eARC Review: Throwaway Girls by Andrea Contos

Rating: ★★★★☆

Categories: YA Thriller, F/F

I received advance copies via Edelweiss and Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

In Throwaway Girls, Caroline’s best friend has gone missing. The day she disappeared, Caroline was supposed to meet her, and the guilt is suffocating. As she tries to get over a painful breakup and the loss of the one person who made life worth living, Caroline now must find her best friend – she knows the police isn’t looking in the right places, and as they try to frame a teacher, Caroline knows he’s not guilty. It’s someone else – someone who’s been taking girls no one cares to look for.

Review: Call Down the Hawk by Maggie Stiefvater

Rating: ★★★☆☆

Genres: Young Adult, Fantasy

Goodreads

Ronan Lynch is a dreamer. He can pull both curiosities and catastrophes out of his dreams.

Jordan Hennessy is a thief. The closer she comes to the dream object she is after, the more inextricably she becomes tied to it.

Carmen Farooq-Lane is a hunter. Her brother was a dreamer … and a killer. She has seen what dreaming can do to a person, and the damage that their dreams can do. But those are nothing compared to the destruction that is about to be unleashed…

Review: Falcon Trilogy, by Gabrielle Mathieu

I don’t often review full trilogies, but this is a small press series that doesn’t get much hype, so I thought it would be more useful to review all three books at once than, for example, book 2 of it alone. I have a full review of the first installment, The Falcon Flies Alone, which you can read here: Review: The Falcon Flies Alone (Falcon Trilogy #1), by Gabrielle Mathieu

Rating: ★★★☆☆

Genres: Young Adult, New Adult, Fantasy

Goodreads

 

I have received this book series from the author in exchange for an honest review.

The Falcon Trilogy tells the story of Peppa, who one day wakes up and finds herself alone, naked and on a rooftop. She has hazy memories about turning into a falcon and killing a man, and doesn’t know what to make of it. When she learns that her animal totem has woken up inside her after she was drugged with Compound T, she must uncover her family’s secrets and find out who drugged her.

Mini-Reviews: Queen of Nothing, The Deep, To Drink Coffee with a Ghost, Stay Sexy & Don’t Get Murdered

Queen of Nothing by Holly Black

Rating: ★★★☆☆

Goodreads

I really enjoyed the first two books in the series, especially for how cutthroat Jude was, and all the scheming and twists and betrayals were just really exciting to read. This final book, however, just felt like one long ode to how amazing Cardan is, how worthy of love and how secretly a good guy he was all along. There is not much going on at all for most of the book, and even what conflict is there was too quickly resolved, too neatly wrapped up. I did enjoy the book, just felt a bit disappointed by it. The audiobook was really good, though!

Review: Missing, Presumed Dead by Emma Berquist

Rating: ★★★★☆

Genres: Mystery, Young Adult, F/F Paranormal Romance

Goodreads

Lexi doesn’t like it when people touch her. No, that’s an understatement – Lexi flinches whenever someone touches her, because she can see how anyone will die if she has contact with their skin. She also sees ghosts, and can send them to wherever it is they should’ve gone when they died, but at great cost to her. She’s lonely and miserable, working at a night club to make ends meet where people like her are welcome. One night, she touches a woman who’s going to be murdered violently that night and when she meets her ghost, she knows she must do whatever it takes to avenge her.

eARC Review: Most Ardently, by Susan Mesler-Evans

Rating: ★★★★☆

Genres: F/F Romance, Contemporary Fiction, Retelling, Young Adult

Goodreads

I received an eARC of this book from Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

Most Ardently is the story of Elisa Benitez, the second of five sisters, who starts taking classes at University, where she meets the insufferable, cold and condescending Darcy. She’s tall, beautiful and… fifthly rich. Elisa despises her, admires her and is determined that, no matter what, Darcy is the kind of girl she could never fall for.

This is a YA F/F retelling of Pride and Prejudice – what else did I really need to know to pick this up? I’ve read quite a few retellings of P&P, which is one of my favorite books of all times, and this one is among my favorites! It’s a light-hearted hate-to-love romcom, with a half-Black lesbian girl (Darcy) and a bisexual Latina (Elisa). This is a lovely read which also touched on sensitive topics like student loan debt, consent, statutory rape. But while these topics were treated seriously and are quite relevant to the story, it didn’t make the novel emotionally difficult to read.

eARC Review: Girl of Fire, by Gabrielle Mathieu

Rating: ★★★☆☆

Genres: Young Adult, Fantasy

Goodreads

I received an eARC for this book by the author in exchange for an honest review.

Berona loves the wilderness, and dreams of finding true love. When an ancient Water Demon threatens her and everything she loves, Berona knows she must make a choice and become stronger. She decides to join the Yellow Cloaks to learn how to become a warrior and kill demons, hopefully without losing her dreams in the process.

Review: Dig, by A. S. King

Rating: ★★★★☆

Genres: Young Adult, Literary Fiction

Goodreads

I first heard of this book from one of Ariel Bissett’s channel and was immediately drawn to the cover – then the synopsis sounded intriguing. I was not sure what to think of literary YA fiction, as it made me think of books like The Catcher in the Rye (which I dislike), but since then I heard a few more positive reviews about it and decided to pick it up.

The Shoveler, the Freak, CanIHelpYou?, Loretta the Flea-Circus Ring Mistress, and First-Class Malcolm. These are the five teenagers lost in the Hemmings family’s maze of tangled secrets. Only a generation removed from being simple Pennsylvania potato farmers, Gottfried and Marla Hemmings managed to trade digging spuds for developing subdivisions and now sit atop a seven-figure bank account, wealth they’ve declined to pass on to their adult children or their teenage grandchildren.

Review: Dry, by Neal Shusterman and Jarrod Shusterman

Rating: ★★★★☆

Genres: Young Adult Thriller

Goodreads / Amazon

Dry is the story of Alyssa, a teenager whose normal life gets disrupted irrevocably when the drought suddenly turns into an apocalypse: the taps go dry. There isn’t water anywhere, the markets have been emptied out and there is a promise of violence in the air. When her parents go missing, things become far worse, and now Alyssa must do whatever it take to save herself and her little brother.

I haven’t read many YA thrillers before, and this left a very good impression! The main difference to adult thrillers is definitely the main characters being teenagers and, on top of the problems caused by the lack of water, they also had to deal with crushes and thinking about school, and also the less graphic violence present on the book.

Review: Sadie, by Courtney Summers

Rating: ★★★★☆

Genres: Young Adult Thriller, Mystery, Contemporary

Goodreads

When Sadie finds out her sister Mattie has been murdered, her world falls apart. There was precious little in her life to make it worth it, and now with Mattie gone, nothing will stop her from getting revenge on the man who killed her. Told in a podcast style as the journalist West McCray investigates and tells the story of Sadie and Mattie, its unique story-telling is great to listen to.

Sadie was a book I had both high and low expectations on: I’d heard the audiobook was amazing, but I hadn’t heard more on the blurb than that, so I hardly knew what the book was even about when I started it. It took me a good third of the book to really get into it – while the narration IS fantastic, Sadie’s character starts out as basically nothing but anger and thinking she’s super dangerous and is going to kill a man, but nothing in her really inspired me to believe she WAS dangerous or anything more than her anger. But as the book progresses, and her character gets fleshed out a lot more, along with the complicated, imperfect people in her life telling their sides of the story, my heart started aching for her, for all she went through and all she lost.