Genre: Fantasy

A Touch of Scarlet

Emma’s life is a mess. Her boyfriend Gray broke up with her. Her roommate, Michelle, isn’t talking to her. She is lonely and isolated at her exclusive prep school. Then things get even stranger when she goes into a trancelike state and enters the world of the novel The Scarlet Letter.

In a moment of weakness, Emma kisses her roommate’s boyfriend, which causes her classmates to exclude Emma even more. Emma wants to feel brave, but instead, she’s heartsick over her breakup with Gray, worried about her estranged relationship with Michelle, and wishing her life didn’t parallel The Scarlet Letter.

When Emma finds out that Michelle is gay, Emma tries to help Michelle come out into the open and stop hiding her secret. The second half of the story follows Michelle’s struggle with discrimination and fear.  However, as the story is told from Emma’s point of view, the reader doesn’t get to see Michelle’s emotions. Although it is clear that Emma cares for her roommate, the battle isn’t Emma’s so it lacks emotion and suspense.

A Touch of Scarlet’s best moments are when Emma goes into the world of Hester and The Scarlet Letter.  When Emma watches the plot of the book unfold, she learns that each situation can be viewed from different perspectives and that forgiveness and honesty are important in life.

The book delves into the voodoo religion, showing how to make a hex. Another troubling portion of the story is when Emma learns how to leave her body and travel to The Scarlet Letter’s world.

Emma is shown to be a troubled teen who is trying to deal with life’s complications. She makes mistakes but cares for her friends. Plus, whe does not have sex or do drugs. However, several of the characters are seen drunk, smoking marijuana, and having sex.

Sexual Content

  • Throughout the book Emma kisses three different boys.
  • Emma and Gray kiss many times throughout the book. In one scene Emma tells Gray that, “My dad worries you’re going to steal my virginal innocence.” Even though Emma considers having sex with Gray, she does not.
  • Emma and Gray make out. She describes the sensation of Gray touching her.  “My body lit up like a pinball machine. Before I knew it, I was lying on the ground, my dress hitched up around my waist, with Grey’s body shifting on top of mine . . . I tore at his shirt, trying to undo the buttons with cold, nervous fingers . . . A part of me wanted to go for it—to lose myself in the moment.”
  • Emma and her roommate, Michelle, talk about how Michelle cheated on her boyfriend.  Michelle says, “It was a little more than kissing . . . I had to tell someone. It’s been eating me up inside.”
  • After a breakup, Emma kisses her roommate’s boyfriend. “Then we were really kissing, his lips on my lips, his hand gripping the back of my neck.”
  • Michelle’s roommate struggles with the fact that she is gay, but she doesn’t want anyone to know about it.
  • One of the characters tells about when she accidently told her friends that her cousin was gay. “Chelsea got all weirded out and Amber flipped because apparently—news to me—she had hooked up with him a few times the summer before. So Amber starts telling me he’s going to hell . . . I feel like vomiting, partly from drinking too many margaritas and partly because I’ve just realized my friend are complete assholes.”

Violence

  • Emma thinks about her mother who killed herself by walking into the ocean. Emma has dreams where she sees her mother walking into the water and Emma tries to save her. “I plunged to the bottom, trying to dive under the tumult, but the waves kept careening over me.”
  • Emma travels to the world of the scarlet letter. Abigail sticks a large needed into her belly and then accuses Elizabeth of being a witch. Elizabeth is arrested when, “the constable finds a poppet with a needle in its belly and accuses Elizabeth of using it as a voodoo doll.”
  • While playing hockey, Emma purposely hits another girl with a hockey puck. “I watched in fascination as it sailed through the air, seeming to hover in slow motion right before it connected with Elise’s exquisite cheekbone.”
  • When Gray finds another boy at Emma’s house. Gray wants to, “smash his face in.” Emma tells him, “You should be thanking him, not trying to smash him to a bloody pulp like some macho dickhead.”
  • In her dream world, Emma is chased by a mob of women who fling mud at her. “Fear and adrenaline surged through me as I ran through the forest, hearing their haunting voices behind me and feeling the pelts of mud at my back.”
  • Emma and Flynn kiss. “His mouth tasted earthy and sweet, like smoke and sage. And then I surrendered to the kiss, allowing him to draw me in, one hand on the back of my neck, the other making its way down my waist.”
  • In her dream world, someone tries to burry Emma alive and turn her into a zombie. “After he poured the last of the dirt on me, he reached in his basket and pulled out one last red rose, which turned black in his hands. He threw it onto my makeshift grave and laughed, ‘this is your fate.”
  • In biology, the class must dissect a cat. Michelle deskins the cat. One of the lab partners tells Michelle not to cut too close to the cat’s tail. The girls laugh when Michelle says, “I wouldn’t touch this cat’s anus with a ten-foot pole.”
  • At the end of the book, the girls find out that their male headmaster had an “inappropriate relationship” with a student when the headmaster worked at an all-male school.

Drugs and Alcohol

  • When Emma gets back to school she thinks, “Lockwood girls didn’t like their parents sticking around any longer than necessary, anxious to break out the booze for the first-night celebrations.”
  • Emma pulls out her cell phone, “looking down at it like a drug addict staring at a fix.”
  • Flynn drinks often, as well as smokes a joint, which is passed around between several others.
  • Flynn’s “father is an asshole and his mother is knocked out on prescription drugs half the time.”
  • Throughout the book, several characters drink as well as talk about things that happened when they were drunk.
  • Emma’s grandmother drinks often. Once the grandmother is admonished, “You’ve had enough whiskey for three people.”

Language

  • A boy asks someone, “When are you two lovebirds going to get off your asses and join us on stage?”
  • After the school finds out the Emma kissed her roommate’s boyfriend she is called a “bitch” and a “slut.” Emma says she is “sick of the slut-shaming.”
  • Emma’s friend is called a “dyke” several times in the story.
  • “Oh my god” and variations of “asshole” are used often.
  • When someone sees Emma and Flynn kissing, he says, “what the hell, man?” Flynn replies, “I’m such a fuck-up.”

Supernatural

  • A major part of the plot is that while running, Emma goes into a trance like state and enters the world of the book The Scarlet letter. After the first time Emma enters the world of The Scarlet Letter, she wonders who she saw. “Ghost lingering in a parallel universe, caught between my world and their own?”
  • Emma is told that she must be careful in her dream world because, “a voodoo priest can put people into trancelike states, and then bury them alive . . . they steak their ti-bone-ange (soul) thus depriving them of free will and conscience. That’s how zombies are created.”
  • Emma learns a “black magic” spell to remove a person “from your path.” Later in the story, Emma and her friends cast the spell. Emma is told, “a hex is just a formal way of putting a wish into the universe.”
  • At a slumber party, the girls play Bloody Mary.  Emma is freaked out when she sees, “Gray’s face, flickering in the candlelight . . . Behind him was a find aura of red, almost like Hester’s ghost was standing behind him.”
  • Emma learns how to send her spirit into the dream world while her body stays in one place. “I imagined myself a dolphin, half of my mind shut down to let me rest; the other half active and alert. It was this second half I sent out wandering.”

