Reviews written by Lauren Thoman

Please Ignore Vera Dietz is one of the more uniquely crafted tales I've read. First of all, the bulk of the story is told by Vera, but occasionally we get another point of view, and none of them are your run-of-the-mill YA narrator. One is her dead ex-best friend, Charlie....

I have a hard time summing up my thoughts on this book. I've been thinking about it for months, trying to come up with a neat little 3-paragraph blurb that can adequately encompass I Am the Messenger, and I'm not sure it's possible. I can say I liked it. I...

The Bitter Kingdom begins with one of my favorite epic fantasy conventions: The Long Journey Into Unknown Lands. In this case, Queen Elisa and her small band of allies are traveling to the hostile territory of Invierne to rescue Hector, the Captain of the Royal Guard, and also the man...

The setting for Across a Star-Swept Sea is far removed from the Luddite estate of For Darkness Shows the Stars. The citizens of Albion and Galatea believe they alone survived the Reduction, but the two islands have very different ideas of how to move forward afterward, and each character in...

I loved Vicious from the first few chilling pages. Vicious is a little grittier, a little bleaker than Victoria's YA novels, but although the prose is more stark than in her other books, it lacks none of her characteristic lyricism. It's obvious from the disturbing opening -- where we meet...

It's been a long, long time since I read a book that made me laugh out loud more than once or twice. It's been even longer since I read a book that made me laugh so hard, I had to stop reading and put down the book in order to...

From the first page, I knew I loved Sharon’s prose. I just wanted to wallow around in it. Her descriptions of the Tulman estate, where most of the book is set (and which is based on Welbeck Abbey in England, during the time of the Fifth Duke of Portland –...

Strange as it sounds, considering no one is fighting for their life in this one (at least physically speaking), I found this book much harder to read than If I Stay. Reading about Adam’s struggles in the years since the accident, after seeing what he was like before then, was...

Reasons I wasn't sure if this book would appeal to me: 1) It sounds like a cheating book. I hate cheating books. 2) It takes place in Paris. I don't like Paris. I know, I'm weird, but when I visited Paris, I just didn't...

First, the positives. Every Day definitely kept my interest. I was never bored, and I thought his prose had a nice simple flow to it. The concept was indeed both original and interesting, and I kind of liked that, like A, we never really figure out why he* jumps from...

If I Stay alternates between Mia's flashbacks of her life and her out-of-body experience after the accident, watching her friends and family react to what has happened to her, her parents, and her brother. We get to see snippets of her childhood, her interaction with her parents and brother, and...

This book took some getting used to, because of the unnatural (yet accurate for the story) use of pronouns and verb conjugations. Because there are two people sharing one body, you get paragraphs like this: "Kind of," Addie said. She managed to keep our voice bland despite...

First of all, the synopsis is misleading. It implies that there is a romance in this book between Blue and Gansey, and there is not. There is a hint of romance between Blue and one of the other Raven Boys, but not Gansey. Now, I'm pretty sure that if all...

Carnival of Souls is the story of two magical races -- witches and daimons -- that aren't exactly at war with each other, but are definitely not on good terms. Mallory is the daughter of the daimon ruler, but her daimon nature is hidden from her when her mother hides...

This review will contain some mild spoilers, but I will try to keep it as non-spoilery as possible. Magisterium starts with a sci-fi feel. It takes place in the future, there’s new technology (some of which seems a lot like an iPad a couple generations down the...