Reviews written by Renae M

I’m going to be completely honest: this is really not my type of book. Romance-centric novels aren’t ones I tend to seek out, especially ones that take place over a short period of time. I don’t personally believe in love at first sight, so stories like that tend to be...

If I liked Heist Society, I pretty much loved Uncommon Criminals. This book had so much more to offer than its prequel, and was just all-around a book of much better quality. Ally Carter is an author who truly writes for the young adult (and possibly middle grade) reader. Her...

We readers like to torture ourselves with dark, depressing stories about awful things happening to perfectly nice people. It’s a true thing. And usually, these terrible stories make us massively uncomfortable, and we tend to wind up with a very severe case of The Feels. These are the books that...

At first glance, Eve isn’t a book that seems to have much going for it. It’s a packaged book for one thing, which tends to indicate that a book will be less than awesome. Carey’s chosen epigraph is a passage from The Handmaid's Tale, arguably the best piece of feminist...

Heist Society is a book written for readers in search of a good time. This novel about teenage thieves and their global adventures is far from serious—and far from realistic. Author Ally Carter writes in a style that’s appropriate for younger audiences, in the vein of the Spy Kids films....

The highly anticipated conclusion to Beth Revis’s debut trilogy was…well, not what I was expecting. A Million Suns ended in a manner that left things very open-ended, but I figured that even so, Shades of Earth was going to follow the basic outline I’d constructed in my head. It didn’t....

For fans of folklore, monsters, and haunted houses, debut author Lindsey Barraclough has written a book just for you. Long Lankin, set in rural post-war England, details an encounter with an ancient beast who’s been stealing children from Guerdon Hall for centuries. Though the story itself drags in places—particularly the...

Sangu Mandanna’s YA debut is a quiet, contemplative piece of science fiction. Obviously inspired by Frankenstein, it deals mostly with identity—the book’s protagonist is out to prove that she can be her own person in spite of her status as a “thing” and not a human. In many ways, The...

Sloane Margaret “Maggie” Jameson is a glamorous up-and-coming actress in New York City. Sloane Margaret Jameson is also a straight-A student living in small town Connecticut. At night, the two girls, Maggie and Sloane, dream of each other’s lives. For each of them, their life is reality and the dreams...

The final book in a series comes with a lot of pressure. This is especially the case with Boundless. As the third installment in Cynthia Hand’s (almost) universally-loved trilogy, I can’t think of a reader who wasn’t anxiously waiting for the answer to the big, pressing question—will Clara choose Christian...

Charmed Thirds is basically what this “new adult” business is trying so hard to be, but hasn’t quite achieved. This book portrays the four years of Jessica Darling’s college existence, and it does it in an honest, uncomplicated way. Yes, she has sex—a lot of it, to be quite honest,...

By and large, Second Helpings was a massive improvement over Sloppy Firsts. Where in the first book I found Jessica Darling to be needlessly rude and judgmental, in this sequel I was instead charmed by her ridiculous sense of humor and pleased by her obvious character growth from her sophomore...

At 16, Jessica feels like her parents don’t even know her, hates her friends, feels like a “loser”, and makes up for her feelings of inadequacy by judging (especially slut-shaming) everyone she comes into contact with. Jessica is not a perfect person, and though she doesn’t make monumental mistakes, she...

Recently, I’ve decided that while I’m not a big fan of YA dystopian, I really like post-apocalyptic novels. Orleans is yet another example of that trend. This is a strong, moving book that grabbed me at the start and held me to the end. Mostly, I was totally impressed by...

I sat down, right before dinner, meaning to read a few of the poems in Burned, just see what Ellen Hopkins was all about. Two hours later I was still reading, captivated by Pattyn von Stratten’s voice, her situation, her timid yet strengthening rebellions. 300 pages were gone, and I’d...