Reviews written by Renae M

After really enjoying This Is Not a Test and not really liking Some Girls Are, I started to suspect Courtney Summers was going to be a one hit wonder. Fear not! That is definitely not going to be the case with this author. Fall for Anything, in spite of an...

Courtney Summers is a queen of young adult realistic fiction. There’s really no denying that. Her prose is powerful and her ability to make readers root for an extremely unlikable female protagonist is incomparable. Summers’ debut, Cracked Up to Be is another strong novel that really reaffirms my belief in...

Normally, I don’t give much credence to the author blurbs they put on front covers. Just because one best-selling author writes something nice about the book doesn’t mean I’ll like it too. However, when I saw that Aimee Bender’s name was on the back cover of Imaginary Girls, I got...

Jessica Spotswood’s Born Wicked, for me, ran very closely to A Great and Terrible Beauty, but also reminded me of The Handmaid’s Tale. Yet while I think Born Wicked is similar to both of those books, I do think it’s also better. In the early stages of...

Generally speaking, YA dystopians and I don’t get along. I hold every dystopian novel I read up to the measuring stick of A Clockwork Orange, and really, there’s no way to beat that, especially in a book intended for a 15-year-old audience. I was informed, however, that...

Jody is obsessed. She’s spent years dreaming of the moment when the lead singer of her favorite band, Jackson Gatlin, will realize that he’s in love with her. She’s been counting on the moment, even though her best friend, Mac, (who may or may not be gay),...

It is my current belief that, between A Clockwork Orange and Unwind, I have no need to ever read a dystopian novel again, much less any of that romance-centric drivel that’s dominating today’s market—Dystopia Lite, I call it. I say this with complete seriousness. Unwind was brilliant. ...

I honestly have no idea how to review this book, and that doesn’t happen often with me. Between Shades of Gray is something entirely outside my previous reading experiences. It’s not the subject matter—I’ve read about Soviet labor camps before. It’s not the prose—Sepetys didn’t astound me, though her writing...

I’ve never been a big reader of horror, simply because I don’t get scared very easily. Almost every horror novel I’ve ever read has been a huge yawn. White Crow is probably the first “scary book” I’ve read that actually scared me. Real, oh-my-god-help scared. That was a first, definitely....

Before I started The Archived, I had fairly massive expectations. This is probably the most unique dystopian novel I’ve seen pitched in a while (in my opinion this book isn’t dystopian at all, though). Shelving the ghosts of the dead so their lives can be recorded and remembered is crazy,...

This book does not sugarcoat its messages, nor does Erin Saldin attempt to make the reader feel good about herself. This isn’t a happy book; you don’t want to cuddle it and if you do end up liking the characters, you probably don’t want to hug them. The Girls of...

First off, I need to have a chat with the people on Goodreads who shelved this as “Dystopia,” because that’s the only reason I didn’t read Nerve sooner. Yeesh. I thought it was going to be something similar to The Hunger Games in a reality-tv-where-kids-fight-for-their-lives kind of way. Guess who...

Literary fiction for the young adult audience is something of a rare beast. It can be found, as evidenced in the work of authors like Markus Zusak and Melina Marchetta, but I feel like a lot of YA novels fall either in the middle ground or fall firmly under the...

A friend of mine read this for a project in school, then I watched the Lifetime film when it came out and decided to read the book. What I Liked: Rodriguez’s writing was simple and to the point, and I liked how it seemed as if she...

When a book—any book, no matter how justified—is labeled as being similar to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, it comes with many, many expectations attached. Even if the reader is one of the few who hasn’t read anything by Stieg Larrsson, they will be expecting good things just based...