A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions

REVIEW: Chernobyl's Wild Kingdom: Life in the Dead Zone (nonfiction book) by Rebecca L. Johnson

2026-02-23T00:53:00.000-06:00

Chernobyl's Wild Kingdom is YA nonfiction. I bought my copy used.

Review:

This gives an overview of the Chernobyl disaster and its effect on the area and people, before getting into research on animals in the Exclusion Zone. Particular attention is paid to Robert Baker and Ronald Chesser and their study of bank voles, and Timothy Mousseau and Anders Pape Møller and their studies of swallows and insects.

I really wished this had been longer and more detailed. It was both a fascinating and frustrating look at animals in the Exclusion Zone. Baker and Chesser's conclusions were very different from Mousseau and Møller's (I got the impression the author agreed more with Mousseau and Møller's conclusions than Baker and Chesser's), and I was left with a lot of questions. Quite possibly there genuinely weren't any answers, but that didn't stop me from wanting a few other scientists' opinions and maybe a chapter set up like a moderated discussion between the different camps.

REVIEW: The Poisoned House (book) by Michael Ford

2026-01-27T14:03:00.001-06:00

The Poisoned House is a YA historical horror/mystery. I bought my copy new.

Review:

This is one of the many works I've read, finished, and then failed to review in a timely manner. On the plus side, I actually took notes right after finishing this one. On the minus side, those notes don't tell me much besides a few basics and how things wrapped up.

I honestly did not recall reading this. Even my notes didn't do much to jog my memory, so take this review with a grain of salt.

This is set sometime in the 1850s. Fourteen-year-old Abigail is a servant at Greave Hall. She's treated terribly by the housekeeper, Mrs. Cotton, who also happens to be the sister-in-law of the widowed Lord Greave. Strange things start to happen that prompt Abi to think her mother is haunting Greave Hall, and she begins looking into the truth behind her mother's death.

I didn't look into this much before starting it, so it took me by surprise that this was YA (and probably the younger end of YA, at that). Overall, this was okay - it obviously didn't make much of an impression on my memory. The ghost story aspects of this barely warranted a mention in my notes, although the mystery, at least, was reasonably interesting, and I wasn't expecting how things turned out.

REVIEW: Prom House (book) by Chelsea Mueller

2026-01-03T21:22:00.000-06:00

Prom House is a YA horror/thriller. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Kylie and her friends have rented a gorgeous beach house so they can party as much and as loudly as they'd like after prom. Unfortunately, not long after they start their partying, Kylie and her friend Aubrey discover Cam, Aubrey's boyfriend, dead. Kylie is convinced that he was murdered and that his murderer could still be somewhere nearby. When the cops arrive, however, Cam's body is gone, and Kylie and the others can't convince them that it isn't a prank.

Now the cops are gone, and everybody's stuck in the house as a violent storm hits and takes down a nearby power line. When yet another person in their group winds up dead, it seems more and more likely that whoever killed Cam is still among them. Can they find the killer before whoever it is claims more victims?

While reading this, I was strongly reminded of the movie Bodies Bodies Bodies, although that movie was a lot slicker and had more fun moments. Kylie and her friends weren't exactly likeable, although it was hard to even properly dislike them since readers were told so little about most of them, just A is sleeping with B and whatnot.

I feel like this might have been a more enjoyable book if it had embraced its slasher aspects more, but the body count was surprisingly low considering how quickly the paranoia and distrust ramped up. For the most part, this book and its characters were just dull and vaguely annoying.

REVIEW: Gimme a Kiss (book) by Christopher Pike

2025-12-27T21:45:00.001-06:00

Gimme a Kiss is a YA mystery/thriller originally published in 1988. I bought my copy new.

This review includes slight spoilers.

Review:

Jane Retton is a teenager who uses her diary to imagine a slightly better life for herself. In her diary, when Kirk, her friend Alice's ex-boyfriend, asked her out, it was super-romantic and perfect. She's in the process of writing about their perfect first time having sex (in reality, Jane has never had sex) when she's interrupted. She forgets to put her diary away, which, unfortunately, soon leads to Patty, a cheerleader who hates Jane's guts, getting hold of the most recent entry, making copies of it, and passing it around school.

Jane is deeply humiliated. It doesn't help that Kirk doesn't deny the events mentioned in the diary and adds fuel to the fire by confirming that the handwriting is Jane's. But then Jane has an idea, a way to temporarily get back at both Kirk and Patty. Except something goes horribly wrong. Now Alice, one of Jane's friends, is the only one who can say what really happened. But did she actually know everything, and is she telling the police the full truth?

Yes, it totally makes sense to deal with humiliation by faking your own death and making it look like those who humiliated you killed you. Absolutely. So yeah, the Christopher Pike banana pantsery is baked right into the premise of this one. It's still fairly mild, though, because additional revelations, while ridiculous in their own way, don't make things that much more outlandish. There are much wilder Christopher Pike books out there.

None of this gave me a sense of deja vu as I was reading, so either I never read this as a teen or it just wasn't memorable enough to stick in my brain. As a mystery/thriller, it had some nice pieces that readers could put together to figure certain things out, with zero supernatural elements to complicate things. Whether it was all believable was, uh, another thing entirely.

All in all, this was an okay read. Needed even more banana pantsery. And ugh, I hated that I could absolutely imagine the 33-year-old cop proposing to [redacted] after rescuing her in the end. They would have the world's most unhealthy and turbulent relationship, ending in either a messy divorce or murder.

REVIEW: Catching Fire (book) by Suzanne Collins

2025-11-02T23:32:00.000-06:00

Catching Fire is the second book in Collins' Hunger Games YA dystopian series. I checked my copy out from the library.

