Wow, it’s been a great year for YA horror! I feel like we are seeing much more diversity than in the past, which is great, and it isn’t just surface: it’s essential to many of these stories. I read more than I got reviewed for Monster Librarian, and there were definitely other great reads (Angel […]
Category: booklist
Book List: The Chosen One Least Likely to be Chosen
April 10, 2021***Cross Posted from the Circulation Desk*** We all know the “Chosen One” trope that is prevalent though all kinds of literature and media from King Arthur to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and its mutated dystopian form that divides families and communities, as in Veronica Roth’s Divergent and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale to produce its hero. But being the […]
Book List: A Year of Witchy Reads
January 1, 2021My library informed me that this year was the Return of the YA Vampire, and indeed we did see a number of YA vampire novels this year, not least of which was Stephenie Meyer’s latest addition to the Twilight saga, Midnight Sun. For myself, I discovered I had read a number of very good books focused on witches […]
I recently discovered The Magicians while surfing Netflix. Yes, I know I’m late to the party. It’s based on a book of the same name by Lev Grossman, and I’m going to say that in this case the show is much better than the book. The Magicians tells the story of Quentin, a nerdy, WASPY, and very unhappy teenager obsessed […]
Book List: 21st Century Lovecraftian Fiction
January 1, 2018A lot of people have had limited (or no) exposure to the work of H.P. Lovecraft. Maybe they’ve seen those memes that go around at election time that say “Cthulhu for President: Choose The Lesser of Two Evils”, or have an adorable tentacled plushie, but that doesn’t mean they have ever actually read his stuff […]
Book List: Breaking Cliches in Zombie Fiction
September 9, 2017I was reading a blog post on realism in zombie fiction by Brian Parker, a writer of zombie fiction. Somewhere in the middle of it, he addressed the problem of the Mary Sue in zombie novels: If you’re like me, you likely roll your eyes at the stereotypical protagonist in zombie fiction. You know the type, it’s […]
Book List: 6 Great YA Dystopian Novels Posted on June 8, 2016 by Kirsten Posted in Uncategorized Even though the media-generated excitement over teen dystopias like the ones in The Hunger Games and (to a lesser degree) Divergent, has died down a bit, anyone living through the past year can see that dystopian fiction is still terrifyingly relevant. Some days it really doesn’t […]
If You Like Divergent & Hunger Games…
August 1, 2016Even though the media-generated excitement over teen dystopias like the ones in The Hunger Games and (to a lesser degree) Divergent, has died down a bit, anyone living through the past year can see that dystopian fiction is still terrifyingly relevant. Some days it really doesn’t feel like we’re all that far from living through […]
Having recently returned from vacation in Alaska and Canada, suddenly I’m finding myself surrounded by YA titles set in those places. While I wouldn’t call these horror in any kind of traditional sense (with the possible exception of Visions) survival stories do possess their own kind of terror and fascination, and there are a lot […]