At first glance, this book looks like it’s going to be fairly clichéd. On their 13th birthdays, a boy and a girl find themselves crossing over into a hidden subterranean kingdom under the surface of Great Britain, where they are caught up in an epic conflict between good and evil, asked to do a task [...]
Amy doesn’t want to leave behind her boyfriend, her life, and the planet Earth itself. But to be with her parents, she joins them in cryogenic sleep aboard the generation ship Godspeed, which will colonize Centauri-Earth in three hundred years. When she wakes, though, it’s fifty years too early — and the Godspeed has changed. [...]
I really wanted to like this book: it’s a Regency-era fantasy (Corsets! Advantageous matches! Industrialization! Magic!) with Romantic poets in it. Not only does it have Lord Byron (who seems to be especially beloved of SF authors everywhere for some reason), but it also has William Blake, who really is an even better SF fit [...]
Alex is a shy but surly teenager who lives with her adult sister Sarah and — despite their lack of parents — is homeschooled. This is odder than you might think, because Alex is a Weirn, a type of magic user whose power manifests as a semi-sentient familiar. Most young Weirns — as well as [...]
We are now offering reviews of manga/graphic novels! So far we only have two, but watch the skies — er, website — and hopefully there will soon be more.
Tohru Honda became an orphan when her mother died a few months ago, and now that her grandfather’s renovating his house, she’s also homeless. Determined to cause no one any trouble, Tohru takes to camping in the woods. But it turns out these woods belong to the Sohmas, a rich and mysterious family. Three of [...]
When Rasetsu was fifteen years old, a powerful demon marked her and said he would return to claim her on her twentieth birthday–unless she could find her true love first. Now eighteen, Resetsu has all but given up on finding a boyfriend; instead, she’s learned to use her psychic powers working for a small agency [...]
Elisa is a princess, but she has always been plagued by a sense of insecurity and inadequacy, leaving the complexities of state affairs to her father the king and her confident and beautiful older sister. Instead of officiating at court functions, Elisa is more likely to be found in the kitchens eating pastries. However, she [...]
Amidst all of the horrible classic literature spin-offs out there in both the YA and adult markets, this book stands out as, if nothing else, actually readable. A teenaged Victor Frankenstein sets out to discover the alchemical Elixir of Life in a desperate quest to save the life of his identical twin brother, Konrad, who [...]
Every now and then, it’s satisfying to pick up a good ol’ doorstopper. This saga of an underground rebellion against an evil overlord certainly qualifies, and it has a number of things going for it. For one thing, it has a well-developed and plausible system of magic, with specific powers tied to the use of [...]