Review:

I read The Hunger Games way back in 2011. I had to read my review of it to remind myself what I thought of it - I liked it well enough but had issues with Katniss and disliked the developing love triangle. I never got around to reading more - for some reason, each new movie and book release, particularly after the original trilogy, reduced my desire to go back to it. However, one of my library's student workers was absolutely shocked that I'd only read the first book, so I decided to finally continue on in order to appease her.

In this book, the latest Hunger Games are over, but that doesn't mean that Katniss and Peeta are free from it all. Katniss and Peeta are both still in the spotlight and, as a result, they're forced to continue acting like they're a happy couple. Katniss still has feelings for Gale, but he'll barely speak to her.

Whether Katniss wants it to or not, a rebellion is brewing with her at its center. Katniss' family's living conditions are better than they once were, but Katniss is painfully aware that this could change at any time on President Snow's orders. She tries her best to be a well-behaved victor in order to keep her friends and family safe, but even her best efforts might not be enough.

When news about changes to the Hunger Games is released, Katniss realizes that even the smallest sliver of safety she'd found was nothing more than a cruel illusion.

Gale's bitterness and moodiness were extremely annoying, and I couldn't help but think that the love triangle was unnecessary. It would have been bad enough for Katniss to realize that she was going to have to spend her life pretending to love a decent guy who genuinely loved her (and who was just as aware she didn't really love him back), rather than have any real choice about her future.

I felt a lot more sympathy for Katniss this time around than I did during the first book. Gale, one of her best friends, was acting like a jerk, she was suffering from PTSD, the actions of others she didn't even know could potentially result in her friends and family being killed, she had to pretend to be a happy girl thrilled to be with the person she loved for the cameras, etc. She just did not get a break, and that was before the new Hunger Games stuff came up.

The new Hunger Games stuff was fantastically cruel, but it also struck me as being a fairly stupid move on the Capitol's part. Before, anyone unlucky enough to end up in the Hunger Games could at least hope they'd end up as a victor and therefore set for life. This change took that hope and stomped on it. It seemed more likely to light a fire under the budding rebellion than anything.

All in all, this was a good read, and I should probably listen to that student worker and at least finish up the original trilogy.

REVIEW: Fake Dates and Mooncakes (book) by Sher Lee

2025-05-05T00:28:00.000-05:00

Fake Dates and Mooncakes is a YA m/m romance. I bought my copy new.

Review:

A year ago, Dylan had hoped to enter a Mid-Autumn Festival mooncake-making contest with his mother. Then she got sick. Now that she's gone, Dylan lives with his aunt and cousin and helps out at his aunt's Chinese takeout place, Wok Warriors. He still wants to enter the mooncake-making contest in his mother's memory, but another benefit of the contest would be the possibility of getting Wok Warriors some desperately needed publicity. His aunt does her best to hide it, but Dylan's painfully aware she can barely make ends meet.

One evening, Dylan fills in for their delivery guy and gets yelled at by a customer for bringing an incorrect order. The one bright spot was that he got an eyeful of the guy's rich and hot boyfriend, Theo. It surprises Dylan when Theo stops by to apologize for his friend Adrian's behavior. The two of them get to talking, and Dylan happens to mention Wok Warriors' money issues...only for Dylan's aunt to later get a surprise "small business grant" for exactly the amount Dylan mentioned. Dylan doesn't feel comfortable accepting the money, so Theo tells him he can be his fake date to an upcoming family wedding if that will make him feel better about it.

The first part of this, with the wedding, reminded me strongly of Crazy Rich Asians, and if I remember right there were even a couple references to it. Theo's family had lots of underlying drama that he didn't bother to inform Dylan about beforehand. It seemed like every guy in Theo's family sucked in some way.

The part with the mooncake-making contest had some really predictable elements (I knew how things were going to go with that one special ingredient the instant it was mentioned), but I still enjoyed it and wished I could try one of Dylan's mooncakes.

All in all, this was a sweet and enjoyable read despite a few irksome minor characters. Dylan was a sweetie, and I liked seeing how things worked out between him and Theo.

REVIEW: Good Girl, Bad Blood (book) by Holly Jackson

2025-03-24T01:01:00.000-05:00

Good Girl, Bad Blood is a YA mystery/thriller, the second in a series. I bought my copy new.

Review:

After the events of the first book, Pip is determined to no longer do detective work. She's still working on her true-crime podcast, but now it's focused on the murder trial related to the case she'd previously investigated. There won't be any new investigations.

That lasts until Connor, a friend of hers, asks for her help after his older brother Jamie goes missing. The cops aren't taking his disappearance seriously because he's disappeared a couple times before and come back, but Connor and his mother are convinced that this time is different.

Pip agrees to look into his disappearance and ask for leads from her podcast listeners. But as she starts to get as obsessed with this case as her previous one, she and those around her wonder whether she can handle this kind of strain again. Surely it's worth it if she can find Jamie, right?

Overall, I enjoyed this mystery, although I may be reading too many YA mysteries, because I kept mixing things up with Karen M. McManus' books. But man, aspects of this book made me angry. Although I could understand why Connor and his mom went to Pip after Jamie disappeared, it was a lot to put on Pip's shoulders. I was honestly kind of surprised that Pip's parents never went to talk to Connor's mom about the pressure she'd put on Pip.

Also, I felt so bad for the way one particular character was treated after certain information was revealed. It really wasn't fair.

Pip absolutely needs to be in therapy in the next book, although I wouldn't be surprised if that doesn't happen.

