Skip to main content

Featured

The Empress of All Seasons by Emiko Jean

Each generation, a competition is held to find the next empress of Honoku. The rules are simple. Survive the palace's enchanted seasonal rooms. Conquer Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall. Marry the prince. All are eligible to compete--all except yokai, supernatural monsters and spirits whom the human emperor is determined to enslave and destroy. Mari has spent a lifetime training to become empress. Winning should be easy. And it would be, if she weren't hiding a dangerous secret. Mari is a yokai with the ability to transform into a terrifying monster. If discovered, her life will be forfeit. As she struggles to keep her true identity hidden, Mari's fate collides with that of Taro, the prince who has no desire to inherit the imperial throne, and Akira, a half-human, half-yokai outcast. Torn between duty and love, loyalty and betrayal, vengeance and forgiveness, the choices of Mari, Taro, and Akira will decide the fate of Honoku in this beautifully written, edge-of-your-seat YA...

The Giver by Lois Lowry (The Giver Quartet, #1)

The Giver is remarkable for well how it builds a dystopian world by not describing things. Jonas is an unreliable narrator in the manner of someone who has been gaslit, he doesn't know what he doesn't know. I'm very glad to know this has sequels.

I'm keeping my descriptions minimal because talking much at all about so short of a book would spoil major portions of it. Suffice it to say, I liked it, I'm ready to read the rest of the quartet, and it's a dystopia such that the most chilling parts of it lie in the implications of what is missing from Jonas's understanding. It doesn't rely on mystery, exactly, just that as Jonas gains some understanding of what was absent from his life, it implies even more things that he hasn't yet learned were missing.

Comments