Spiritual Content

  • Michelle says that God hates her because she doesn’t believe in God.
  • Michelle’s aunt is “part dream interpreter, part voodoo practitioner, and all around wise woman. She believed in the spirit world and claimed to communicate with the dead.”
  • Emma goes and stands in the same spot where she was hit by lightning. She wonders, “If God would be audacious enough to strike the same place, and person, twice.”
  • When Emma is having her dreams, she is told that, “The Haitian people believe you have two parts of your soul-le ti-bon-ange, or your little angel, and le gros-bon-ange, your big angel. Now the little angel is like your shadow soul.  It’s only visible in dreams or visions, and helps you communicate with the spirits or the loa, kind of like your conscience. But the big angel is your fate soul, the one that determines your destiny or prophesizes your future.”
  • Emma goes to Easter service. “I hadn’t been to church since Christmas, and I felt a little guilty about it. It wasn’t’ that I didn’t believe in God, more than I questioned what kind of God he was.  Anyone who’s lost a parent must go through this crisis of faith, asking, How could a merciful God take my mother away?”
  • Emma thinks, “Michelle claimed to be an atheist, with science her only religion. She often scoffed at Darlene’s voodoo beliefs, but deep down, I think Michelle had some faith of her own, even if it didn’t conform to any church or institutions view of the cosmos.”

All that Burns

Emrys’ job was to secretly guard the prince, not fall in love with him.  However, loving him was a choice—one she gladly made, even when she had to give up her fairy power and immortality to be with him.  The mortals distrust her because they think she cast a spell over the young prince.  Now they want her and her fairy sisters dead.

To make matters worse, an old prisoner of Mabb’s has escaped and is determined to kill the royal family.  No one knows who the prisoner is or what he will do.  When Richard is abducted, no one knows if the enemy is a mortal or a fairy.  Emrys and Richard’s sister try to figure out what has happened to him, but they must do it in secret, because in a world where fairy and mortals mix, it is impossible to know who to trust.

All that Burns is an interesting story that focuses on Emrys’ love and the loss of her power.  Richard is worth all she has given up, but she still questions everything—her decision to give up her power and her new place within the mortal world.  At times, Emry’s inner conflict overshadows the story’s action and suspense.  In addition, many of the characters have lived thousands of years and reflect on their life in Camelot.  Thus anyone who is not familiar with King Arthur and Camelot may be confused.  One bright spot in the story is Richard’s sister Anabelle who is fiercely devoted to finding Richard and returning him to Emrys’ arms.

Sexual Content

  • When Richard touches Emrys she says it, “reminds me—in a faint and aching way—of magic. The way a spell burned just under my skin.    Waiting to explode.  This is what his touch does to me.  Every time.”  And then they kiss.
  • Richard’s touch slides down Emrys’ collarbone, his hand sinks into her hair and they kiss. “Richard’s breathe scarves my neck and his kisses trail down, forging new paths all the way to my collarbone . . . Want rises inside me, like the first surge on an unleashed spell.”  When Emrys reaches for the zipper on her dress, Richard “goes rigid.”
  • Another time Emrys kisses Richard and her, “hand slides up his chest and draws him closer.”
  • When another man kisses Emrys, she compares his kiss to Richard’s kiss.

Violence

  • Emrys is plague by dreams of the fall of Camelot. She sees a field that has turned to mud and is, “churned and mixed with the blood of a thousand men.  Full of flailing horses, snapped spears, and knights carved each other to pieces with crude metal.”
  • A mob of angry mortals chase Emrys and are run off by a Black Dog, which is a soul feeder. The Black Dog, which eats mortals and fairies alike, corners Emrys, but doesn’t eat her.
  • Emrys and Richard are attacked by men in black jackets and ski masks. A man presses a knife to Richard’s face and puts a cloth over his face that makes him go still. Emrys escapes only to see a Black Dog coming to get her.
  • One of the king’s guards shoots the fairy queen with electricity, the only thing that can kill a fairy.
  • When the veiling spell is broken, Emrys and the princess are chased by detectives.
  • People burn an effigy of Emrys over a fire barrel.
  • Emrys and Richard are put into a room underground, where they are told they will die when the building above them is blown-up.
  • Emrys and Richard are chased by the Ad-hene, but someone comes to their rescue by using magic to slice a staircase in half. Then the palace of Westminster is blown up, crushing the Ad-hene.
  • In the end the fairies corner Morgaine le Fay, who runs into tunnels that loop and cannot be escaped.

Drugs and Alcohol

  • When Emrys is under a veiling spell, she describes her steps as, “if I’ve had too many gin and tonics. I guess I am drunk in a way, reeling under so much magic after so many months without it.”
  • When inviting an enemy to dine at her table, the princess said, “I was thinking more along the lines of spiking his drink.”

Language

  • Richard tells Emrys, “the thought of losing you scares me shitless.”
  • In a fit of panic the prince’s sister uses magic and then says, “Oh shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.”
  • “Crap” is used once.

Supernatural

  • There are fairies, spirits, and spells.

Spiritual Content

  • None

All that Glows

Emrys, a fiery Faery, was sent to London to guard the prince from the Old One who is out to destroy the crown.  Emrys is to guard Prince Richard, “Britain’s notorious, partying bad boy and soon-to-be king.”  Richard’s wild ways attack soul-feeding Green Woman, but also Emrys.

In a move that goes against every Faery rule, Emrys reveals herself to Richard and finds herself falling in love with the mortal.  Now she is in a fight against time to discover who the Old One is so she can keep Richard safe.  And if she can keep him safe, she will have to make the ultimate choice—loving Richard or keeping her magic.

 All that Glows is an entertaining story that has suspense, love, and intrigue.  Although others see Richard as an unruly party boy, the reader gets to see the side of him that is unsure and lonely.  As the novel progresses, Richard becomes more and more likable as he grows out of his boyhood partying ways and into a man worthy of being king.

There are several fights between Green Woman and Emrys, and the story ends with a final battle between the faeries.  These scenes add suspense and the reader is allowed to imagine these scenes unfolding since they are described without graphic or gory details.  Like the fight scenes, the love scenes are also tame.   Richard and Emry kiss and Emrys admires Richard’s physique, and although there is sexual longing, the two do not act on this desire.

 All That Glows is an excellent story.  However, there is a fair amount of scenes that revolve around clubbing, alcohol, and sexual desire that may be inappropriate for younger readers.

Sexual Content

  • When Richard looks at Emrys she describes the feeling as, “the strange jolt that seized me when our eyes met.”
  • When Richard takes Emrys to a club, Emrys thinks, “I hate the way he’s looking at me, all slow and squinty, like he wants nothing more than to get his fingers on the zipper of my dress.”
  • Richard kisses Emrys. She describes it as, “a nameless desire in the way he kisses me.  I feel it rising in me as well, swelling like clear, triumphant notes.  He pulls me closer, his kiss growing deeper, a never-ending crescendo.”
  • When Richard kisses Emrys, “it’s so easy to lose myself in the feel of him. His tongue just barely grazes the edge of my lips.  My hands slide up around his neck, anchor in his shaggy hair, pull him closer.  With a single finger he traces the ridged pathway of my spine all the way down to the small of my back…It’s like being in another universe, a time apart.  Nothing else in the world matters but how he’s touching me, making me move.”
  • In another scene, Richard kisses Emrys and she savors, “the taste of him, rest in his warmth . . . he pulls me closer . . . our kisses grow bolder, deeper. Forging new ground . . . I lose myself in his kiss.  In its perfect glowing feeling.”
  • Richard, “leans in closer, so that I feel his breath grazing my check. Deliciously hot.  Here (away from the bed’s feathery sheets), I think it will be easier to stop.  I let our lips collide, press soft into each other . . . ”
  • In another scene when Richard and Emrys kiss, she describes it as, “it’s like I’m diving into him, swimming down, down and never coming up for air. And I never want to.  His tongue grazes mine, inviting me deeper.  To places I could never go in the presence of so many watchers.”