Additional Comments:

The book includes a map and a few other illustrations. Supposedly, this takes place in Fairview, CT, and yet the courtroom sketch features a judge and lawyer wearing wigs. After looking through a few reviews, it sounds like this was maybe the result of sloppy localization?

REVIEW: Fright Night (book) by Maren Stoffels, translated by Laura Watkinson

2025-03-23T22:00:00.003-05:00

Fright Night is YA horror. I bought my copy new.

Review:

This follows two groups of characters: Sofia, Dylan, and Quin, a group of friends who've decided to take part in Fright Night, a super-scary event in the woods that tailors its scares to the real-life fears of its participants; and Kelly and Sandy, a pair of troubled teens who've just gotten a part-time job as scarers at Fright Night.

This was marginally better than the other book I read by this author, Escape Room, but still not very good. The translation/writing is stiff and clunky, and the story itself doesn't have anything I'd call scary moments. One of the characters does eat a cockroach on-page, though, so...ew. There's that.

The details of Dylan and Kelly's pasts were relatively interesting, and I felt a bit sorry for them when everything was revealed. Overall, though, this was at best a lukewarm reading experience.

REVIEW: Escape Room (book) by Maren Stoffels, translated by Laura Watkinson

2024-12-16T00:10:00.001-06:00

Escape Room is a YA mystery/thriller. I bought my copy new.

Review:

This alternates between four POVs, five if you count the occasional page from the POV of the person determined to punish one or more of the characters. Alissa is a pretty girl who hates it when people judge her by what they see on the surface. Her father is a firefighter who struggled with PTSD after one particular fire. Mint is the shy, withdrawn girl Alissa befriended. Although she hasn't told anyone, she thinks she has the ability to feel other people's pain. It makes it difficult for her to interact with others. Sky is another member of this friend group. Miles is one of Sky's coworkers, a handsome but secretly tortured young man who finds himself immediately drawn to Alissa.

The four of them hear about a new escape room that requires a minimum of four people, and they decide to give it a try. Unfortunately, what they don't realize is that the escape room is a trap arranged by someone with a massive grudge.

The best thing I can say about this is that the escape room itself sounded pretty awesome. I would've wanted to try it myself, although I'm sure I'd have sucked at it.

Granted, I'm nowhere near the target age for this, but I feel like even readers in the target age range might've had problems relating to these characters, the way they were written. Also, except for one moment when the villain got a bit more violent than I expected (one character ended up with a badly injured hand), there weren't really a lot of surprising moments. The villain came across as almost cartoonishly insane, rather than as someone who could carefully craft the perfect trap without anyone wondering about their mental state.

I got this as part of a three-pack of the author's books, so here's hoping the other two work better for me.

REVIEW: One of Us Is Back (book) by Karen M. McManus

2024-09-23T10:22:00.001-05:00

One of Us Is Back is the third (and final?) book in McManus' One of Us Is Lying series. I bought my copy new.

Review:

This review contains spoilers for the events of the first two books.

It's been almost 2 years since Simon's death in the first book. Jake, Addy's ex-boyfriend, is about to be retried and potentially let out. Addy is understandably terrified - Jake has been working hard to turn public sentiment in his favor. Meanwhile, Phoebe is killing herself with worry that Owen, her little brother, will turn out like Jake because she and her sister didn't turn him in for his part in the events of Book 2.

Then someone hacks a billboard, announcing the start of a new game, and one of the Bayview Crew goes missing. Is Jake responsible, or someone close to him?

This was a mostly believable extension of the original story, although I still think it would have made more sense for the person involved to have done something sooner.

By this point in the series, the Bayview Four has grown into a fairly large Bayview Crew, and it was something of a relief that the author limited the POVs to Nate, Phoebe, and Addy, the characters still grappling with questions about their futures.

The setup wasn't as intriguing as the first book, but it was still an interesting enough mystery with lots of red herrings.

REVIEW: I Know What You Did Last Summer (book) by Lois Duncan

2024-09-22T23:27:00.000-05:00

I Know What You Did Last Summer is YA suspense. I bought my copy new.

Review:

A year ago, Julie was a cheerleader who was more focused on her social life than on her academics. All that changed after one particular summer night. Now she's determined to leave everything behind, go to college, and forget everything that happened.

Except someone won't let her, sending her a note that just says "I know what you did last summer." Sick and scared, Julie tracks down the others who were there that night: Helen, a pretty but insecure young woman; Barry, a football player and Helen's boyfriend (who unbeknownst to Helen, is seeing lots of other girls besides her); and Ray, Julie's former boyfriend, who she broke up with soon after the events of that summer.

I figured out who was after the characters pretty much the instant the person appeared on-page. Although there was one moment that took me a bit by surprise, the various clues Duncan scattered around were fairly easy for me to spot. That said, I'm an adult reader with years worth of experience reading thrillers and suspense novels - I don't know what Teen Me would have thought of this book (and I'm fairly sure Teen Me never read it, since nothing here ever gave me a feeling of deja vu).

Unfortunately, this turned out to be the updated text rather than the original, which meant there were occasional mentions of things like GPS, webcasts, and cellphones, and yet for some reason no one had their cellphones on them when they might have been useful, and no one had anyone else's cellphone number. Also, the way "Iraq" was substituted for "Vietnam" created some weird moments that didn't quite work.

All in all, this was okay. I found Helen, in particular, to be an interesting if not very likeable character.

Extras:

A Q&A between Barry Lyga and Lois Duncan, in which Duncan talks about the movie version (which horrified her, not in a good way) and updating the text. Also, a list of reader discussion questions.

