YA

As a Nigerian-American girl and voracious reader growing up in Homewood Flossmoor and Hinsdale, Illinois, Tomi Adeyemi rarely encountered powerful characters who looked like her. Nevertheless, this 24 year-old recent Harvard graduate has burst onto the scene this year with a NY Times best-selling book set in the mythical West African kingdom of Orisha which…

I know. I get it. This time of year EVERYONE who has ever breathed near a book has a list, or an award, or a best-of, or an opinion. It gets really hard to keep track of which award is for what and which ones are prestigious and which are made up. Throwing another list…

Female of the Species by Mindy McGinnis opens with this chilling line: “This is how I kill someone.”  Alex is a senior in high school on track to be valedictorian. She does her homework, but stays in the background of her small town. Alex is known as the girl whose sister was brutally murdered a…

Jo is an out and proud lesbian. Her father is the radio famous Reverend Gordon. Before Jo’s senior year of high school, her dad marries Elizabeth (whom Jo calls Three) and moves them from Atlanta and all of Jo’s friends to Elizabeth’s small hometown of Rome, Georgia. Jo’s dad asks her to go back into…

Now that school has officially started and fall is upon us, I’ve promptly started counting down to Thanksgiving break (83 days, in case you were wondering). Beyond pumpkin spice lattes there are a lot of other great things to look forward to this fall.  There are several top-notch teen fantasy and science fiction sequels coming…

The Summer Olympics kick off with the opening ceremony in Rio tonight. The Olympics are always an exciting event. One my favorite summer Olympic sports to watch is gymnastics. I don’t know a lot about gymnastics, and I don’t follow it very much in non-Olympic years, but I still enjoy it. This year my enjoyment…

There are just some people you meet that you feel like you’ve known forever. Some friendships are just easy to pick up, even after significant times apart you feel as though you are able to pick up right where you left off. This is how You Know Me Well feels, in both tone and actual…

I really want my entire blog post about Highly Illogical Behavior to be: Read. This. Book. Full stop. Do nothing else until you’ve read this book. Because, truly that is about as high of an endorsement as I can give a book. Even though it is only the end of May I have a strong…

The Raven King comes out on April 26th as the last addition to Maggie Stiefvater’s beloved Raven Cycle series. If this sentence confounds you, then you probably haven’t indulged in any of the Raven Cycle books and now is a fabulous time to start. Since the final book will be released soon, if you start…

This is a plot we’ve all read or seen before. We know how it works. Person A has a secret. Person B finds out that secret. Person B blackmails Person A to do something for them in exchange for not revealing Person A’s secret. This is a straightforward, run-of-the-mill plotline that we’ve all seen too many times…