young adult fiction
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A Spy in the House (The Agency #1) by Y.S. Lee
A Spy in the House by Y.S. Lee My rating: 4 of 5 stars Mary Quinn finds herself in a bit of a Nikita situation….as she reforms her life, she is given a proposal to give up her traditional woman’s destiny and become part of The Agency. The really interesting part happens though when Mary…
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Delusion Road by Don Aker
Delusion Road by Don Aker My rating: 3 of 5 stars This book is nominated this year for an Ontario Library Association White Pine award and It is hopping off the shelves in my secondary school library. At first I found the book to feel very abrupt as the chapters interchange between the two essential…
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Rush by Eve Silver
Rush by Eve Silver My rating: 4 of 5 stars Eve Silver‘s book Rush is a sure fire winner with the strong young adult readers in my secondary school library. It begins with the life of an otherwise ordinary girl who gets pulled through dimensions into a ‘game’ but it turns out that she actually…
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Trillium by Jeff Lemire
Trillium by Jeff Lemire My rating: 5 of 5 stars Jeff Lemire ‘s graphic novel reminds me of this version of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time: The Graphic Novel. As Nika and William come together through time and space and then are separated again, Lemire presents this as happening on two separate planes of…
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Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith
Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith My rating: 3 of 5 stars Andrew Smith ‘s book Grasshopper Jungle came highly recommended to me as a secondary school teacher-librarian as something that would connect with those elusive, hard-to-read teens. Scientifically it checks a number of those ‘should-I-buy-it’ boxes: involves issues of gender-identity, bullying, marginalized characters, and it’s…
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Cinder by Marissa Meyer
Cinder by Marissa Meyer My rating: 3 of 5 stars As much as I wanted to get into this book about a Cyborg with way more problems than Cinderella (who the book loosely resembles), I had trouble with the world-building and the flow of unfolding the politics of this fantastic setting. I had trouble understanding…
threadbare beauty 