REVIEW: Five Total Strangers (book) by Natalie D. Richards

2024-09-22T22:45:00.000-05:00

Five Total Strangers is a YA thriller. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Mira is heading to her mother's for Christmas. She knows her mom will need her support - it's the anniversary of Aunt Phoebe's (her mother's twin) death.

Except that there's a blizzard on the way and her connecting flight, as well as all other flights, has been cancelled. Rather than wait it out, Mira accepts an offer of a ride from Harper, the glamorous and unflappable college student she met on the plane. Harper is accompanied by several others Mira initially assumes are her friends: Kayla, a young woman who looks sick and sleeps most of the time; Josh, who's using crutches due to a torn ACL; and Brecken, a handsome pre-med student who rubs Mira the wrong way.

In reality, all of these people are actually strangers Harper just befriended at the airport. Or are they? Something weird is going on. Harper and Brecken seem surprisingly close for people who supposedly just met in a rental car line. Random things keep going missing, and everyone in the car seems to have secrets. As the drive becomes more treacherous and the situation goes from bad to worse, Mira wonders who she can trust.

A big part of what made this such an intense read was the claustrophobic and tense real-life situation the characters were in. Would I have gotten into a car with a bunch of strangers, knowing that a blizzard was coming? Hopefully not, but I could imagine it happening, and I could believe in Mira's reasons for wanting to rush home. This book reminded me, viscerally, why I hate snow. I could practically feel myself in the car with them, holding my breath as visibility dropped and the tires slid. The bridge scene, in particular, was terrifying.

Things get even more intense after a nasty confrontation with a gas station attendant, and Mira notices that a man in a yellow hat keeps showing up pretty much every place they stop. Also, interspersed throughout the book are letters that indicate that Mira has a stalker she doesn't know about, someone who's been keeping track of her since her aunt died in the hospital a year ago.

I pretty much gobbled this up. There were a few things that were a little hard to believe, but overall I really enjoyed this.

REVIEW: Four Found Dead (book) by Natalie D. Richards

2024-09-16T10:51:00.000-05:00

Four Found Dead is a YA thriller/horror novel. I bought my copy new.

Review:

The mall movie theater is one of the last places that held on after most of the businesses in the Riverview Fashionplace shopping mall closed. It's finally closing, however, and seven employees and one manager are there on its final night, cleaning and locking everything up.

Clayton, the manager, has always been disliked by his employees, but this evening in particular he's jumpy and angry. Then Jo notices that he has a gun on him, and she's instantly terrified - when she was 9, she witnessed her dad get killed in a gas station robbery.

As the situation in the theater rapidly devolves, one of the employees ends up dead and the rest of them find themselves trapped, locked inside with Clayton (who has the keys, and who took their phones at the beginning of their shifts because no one is supposed to be using their cellphones while working). So begins as tense game of cat-and-mouse as the group tries to figure out how to get to safety.

At the beginning, readers learn that four of the characters will die, including one adult. There are articles about the incident at the movie theater interspersed throughout the book, as well as journal entries/letters written by one of the survivors. As the story progresses, readers learn a little about each of the characters, and various mysteries start to make themselves known.

This was very high-adrenaline, fast-paced, and intense. I generally enjoyed it, although there were details here and there that I had trouble believing (who blocks all the emergency exits in a building that's still being used, even if only barely?). Also, the final action scenes were a little hard to follow.

REVIEW: Life and Death (book) by Stephenie Meyer

2024-09-14T19:38:00.000-05:00

Life and Death is YA paranormal romance. I bought my copy new.

Review:

In her foreword, Stephenie Meyer writes that this book was inspired by complaints that Bella was too much a "damsel in distress" and too consumed by her feelings for Edward. Meyer was inspired to write this gender-swapped version of Twilight because she felt it would show that the things Bella experienced and the way she reacted wouldn't have changed in the slightest had Bella been male instead of female.

And so we have this book, which follows the same plot as Twilight and even, I'm pretty sure, uses much of the same text word-for-word, with a few pronoun changes. I didn't have a copy of Twilight to compare it to, and it's been years since I last read Twilight, but even I could recognize chunks of text.

The two characters I know for sure weren't gender-swapped are Charlie and Renee, Bella's (or in this case, Beaus's) parents. Meyer explained her reasons for that in her foreword as well, although I think she could have managed to make the change work if she'd really wanted.

Anyway, initially I liked Beau well enough. Then, like Bella, he met Edythe (Edward) and became consumed by her to the point that he stopped caring that she might break down at any point and kill him. It was just as annoying and horrible with Beau as it was with Bella. Plus, it didn't seem as thought Meyer had thought through the gender-swapping well enough. Imagine a high school guy suddenly becoming starry-eyed over a girl, spending all his time with her even when he was supposed to be with friends, and letting her drive him to school multiple times, in 2005. I'd have thought at least one guy would tease him for it a little, but instead everyone went wide-eyed and just accepted it.

After a while, I considered DNFing. This was basically like rereading Twilight, except with bonus ghost of Twilight haunting the edges. I continued on, although now that I've finished, my advice to others who are unsure, for similar reasons, whether to DNF is just to skip to Chapter 22 and read from there to the end. The one change Meyer makes is to the ending. Honestly, this version probably worked better for me than the original. The gender-swapping alone made Renesmee an impossibility (yay!), but the change to the ending made a few other annoying things from the later books either unlikely or impossible.

Did this book need to exist? No. Did it prove what Meyer wanted it to prove? No - like I said, there were moments when it felt like Meyer didn't think through the gender-swapping well enough and how characters would really have reacted. Also, both Beau and Bella's lack of survival instincts after they met their respective love interests was concerning. I'm still convinced that neither of the two were actually in love, but rather reacting like mice infected with toxoplasmosis being confronted by a cat.

