When your novel's heroine opens the story as a popular, mean highschooler, the story will be one of two things: a paean to Dolce & Gabbana or a tale of redemption. Sam's story is of the latter kind: a Groundhog Day-style repeated day she must relive until she gets it right. With each repeat, she changes something in her relationships-to her family, to the cruelty of her queen-bee friends, to her lecherous boyfriend, to the hot math teacher and to the countless nerds, dorks and freaks she's always abused or ignored. If she can just get it right, Sam thinks, she'll be freed from her loop and can move on with her life. Within this predictable framework Oliver builds a quietly lyrical story of selfhood and friendship, avoiding the obvious paths out of the time loop. Bill Murray's Groundhog Day character used his repeated day to learn French; Sam, more valuably, learns that life's composed of "little gaps and jumps and stutters that can never be reproduced." Unexpectedly rich. (Fantasy. 12-15)
Ah, yes Groundhog Day. Didn’t this just happen? If you’re like us, you’ve given up all hope of the warmth of the sun and are burrowing to await the end of this wretched cold. With the repetitive feeling of leaving and returning home in the cold dark, we present to you a few books that […]
Books have been a significant inspiration at the movies since the earliest days of the cinema. We’re never less than thrilled (if, perhaps, trepidatious) when we learn our favorite novel is being adapted into a film, because when it all comes together in just the right way, it’s glorious, breathing a second life into a beloved […]
A teen novelist, set loose in New York City after her debut sells big. A girl mutated by fever, just discovering the extent of her new supernatural powers. The dregs of the human race, fighting to survive alien invasion. In the best teen books of the year, young protagonists navigate life in our world and at the end of it. They struggle to survive and thrive in imagined universes, dead-end towns, and deep under the sea. These are the year’s most moving, heart-pounding, and engrossing teen books.
First lines are powerful. It’s the author’s best chance to hook the reader. A great first line will pull you in, introduce you to the narrator, and set the tone for the entire book. Depending on what you’re reading, a great first line can be funny or meaningful or sad or somehow all of the above. […]
Sci-fi and fantasy have their big, bad, powerful villains, but make no mistake—so does contemporary. In realistic YA fiction, no villain stands out like the bully, those classmates who make your life a living hell. Most of those books, of course, feature the victims: kids who get bullied for anything from going for the wrong […]