Tag Archives: YA fiction

#BookReview ‘Viper’s Daughter’ by Michelle Paver #WolfBrother #YA #fantasy

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After an eleven-year gap while writing other fiction, in 2020 Michelle Paver returned to her ‘Chronicles of Ancient Darkness’ YA series with the seventh installment, Viper’s Daughter. Torak and Renn’s peaceful life, living alongside Wolf, Darkfur and their cubs, is broken when Renn disappears without a word. Michelle PaverOnce again, the trio are catapulted into danger as they travel to the Far North, an unfamiliar land without trees, negotiating ice flows, ice bears, mammut and firey demons. Wearing claws strapped to their feet and shields over their eyes, their always sharp senses are minimised in this unfamiliar territory, oh so cold and without their normal forest prey for food. But the foe they seek is worse than they could ever have imagined.
The story is told in turn from Torak, Renn and Wolf’s viewpoints. As always, Wolf’s voice is a standout. The world created by Paver is so believable, based on a phenomenal amount of research and expeditions in Scandinavia, Siberia, Greenland and Alaska. She knows what she is talking about. And Wolf’s observations seem to clarify the differences between the trio’s home in the Forest and this eerie place of the ‘Great Hard Cold’ where the ground rumbles ‘like the earth talking to itself.’ Paver’s love for the natural world is behind every description and her imagination continues to thrill as this mature series continues to surprise and delight.
This is a great read, full of magic, love, loyalty, challenge and adventure. Such a pleasure to be back with such well-loved characters, though if you are new to the series Viper’s Daughter can also be read as a stand-alone novel.
Seventh in the fantastic ‘Chronicles of Ancient Darkness’ series, which started with Wolf Brother, with another two books, Skin Taker and Wolfbane, taking the series to nine. Don’t miss the audio series, narrated by Ian McKellan. Great for children and adults alike.

And read my reviews of two other novels by Michelle Paver:-
THE OUTSIDERS #1GODS&WARRIORS
THIN AIR
WAKENHYRST

If you like this, try:-
‘Holes’ by Louis Sachar
‘Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane’ by Suzanne Collins #2UnderlandChronicles
‘Insurgent’ by Veronica Roth #2Divergent

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#BookReview VIPER’S DAUGHTER by Michelle Paver https://wp.me/p2ZHJe-7g8 via @SandraDanby

COMING SOON… THE NEXT BOOK I REVIEW WILL BE:- Amanda Huggins

#BookReview ‘The Outsiders’ by Michelle Paver #YA #fantasy

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I came to this Michelle Paver series late, years after reading the award-winning ‘Chronicles of Ancient Darkness’ series which starts with the wonderful Wolf Brother. Doubtful that any character could be as admirable as Torak, it was a joy to read about The Outsiders, first in the ‘Gods and Warriors’ series. Hylas, like Torak, is an outsider. Michelle PaverThe Outsiders starts at a run from the first page and doesn’t slow up. Hylas has been attacked, his dog is dead, his sister missing and a fellow goatherd killed. And the killers are after him. Adrift at sea, disorientated, Hylas fears he must die. And then there follows a glorious section about dolphins. I won’t give away any more of the plot. The narrative is a shape familiar from Wolf Brother – wild boy in trouble, on the run, not sure who is friend or foe, sets off on a quest where he makes new alliances – but that doesn’t mean this is not an entertaining read with new characters, a new setting, and different myths and gods.
Michelle Paver’s books for children and young adults are set in mystical places but are based on solid research about the way our ancestors lived and survived in wild lands, the animals they hunted, the gods they worshipped and the monsters they feared. The Outsiders is set in the Mediterranean in the Bronze Age.
All the outdoors things inaccessible to today’s children – unsupervised by adults, expected to be self-sufficient at the age of twelve, adventuring to unfamiliar places, making a den, lighting a fire, navigating, foraging, analysing geography, weather and threats. Her child characters have respect for their world, they are brave, adventurous and learn quickly from their mistakes. If they don’t, they will die: these are not gentle stories but they are a preparation for the real world where children must learn for themselves how to survive.