REVIEW: Killer Content (book) by Kiley Roache

2024-06-21T15:31:00.003-05:00

Killer Content is a YA thriller/mystery. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Sydney, Gwen, Cami, Tucker, Beau, and Kat are six teens who live in a beachfront mansion they've named the Lit Lair - it's a collab house intended to allow the TikTokers to work together and use their follower counts to boost each other to greater heights. Sydney's parents made the down payment on the house (which she never lets them forget), but they all have an agreement that essentially makes them equal, as long as they abide by the rules of the house and continue to pay rent on their rooms.

Of course, teens being teens, there's a lot of drama under the surface. Sydney and Tucker are a couple, but Tucker's been sleeping with someone else behind Sydney's back. Cami has a secret crush on Gwen, Gwen is painfully aware that the others don't consider her to be very smart, and Beau and Kat (who many of the Lit Lair's fans ship, although they aren't a couple) are the only two in the group whose TikToks have a comedy rather than dance focus.

After Sydney gets in a fight with her housemates, she leaves and doesn't even come back for a planned celebrity meeting. But she's done similar things before, so the others shrug it off...until the next morning, when Cami spots Sydney's body in the pool while filming a live tour of the house. A short while later, someone uses the Lit Lair social media accounts to tauntingly post about her death. True, the housemates had some beefs with each other, but did one of them really hate Sydney enough to kill her?

This was one of my Book Bonanza purchases - the cover art got my attention, and I'm often drawn to YA thrillers/mysteries.

The characters in this reminded me of the movie Bodies Bodies Bodies - for the most part, shallow, rich, and annoying. The best of the bunch were Kat (whose parents made her put most of the money she earned into a college fund for herself) and Beau (a computer science student), which made me wonder for a while whether they'd be revealed as the group's secret snakes. The others were more openly awful. Cami was abrasive, Tucker was scum, and Gwen was shallow and so stupid at times that it seemed like she had to be faking it. Sydney's POV didn't come until later, but honestly most of their POVs were hard to take for long. They called each other friends but often seemed to hate each other more than they liked each other.

There were times I wanted to DNF the book just because I disliked the characters so much. At the same time, they were a train wreck I couldn't stop watching. But man, I wanted to shake some of them. (And yell at them. Yes, Tucker, you're a douchebag.)

It only took a couple clues to figure out who the murderer was, although I didn't find out the full motive until fairly late in the book. I did find myself second-guessing myself when a few secrets were revealed, though, and in general the mystery aspects were fun.

But ugh, the ending. The more I think about it, the more it bugs me. It seems to have been set up simultaneously to allow for a sequel and to make it look like some (but not all) of the characters maybe learned something from this experience. I was most disappointed in one particular character - the final chapter made it seem like they'd fall into the exact same traps as before. Plus, I still had questions (what terrible thing did you do besides the obvious? why were you in Sydney's room? does your mom still have access to your accounts?).

REVIEW: The Haunting (book) by Natasha Preston

2024-06-02T20:52:00.002-05:00

The Haunting is a YA thriller. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Almost a year ago, Penny's small town was rocked by the news that Jackson Whitmore, the father of Penny's boyfriend Nash, was a serial killer who'd murdered several teens. Now Halloween is rolling around again, and Penny can't help but think of Nash, who, along with his older sister Grace, was basically ostracized after his father was caught. Even though Penny knew he'd been as much in the dark about his father as everyone else, she still cut off contact with Nash on her parents' orders. She's regretting that decision now.

But then a new body turns up. Is it a copycat killer? Everyone immediately focuses on Nash and Grace, particularly Nash. Penny refuses to believe it's him, but someone's started these murders up again, and she can't help but think it's someone close to her.

Why do I have so many of this author's books? I've read three of them, four counting this one, and I haven't liked any of them. At least the other three had semi-interesting premises. With this one, I kept hoping that the hook would be something better than "MC's ex-boyfriend's father was a serial killer, and now the killings have started up again." No such luck. Penny spent the entire book feeling paranoid about her ex-boyfriend and friends while also feeling guilty about her paranoia...and that was basically it. Preston was maybe going for a Scream movie vibe, complete with references to the movie and a killer who wore a mask, but the result was tepid and uninteresting.

Preston continues to have no clue how to satisfactorily finish books. The one stops in the midst of its climactic scene.

REVIEW: Ask Me Anything (book) by Molly E. Lee

2024-04-08T00:01:00.000-05:00

Ask Me Anything is a YA romance/social issues book. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Amber and Dean are students at an elite but conservative high school. They both love hacking and became friends due to that shared interest, but their friendship never really extended outside of school until an incident at the school's annual "abstinence is best" presentation prompts the principal to order Dean to start "Code Club." Amber ends up being the only person to join, and they spend most meetings practicing their hacking skills with friendly competitions. Then they make a bet that leads to Amber secretly creating an anonymous website called "Ask Me Anything" - she'll thumb her nose at the principal while answering all the sexual health-related student questions that the school refuses to recognize even exist.

This is one of the books I bought at a past Book Bonanza.

The Q&A posts reminded me a lot of a YA book I read back in 2020, L.C. Rosen's Jack of Hearts (And Other Parts), although that one was a bit more explicit, and Jack was more sexually experienced than Amber. I did think that the explanation for how Amber wrote all her posts was more believable, though - she drew a lot on her parents' work-related knowledge (her dad was a teen psychologist and her mom was an erotica author), letting them think she was asking questions because she was considering doing work similar to theirs.