Violence

  • A Green Woman (soul feeder) tries to sink her teeth into the prince. “The teeth beneath her mottled lips grow ragged, meant for tearing tendon from bone. “ Emrys throws herself at the soul feeder.  She then uses her magic to throw the soul feeder, “back with such force that the stall door crumples around her body.”
  • While in the restroom, a man comes in and approaches Emrys. “He’s less than an arm’s length away when he reaches out, his fingers twitching and eager.”  Richard hits the man and stands, “over the howling drunk as he writhes on the floor clutching his face and his awful, running nose.” When the man again reaches for Emrys, the drunk prince knocks him out.
  • After the fight in the club, Richard shows his sister his injured hand. She replies, “Well, you must have had one hell of a good reason to hit him.”
  • When a Banshee (soul feeder) tries to seduce Richard’s friend, Emrys jumps at her, “only dimly aware of the scattering remains of beer glasses and sloshed whiskey.” Emrys throws a spell at the Banshee taking away her voice. Then Emrys’ hands, “envelope her (Banshee), crushing over her larynx.” As she is holding the Banshee, Emrys puts a spell on the soul feeder so she cannot talk about what happened.
  • A Banshee and a Black dog attack Emrys and another fairy. However, Emrys uses a banishing spell to make them flee.
  • Emrys goes into a club to try to question a Green Woman. The Green Woman throws a spell meant to kill Emrys.  Instead it hits a girl.  “The girl’s body lies close to my feet . . .  Her eyes are open—but there’s nothing behind them.”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • The prince goes to a club several times through the story. In each club scene there is drinking.  In one scene, the bartender says, “All the girls buy him drinks, and he gets drunker than a jilted woman on her wedding anniversary . . . he’s gonna get us shut down for all that underage drinking.”
  • While at a club, the prince dances and, “amber liquid sloshes from the top of his beer bottle. . . ”
  • When Emrys tells Richard that his life is in danger he, “emerges with what he’s hunting for—a bottle of whiskey and a weighty crystal glass.”
  • After Richard’s father dies, Richard has a hard time coping. He says, “. . . just a few weeks ago I was at Eton and my biggest worry was whether or not the prefects would find my stash of booze.”
  • When the fairy queen asks Emrys to report on Richard’s behavior, the queen asks, “How’s the prince coping? Drowning in the neck of a liquor bottle?”
  • Richard gets so drunk that he passes out.
  • At a dinner party, champagne and wine, “flows abundantly” and, “the crowd of faces grows increasingly flushed and the laughter grows volumes louder by the hour.”

Language

  • Richard says “bloody hell” after being attacked by a soul feeder.
  • After a night of partying, Richard’s father yells, “I’ll go to hell and back before I let you spend twelve months pissing in the corner of some pub.”
  • When Emrys shows herself to Richard he says, “Shit. I’ve gone crazy.”
  • Richard and Emrys get into an argument. Richard yells, “Maybe that (being dead) wouldn’t be such a bad thing!  Then you’ll be free and you won’t have to babysit me and wipe my ass every second of the damn day!”
  • In an argument, Richard’s sister yells, “Like hell I am,” she huffs. “You don’t just get to tell me I have a flipping Faery godmother and that we’re being attacked by some old thing and then go traipsing off into God-knows-where.”
  • Damn and hell are used several times.

Supernatural

  • There are fairies, spirits, and spells. Throughout most of the book, Emrys uses a veiling spell, which makes it so mortals cannot see her.
  • Emrys uses a banishing spell to keep people away and a spell that wipes people memories. She uses a variety of other spells as well.
  • Emrys talks about Henry VIII and the ghost of his wives as, “disturbed, unrested souls—cluster around, haunting him in all their vehemence.”
  • There are Tower ravens, “prophets clad in black feathers” that warn Emrys that someone is out to kill all of the royal family. In another scene, several of the Tower ravens go to Emrys to warn her about the Old One. They tell Richard that the Old One is, “coming for your crown and head.”
  • Emrys explains soul feeders. “There are spirits whose powers are strengthen by a mortal’s death…They like to hunt in the cities, usually at night.”
  • Banshees suck out mortals’ souls with a scream. They can also shape shift into weasels, stoats, hares, and crows.
  • A Green Woman appears as a beautiful, green-clad blonde to seduce and kill men.
  • Emrys explains that royal blood contains blood magic that can be transferred, which is why the Old One wants to kill him.
  • Emrys explains that there are many types of supernatural creatures including Herne the Hunter, who is a very old spirit who guards the woods of Windsor.

Spiritual Content

  • There’s several references to “the Greater Spirit.” One of the characters tells Emrys, “may the Greater Spirit go with you.”
  • Emrys promises to erase a Black Dog’s memory and tells him, “I swear it by the Greater Spirit.”
  • After Richard’s father dies, Richard says, “Sometimes I wonder if he’s watching me . . . I wonder if he likes what he sees.”
  • Emrys looks at the Thames and thinks, “In dusk’s illuminating glow, the surface of the Thames looks less full of sewage and debris and more like the mighty brown god it once was.”
  • When a faery dies, Emrys says, “We do not know what lies beyond this plane. We can’t imagine where our sisters might be now—yet we know they aren’t gone.”

Raging Star

DeMalo has established his borders. New Haven is expanding and its subjects appear to be thriving. At a quick glance, this land is exactly the paradise DeMalo proclaims it to be.

But at its border, a small token of resistance remains. Saba and her family have pledged themselves to destroy DeMalo and all he has built. But what can so few hope to accomplish against a united nation?

The final installment of Young’s trilogy focuses on the struggle taking place within Saba. Every time she attempts to leave the Angel of Death behind and find a non-violent solution to the rebel’s problems, a crisis gets in the way. Her sister is growing up and discovering new talents, DeMalo wants Saba for his wife, and there is a traitor among her small group of trusted friends. The path Saba takes is filled with surprising twists, and the suspense continues to grow in this gripping tale.

 Sexual Content

  • DeMalo asks Saba if she’s pregnant.
  • Saba starts kissing Jack and undressing him. “I kiss him . . . He ain’t kissin me back. He ain’t touchin me. He jest stands, not movin. His shirt hangs open. Did I do that? I don’t recall. I press closer, ever closer. My fevered hands roam him. Reckless. Hell-bent. Uh-uh. He grabs ’em. Firmly. Stop right there, he says.”
  • Saba makes out with Jack. “Our kisses grow hungry. Our bodies heat . . . I push him off, sit up an start puttin my cloths to rights. He’s made a heroic effort to undress me.”
  • An unnamed character has intercourse with Molly so he can learn, “how to please a woman. Yer teachin me. That’s all this is.”
  • Saba sleeps with Jack. “We’re skin to skin. Breath to breath. There’s now. There’s here. There’s him an”
  • Saba agrees to marry DeMalo if he gives her friends and family safe passage. When Jack finds out, he and Saba fight. “What deal did you make? To marry him, I says. His eyes harden to ice. You bought our freedom in his bed.”
  • Saba has a miscarriage. “You miscarried, lady . . . if often happens with the first one. Sometimes you don’t even know you’re pregnant.” Saba’s not sure who the father was as she slept with both DeMalo and Jack.

