Book Review: The Promise of Amazing

The Promise of Amazing by Robin Constantine

**SPOILERS**

I love a good romance book. You know, a good, easy, cute book that you can escape into for a few hours that’ll make you smile. The Promise of Amazing is almost that type of book.

The Promise of Amazing is told through alternating points of view, with every other chapter belonging to either Wren Caswell or Grayson Barrett. It takes place during the characters’ junior year, where Wren and Grayson first meet. They wouldn’t have run into each other had Wren not gone to work at her family’s catering hall after being annoyed at her guidance counselor’s “no one is going to Harvard,” pep talk.

It’s a cute idea when you consider the whole opposites attract thing, but just a glance at the YA shelf will prove that there are more than enough books about the bad boy and good girl falling insta-in-love. It started out cutely, as though their romance might be a real high school dating story, but that soon changed. When a book revolves around the romance connection, it needs to be believable; I could buy it if it was a story of dating casually to see if the two fit together, but not one about falling in love at first sight.

Book Review: The Hynotists

The Hypnotists by Gordon Korman

Rating: 3.5/5

Genre: middle grade, fiction, supernatural

In the beginning of his new series, Gordon Korman introduces readers to a young man whose color changing eyes can make others do anything. Jackson “Jax” Opus is an ordinary twelve year old boy who learns he is a descendant of a long line of hypnotists after he accidentally hypnotizes those around him. As soon as he discovers this, Doctor Elias Mako, the head of the Sentia institute, contacts him with an invitation to join their groundbreaking research. At an institute where Jax is surrounded by mindbenders like himself, he soon discovers that everything is not as it seems. Sentia has a much darker purpose, and Jax is the key to its success. Soon, Jax has to use his power to protect himself and those he loves from people who will do anything to possess his power.

Book Review: Escape From Eden

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Escape From Eden is not your typical YA novel - and thank goodness for that. While the cover and summary may lead you to believe that you’re holding just another dystopian teen romance, from the first page Elisa Nader creates a world unlike any other currently on the market. This fast-paced thriller will take you on a page-turning ride that you won’t want to put down.

Nader grants us a strong and interesting female protagonist, Mia Eden, who gets to be her own hero by the end of the book, a feat so rare in YA literature. I spent the whole time waiting for her love interest, Gabriel, to swoop in and save the day. Escape From Eden does not fall prey to the patterns most YA books do. The premise of a religious cult sequestered in the jungles of South America is both refreshingly new and intriguing. Mia’s story is action-packed and suspenseful from the very beginning where we are introduced to a religious cult that resides in Edenton called “The Flock.”

Book Review: Inhuman

When I first started Kat Falls’s book, Inhuman, I couldn’t get the futuristic, post-apocalyptic vibe out of my head. In the book, a virus that mutates the human population into savage cannibals causes a seven hundred foot wall to be erected in order to separate the infected from the non-infected. Reminiscent of The Walking Dead and Game of Throne series, Falls takes familiar elements and makes them her own with her descriptions of two isolated societes who have been faced with the “Ferae Naturae” virus in her latest series.

Imagine a society obsessed with cleanliness: everyone is constantly sanitizing their hands, there is little physical contact to avoid germs, and kids go to school online to, well, avoid spreading those germs. Okay, that’s not too far off from the society we know now, but imagine if we became this way because a virus had turned half the population into cannibalistic human-animal hybrids. That’s the society that Delany Park McEvoy comes from on the western side of the wall. Thrown into the zone just east of the Mississippi, she aims to find her father and send him on a secret mission. We can see through her eyes what the virus has done.

Book Review: Goblins by Philip Reeve

Skarper isn’t like the other goblins. Well, he does have the same love of treasure and the tendency to steal to accumulate more treasure. But unlike others of his kind, he has intelligence and a thirst for knowledge. In Philip Reeve’s Goblins, it is this brain that gets him into trouble – very amusing, imaginative trouble.

Along with Skarper, the book focuses on Henwyn, a young man who dreams of something bigger than cheese (he is apprenticed as a cheesewright in his father’s cheesery). When Skarper is kicked out of the goblin tower - or more accurately, catapulted out- for questioning the goblin king, and Henwyn is driven out of his town after an unfortunate incident with a magical cheese monster, the two misfits find each other. And soon, adventure finds them. There is old magic awakening in the land of Clovenstone, and it could spell danger if that power falls into the wrong hands.

Superhuman

Blackout by Robison Wells

In Robison Wells’s Blackout, a virus is spreading across the United States, but for some reason this mysterious disease affects only teens. The symptoms? Strange superpowers that range from invisibility to super-strength to mind control. Add in some terrorist attacks, several destroyed monuments, and a paranoid military force, and you’ve got the perfect recipe for a post-apocalyptic story that keeps you turning those pages.

Laura and Alec are trained, lethal terrorists, while Jack and Aubrey were two average high school students. They come from extremely different backgrounds yet, as a result of this new virus, their lives become connected in a way that no one could have foreseen. Now they must work together to survive in this strange, new world.

The Dreams Continue

The Dream Thieves (Book II in the Raven Boys Cycle) by Maggie Stiefvater

Last year, I was fortunate enough to review the first book in the Raven Boys Cycle. At the end, I was so wrapped up in the suspense that I couldn’t believe the book was over. Naturally, I jumped at the chance to review the second book, and it does not disappoint by any stretch of the imagination.

Blue and her friends are back again, picking up where the last book left off. Gansey is continuing his search for Glendower, the old Welsh king, trying to deny his unusual attraction to Blue. Blue is trying to keep Gansey at bay, knowing all too well his fate –  Blue comes from a family of psychics (but possesses no psychic ability herself), and it has been predicted that he is her true love, and if he is to kiss her, he will die. Adam, the boy who has worked hard for everything he has (overcoming an abusive home in the last book) has made an unusual sacrifice that causes him to become more important to the quest than he ever dreamed he would be. And Ronan, the underplayed character in the first novel, becomes crucial.

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Ronan has the ability to steal objects from dreams. While not quite understanding himself, Ronan comes to realize that he is not only important to Gansey’s quest, but also is being targeted by several who are searching the ley lines (the sources of magical energy which are being used to find Glendower) as well. The possibility of murder and a desperate sense of urgency underlie this book, leaving the readers scrambling toward the finish line, only to be left with a new series of questions that beg to be answered in book three.

Stiefvater has done it again. Her writing pulls the reader in, engrossing them in the story so completely that the book becomes impossible to put down. The dialogue sounds so realistic, and there are some quips that make the reader laugh out loud. The complex plot line is woven in such a detailed manner that forces the reader to pay attention to even the slightest details. In short, it is a work that should definitely be considered one of the greatest in current YA fiction. The plot is unlike anything else on the market, yet plays into the themes that are so hot right now – the sense of a ticking time-bomb, a hint of magic, and a dash of romance combine to create the second in a series that leaves readers begging for more.

By: Natalie Hamil