I don't recall Jack's posts inspiring quite as much panic as a few of Amber's, though. One of them eventually blew up in a way that was addressed in the text. There was another, however, that Amber took as a question about cheating and that, to me, sounded like a potential statutory rape situation - the question asker, almost certainly a minor, was in a relationship with a married woman who was 6 years older than them.

Anyway, I liked this book reasonably well at first, but unfortunately it vastly outstayed its welcome. It should have been at least 100 pages shorter. It took Dean way too long to realize who was behind the blog, considering the hints Amber let slip in her entries. Also, it was pretty obvious what must have happened between Amber and Brandon, her ex-boyfriend, but it took ages for everything to finally be laid out on-page.

Amber and Dean read like the main characters in a New Adult romance, to the point that the occasional reminders that they were, in fact, high schoolers felt almost weird. Neither of them were all that interesting, and Amber, in particular, came across like a pile of "cool girl" stereotypes.

The ending was a group hug's worth of gooiness, complete with just about everyone apologizing to each other. Except for the principal - he was just 100% horrible, and pretty stupid to boot.

REVIEW: How to Survive Your Murder (book) by Danielle Valentine

2024-02-25T23:36:00.001-06:00

How to Survive Your Murder is a YA thriller. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Alice's sister Claire was murdered on Halloween, and Alice saw it happen. A year later, she's about to take the stand as a witness in the trial of Claire's killer when she meets a girl who looks exactly like Scream's Sidney Prescott. NotSidney says she's an angel and sends Alice back in time to go after her sister in the cornfield maze where she was murdered, so that she can finally learn the truth about what really happened that night.

This has loads of horror movie references and yet is conspicuously missing any mention of Happy Death Day, a movie with a similar premise. Anyway, this was an impulse purchase that I expected would be mediocre at best. I did not predict how angry it would end up making me.

Alice may take the prize for heroine with the worst friends. Prior to Claire's death, Alice and her friends had been planning some kind of horror movie-related podcast. After Claire's death, they started the podcast without her and made its focus true crimes looked at through the lens of horror movies - basically, what could the victims of these crimes have done to better align with horror movie rules that might have allowed them to survive? If that isn't horrible enough, one of the victims they talk about, against Alice's wishes, is Claire.

Alice's crush on Wes didn't make much more sense than her friendships. The author tried really hard to convince readers that Wes was some kind of mysterious hottie, but mostly he just sounded like some kind of weird loner.

Really, though, he was bait intended to convince readers that this was going to wrap up with a cliched and mediocre ending. Instead, the ending was utterly unhinged and aggravating. I don't even know where to begin. It only made sense in the most shallow way - there were holes you could drive a truck through, and about a billion unanswered questions. The bonus chapter didn't add anything to the story and, in fact, somehow just made things worse.

Extras:

Bonus chapter (do some editions of this book not have this chapter? I wasn't sure what made it a bonus) and a Q&A with the author (where Happy Death Day is mentioned).

REVIEW: A Good Girl's Guide to Murder (book) by Holly Jackson

2024-02-18T21:27:00.000-06:00

A Good Girl's Guide to Murder is YA mystery. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Five years ago, pretty and popular high school senior Andie Bell disappeared. A short while later, his alibi in tatters, Sal Singh, her boyfriend, confessed to killing her and then killed himself. Although it was never proven in a court of law, everyone in town accepted that Sal was the murderer.

Everyone except Pip. Now that she's a high school senior herself, Pip plans to use her senior capstone project to investigate the truth behind Andie's disappearance and apparent murder. The Sal she knew was a nice guy - she's never been able to accept that he might have killed his girlfriend, and it's always bothered her that the entire town so readily accepted this narrative. She convinces Ravi, Sal's brother, to help her, and the two of them begin picking at the various threads of the original investigation, trying to find things that the police missed.

A star student hoping to get into a good college almost certainly wouldn't have picked a senior capstone project with a high probability of getting disqualified (Pip was told flat out that any ethical violations would get her disqualified). But the author needed a reason why Pip would be able to devote this much time and effort to a single thing - if you can accept that, the investigation in general was pretty interesting. I enjoyed the way Pip dug into her topic and tried to find various holes or inconsistencies. At least until the end, the way everything was laid out (including things like Pip's map, her attempts at a timeline, etc.) made it feel like readers could follow along and try to solve the mystery with her.

Pip was so focused on her investigation that it was, unfortunately, easy to forget that she had family or friends. Anytime any of them had on-page appearances, it was a bit of a surprise. I had particular difficulty remembering the names of Pip's friends. Maybe that's part of the reason why Pip herself never really grew on me as a character. I enjoyed her investigation, while she was just the way that investigation was communicated to readers.

And about that investigation...for someone who was supposedly so smart, Pip made some truly boneheaded decisions at times. The ones that stuck out to me the most were the ones that literally put her in danger. I get that she wanted more information than the police would likely give her later on, but confronting a likely murderer all on her own was really, really stupid, especially considering that her investigation had already led to more death.

While I generally liked this book, I haven't decided yet whether I'll continue on with the series. As far as I'm concerned, this book works fine as a standalone.

REVIEW: Thanatos (book) by Eva Pohler

2024-01-01T19:24:00.001-06:00

Thanatos is the first book in Pohler's Underworld Saga series. It's YA fantasy. I bought my copy new.

Review:

I finished this way back in July 2023 and should have reviewed it closer to that time. I've forgotten a lot of the details of the plot of this book, but basically seventeen-year-old Therese ends up in a coma after the car accident that kills both her parents. While in her coma, she meets the sons of Hades, Hypnos and Thanatos, and kisses Thanatos in what she thinks is just a dream. Than, of course, falls in love with her and makes a deal with his father to go find her and try to win her heart. Meanwhile, Than's sisters investigate Therese's parents' death, which was not just an accident.

