Reviews written by Christina Franke

What I Loved: Wow. I am in awe of how amazing this novel is, let alone for a debut. Anne Blankman’s Prisoner of Night and Fog is a book I had high expectations for, but it left them all in the dust. Truly, I couldn’t conceive of the book...

What I Liked To be entirely up front, I’m going to tell you a probably surprising fact: I don’t love the heroine. Lainey’s totally not someone I could envision being best friends with at all. She’s not incredibly smart, she’s a jock, and she’s popular. She spray tans herself...

What I Loved: At its core, Everything Leads to You is a story of happenstance, of coincidence, and the way that it brings people together in ways that seem meant to be. The way I met one of my current best friends is a similarly ideal meetcute, something that...

What I Loved: Warning: the chapters in Since You’ve Been Gone are almost all really long. The first two chapters together are 90 pages. I warn you of this, because I generally really struggle with long chapters. It’s a sign of how good Since You’ve Been Gone is and...

What I Liked: The core concept of #16thingsithoughtweretrue is right there in the title of the book. Morgan’s been living her life in such a way as to not get burned again. She already felt inferior because her father, whose name she doesn’t even know, abandoned her before she...

What I Liked: Never Ending alternates between Shiv (short for Siobhan) in the present and her memories of the past. She’s dealing with her brother’s tragic death in Greece, which resulted in a total media circus. Bedford does the whole thing where the truth of what happens unfolds really...

What I Liked: The heroine Vivi is a haguari, which means that she, like her parents can shapeshift into a jaguar. Unlike them, though, she sees this as a curse. All she wants is a normal life. This is trope number one, but I did really like the way...

What I Loved: After hearing hype about Marcus Sedgwick for the last couple of years, I had to try She Is Not Invisible, and I didn’t really care what it was about or anything. I just knew that I needed to read a Sedgwick book. I was nervous, though,...

Federle’s debut Better Nate Than Ever totally charmed me. As such, I was, for once, thrilled to learn of a sequel. However, it came out in hardcover with no word on the audio. I decided to wait, and I have been rewarded. Federle’s performance is just as perfect for his...

Though I loved My Life Next Door overall and was really impressed with the characterization, I was equal parts anticipating and fearing Fitzpatrick’s follow-up. I mean, I had some issues with MLND too, which I found to be somewhat uneven. Plus, you just never know with an author’s sophomore effort....

What I Liked: In We Were Liars, the frame’s rather simple. Cady was in some sort of accident she cannot remember, and is spending her summer trying to figure out what happened on the Sinclair’s island two years before. Cady cannot remember what happened, even though she’s been told;...

As ever with audio, I can’t really say whether I would have enjoyed the book as much in print. All I know for sure is that the audiobook was perfect. I listened to it in just two days, which speaks to its quality. J. B. Adkins does a completely brilliant...

Marthe Jocelyn’s What We Hide was a completely unknown quantity when I picked it out. I’d never heard of it before it appeared in the YABC book haul, the cover tells me nothing, and no one I know has read it. Books like this don’t come along often, but it’s...

What I Liked: Free to Fall takes place 20 years in the future. The world’s not all that different. Apple has been replaced in cell phone dominance by a company called Gnosis, most famous for their Lux App. Lux does Siri one better. Lux doesn’t just look things up...

What I Liked: Jennifer L. Armentrout is one of the few super popular YA authors I’d actually never read. Actually, I was a little scared (okay, a lot scared) to try her books, because I wasn’t sure if they would be my thing. Then Don’t Look Back showed up...