Reviews written by Paige Cee, Staff Reviewer

WHAT I LOVED: People do inadvisable things for love. Some of us publicly embarrass ourselves, but Asra uses her life-draining magic to help her girlfriend Ina find the animal she’ll shapeshift into and inadvertently kills Ina’s entire village. To stop Ina from killing the king and destroying the...

WHAT I LOVED: The wealth of queer and POC representation is by far one of the best things about the book, but there’s far more to it than just that. The worldbuilding and the conflicts created by the king’s refusal to pass the crown to one of his...

Clara Shin is the class clown and definitely qualifies as a troll too. (Big difference between the two, I'm not gonna get into it.) Thanks to re-enacting Carrie's bucket dump when she wins prom queen, she's stuck working her her dad's food truck with her worst enemy Rose Carver. All...

Recently recognized as a National Book Award finalist and a Stonewall Honor book, Pet is also Akwaeke Emezi’s YA debut and the first title from Random House’s Make Me a World imprint. This short novel has been a bit of a Big Book with a good reputation that precedes it...

WHAT I LOVED: I read various poems and short stories written by Edgar Allen Poe as early as seventh grade, when my teachers started assigning them–and they were almost always assigned around Halloween. Listening to “The Telltale Heart” and reading “The Cask of Amontillado” out...

WHAT I LOVED: Excuse me, who gave Anna Priemaza permission to bug my house and use my brother and I as character inspirations? All jokes aside, it’s eerie how similar Lainey and her brother Cody are to me and my own older brother. I plan to...

Los Angeles, Ferguson, and Baltimore. Three cities where years of racism, injustice, unchecked police brutality, and rampant anti-Black racism came together and riots ensued after a failure of accountability let cops get away with brutal assaults on black men. Less than two weeks before he was assassinated, MLK Jr. himself...

I started out reading an ARC of Symptoms of a Heartbreak, but then I switched to reading a hardcover in part because my mom used my ARC to kill a bug and because the book was just so good I wanted a finished copy to keep reading and then put...

WHAT I LOVED: Readers get a dual POV novel narrated by Jasmine, a fat Black girl, and Chelsea, a white girl who presumably wears straight sizes but at the very least is nowhere near Jasmine’s size. I bring their body sizes up because it’s relevant; Jasmine and...

The Parkland massacre took the lives of 17 students the day it happened and the very recent passings of two survivors bump the number up. That makes for 19 young lives stolen before they could even drink legally or decide their futures. And yet people still say the shooting was...

As of chapter one, Embry is a senior in high school, a girl feeling adrift as Christmas approaches, and the recipient of a marriage proposal from her ex-but-it’s-complicated-boyfriend Luke. He’s overseas on deployment and isn’t actually aware she’s hooking up with this guy Holden instead and doesn’t share Luke’s vision...

WHAT I LOVED: AJ is your average kid and doesn’t have anything exciting going on in his life, but he’s got a serious crush on his classmate Nia. His efforts to win her affection by pretending to be a vampire since she says herself she’s obsessed with the creatures...

See more of my reviews on The YA Kitten! My copy was an ARC I got from the publisher as a reviewer for YA Books Central. Lord, anthologies are having a good run when you have a diverse, #ownvoices set of authors involved! First Fresh Ink and...

The phrases “beautiful disaster” and “bad romance” but NOT the well-known novels that use those phrases for their titles. Five different Emilie Autumn songs, “Did You Imagine” by Lumidee, and “I Want My Tears Back” by Nightwish. These are just a few of the things that Winner Take All is...

Anthologies have such a special place in my heart. The art of the short story is undervalued and it’s just really cool to see a bunch of authors you like sharing space inside the pages of a book. As one of two anthologies put together thus far by We...