I met Eva Pohler at a past Book Bonanza and thought her books sounded appealing enough that I bought four of them - a set of the first three books in this series, and one of the books in Pohler's Mystery House series for adults. It's probably a good thing I read the Mystery House book before this one, because that was definitely the stronger work. This book, unfortunately, wasn't good at all, and now I'm bummed that I bought it as part of a set.

Therese was supposed to be seventeen but generally came across to me is being about twelve or thirteen years old. It was tough to believe that a god would ever fall for her. The romantic aspects were cringe-worthy at the best of times, and there were some unintentionally hilarious moments, like the time Therese noted one character's bowl-cut while admiring how gorgeous he was.

I don't like offloading books unread, especially ones I bought brand new, but I may end up doing just that with the next two books in this series. It's possible the series might improve, but the thought of continuing on isn't appealing.

REVIEW: One of Us Is Next (book) by Karen M. McManus

2023-12-31T17:53:00.000-06:00

One of Us Is Next is a YA thriller/mystery. I bought my copy new. This review includes slight spoilers unrelated to the final twists.

Review:

Just in case it isn't obvious, you shouldn't read this book, or even this review, unless you're comfortable with the possibility of getting major spoilers for the first book in the series, One of Us Is Lying. You've been warned.

It's been a year since the events of the first book, and although Simon copycats have occasionally popped up, none of them have stuck around for long - it's hard to be as devious as Simon was, and as well-informed about everyone's secrets. When Bayview High students suddenly get texts from yet another Simon copycat telling them that they're going to be playing Truth or Dare, everyone figures it'll fizzle out like the other times. The anonymous texter picks Phoebe as their first victim, and she ignores them...only for one of her most hurtful secrets to be revealed to everyone when she misses the deadline to play along.

Who is this person, and what's their goal? Those questions are on everyone's minds as the game goes from hurtful and/or dangerous to deadly.

It's been a couple years since I read the first book, but there were enough details in this one to remind me of what happened and the basics of who all the returning characters were. A lot of familiar faces (the Bayview Four, Luis, Eli, etc.) made appearances and had varying levels of involvement in the story, but the POV characters, this time around, were Maeve (Bronwyn's younger sister), Knox (Maeve's best friend, and currently an intern at Unproven), and Phoebe (works as a waitress at Luis's family's restaurant).

Although the setup for this book wasn't as intriguing as the first one, I liked the new POV characters well enough. Maeve was the relatively familiar core - readers already knew a bit about her, her past struggles with leukemia, and her actions in the first book. She spends a large chunk of the book secretly worried that she's having a cancer relapse (I worried right along with her every time she got another nosebleed), but it's later revealed that she's still cancer-free. Knox was probably the least interesting of the three POV characters, but he was still a decent guy I could root for, and I ended up liking Phoebe a lot more than I initially thought I would.

Bronwyn and Nate continued to be kind of exhausting - it would have been weird not to have any updates about them and their relationship, but I was much less interested in them than I was in the POV characters' potential romances. That's one thing I definitely liked about this book more than the first one - the romantic subplots. They developed nicely and didn't feel overdone in the face of everything else going on in the story.

I guessed one of the book's big revelations well before the end, and certainly well before the other characters, although there were still aspects that surprised me. I didn't see that final piece coming at all, and I'm doubtful that the decisions certain characters made about it would hold up well if the story had continued any further.

As usual, McManus delivers a decent but not stellar YA mystery/thriller.

Extras:

Includes a book discussion guide and an interview with the author.

REVIEW: The Inheritance Games (book) by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

2023-10-08T15:26:00.002-05:00

The Inheritance Games is a YA mystery/thriller. I checked my copy out from the library.

Review:

Avery Grambs is a smart teen who's determined to build a better life for herself. That means getting out of high school, winning a scholarship, entering a good actuarial science program, and hopefully starting a well-paying career. And then billionaire Tobias Hawthorne dies and changes all of Avery's plans in an instant when his will reveals that he left her nearly his entire fortune. The only catch is that she must live in his mansion with the family members who were just disinherited.

Avery has no idea why a billionaire with no connection to her would have left her his fortune, and most of Tobias' surviving family members are understandably less than friendly. However, there are indications that Tobias left answers behind, hidden behind a series of riddles, codes, and secret passages. Unfortunately, the ones best suited to solving the puzzles Tobias left behind are his grandsons, who are definitely keeping secrets from her and have no real reason to help her.

I started this expecting an intelligent main character with Knives Out-style rich family drama and a side of twisty puzzle-solving. Instead, I got a heroine whose brains and ability to focus were constantly hijacked by the hotness of the Hawthorne brothers, and a potential love triangle between her and Jameson and Grayson Hawthorne (brothers who really need some time away from each other, because this is not the first time they've both been interested in the same girl).

Avery was supposedly a smart girl who'd previously gotten used to using her brains to maximize her very limited resources. Then Tobias Hawthorne essentially put her in the position of having unlimited resources, and instead of turning all those brains to the puzzles he left behind, she kept getting distracted by hot guys she had zero reason to trust. It was tiresome, and it left me with thoroughly unimpressed with Avery.

I'm just intrigued enough by the puzzles to continue reading this series, but I sincerely hope Avery will be less easily distracted in the later books.

REVIEW: 14 Ways to Die (book) by Vincent Ralph

2023-10-08T14:44:00.000-05:00

14 Ways to Die (originally published as Are You Watching? in the UK) is a YA thriller. I bought my copy new.

Review:

When Jess was 7, her mother became the Magpie Man's first victim. Since then, he's killed 12 others, and the police are no closer to finding him and giving his victims justice.