Violence

  • Saba and the rebels set out to blow up a bridge. At the last minute, a group of Tonton and slaves cross the bridge and get blown up with it. “Gone. The three Tonton. All gone. The Stewards in their cart. The blameless beasts. Animals an people, now bloody lumps of flesh. Flung like so much bad meat.”
  • Mercy has scars on her back. “I’ll survive, she says. I’ve had worse. Thin white lines, the scars of a whip, criss-cross her sun-tough skin.”
  • Mercy slaps Creed. “Marry me, he says. She slaps him hard. Almost slaps his head off. Everybody turns at the sound. The angry crack of skin on skin.”
  • In New Eden, weak newborn babies are left outside overnight. If they survive, they are given a second chance to live.
  • Someone nails a dead crow to a tree, hoping Saba will think it is her pet Nero and get frightened. “There’s a crow spiked to the trunk. Jest above head height. Wings spread wide. Dead. Nero.”
  • Emmi is shot. “We’re runnin an pullin her along by her hands. Lugh one side, me the other. There’s a crack. I feel the shot hit her. The blast throws her forward. I hold tight to her hand. She goes limp between us.”
  • Lugh is shot. “What’ve you done? I shout at Lugh. He’s on his feet, lookin dazed. A gun thuds. a bolt slams him in the back. No! I scream as his arms fly up as he twists an falls to my arms. Then we tip we topple out of the window down to the river below.”
  • Saba kills DeMalo. “DeMalo’s knife slashes my arm . . . I seize the crystal rock. I raise it high. I smash DeMalo in the head…My fingers wet with his blood. His head’s crushed. A mess of hair, blood an”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • Saba is given a sleeping potion. “From a tiny stone bottle she tipped the merest, barest blink of a teardrop . . . Molly weakened it three times in water. Saba drained the cup, then lay down. Short minutes later she was out.”

Language

  • Profanity is used throughout the book. The profanity used includes: Gawd, bullshit, bullshitter, fergawdsake, dammit, ass, sonofabitch, ohmigawd, damn, and hell.
  • Gawdamn and gawdamnmit are said many times throughout the story.
  • Saba has a chance to shoot DeMalo, but “I cain’t. I cain’t do it. Slowly I lower my bow. I says, Gawdamnn you sonofabitch.”

Supernatural

  • Emmi starts to hear earth songs, a sign that she can become a shaman. “They’d wakened her at dawn yesterday. The earth songs…the songs leading her, telling her, teaching her. Not songs with words. No. No words. Dreams.”
  • DeMalo claims to have visions of what the earth looked like before the apocalypse.
  • Saba has a heartstone. It gets hot as a way of leading a person to their heart’s desire.

Spiritual Content

  • Saba wonders if it is ever right to kill. “I killed some people. Not becuz I wanted to, I had to. It was kill or be killed. Is that wrong? . . . That’s a big question, says Mercy. Is it ever right to kill another person?”

by Morgan Lynn

Rebel Heart

Saba killed the King, but she didn’t destroy the empire. DeMalo, the King’s second in command, has taken control. He has plans to create a new empire and prove himself a much tougher opponent than his predecessor.

All Saba wants to do is join up with Jack at the ocean and live the rest of her life in peace. But the world has other plans. Rumors that Jack joined the Tonton sends Saba on a journey to find him. Only Saba believes in Jack’s innocence; those she travels with doubt his intentions and are ready to kill him if need be.

Swept into the heart of DeMalo’s new empire, Saba reluctantly joins rebels who are determined to destroy everything DeMalo has created. This sequel to Blood Red Road is not as fast-paced as the first, but the world DeMalo is trying to build is both interesting and alluring. The author makes Saba’s decision between joining DeMalo and fighting him a difficult one. While his methods may be harsh, the picture he draws of the future is beautiful. It’s the age-old question: does the end justify the means? A gripping story, the Dust Lands series has enough violence and sexual content to exclude younger readers.

Sexual Content

  • Saba sees her brother go off with a prostitute after a party. “His hands circle her ankles, smooth her bare legs with restless intent. She jumps down. She takes him by the hand. She leads him off into the night.”
  • Slim tells Lugh to, “get on with it. Life’s too short. Take her off in the bushes, my friend, an make her yer own. If you don’t, somebody else will. Hell, I might jest make a play fer her myself.”
  • Tommo kisses Saba. She stops him.
  • Saba makes out with DeMalo, then sleeps with him. “I’ve climbed on to his lap an I’m runnin my hands through his hair, over his shoulders an arms, while we kiss . . . he drags his lips along the inside of my arm, wrist to elbow. Trailin shivery fire on my tender skin till I’m quiverin head to foot. A rush in my belly, hot an ancient . . . I lead him to the bed. We lie down together.”
  • Molly sees a hickey on Saba’s neck.
  • Saba kisses Tommo to get him to trust her.
  • Saba kisses Jack when she finally finds him. “He takes my face in his hands an kisses me, over an over an over agin. My lips an my cheeks an my eyes an my lips, oh my lips. An I kiss him back. My whole body’s shaking. On fire. He’s shakin too.”

Violence

  • Subjects of New Haven are branded on the forehead depending on their status.
  • A family is displaced. The parents and son are shot, the daughter shoots herself rather than be taken. One of the soldiers is also shot for disobeying orders.
  • Saba is attacked by wolves. Her friend’s wolfdog saves her by ripping the other wolves’ throats out. Saba is knocked unconscious during this; she only sees the dead wolves afterward. “They lie in pools of their own blood. Both got their throats ripped out . . . The air hums with a hungry buzz. Flies. Hunnerds of ’em. Thousands of ’em. The open wounds, the half-dried lakes of sticky blood.”
  • In a fit of rage, Saba attacks her brother. “I leap at Lugh. I knock him backwards. We roll on the ground. I punch, I kick, I claw . . . my hands is tight around Lugh’s throat. My thumbs pressin on his windpipe.”
  • Saba discovers a temple of skeletons built by cannibals. The skeletons “sit close packed, side by side, on long wooden benches. They gleam whitely, dully, in the dim light.”
  • There is a pot cooking in the temple. “Somethin large bobs to the surface. It turns over…a face looks at me. A human face.” She flees, killing a priest on the way out. The cannibals give chase, and she shoots several of them with her arrows.
  • Saba and her friends hijack a man’s wagon. They force him to drive it by threatening to shoot him. “Gawdamn sonofabitch, I mutter . . . I walk fast, loadin by bow, aimin it straight at his face. He throws his hands up.”
  • Twice while on the road, Saba and her friends are spotted. They kill the people to keep their presence in New Haven quiet. “He shoots her head. An it’s silent. Jest like that.”
  • While on the road Saba sees a dead man who was lashed to a tree trunk. “A fat iron spike’s bin nailed through his throat. He ain’t bin here more’n a few days. He died hard. Hard an long.”
  • Saba jumps off a cliff. DeMalo pulls her out of the water and asks, “Were you trying to kill yourself?…[Saba] says naught.”
  • When attacked by Tonton, all the Tonton are killed. One of Saba’s allies is killed, possibly from friendly fire. “Both Tonton lie dead on the ground. Bram hangs halfways outta the driver’s seat, face down. He’s bin shot in the back.”
  • Maev gives herself up as a diversion so the others can escape. She fights for as long as she can, then blows herself up. When Saba tells Maev goodbye, “I kiss her lips. Don’t let ’em take you, I whisper . . . An as I soar through the darkness, high above the lake, Maev starts to shoot . . . the sound of gunfire goes on fer longer than I’d of thought it would. Or could. Then one big explosion.”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • Jack drinks wormwood whiskey at his friend’s inn.
  • Saba accuses her brother of taking the drug chaal, but he denies it.
  • Saba’s brother is hit with a blow dart. They cut open the wound and suck the poison out.
  • Saba drugs DeMalo’s wine with a potion that will knock him unconscious for many hours.

Language

  • The words damned, helluva, fergawdsake, damn, and sonofabitch are used once or twice.
  • Hell, variations of gawdamn, and ohmigawd are used often.
  • When Saba starts acting irrationally, her brother yells at her. “Tell me, gawdammit! Why’d you break yer dawdamn bow?”

