Reviews written by Paige Cee

What I Loved: I started watching the morning and evening news when I was ten years old and did three years of journalism in high school, so you could call me a fan of the news. Juuuuuuuust maybe. I’m also a fan of cute middle-grade novels because the warm...

What I Loved: Every time I open my mouth to talk about this book, all that comes out is an awe-soaked expletive. It's that kind of book. I used to hate how the cover looked like a placeholder, but now that I've read the book, I don't think there's...

What I Liked: If you’re like me and didn’t read Wicked Games but want to read Reckless Hearts, you won’t be lost if you skip the first book altogether. They’re more akin to companion novels than a solid series. The events of the first book seem to...

What I Loved: Tyler starts out as exactly the kind of uber macho, woman-disrespecting punk no girl wants anything to do with but is still bafflingly popular thanks to his stellar skills as a running back. His head is a horrid place to be because of his...

What I Loved: Dawn, Darby, and Delaney Brewster are a very driven set of triplets with the goal of conquering the United States via becoming the president, Speaker of the House, and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, respectively. Right now, they’re focused on snagging the...

What I Loved: Older’s worldbuilding is some of the most vivid and creative I’ve ever come across. Graffiti and murals–two types of art often sneered at as “vandalism, not art”–are explicitly turned into something good, culturally important, and powerful. The world is saved not with fists but...

What I Loved: Considering she makes it clear immediately that she doesn’t intend to live through her stay at the treatment facility, Stevie isn’t the sweetest of characters. As the story of her mother abandoning the family, a life-changing car accident, and a college girl named Eden...

What I Loved: This isn't the kind of thriller where there's a lot of sneaking around lasers to avoid triggering alarms or running from cops. Pretending to Be Erica is a more introspective thriller focused on Violet's job of being Erica versus her conflict with that job as she...

What I Loved: YA protagonists being extraordinary because they’re the only one that can solve the mystery or they’re a genius or any variety of reasons are par for the course. Vic is not that kind of YA protagonist. He has no hobbies, no specialties in school,...

What I Loved: Anna’s voice is pitch perfect from page one. She grew up in a nice household with plenty of money, but her father’s harsh (and possibly related to his Puerto Rican heritage, as the novel implies) discipline over the smallest things turned her into a...

What I Loved: For much of the novel, we rotate between Kelsey’s past with David and the present in which she has a boyfriend, popularity, and a wrench in the machine with David moving to town when she left him behind over a year before. As difficult...

What I Loved: Tera seems a highly unlikable narrator at first, but it’s part of her charm as well as a major facet of her character. We’ve all heard of the mama’s boys and daddy’s girls and Tera is a daddy’s girl if there has ever been...

What I Loved: #WeNeedDiverseBooks has been going strong for over a year now and Vanished is the kind of novel that fits in perfectly with what they want: novels with intersectional diversity across the board. Kalah, our bisexual Indian narrator with OCD and anxiety, has a well-written...

What I Loved: The prologue in which the shooting goes down and Alys stares down the barrel of the gun held by her own older brother is a chilling scene no one will forget any time soon. It made me tear up personally because of how close...

What I Loved: I don't put much thought into the Printz award or other major awards for YA novels because the award-winners typically don't appeal to me, but The Game of Love and Death is the first novel to make me think, "Wow, this is some serious...