YA Highway highlights YA blogs

Saw this post, highlighting a bunch of blogs that focus on teen and YA fiction. It's a great spotlight post.

Magic Under Glass - Jaclyn Dolamore

(this is the first post by one of our new reviewers so please giver her the customary warm Un:Bound welcome - Hagelrat).

Magic Under Glass By Jaclyn Dolamore is the best book I have ever read.

It is about a seventeen year old girl called Nimira, she sings and dances in a show that pays very little. When a gentleman named Hollin Parry walks into the show and asks her to work for him, singing alongside a clockwork man who plays the piano, she accepts gratefully.

When she sees the clockwork man or 'Automaton' she notices something strange about it. A few days later when the automaton was wound up, it starting murmuring, Nimira was shocked, she then realised, he was trying to communicate with her by tapping the piano keys. The automaton's name is Erris, and Nimira, finds out he is a fairy prince.

Erris explained that in the midst of a battle, Fairies against Sorcerers, he had been turned into the automaton. A kind Sorcerer called Garvin had found him and had planned to restore Erris to a fairy, but Garvin was killed mysteriously.

Spoiler section highlight to read.

Eventually, with the help of Annalie and the mysterious Queen of the longest night, Nimira manages to turn Erris into a human. When Hollin finds out he is furious! For he thinks fairies are all evil. When Smollings takes Erris away, all of them think up a plan and Garvin's spirit enters Annalie to defeat Smollings. Fortunately, Erris is alive but all his clockwork mechanism is opened up. In the end they defeat smollings and are going in search of Erris's sister's husband.

End of spoilers

I think this is a brilliant book. Probably aimed at girls, aged 12 - 14

You need a very good imagination for this book otherwise the plot would not make sense. I would love Jaclyn Dolamore to make a sequel to this book as I think the ending suggests another part of the story is needed. I read this book solid in 6 hours and loved it to pieces.

Announcements

Hi folks, I am popping by with a couple of announcements today.

Fist of all we will have some new reviewers joining us soon. PomPom has officially come on board and there are two other volunteers who I will be getting names from and announcing soon.

Also, the delightful Debbie Viguie co author of the Wicked series has agreed to be interviewed. Zobdy is reading one of her books now and she and PomPom will be conducting the interview in January.

You may also have noticed the shelfari widget. We will be adding the books that we review to it as we go along.

Have a Happy Christmas all and we will see you next year.

Ice - Sarah Beth Durst

I thought this book was amazing and I loved it. It is about a girl called Cassie, who has lived in a research station in the Arctic all her life and she loves it. When she was little, her grandmother told her that her (Cassie’s) mother was the daughter of the North Wind, and the North Wind had promised that she would marry the Polar Bear King when she was old enough. But she fell in love with a human man (Cassie’s dad) so she (Cassie’s mother) promised that when she had a daughter (Cassie), her daughter could marry the Polar Bear King instead. The North Wind was so angry that he blew Cassie’s mum into the troll castle where she has been ever since.

Cassie stopped believing that when she was four. Her father had told her that her mother had been killed in a blizzard. But, on her eighteenth birthday, the Polar Bear King comes for her and she realises that the story is true and her mum could still be alive. She makes a deal with the Polar Bear King and says that she will marry him if he saves her mum. He agrees so she stays with him. Gradually, she begins to love him and when he is taken away, she makes a perilous journey to save him.

It is a great book with magic, mystery, excitement, action, romance and a talking polar bear. What more could you ask for? In places, the story didn’t move on as quickly as I would have liked it to but I loved it anyway. I read it non-stop in two days. I would love to read other books written by Sarah Beth Durst. I would recommend it for 10+ (probably girls).

By Zobdy

Age 12

The Monstrumologist: The Terror Beneath by Rick Yancey

This is a non-review as I have not finished the book. It’s about a doctor who studies monsters (a monstrumologist) and his assistant, an orphaned, twelve year old boy called Will Henry.

I enjoyed reading this book and will probably get back to it later but if I waited that long to write a review, it would be too late. I don’t know why, but I just couldn’t get into this book, it didn’t grip me. I got distracted by other things and, like I said, I’ll probably get back to it another time.

I normally like books like this, mysterious, mythical, a little bit gory, but it just didn’t make me want to read it. It was well written and it had an interesting story and I enjoyed it but I just didn’t get sucked in. Ironically, the Prologue says that an old man had just died and another man had been given his journal (the rest of the book) to read because it’s the kind of story he might like, but it says it sat on his shelf for nearly six months until he reads it and decides it’s nothing but fiction. I will probably be the same except I think I might enjoy the story more than he did when I finally get round to reading it properly.

By Zobdy

Age 12

Reviewers Needed

Hi folks, Pizza is sadly withdrawing from blogging because, frankly, he's just that age where he needs to be focusing on exams and his writing rather than the blog. It's a shame and he will be missed, he's been a huge contribution to Young & Un:Bound.
I wish him all the best for future and hope when things settle down he'll return to blogging, even if not to us here.

In the meantime this means we are now severely under par. The one drawback of using younger reviewers is frankly school is a much bigger time suck than work so the more we have the better covered we are. On the plus side we get wonderful frank reviews about books from the agegroup they are aimed at.

I would like to open up the roster, if anyone out there is under sixteen and would like to review for us here at the youth site I would be delighted to have you on board! In order to maintain anonimity, if you are under 14 I would ask that you email reviews to me and I will post them, with your blog name at the end, as I do for MJ & Zobdy. If you are happy to receive occasional books to review from me then include your postal address when you email me and I will send them out to you from time to time, dishing them out as they come in to me. Worldwide postage is no problem although it may restrict you to paperbacks.

If you are interested please email me at hagelrat (at) googlemail (dot) com with your age, user name (not real name) and any strong reading likes/dislikes (do you hate horror or love historical novels? Are you a captain underpants fan?) .
I am happy for contact to go through a parent rather than being direct and there is no specific time commitment, as and when you can is fine.

Troubadour - Mary Hoffman

Troubadour is set in Southern France in the thirteenth century. The story starts in a Lord’s castle where the Lord’s thirteen year old daughter, Elinor, is making her first appearance as Lady Elinor, a young noblewoman. Her favourite troubadour (travelling musician), Bertran, is moving on to the next town and Elinor’s parents have arranged for her to be married to a Lord in his forties so Elinor, dressed as a boy, sneaks into another troubadour’s troupe with the help of the joglars and joglaresas (minstrels). As Elinor flees, the Pope declares war and the whole of Southern France is chaos.

The story starts with a scene in the Lord’s castle but then splits off into telling what is happening to Elinor, Bertran and also the Pope and his forces. As the story goes on, and we meet more characters and groups slit up, we see what is going on in lots of different places. I enjoyed this because if it had only been following one person there wouldn’t have been nearly as much information and it wouldn’t have been very interesting.

Also, at the back of the book, there is a glossary and historical notes. I found the glossary useful because there were words that I didn’t recognise and I found the historical notes very interesting because I had never heard of the French crusades and I enjoyed the background information.

I thought it was very well written and it kept me hooked. I was desperate to know what would happen to Elinor and her friends so I kept reading it. I would recommend this book to eleven plus.

Zobdy