Supernatural

  • Saba has a heartstone. It gets hot as a way of leading a person to their heart’s desire.
  • Saba starts to see ghosts. “It’s Epona. But not like she was. In life, she gleamed an shone…She’s a child of the air now. Fog an mist. She drifts. She gathers. She fades.”
  • Saba meets the Sky Speaker, a type of shaman who can sing the earths songs and sometimes see what will happen in the future. “The Sky Speaker’s shakin, head to foot. Her eyes roll back an she waves her hands wildly. She starts to babble, a endless stream of sounds.”
  • Saba follows the Wraithway, a road where spirits are said to roam.

Spiritual Content

  • None

by Morgan Lynn

No True Echo

In a strange twist of events that he doesn’t understand, Eddie relives the same day over and over. The first time Eddie lived through the day, his mother died when he was an infant and his only plan was to spend his school break climbing trees with his best friend and trying to find a way to talk to the new girl. As Eddie continues to relive the same day, he is also attempting to figure out what is causing the strange occurrence, why the new girl keeps asking about his dead mother, and if there is a way he can change the day’s events.

As Eddie navigates his unexpected time-travel, Eddie tries to figure out who he can trust. And in the end, he must decide if telling the truth is the right thing to do, even if it means losing someone he loves.

No True Echo weaves a gripping story that leaves the reader wondering what will happen next. The story revolves around Eddie (and others) being shot which adds suspense and intrigue. The shooting scenes are described with little detail which allows the reader to imagine as much or as little as they like.

However, what really drives the story is the characters. The story is told from Eddie’s point of view as well as a police officer’s point of view which adds depth to the storyline. The adults are not portrayed as perfect, but with problems of their own. Eddie’s best friend Angus adds humor. The new girl Scarlett adds suspense and a bit of romance. The interactions between the characters are realistic and emotional. In the end, the story shows that the connections people make are what really matter in life.

Sexual Content

  • None

Violence

  • Eddie is shot several times, but it is not described in detail. The first time Eddie is shot, he jumps in front of a girl to protect her. “All I knew was the agony of the bullet ripping into my chest. And the shock. And the fear.”
  • Another time Eddie is shot, he “shut my eyes in agony as the bullet tore through my body, but the pain vanished as though it had never been there.” Later when discussing the shooting, he is told that “he (the shooter) knew that the timeline would be destroyed anyways, so I’m not sure that counts (as murder). He also knew I would save you.”

 Drugs and Alcohol

  • Eddie’s mom has a “large glass of wine” with dinner.

Language

  • None

Supernatural

  • In this time period, people can time travel by going back into their younger bodies. At one point in the story, Eddie travels into his infant body so he can watch his mother’s death in order to determine if her car accident was an accident or a murder.

Spiritual Content

  • None

 

I Am Number Four

John moves around a lot. But not because of his dad’s job—because he’s an alien. He is one of the few survivors of the Loriac, who are being hunted to extinction by the Mogadorians, a race of conquering aliens who have now set their eyes on Earth.

John tries to blend in among the Earthlings, something that isn’t difficult at first. He looks just like you and me. But then his Legacies start to appear.  Glowing hands, fire-proof skin, and more. With the appearance of his Legacies, his life becomes a lot more complicated. Will he have to move again? It has never been a problem before, but now John has a best friend and girlfriend, and refuses to flee when the Mogadorians start to close in.

I Am Number Four is an interesting story. The story is told from John’s mind, which feels like the mind of any normal teenage boy. John learns about the death of his planet, his parents, and his race. At first, he wishes that he could just be human and not have to hide anymore. But as he learns more about his heritage, John begins to realize he is a part of a much bigger battle.

This book is fun, but lacks suspense until the very end. The characters are extremely likable though, and following their lives is enjoyable. I Am Number Four is a good introduction to Lorien series.

Sexual Content

  • John and Sarah kiss several times. “I kiss her good night, a lingering kiss while holding both her hands gently in mine.”
  • “When we get to her room, she closes the door and kisses me. I’m surprised, but thrilled.”
  • Sarah and John make out on his bed. “We fall back on the bed, on our sides…all at once we’re kissing again. Entangled. Meshed. Our arms tightly around the other…Sarah and I fall on the bed kissing each other, falling into each other.”

 Violence

  • A man is killed. “ ‘No,’ the man whispers, and in that instant the blade of a sword, long and gleaming…comes through the door and sinks deeply into the man’s chest . . . The man takes a single breath, and utters one word: ‘Run.’ He falls lifeless to the floor.”
  • John gets into a fight with some bullies. “I bring my knee straight up into his crotch. His breath catches in his throat, and he doubles over.”
  • John sees visions of his planet’s destruction. “People are running everywhere, fighting back. As many Mogadorians as Loric are being killed . . . I turn around and face a beast that must be forty feet tall…[it] takes out dozens of Loric around me.”
  • John sees another vision of his planet. “Mounds of bodies, not all of them intact, not all of them whole. On top of one mound is the man in silver and blue, dead like all the rest.”
  • Sarah is dragged off in the darkness of a hayride. John is attacked but finds Sarah and fights back. “I throw him and he hits the side of a tree twenty feet away . . . I pick him up and lift him a foot off the ground with my hand again around his throat. His legs kick wildly.”
  • John challenges a group of bullies to a fight. “Two of the guys come at me, both bigger than me. One swings but I duck his punch and send one of my own into his gut . . . I shove the second guy and his feet leave the ground. He lands with a thud five feet away.”
  • Sam points a gun at John because he thinks he isn’t human. John talks Sam into putting the gun down, and Sam admits, “it wasn’t actually loaded.”
  • Henri disappears. John goes after him and follows him to a certain address. When he goes in, he is attacked by a man with a bat. “He swings the bat. I duck and it hits the wall with a thud, leaving a large splintered hole in the wood panel.”
  • A man points a gun at John. Later, John points the gun at the man to get him to share information.
  • John is attacked by Mogadorians. “Henri fires the shotgun. The sound is deafening…He cocks the gun again, keeps it aimed. I twist my body to look out. Two fallen scouts are lying in the grass, unmoving.”
  • During the final fight, there is a lot of shooting, fighting, and running away from Mogadorians with swords. “A golden glinting object that speeds through the air with violence. It hits the scout so hard that its skull cracks on impact, and then it falls to the ground and lies motionless…Henri takes Sarah’s knife and thrusts it through its chest, reducing it to a pile of ash.” “Henri cries out in pain. I turn. One of the scouts has thrust a knife into his gut . . . The soldier raises its sword in the air. The blade tastes death, starts glowing in the night sky behind it.”

 Drugs and Alcohol

  • John goes to a party where there is beer.
  • There is a substance that looks like a stone. When placed under a Loriac’s tongue, it dissolves and gives the Loriac strength.

Language

  • Hell, dick, shit, and damn are said many times in daily conversation.
  • Son of a bitch, ass, bitch, asshole, and bullshit are said one or two times.

Supernatural

  • The protagonist of the story is an alien. There are many aliens living on Earth, hailing from two different races and two different planets. One race is trying to drive the other to extinction.
  • John starts developing powers such as being fire-proof and telekinetic. “I put all my power into the pit of my stomach and direct it towards him…he goes flying backward and crashes into the wall.”
  • John’s race of aliens develops a myriad of powers. Some are universal, such as super strength, while some are specialized, such as invisibility. John trains to increase his powers’ strengths.
  • John has visions of his planet’s destruction.
  • On Loriac the animals can change their shapes.
  • The Mogadorians can make people see horrible visions, such as, “My own death, and the deaths of all the people I know and love . . . Not only did I have to witness the deaths, but I could feel them, too . . . then came things I’ve always feared as a kid . . . werewolves. Demonic clowns. Giant spiders. I viewed them all through the eyes of a child, and they absolutely terrified me. And every time one of those things bit into me, I could feel its teeth rip the flesh from my body . . . I couldn’t stop screaming.”

