Author | Editor | Photographer | Slayer of Dragons
Magic is my favorite thing in a story. I get to see how it works in the universe and how it affects the characters. Magic in a modern day world, like the one in A Tale of Highly Unusual Magic, where cell phones and blogs make a regular appearance, always intrigues me. How will magic and technology … Continue reading Review: A Tale of Highly Unusual Magic ★★★★★
Graphic novels have always had a special place in my heart, and Ghosts by Raina Telgemeier has taken my heart in its adorable fist and crushed it to smithereens. Catrina and her family are moving to the coast of Northern California because her little sister, Maya, is sick. Cat isn't happy about leaving her friends for … Continue reading Review: Ghosts ★★★★★
Jessamine works with her mother pretending to be spiritualists—until the day where the pretending becomes real and she finds out she has mysterious powers. Ronald L. Smith has made a dark and memorable middle-grade story in The Mesmerist. Thirteen-year-old Jessamine Grace and her mother make a living as sham spiritualists—until they discover that Jess is a … Continue reading Review: The Mesmerist ★★★★☆
Give me a book about kickass magic wielding ladies set in an incredibly built world, and I'll fall in love. And I fell head over heels into a portal leading to Los Lagos. Zoraida Córdova's Labyrinth Lost was the type of book where, had I read it as an actual teenager, I would have reread it every … Continue reading Review: Labyrinth Lost 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
The Wolf in the Attic by Paul Kearney is the long winded tale of Anna, a Greek refugee living in London with her father in the early 20th century. There was exactly one exciting, plot driven scene in the first quarter of the book and everything else is countless pages of details, descriptions and character … Continue reading Review: The Wolf in the Attic ★☆☆☆☆
I always thought I loved portal fantasy stories; after all, I did spend ten years writing one, but Akarnae proved that I did not love portal fantasies as much as I thought I did. Dreading her first day at a new school, Alex is stunned when she walks through a doorway and finds herself stranded in … Continue reading Review: Akarnae ★★☆☆☆
I'm always enamored by girls in stories that seem innocent and invisible but use that to their advantage to carve their own path -- which is exactly what Faith Sunderly does in The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge. It's impossible to put down this historical mystery, set just after the advent of Darwin's On The … Continue reading Review: The Lie Tree ★★★★☆
If you gave me the option to read a book with dragons, versus one without, I will pick the dragons over everything else. I love dragons that much. So, of course, being promised an asteroid made of dragons, I was pretty excited. And Asteroid Made of Dragons by G. Derek Adams was pretty exciting--at first. When a … Continue reading Review: Asteroid Made of Dragons ★★★☆☆
If I could sum up my entire experience of Glass Sword by Victoria Aveyard in a single gif, it would be this one: If you've spent any amount of time at Round Robin Writes, or listening to our Podcasts, you know how much of a fan Jess and I are of Victoria Aveyard. We fell in love … Continue reading Review: Glass Sword 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
When it comes to the broad sibling genre of Sci-Fi and Fantasy, I've always been more in the favor of Fantasy. But Beyond The Red by Ava Jae showed me a whole new world within the Sci-Fi realm, and I have fallen in love. Alien queen Kora has a problem as vast as the endless crimson … Continue reading Review: Beyond the Red 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