Specials by Scott Westerfeld continues the mutatious adventures of Tally Youngblood. First she struggled to maintain her individuality in a world that forces their population to undergo an extreme kind of plastic surgery that affects both body and brain. Then she struggled to reclaim her identity when she was blackmailed into the change for the […]
Category: science fiction
Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
March 7, 2014I doubt there is anything that makes me fall for a book faster than a damaged main character. Is Katniss damaged after her win at The Hunger Games? Oh, absolutely. The willingness to kill to survive doesn’t make it easier, especially when said survival is a farce, a forced situation so twisted that people celebrate […]
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
March 4, 2014I’m late to the bandwagon so I’ll jump to the point—The Hunger Games is one of the scariest books I’ve read. It’s not just twenty four 12 to 17 year olds battling to the death for the entertainment of the populace. It’s them being forced to do it, putting their names in the lottery extra […]
Review: Raptor by Paul Zindel
February 3, 2014When Zack and his Native American friend Ute explore the cave where Zack’s paleontologist father was mysteriously injured, they discover a strange nest with very large eggs. Zack, thinking they might be worth a lot of money, takes an egg with him despite Ute’s warnings that he should leave it be. Ute is right, of […]
Dueling Reviews: Raiju: A Kaiju Hunter Novel by K.H. Koehler
January 30, 2014Colleen says: Kevin Takahashi is a 16-year-old refugee from San Francisco living in New York City with his dad. San Francisco was destroyed by a kaiju, or monster (think Godzilla). A shark had eaten so much polluted fish that it changed into a monster called a Karkadon and came ashore in San Francisco Bay, […]
Dueling Reviews: The Monstrumologist by Rick Yancey
January 27, 2014The MonsterLibrarian says: In The Monstrumologist, twelve year old Will Henry is thrust into danger when a grave robber brings a horrifying creature to his mentor, Dr. Warthrop, in the middle of the night. Dr. Warthrop is a monstrumologist, a monster-hunting doctor, and now Will and his mentor are in a race to find and stop these […]
The third and final volume in K. H. Koehler’s tale of steampunk, time travel and dragons is just as good as the previous two. As in the second volume, there is a reorienting chapter at the start, and then the tale continues. Sasha Strange, Lord Quinn, and now Dr. John Ulysses, struggle to survive long […]
K. H. Koehler has put together a great second stage to her tale of time travel, steampunk and dinosaurs. This volume picks up where Planet of Dinosaurs ended complete with a short summary to reorient the reader. In Sea of Serpents, Sasha Strange, Lord Quinn, and Toby, sort through their relationships to one another while overcoming adversity and […]
Time Travel Steampunk. This is a fun read from K. H. Koehler. The story begins in 1889, with the heroine, Sasha Strange, on the verge of being married off to the boorish brute Lord Sirius Quinn. To the chagrin of her father, Sasha is only interested in science and the freedom to explore away […]
Pretties by Scott Westerfeld
September 18, 2013When we last left Tally she valiantly volunteered to surrender herself to the Specials and undergo the process of becoming Pretty. See the big secret of the first book is that becoming Pretty is not just a physical thing, they also burn away bits of your brain that encourage free thought and independence. So Tally […]