Jess, now 17, has a plan. She has applied to be part of a reality show that will involve her life and social media feed constantly being in the public eye. One day a week, it'll all be available live for whoever wants to watch, while the rest of the time she'll have to film her own daily life and provide it to her director to be edited into episodes for her viewing public. Jess is determined to use her time to remind everyone of the Magpie Man and his victims, and hopefully get people thinking about the people in their own lives, one of whom must surely be the killer.

Unfortunately, the Magpie Man is also watching, and he has his own thoughts about what Jess is doing.

Even with great big stacks of consent forms, this reality show came across like a giant legal nightmare, and I could never bring myself to fully believe in it, especially when Jess started getting threats and a new victim appeared. From what I could tell, Jess didn't even stick to the premise very well - there were so many moments that she was technically supposed to film but didn't (because filming them would have been stupid or would have scared off the people she wanted to talk to). The cameras were pretty much only on when it was convenient to the story for them to be.

Because it's the way of most mysteries/thrillers, I figured that the Magpie Man was someone Jess had at least a little contact with, and there weren't a whole lot of possibilities for who that might be. I came very close to correctly guessing the killer's identity due to one very dramatic event that suspiciously didn't come up as much later on as I would have expected it to.

This was definitely a quick read, but that and its short chapters didn't necessarily mean that it was fast-paced. Not a lot actually happened - the bulk of the book was devoted to Jess's grief over what her mother's murder had done to her family.

Extras:

An author's note and a Q&A with the author.

REVIEW: The Cousins (book) by Karen M. McManus

2023-10-08T14:11:00.000-05:00

The Cousins is a YA thriller/mystery. I bought my copy new.

Review:

This book alternates between the past and present, as well as between several POVs. Milly, Aubrey, and Jonah Story are cousins. They hardly know each other, but they're united by family mysteries and drama. Twenty-four years ago, wealthy Mildred Story shocked everyone by suddenly disinheriting all four of her children. The only explanation she gave was a letter sent through her lawyer that said "You know what you did." Mildred has refused to have any contact with her children since then, and she's certainly never contacted her grandchildren.

Until now. Out of the blue, Milly, Aubrey, and Jonah have been invited to spend the summer working at one of Mildred's properties, the Gull Cove Resort. None of them particularly want to go there, but their parents, hopeful that Mildred might be softening in her old age, don't give them much of a choice.

The Story family has more secrets than any of the cousins ever realized, and Gull Cove Resort is going to give them an opportunity to find them all out.

I think this might be the best of McManus' books I've read so far. It does start off a bit slow, with only a few hints of potential "rich people" drama to keep readers interested, and I never really got into the scenes set in the past as much as the scenes in the present. Eventually, however, the hints of something else going on under the surface became more intriguing.

Milly and Aubrey were a great pair - I loved their interactions and the friendship blossoming between sunshiney Aubrey and cool and sharp Milly. I was iffier about Jonah, especially since McManus seemed to be hinting at a development I wasn't wild about (thankfully that went better than I initially expected it would).

Maybe I just read this at the right time - it was nice to read a YA thriller that didn't take place at school, and I was definitely in the mood for a little rich people drama - but for the most part I really enjoyed this.

Extras:

A book club discussion guide and an interview with the author.

REVIEW: The Lost (book) by Natasha Preston

2023-07-17T23:27:00.001-05:00

The Lost is a YA thriller (could possibly be considered YA horror?). I bought my copy new.

Review:

Piper and her friend Hazel decide to play amateur detectives and look into some of the recent disappearances of teens in their hometown. Most people have written the disappearances off as runaways, but something doesn't seem right to Piper.

Unfortunately, the girls let their guard down a bit too much and go off with Caleb and Owen, two good-looking college students from wealthy and well-respected families who also happen to be sadistic kidnappers. Before they can process what's going on, Piper and Hazel end up trapped in a house with several other kidnapped teens.

Caleb, Owen, and a third person, Matt, randomly select prisoners at various times, sending them to one of six rooms. Five of the rooms contain some form of torture (sound, temperature, light, sleep deprivation, and water), while the sixth one is where two prisoners are forced to fight each other until one has died. All of this is intended for the amusement of Caleb, Owen, and Matt, who are a nasty combination of rich, bored, and horrible.

Somehow, Piper plans to escape (Hazel is firmly in "nah, we're going to die" mode). First, however, she has to survive.

This was my third Natasha Preston book and, for a while, it looked like it might be the best of the bunch. Granted, that's not saying much, but "meh, okay" is better than "terrible." It was low-grade torture porn, but at least the various rooms and the way Caleb and his group expanded their games gave that aspect a bit of variety. I wasn't a fan of the way Piper and Hazel were written as opposites, the one who fought and wouldn't give up vs. the one who curled up into a ball of misery and waited for death. Still, I could deal with it, for the most part.

Evan's introduction to the story was where things started to go downhill. Somehow, Preston managed to work a love triangle into a story about a bunch of kidnapped teens being repeatedly tortured. The whole thing between Piper, Theo, and Evan was tiresome - if I didn't have the energy for that drama, how did any of them?? Combined with the Hazel stuff, it seemed like yet another thing meant to establish that Piper was somehow the most special girl in the bunch.

The last 20 or so pages were a complete mess. It was tough to believe the guys got away with it for as long as they did, but when they truly melted down, all brain cells were vaporized. Also, I am now convinced that Preston has no idea how to end books - this is the third ending, out of three, that has involved a sudden huge development that is just where the story stops.