Next SFF Author: Rick Yancey

Previous SFF Author: John Wyndham

Series: Young Adult

Fantasy Literature for Young Adults (over the age of 12).

Strange the Dreamer: Complex and compelling

Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor

On first look, it might seem that Laini Taylor was a little too ambitious with her latest offering, Strange the Dreamer (2017), kind of like an overenthusiastic cook that goes a bit overboard with their cake ingredients. The blurb doesn’t help matters, citing a war between gods and men, a mysterious city, a mythical hero, a librarian, alchemy, nightmares and monsters as some of the components of the story — which will no doubt have raised an eyebrow or two.

The Bone Witch: Monsters and necromancy galore

The Bone Witch by Rin Chupeco

Tea starts her story by accidentally raising her brother from the dead. This is surely a traumatic enough experience for a young girl, but it marks her with the dark magic of the bone witch, unlike her sisters who possess ‘normal’ magic. So on top of having to deal with her corpse brother, Tea is now spurned by the village she’s grown up in. The Bone Witch (2017) explores Tea’s journey of coming to terms with the darkness within her and finding her place in a world that fears her.

The Last Harvest: Darkness lurking within a cheery Midwestern town

The Last Harvest by Kim Liggett

YA horror novel The Last Harvest (2017) focuses on hidden secrets within a small town and the unreliability of one’s senses. Taking a page or two from Ira Levin’s classic novel Rosemary’s Baby (1967) and clearly inspired by instances of “Satanism-related moral panic,” Kim Liggett serves up a tale of teenagers inheriting a dark legacy — and whether that legacy is mental illness or something more sinister is at the core of her story.

Game of Shadows: An action-packed YA adventure

Game of Shadows by Erika Lewis

High school is hard enough on its own — there’s homework, bullies, unrequited crushes, and overprotective parents, just to name a few hurdles on the way to freedom and adulthood. But that’s nothing compared to the challenges presented in Erika Lewis’ Game of Shadows (2017); our intrepid hero must also learn sword fighting, diplomacy, and an entirely new language and culture if he is to save his mother from an evil sorcerer’s machinations. By comparison, Advanced Geometry seems a lot more appealing!

The Guild Conspiracy: A good YA steampunk adventure

The Guild Conspiracy by Brooke Johnson

Published in 2016, The Guild Conspiracy, by Brooke Johnson, is the second book in the CHRONIKER CITY STORIES series. It begins about six months after the events of Book One, The Brass Giant. Petra Wade, a young woman fighting to be accepted as an equal in the Engineers Guild, continues her struggle while also waging an asymmetrical battle against Julian Goss, an engineer who has a terrifying view of a mechanistic future world and is willing to orchestrate a war to get it.

The Diabolic: Stabbing and backstabbing in the galactic Imperial Court

The Diabolic by S.J. Kincaid

The Diabolic (2016) is set in some distant future, when humans have settled the galaxy using spaceships that travel through hyperspace. Humanity has also been experimenting with genetic engineering, and for a period of time it becomes fashionable to purchase so-called Diabolics as bodyguards. Diabolics are cloned humans, engineered to have superior strength and resistance to sickness and poisons, and trained from early childhood to be skilled and ruthless fighters and killers, with no regard for anyone but the person they are chemically induced to love and protect.

Empress of a Thousand Skies: Propulsive plot but a few too many issues

Empress of a Thousand Skies by Rhoda Belleza

Empress of a Thousand Skies by Rhoda Belleza is a YA space opera that feels a bit like old-time science fiction with a modern sensibility, in that characterization takes a back seat to a plot that can’t really be examined too closely, but those relatively flat characters are a nicely diverse mix in terms of gender and color. Sometimes such a propulsive plot can compensate for, or at least ameliorate somewhat, flat characters, but the plot also had its issues,

Martians Abroad: Fun from the first page to the last

Martians Abroad by Carrie Vaughn

In Martians Abroad (2017), Carrie Vaughn re-envisions aspects of the “juvenile” novel Podkayne of Mars by Robert A. Heinlein, turning his classic spacefaring story into something refreshing and new while retaining the sense of limitless adventure. Kat has mentioned in her reviews of Heinlein’s juveniles that they were instrumental in forming her love of science fiction, and the same is true for me: books like Have Space Suit — Will Travel and Red Planet captured my imagination and made me dream of embarking upon my own interplanetary journeys.

A Face Like Glass: Hardinge has a wonderful way with weird

A Face Like Glass by Frances Hardinge

Frances Hardinge is rumoured to be made “entirely of velvet”, or so her biography would have us believe. A mysteriously “unphotographable” author who wears a black hat. She seems to covet a certain strangeness, a sense of mystery that shrouds both her writing and herself.

Well if that’s what it takes to write stories as well as she does, then I’m all for it.

Once again on reading Hardinge, I am struck that the age-old question — where do you get your ideas?

The Rising: Fast-paced alien invasion adventure

The Rising by Heather Graham & Jon Land

In The Rising (2017), Alex Chin is a rising star, the handsome blond quarterback of his high school football team, dating the head cheerleader. His Chinese adoptive parents are concerned about his grades not being good enough, and his nerdy tutor Samantha, a classmate with plans for a career at NASA, hounds him to work harder at school, while nursing a secret and seemingly hopeless crush on Alex. He also has strange dreams that cause him to fill a drawing pad with detailed drawings of a world filled with menacing machines.

Next SFF Author: Rick Yancey

Previous SFF Author: John Wyndham

We have reviewed 8292 fantasy, science fiction, and horror books, audiobooks, magazines, comics, and films.

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