Spiritual Content

  • None

Bang

Fear:  that’s what Sawyer feels. And Jules can understand why. After all, she is the one who gave the vision curse to Sawyer.  Now Sawyer and Jules must decide if they are going to risk their lives trying to stop a tragedy.

Book II of the Visions series adds more involvement from Jule’s brother Trey.  Jules loves her brother, and it’s easy to see why.  He’s good-natured, loyal, and teases his sister about her love life. The relationship between Trey and his sister adds depth and delight to bang.  However, both Sawyer’s and Jules’ relationship with their parents is dysfunctional and full of distrust.  Sawyer’s grandfather hits him, in the past, his mother had an affair, and Sawyer lies to his parent so he can spend time with Jules and try to solve the mystery of the vision.

At the beginning of the book, the language is mild with words like “crap” and “friggin.’” However, it doesn’t take long until the cursing (and the make-out scenes) increase in frequency and intensity. Another troubling aspect of the book is Jules’ sisters’ romantic relationship. Her sister decides to fly to New York to stay with a boy she met at soccer camp, all without her parents knowing about the trip until she’s left.

bang loses a lot of the suspense that was contained in the first book, crash.  Instead of focusing on the mystery of the vision, bang delves into Jules’ relationship with Sawyer as well as their family relationships.  Although Jules cares deeply about her siblings, she is disrespectful and deceitful to her parents.  None of the characters consider confiding in the adults in their life.  Instead, Sawyer, Jules, and Trey band together to try to stop a tragedy from happening.

 Sexual Content

  • Jules sneaks out of the house where she receives her first kiss which was the, “most weirdly amazing feeling.”
  • When Jules sees her boyfriend, he tells her that he’d like to kiss her but only, “runs his thumb across my lips and looks at me so longingly it hurts.” Later Jules presses, “a finger to his lips and watch his eyes droop halfway in response,” and, “his gaze lingers and burns.”  When her boyfriend leaves she thinks, “At this rate, we’ll have, like, nine babies by the end of our senior year.”
  • There are many scenes where Jules and her boyfriend make out, which involves kissing and caresses each other. In one scene Jules thinks, “I really want to see that chest once more.”
  • In another scene, the two make out and they are, “kissing and panting and touching each other, starving and lusty and steamy hot . . . he presses against me, his chest against my chest, our feet finding spaces every other, and his thighs squeezing mine. And suddenly, I realize that what’s pressing against me is not all thigh, and I am secretly amazed and a little shocked by it being there, doing that.”  She describes being, “intoxicated by his fervor and the overwhelming electric, psychedelic aching in my loins.”
  • While joking with his sister and her boyfriend, Trey says, “I’m not into incest, thank you. However…If you ever, you know, want to experiment.” Sawyer replies, “Maybe I could bang all the Demarco siblings.”
  • At school, a girl who likes Sawyer comes up to him and, “sticks her boobs out.” She asks him to Spring Fling and promises they can, “make out behind the bleachers like when we were a couple.” Sawyer tells the girl he is gay, and she gets upset and asks, “I made out with a gay?” and “Were you gay when we made out?”
  • Jules father asks her, “What do you want to say that I don’t already know? That you’re pregnant?”  Jules is angry that her father, “thinks I’m out there banging people left and right.”
  • Jules thinks about her father’s past affair, and she talks about it with others.

 Violence

  • Jules boyfriend talks about how his grandfather used to hit him.
  • Sawyer has a gruesome vision of a school shooting where eleven people are shot. He describes the scene of the shooting and how the “faces are blown into bits.”
  • A college campus was vandalized and someone spray paints a stop sign so that it reads, “Stop fags.”
  • The college campus shooting is describe in detail over four pages. Several people are shot.  One of the shooters jabs a gun between a boy’s eyes.  There is a fight between the gunman and several others, which is described.  “I kick the crap out of her arm that holds the gun, and I whack the shit out of her face with my cast . . . I kneel on her fucking head as she screams.”  Trey shows up and is shot.  Jules watches as he sinks, “to the floor, leaving s streak of red on the wall behind him.”
  • Trey says, “All I can remember is someone screaming ‘Die, fag!’ in my face, which really, you know, sucked. Then I took one look at the blood spurting out of my arm” and he passed out.
  • In the hospital, several characters discuss the events of the shooting and the injuries of the victims.

 Drugs and Alcohol

  • While in the hospital, Trey is given morphine for his pain. He acts goofy and, “a little drunk on morphine.”  Later when Trey talks about going to a pricey private school that she knows her family can’t afford,  Jules thinks, “there’s always the power of morphine to make your forget about the minor details of your life.”
  • Jules, “scared the hell out of Trey when I tell him that he totally threw himself at a college boy while under the influence of morphine.”

Language

  • Cursing is frequent. The cursing includes crap, dang, shit, damn it, fucking and pissed.
  • Jules uses Oh my God and Oh Christ as profanity.
  • Jules wonders when she became an “insecure loser” and thinks, “back when I accepted the fact that I was a total psycho.”
  • A character says jokingly, “tell the two-timing lunch whore I said hey.”
  • When Trey is frustrated, he says, “for shit’s sake, Jules.”
  • Jules brother, Trey, is jealous that both of his sisters have a boyfriend and he doesn’t. When his sister talks about sneaking out of the house and flying to New York to see him, Trey says, “Fuck…Why the hell not.  Why the hell not.”
  • Jules’ sister jokingly tells her, “You ruin this for me, and I will ruin your face, bitch.”

Supernatural

  • Jules talks about, “the vision isn’t a total fix; it’s a chance to change a bad thing to something less bad . . . the vision’s gone. You did what you were supposed to do. Maybe . . . maybe those people needed to go through that experience in order to become the people they’re meant to be, you know?  Maybe the experience triggers something inside of them that will help them become great.”   Sawyer replies, “And maybe it’ll make them dependent on prescription drugs, or want to kill themselves.”
  • Jules asks Sawyer, “You think the vision gods, or whoever, gave us these changes so we can end up watching the people we save turn into drug addicts?”

Spiritual Content

  • One of Jules favorite sayings is, “thank dog for that.”
  • Jules finds a newspaper article that reports about a protest lead by a cult preacher who’s been, “shouting about gays taking over the government, and he’s been ragging on U of C lately because their rights group have been picketing the guy.” The preacher has been getting his followers and, “saying God wants his cult to rid the country of homosexuality.”  Sawyer asks, “So you think our shooters are some outsider cult followers of the raving lunatic, coming to campus to . . . do God’s will?”
  • When Jules talks about the news article she asks, “Who would want to believe in a God like that? If God is not, like, totally in love with all the people he created, why would anybody want to believe in him?  Five things a real God should be:   Not a hater.  2. That about sums it up.

Crash

Jules wonders if she is going insane.  After all, she sees a truck smashing into a building, exploding, and then nine body bags in the snow.  And one of the bodies is that of her childhood friend, with who she is in love.  As the vision comes more frequently, life gets complicated. Jules can’t warn her friend because of a long-standing family rivalry.  And even if she did tell him about the visions, would he think she was crazy?  After all, that’s exactly what Jules wonders.

 Crash is a fast-paced book that throws the reader into suspense from the beginning until the end.  The story is full of drama-family drama, school drama, and boy drama.  Jules doesn’t think she can trust her family with her fear about the visions so she lies and sneaks around.  And it turns out that secrecy is normal in her family; after all, her sister has a secret boyfriend, her father had a secret affair, and Jules secretly tries to figure out the meaning of her visions.

