Minnesota Reads

It’s pretty clear that my current obsession is dystopian fiction, but I recently stopped reading a handful of young adult dystopian novels. How could I read a book where love needs to be cured? Because, apparently, everything bad in our society (hate, war, etc.) is caused by love, so love is enemy number one. Please. [...]

Ilsa J. Bick does not make me want to go camping. Let’s face it, I never want to go camping, but now I have another reason why I don’t want to go – zombie apocalypse. What would I do if I were camping when the zombie apocalypse happened? Alex is a teenager camping in Wisconsin [...]

I’ve listened to the buzz surrounding Marie Lu’s debut young adult novel Legend all year. It just came out at the end of November, but long before it came out the rights were sold for a movie. It’s also been called the new Hunger Games, which I love just a little too much. I think [...]

Necromancy: the ability to communicate with and raise the dead. Sam LaCroix had no idea what necromancy was or that he had this power. Living a boring, fast-food-employee life, Sam could barely make rent, had no girlfriend and no motivation or drive to change anything. He was sarcastically apathetic about his humdrum life. But when [...]

It’s ironic that a book about bullying can be so full of cruel, negative stereotypes that it verges on bullying itself. Lucky Linderman, the teenage protagonist of A.S. King’s young adult novel Everybody Sees the Ants, has been routinely bullied by an asshole named Nader McMillan since he was seven years old. Nader’s antics grow [...]

The world is just so huge, boundary-less, in young adult fiction. It’s malleable. A soft fontenelle. A kid standing at the foot of her parent’s bed and saying: When I grow up I want to be a cheerleader and a fireman and a teacher and a rock star and a robot. Maybe I’ll be the [...]

I need to stop being amazed that authors make me cry, because apparently I?m now a sloppy, sobbing, crying mess when I read. Patrick Ness got me, again. But this wasn?t just a little bit of water in my eyes or a few tears streaming down my cheeks. This time I was blubbering, weeping, practically [...]

I loved the first book in Jonathan Stroud?s Bartimaeus trilogy, mostly because of snarky, clever Bartimaeus. In this second book, The Golem’s Eye, we don?t see Bartimaeus as much, and because of this I didn?t think the book was as funny, clever, or exciting as the first. In The Golem’s Eye, we revisit Nathaniel and [...]

Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty was as much a part of my childhood as were ?Sesame Street? and parental concern about pesticides on apples. I decided to re-read it recently and in doing so discovered why it is, by some counts, the fifth best-selling English language book of all time. Black Beauty is the story of [...]

Before I started reading Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs, I took off the book jacket and placed it on the coffee table. I didn’t want that image anywhere near my bedroom, where I was convinced it would give me nightmares. That picture is scary. The book is scary too, but only [...]