And read my reviews of these other novels by Michelle Paver:-
THIN AIR
VIPER’S DAUGHTER #7WOLFBROTHER
WAKENHYRST

If you like this, try:-
‘Gregor the Overlander’ by Suzanne Collins #1UNDERLANDCHRONICLES
‘The Bear and the Nightingale’ by Katherine Arden #1WINTERNIGHT
‘Divergent’ by Veronica Roth #1DIVERGENT

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#BookReview ‘Found’ by @HarlanCoben #crime #YA

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September. A sunny day in Paris and I needed a book to read on the Eurostar train home. I needed a page turner. I searched my Kindle. What was required was Harlan Coben. I started to read Found, Coben’s latest UK release, which I thought was the new Myron Bolitar story. Except, it isn’t. Harlan CobenFound is the third in the Mickey Bolitar YA [young adult] series. I didn’t know this series existed. Mickey Bolitar is Myron’s nephew.  I guess the two M’s got me confused… oh well. Found may be a YA novel but that doesn’t stop the story from being gripping, in true Coben fashion this really rattled along. Ideal for a train journey.
Mickey is Myron Bolitar’s nephew who, surprise surprise, is a basketball player and amateur detective. This is story three in the series, and I did need to know the back story. But Mr Coben is very efficient at filling that in without stopping the story moving forward.
Two storylines are woven together. On Mickey’s basketball team, one player moves away suddenly, another is dropped from the team for taking steroids. Mickey investigates. Meanwhile, continued from book two in the series, one of Mickey’s friends is in hospital after an adventure when the four friends – Mickey, Spoon, Ema and Rachel – solve a mystery. It appears now though that this mystery is not completely solved.
The quartet combines to track down a missing teen and discover the truth of what happened to Mickey’s father. In true thriller fashion, it starts out with the two stories being completely separate but in the end they overlap. I knew the overlap was coming, but couldn’t see where.

Read my review of a Myron Bolitar novel by Harlan Coben:-
ONE FALSE MOVE #5MYRONBOLITAR

If you like this, try:-
‘Wilderness’ by Campbell Hart
‘Snow White Must Die’ by Nele Heuhaus
‘Nightfall’ by Stephen Leather

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#BookReview FOUND by @HarlanCoben https://wp.me/p2ZHJe-1ds via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Allegiant’ by Veronica Roth #YA #fantasy

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The tone of Allegiant, the third in the ‘Divergent’ trilogy by Veronica Roth, is different. Tris lives in Chicago where every citizen belongs to one of five factions, each representing a human virtue. But Tris doesn’t fit in and is searching for a new world. Veronica RothKey to the change of tone in this book is a change in point-of-view, which is split for the first time; between Tris and Tobias [Four]. Getting a male perspective is interesting, and I guess Veronica Roth took this approach to add more tension to the storytelling. It certainly highlights the lack of communication between the two. But at times, I lost track of whose thoughts I was reading.
The book is full of strong female characters, but not strong in a good way. Evelyn, head of the factionless; Edith Prior, Tris’s ancestor, whose mystery hangs over this third book. The world Tris knew in Divergent and Insurgent has been shattered by violence so she and Tobias set out beyond the fence to find a new world. Except the new world is not green fields, but just as violent and unequal as the world they are escaping.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK

Click the title to read my reviews of the other books in this series:-
DIVERGENT #1DIVERGENT
INSURGENT #2DIVERGENT

If you like this, try:-
‘The Bear and the Nightingale’ by Katherine Arden #1WinternightTrilogy
‘Dark Earth’ by Rebecca Stott
‘The Secret Commonwealth’ by Philip Pullman #2TheBookOfDust

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#BookReview ALLEGIANT by Veronica Roth via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-Pt

#BookReview ‘Insurgent’ by Veronica Roth #YA #fantasy

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Insurgent, second in the fantasy trilogy by Veronica Roth, is action-led and the pace fairly trips along. Everyone living in the post-dystopian city of Chicago belongs to one of five factions, each represents a human virtue. When the factions disagree, there is a struggle for power. Veronica RothHeroine Tris is a complex mixture of two factions: her upbringing in Abnegation [considerate, selfless] and her adopted faction Dauntless [brave, daring, reckless]. This dangerous mixture gets her into trouble and that drives the story along. She is confrontational, brave, but often makes questionable decisions. She distrusts Four’s father and believes he is misleading them: ‘…sometimes, if you want the truth, you have to demand it.’ Demand, not ask: this tells me more about Tris than about Four’s father Marcus.
As this is the second novel of the trilogy there is more time for characterisation, we see more of Tris’s inner world in Insurgent compared with Divergent. She is maturing into her divergent personality, ‘I drift off to sleep, carried by the sound of distant conversations. These days its easier for me to fall asleep when there is noise around me. I can focus on the sound instead of whatever thoughts would crawl into my head in silence. Noise and activity are the refuges of the bereaved and guilty.’ And she is both.
I had difficulty keeping track of the huge list of characters and longed for a cast list. But more importantly is the lack of clarity about the main enemy: who is it? There’s lots of infighting to keep track of too, petty squabbles some of which have carried forward from the first book and which I had forgotten. I made the mistake of not reading the books back-to-back which would have really helped.
Tris’s confusion reminded me of my teenage years, confusion is universal: ‘Sometimes I feel like I am collecting the lessons each faction has to teach me, and storing them in my mind like a guidebook for moving through the world. There is always something to learn, always something that’s important to understand.’ Like all young people, Tris must learn there is no cut-off date by which she will have learned everything, adults continue to learn until they die.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK AT AMAZON