To add to the drama, Jules has been banned from taking to her childhood friend, who may end up in a body bag.  In order to save her friend, Jules is willing to do whatever it takes.

 Crash is an entertaining mystery with lots of unexpected turns.  Jules is a likable character who is easy to relate to because her life is so messy.   Her relationship with her brother adds to the book’s enjoyment.

One downside of the book is the cursing, which is common throughout the book, both in dialogue and the character’s thoughts.  Although the book is entertaining, it also contains some heavy topics such as hoarding, depression, dishonesty, and homosexuality.  Although the topics are not discussed in detail, it is clear that Jules does not respect her father because of his depression and his hoarding.  Also, there are so many characters keeping secrets from each other that honesty seems to be a trait that is not highly valued.

Sexual Content

  • Jules’ brother is gay. There are several times that Jules and her brother tease each other about liking the same boy.
  • When Jules begins acting strange, her brother asks, “You’re not pregnant, are you?” Her brother then tells Jules that he only asked because that’s what their father said.  During this conversation, Jules says she is, “the poster child for purity” because she still has her… Her brother finishes the thought with the words “cheery, and hymen.”  They also mention a chastity belt. During the same conversation, Jules’ brother asks, “You’re not having an alien Antichrist baby for the seed of Angotti?”
  • Jules’ sister is having a long-distance relationship with a boy she met at camp. When Jules asks about meeting him online, her sister replies, “. . . his online user name is Child Predator77.  I sent him pictures of my naked budding bazooms and he wants to meet me behind the Dumpster at Pete’s Liquor to give me candy.  Jeez, Jules!  Of course not.  I’m not stupid.”
  • When Jules’ crush walks into the room, he, “ducks his head in a shy sort of way, which makes my thighs ache, and not because of the bruises” and later when he smiles Jules’ “stomach flips.”
  • Jules’ mother tells her that her father had an affair.
  • Jules’ crush gives her an anxious, “hungry look” before he, “slips his fingers gently into her hair.” Then he leans her against a wall and traces her lips with his fingers. He kisses Jules, “but soon he’s pressing harder and I’m reaching for him and I can’t be bothered to think or remember anything at all.  I just need to be in it and try to breathe . . . “
  • During the kissing scene, Jules describes feeling the warmth of his back and how “his tongue finds mine.”

Violence

  • Jules describes a time when she was delivering a pizza and a guy came up behind her, grabbed her by the neck, and stole her money belt before he shoved her into a snowy bush. The thief held a knife by her ear.   Luckily a stranger tackled the guy and the mugger got away.  The police tell Jules the man was, “probably some meth addict who needed money for supplies.”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • The narrator thinks about her grandfather who, “killed himself with I was little. ”  Although the grandfather’s death is mentioned several times, how he committed suicide is never described.
  • One of the character’s cousins, “takes a drag and drops her cigarette butt to the ground.”

Language

  • One of the Jules’ favorite sayings is, “Oh my dogs.”
  • The narrator describes a character as a “douche” and another as an “asshole.” Her car is a “piece of crap.”
  • The words dammit, hell, crap, fucking, son-of-a-bitch, and shit are used in dialogue as well as in Jules’ thoughts.
  • Several times when Jules is having a difficult conversation, she says, “Oh my God.”
  • In an argument, Jules says, “mother-fuh-lovin’ crap.”
  • In one scene, the narrator describes her feelings as “pissed.”
  • One of the characters yells, “Get your asses out there!” Another time she says, “Where’s the fucking phone book?  God!  I hate this stupid place.”
  • While talking to a friend, Jules yells, “But goddammit, Sawyer, despite all that, I’m going to save your fucking life anyway, because I love you, and one day you’d better fucking appreciate it.” After she hangs up the phone, she thinks, “You? Are bumblefucking nuts, Demarco.”
  • As two characters discuss a family member, one says, “He’ll bring out his whole tradition and honor bullshit and use that as an excuse to be a bastard.”
  • Jules’ mother tells her husband, “act your age once, will you.  We’re in a hospital, for Christ’s sake.”

Supernatural

  • Jules sees visions in billboards, television screens, and in windows. When she begins to get clues and figure out the pieces of the puzzle, the visions let up. However, when she is getting the meaning of the clues wrong, the visions become more frequent.

Spiritual Content

  • Jules’ parents will not discuss the fact that their son is gay. Jules and her brother don’t go to church because, “if their church won’t accept my brother, they can’t have me either.  Plus her parents, “religious fear runs deep.”

Gasp

The vision has been passed on to another, but who?  If Jules passed the vision curse to Sawyer when she saved him, isn’t it logical to think that Sawyer passed it on to another?  And is it Jules’ responsibility to help the next person since the vision curse started with her?

Jules and Sawyer go on a search to discover if the vision curse has been passed to another.  After searching and finding the next victim, all they want to do is help.  But the victim’s overbearing mother doesn’t believe in the curse and doesn’t want Jules and Sawyer anywhere near her daughter.  With few clues to go on, Jules and Sawyer attempt to prevent tragedy.  And in the end, they find out that the vision curse refuses to be ignored.

Gasp has enough twists and turns to keep the reader interested.  Jules and Sawyer, with the help of their friends, try to help the next victim of the curse which allows the author to throw many surprises into the storyline.  Unlike bang, gasp focuses more on the mystery of the curse, and less on the romantic relationships between characters, which makes gasp a very enjoyable read.

Sexual Content

  • Jules thinks that her older brother’s crush on a cute guy is “fun” to watch develop.
  • Trey said that a boy, “touched my face and kissed me.” Later in the book, Jules watched Trey kissing the boy.
  • When Sawyer kisses Jules she, “feels like the fire is inside me now.”
  • Jules’ sister asks her if she is ‘sexting.”
  • In one scene that lasts approximately three pages, Jules tells Sawyer to pull over the car. When he does she straddles his lap and then begins touching his face and, “nipping his lips with my teeth, drawing the tip of my tongue across his.”  They then makeup and she unbuttons his shirt.  “I guide his hand up my side and press it against my bra, and through the fabric his thumb stumbles over my nipple.”  In the scene, “his torso jerks and shudders and his gasp turns into a low moan.”  Then Sawyer said, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t even know that could . . . you know, happen, without actually, you know. Touching it.”
  • When Jules’ mom asks where she’s been, Jules thinks, “I try to think of something other than Sawyer spooged his pants so we called it the night.”
  • Jules, Sawyer, and Trey are teasing each other when Sawyer says, “Aw, man. I thought Ben would cure you of this desire to force homosexuality on me for your own selfish whims.”
  • When Sawyer is putting on a wetsuit, Jules yells, “I can’t wait to see your package in that suit.”
  • Jules’ father asks her if she is pregnant.
  • Jules and her father discuss his affair.

Violence

  • The story reviews the school shooting that happened in bang. One of the victim’s wounds are described—“only her guts were ripped up, and the shreds sewn together. She still has tubes going into her arm—pain meds and antibiotics . . . ”
  • Jules thinks about the first vision when she saw Sawyer’s face in a body bag.
  • Jules, Sawyer, and their friends help the victims of a ferry accident.
  • Jules goes back to the scene where she was mugged and describes what happened.
  • Jules asks her father about the “years of never knowing if we were going to come home to find that you killed yourself.”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • They talk about how the victim of the school shooting is “heavily medicated” by pain medication and that when Trey was in the hospital, the pain medications make troy “emboldened.” They say the medication makes a person “stoned.”
  • When walking on a boat, Trey’s walk is described as, “like a drunk.”

