that they’re reversed, though, with Percy’s adventures occurring during the summer and normal life resuming during the school year. Not that Percy’s school life is particularly normal either,...

What I Liked: For those who don’t know, I have a degree in librarianship. Sadly, I hated my Master’s program, but you can call me “master” which is pretty cool. One of the only courses I actually enjoyed during my time in library school was on the history of...

What I Liked By far the best part of the Soul Screamers series in the first two books is the mythology. Rachel Vincent makes use of Celtic and other mythologies to devise a paranormal landscape not quite like any I’ve ever read about. There’s a depth and cleverness here...

Woohoo! A new Gene Luen Yang graphic novel! Basically, any time I hear about one, I’m really excited. The Shadow Hero is about a superhero, which meant that I was even more excited. I was right to be, because The Shadow Hero is fantastic. Of course, that’s expected from Gene...