Reviews written by Angela Blount

With a memorable duo-chromatic cover and shadowy charcoal sketches, this little hardback is an effort to combine artistry and emotion. The style is very reminiscent of a simple children’s book. Depression is depicted as a dragon, a smoky fog, as a blinding and suffocating personification of darkness. The goal is...

>“Let us be elegant or die!” I’d like to confess up front, I avoided reading this book for most of my life simply because of the title. It sounded so… painfully feminine. And as someone who’s struggled to make peace with their biological gender, I...

“I don't understand it any more than you do, but one thing I've learned is that you don't have to understand things for them to be.” Beautifully peculiar. I missed this one in my childhood. (I heard it mentioned now and then as...

I sincerely think this book is better than the first one. (I suspect the 11-year release gap between book 1 and 2 may have positively contributed.) The writing, the cohesion, the clarity, the emotional conveyance... everything is taken up a notable notch. Not to mention, the focal idea of the...

Time-travel, evil dictators, Unicorns, and impending nuclear doom. Oh my! When you break it down to it’s basic parts, it doesn’t look like this story could possibly work. And yet, somehow, it does. Not perfectly or without some name-related confusion. But what it sometimes lacks in clear...

"Stay Strong. Love endlessly. Change lives." --Amy Bleuel This suicide and mental illness awareness collection is made up of both survival testimonials and memorial accounts of those enduring the pain of a lost loved one. The range of writing length and ability here is widely...

In this second installment of the series, Thomas ward is now 13 and has been the Spook’s apprentice for 6 months. An unfortunate occurrence involving his estranged priest brother leaves the Spook an opening—a reason to revisit Priestown. There he hopes to tangle again with an ancient being...

A contemporary YA romance—heavy on the romance—with an Indian-American take on the attraction of opposites. The story is told in alternating dual POVs, from the very different perspectives of two recent high school graduates: Rishi and Dimple. Both are highly intelligent and highly motivated, eyeing tech-oriented careers....

A charming gift idea for young Wonder Woman fans, with plenty of additional DC universe appeal. This Wonder Woman ultimate sticker collection isn’t merely that (although it does deliver on the more-than-1000-sticker promise.) The first 31 pages are actually more guide-like, dedicated to introducing children to the...

The year is 1943. The setting locations are England, and Nazi-occupied France. The book is told in a split first-person point of view (which occurs halfway through the book), between Queenie (“Verity”), and her best friend, Maddie. Queenie is a bold, German-speaking Scottish aristocrat who has...

A mature contemporary YA, set in New York City. The story is told in first-person present-tense, exclusively from the perspective of a young teen named Craig—who is struggling with anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation. After a particularly bad night, he opts to check himself into the psychiatric floor of a...

A mature middle-grade fantasy—sporting a medieval feel and steeped in an eerie English folklore ambiance which, at times, drifts over the line into horror. The story is told exclusively in the first-person past tense perspective of Tom Ward, the latest (and allegedly last) apprentice to the...

This first-person present-tense piece of historical YA fiction begins a bit like a Charles Dicken’s work—eighteenth-century London, poor destitute orphan, cruel world. But from there, things get a lot more interesting… Mary Faber came from a good family, but that didn’t spare her their loss to rampant...

I’ll admit I was a bit hesitant to pick this one up. First of all, it sounded a bit like Titanic: In Space!, (and to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t a fan of how the movie ended. *sniffle*) Secondly, Illuminae was my first exposure to Amie Kaufman’s work (albeit in...

The Doldrums are back in this mystery and intrigue-laden Middle Grade continuation. Though it’s definitely a sequel, the story has been crafted in such a way that readers needn’t have discovered book #1 to enjoy and fully comprehend The Doldrums and the Helmsley Curse. Here, Archer (and readers by extension)...