Click the title to read my reviews of the other books in this series:-
DIVERGENT #1DIVERGENT
ALLEGIANT #3DIVERGENT

If you like this, try:-
‘Beneath the Keep’ by Erika Johansen #prequelTearling
‘Children of Blood and Bone’ by Tomi Adeyemi #1LegacyofOrisha
‘La Belle Sauvage’ by Philip Pullman #1TheBookOfDust

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview INSURGENT by Veronica Roth via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-Po

#BookReview ‘Divergent’ by Veronica Roth #YA #fantasy

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Divergent by Veronica Roth is a book that had passed me by until I read online reviews, which prompted my Kindle purchase of the trilogy. Veronica RothI wonder what percentage of Young Adult [YA] fiction currently published features a dystopian world. Are our teens disenchanted with their own real world and so want to read fantasy? Certainly Suzanne Collins and Stephanie Meyer have a lot of responsibility for this, their two series have dominated the bookshelves and cinema screens. And they are all entertaining, in different ways.
Divergent is set in a city which was once Chicago where every citizen belongs to one of five factions. Each faction represents a human virtue: Candor [honesty], Amity [kindness], Dauntless [fearlessness], Abnegation [selflessness], Erudite [searching for knowledge]. At 16, teenagers are assessed for their affinity to the factions and can choose the faction they will be for the rest of their life. Anyone whose test results are inconclusive is labelled ‘divergent’. Tris, the protagonist, is divergent. This is her story and is the first of a trilogy.
Tris embraces her non-conformity. She is brave enough to be true to herself even though at times she is not sure what that is. She learns to be suspicious of labels, not to pre-judge people. But for me some factions verge on cliches. In particular, the fearlessness of the Dauntless verges on stupidity, danger for the sake of it. It is that particular computer-game type of violence that doesn’t hurt on the page but would seriously damage/kill in real life.
I’d like to see more character development, none of the depth here of The Hunger Games, but this is the first book of the trilogy so there is a world to set-up. Also I’d worked out the ending before I got there. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the book but just that it seems superficial in comparison with The Hunger Games, which from page one gives you the sense of the deep back story. My expectations are set high.

Click the title to read my reviews of the other books in this series:-
INSURGENT #2DIVERGENT
ALLEGIANT #3DIVERGENT

If you like this, try:-
‘Gregor the Overlander’ by Suzanne Collins #1UNDERLANDCHRONICLES
‘The Queen of the Tearling’ by Erika Johansen #1TEARLING
‘The Magicians’ by Lev Grossman #1THEMAGICIANS

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#BookReview DIVERGENT by Veronica Roth http://wp.me/p5gEM4-Jq via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Lost Girl’ by @SanguMandanna #scifi #YA

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I admit to never having heard of The Lost Girl by Sangu Mandanna until seeing it mentioned in ‘favourite read’ lists on a few blogs. I ordered it purely on that basis and had no idea it was a YA novel. It is a romantic story of love and loss, grief and identity, set in the UK and India, with sinister echoes of Frankenstein. Sangu Mandanna Eva is an ‘echo’, a non-human ‘woven’ by a mysterious organization called The Loom which makes copies of real people for their family in case the loved one should die. The idea is that the ‘echo’ slips into the dead person’s shoes so minimising the family’s loss. Of course it is not that simple. Mandanna handles a difficult subject well, not avoiding the awkward moral issues which litter the dystopian story premise. The world is disturbingly almost normal, littered with everyday familiar references. Eva, who lives in the Lake District, is the echo for Amarra from Bangalore. I found it quite an emotional read, not just Eva’s situation but her guardians, her familiars, and Amarra’s friends in India. What seems a simple premise at the beginning, done with the best intentions, becomes increasingly dark as the story develops and the true horror of Eva’s situation is explained.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK AT AMAZON

If you like this, try:-
‘The Bear and the Nightingale’ by Katherine Arden #1WinternightTrilogy
‘The Magicians’ by Lev Grossman #1TheMagicianstrilogy
‘The Queen of the Tearling’ by Erika Johansen #1Tearling

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE LOST GIRL by @SanguMandanna via @SandraDanby https://wp.me/p2ZHJe-4b7