Reviews written by Lauren Thoman, Listings Manager

Poison is different from most of the fantasy I've read, either YA or otherwise. It's lighthearted and whimsical, and never takes itself too seriously. I'll admit, my personal preference normally trends a bit darker, but Poison was a fun read that kept me smiling from beginning to end. ...

When I started reading Dare You To, I was a tad on the worried side. Like Pushing the Limits, the story is told from two perspectives. We open with Ryan, and I was not too fond of him. He seemed exactly like the type of guy I steered clear of...

From the first few moments of Infinityglass, it's clear that this is going to be a different sort of story from the first two books in the series. For one thing, as with Timepiece, we have a new narrator -- but this time, there's two of them, and one of...

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...

If you're still reeling from the catastrophic ending of Defiance, fear not. Deception picks up very shortly after Defiance ends, with Logan and Rachel trying to figure out what to do with the hundred-plus survivors of Baalboden. It hits the ground running, and the first couple chapters introduce a lot...

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...

This book had literally everything I love in a story. The action and adventure was incredible. There were scenes that literally left me gasping and curling into a ball, and that's not something I typically do while reading. I'm normally a much more...stationary...reader. But the tension in...

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...