Reviews written by David Kudler

As someone with an interest in YA novels about female teen assassins, I’ve enjoyed Sarah J. Maas’s Throne of Glass series. The latest volume, Empire of Storms, delivers all of the pleasures that have made the previous installments addictive — fast-moving action, well-thought-through epic fantasy, and, at its center, the...

I picked this book up to see if it would be appropriate for my precocious nine-year-old, and was blown away by Lowry's daring plot and wonderful prose. The book takes on themes that are incredibly sophisticated and examines them in ways that even a bonehead like me can wrap his...

Exciting, thought-provoking and riotously funny—in addition to being more tightly plotted than many of Pratchett's books. Just about the perfect YA fantasy! Tiffany Aching is a wonderful, unique protagonist, and her titular sidekicks are a hoot. Only Terry Pratchett could take a fantasy novel about an old-beyond-her-years...

It is difficult to know whether the gloomy mood I felt while reading The Shepherd’s Crown was due to the book itself or to the fact that the fifth Tiffany Aching novel (and forty-first Discworld novel) was in fact the late Sir Terry Pratchett’s final work. The...