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

www.goodreads.com

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.

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Books

Who here has read Ann Brashares’ Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series? (*Proceeds to raise hand*) The concept is really quite simple: four friends are preparing to spend their first summer apart when they discover a pair of jeans that happens to fit each of them perfectly. The friends decide to share the pants over the summer. Each time a girl mails them to the next friend, they send an accompanying letter about all of the adventures the “traveling pants” have blessed them with. This summer, three friends, Hayley, Natalie, Caroline, and I decided to do something similar and formed The Sisterhood of the Traveling Books. Each of us selected a book and wrote a letter detailing our reasons for picking it. On the tenth of each month, we rotated books, so I shipped one to Natalie who shipped one to Caroline who shipped one to Hayley who shipped one to me. At the end of each book, the reader also wrote a new letter about how the book has influenced her, just like in Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.

Realistic Fiction

Hold Fast by Blue Balliett

Langston Hughes wrote “Hold fast to dreams/For if dreams die/Life is a broken-winged bird/That cannot fly.” As one of the most influential American poets, Hughes weaves words that make the heart soar and weep simultaneously, two qualities shared with Blue Balliett’s new YA book Hold Fast. Balliett illuminates the sad but ultimately hopeful world of Chicago’s homeless shelters through the eyes of one poetry lover, eleven-year-old Early Pearl.

Early’s father, an aide at the Chicago Public Library, has disappeared under the most mysterious circumstances, leaving Early, her younger brother Jubie, and their mother Summer to fend for themselves. With no money and no clue as to the location of Dash, the Pearl family must assimilate into the claustrophobic world of the Chicago shelters. Balliett, author of the award-winning novel Chasing Vermeer, employs her trademark mystery and problem-solving in Early’s quest to deduce the location of her father through the poems of Hughes he loved to share.

Track this Twitter Tag!

How to make #MSWL work for you.

When I accidentally stumbled across the Manuscript Wishlist tag (#MSWL) on Twitter a few weeks ago, I immediately got really excited. This is the kind of information that can really help ambitious publishers and writers. September 24th was the official #MSWL day, but agents and editors are still posting more wish list items and information, making this tag a treasure trove of information about the kinds of manuscripts that people in the industry are personally looking for.