Language

  • Jules said spring break being over, “sucked balls.”
  • Rowan’s sister calls her a “grammar whore” and later said, “don’t be a douche.”
  • When Jules father can’t be found she thinks, “He’s a douche for making you worry. Maybe it would be best if he does just go kill himself, so we can get on with our lives.”
  • Jules wonders if her teacher thinks she’s “batshit crazy.”
  • When Jules thinks Sawyer is dead she goes to school where she doesn’t, “want anybody infiltrating it (her grief) with their fake-ass, digesting bullshit.”
  • Profanity is used often throughout the book. The profanity used includes the following: shit, fucking, Oh my God, damn it, pissed, holy shit, and Jesus futhermucker.

Supernatural

  • The story revolves around a person who sees a vision of a tragic event. The vision changes based on if the person is finding clues to help the potential victims or if the person is on the wrong track.

Spiritual Content

  • When Jules feels like she has failed the victim, her brother says, “You didn’t fail. The victim failed.  We are not God.  Or dog.”
  • Jules rolls her eyes to the Jesus in the sky.
  • The victim said, “I guess since you and Sawyer didn’t get shot, we figured you had some mystical protection or a guardian angel watching over you or something.”
  • When the group of teens is talking about the ferry accident, Trey said, “Hey, let’s not bring God into this.”
  • Jules’ parents will not discuss the fact that their son is gay. Jules and her brother don’t go to church because, “if their church won’t accept my brother, they can’t have me either.  Plus her parents, “religious fear runs deep.”

Perfect Ruin

The edge calls.  Life on Internment should be enough, but for some it is not. They seek the edge. They brave the hypnotizing winds.  They hope for a glimpse of the ground.  They want more.

For Morgan, life on Internment has been enough.  Then a young girl is murdered and everything changes.  Danger is in the air.  But it’s not the murder that worries Morgan.  She wonders if she can resist the call of the edge.  She wonders if Internment is what it appears. She wonders.  She daydreams.  She questions.  And her questions can be dangerous.

 Perfect Ruin creates a world that is a utopia for most.  The author creates a world that is interesting in the fact that it is not perfect, but it is not evil.  However, what makes Perfect Ruin a great read is the characters. From the start, the reader can easily fall in love with Morgan as well as her friends and family.  Morgan’s best friend Pen is full of contradictions and surprises.  Basil, Morgan’s betrothed, is a solid character who clearly understands Morgan and loves her anyway.  The interaction between the characters is heart-warming and believable.

The storyline is full of twists and surprises.  And when the readers get to the end, they are going to want to pick up the second book in the series, Burning Kingdoms.

 Sexual Content

  • In Morgan’s narration, she says, “. . . I’ve heard it isn’t uncommon for girls my age to be intimate with their betrothed, but the idea still embarrasses me.”
  • Morgan and her friend are caught sneaking out of the academy. When asked by the headmaster why they left, Morgan’s friend says they were talking about “female matters, sir.  I’m a little more—seasoned—than Morgan and she was asking me for advice regarding a private conundrum with her betrothed.”
  • Morgan and her betrothed kiss. “We move our faces at the same time, and then our lips are touching.  I’ve lost my worries.  Traded them in for the sun and the taste of his tongue and the thought that in sixty years we’ll be ashes—we’ll be tossed into the air and after a moment of weightlessness we’ll be everywhere and nowhere.”
  • Morgan describes when she kisses her betrothed. “It roots me to the place, makes me feel at home.”
  • One of the characters mentions that her brother is “more interested in my betrothed than I am.” At that time Morgan thinks, “I am still thinking about the prince being attracted to his sister’s betrothed…the prince isn’t the first to be attracted to his own gender; although it isn’t talked about, I remember my brother denouncing the serum and the surgery purported to treat this kind of attraction.”
  • When Morgan kisses her betrothed, “he’s touching the side of my face, his hands are soft as air. His eyes have changed, gone hazy the way they do when bodies are close. I like that I’m the only one that does this with him; I’m the only one who gets to see him this way.”

Violence

  • Morgan and several of her classmates are on their way home from the academy when the train backs up because a young girl has been murdered. Morgan finds out that the girl’s throat and wrist were slashed. “Everything indicates that she bled to death.”
  • Morgan thinks back to a murder that happened when her parents were young. Two men were fighting and one pushed the other one into the swallows, an area much like quicksand. The murderer “had been driven mad by a tainted elixir that should have been discarded by the pharmacists.  He was feverish and deranged when they found him, and the king had no choice but to have him dispatched.”
  • A flower shop burns down, which is highly unusual in this world.
  • When a specialist asks about her sister-in-law’s “procedure”, Morgan thinks, “Procedures. Like ‘incident,’ this is another word that covers a broad range of unpleasant things.  There is the termination procedure.  The dispatch procedure.  The dusting procedure that reduces bodies to ash.  The mercy procedure that dispatches the infants who are born unwell.”
  • Morgan narrates a story about two twins. The one twin, Olive, killed her sister and assumed her identity.  All of Olive’s children were born dead, “Convinced that she was being punished by the god in the sky, and driven mad by grief, Olive confessed what she had done.”
  • Morgan and her friend are kidnapped, have their hands tied behind their backs, and are put into a dark room. One of the attackers says, “We’ve decided to let you live . . . for now. If we killed you tonight, it would be an awful lot of blood; we’d be up until dawn with the cleaning. . .”
  • Morgan and her friend plan an escape. At this time, Morgan’s friend hits one of the attackers with a brick, and he falls to the ground bleeding.

Drugs and Alcohol

  • Morgan’s mother regularly takes a prescription. When Morgan sees a murdered girl, she doesn’t want her mother to worry.  “She’s been doing so well lately.  It has been a while since she’s gone through an entire prescription.” Later in the story, Morgan’s mom sleeps a lot because of the headache elixir.
  • Morgan’s sister-in-law becomes pregnant “out of turn.” She has to have the pregnancy terminated.   As part of the narration, Morgan also tells a story about another woman: “A woman decided she’d rather smother her child than allow it to belong to someone else.”
  • When Morgan and her betrothed go to her bedroom, Morgan’s mother asks her if she took her “sterility pill.”
  • One of the character’s mothers has a tonic addiction that is referred to several times. The addiction prevented her mother from working for a while.
  • One character is given a pill so she doesn’t “have a fit.”
  • One of the characters says, “I’m going to get drunk now, I think . . . you’re welcome to join me.” However, Morgan talks her friend out of getting drunk when she says, “We promised to sneak tonic bottle only when we’re looking to have fun. This wouldn’t be fun.  It would just be sad.”

Language

  • A character tells Morgan she’s lucky because “You aren’t doomed to marry a complete ass.”

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • The book revolves around The History of Interment that tells of the first humans who the god of the ground wanted to destroy because they were ungrateful. The god of the sky “thought they were too clever to waste, and he agreed to keep them in the sky with the promise that they would never again interfere with the ground.”  Because of this belief, the god of the sky is referred to often.
  • There is a festival of stars, which is a month-long celebration. At the end of the festival, people ask the god of the sky for gifts and requests.
  • On the train ride home, Morgan sees a pregnant woman. “Her lips are moving.  It takes me a few seconds to realize that she’s talking to the god in the sky, something the people of Internment do only when they are desperate.”
  • In Daphne Leander’s essay, she wrote, “Up until someone I loved approached the edge, I had no reason to question the hand of any god, much less my own god’s hand. But to see that no amount of love or will on my part could make that little girl open her eyes as she lay unconscious in a sterile room—How could I not question this god that watches over us?”
  • Some think that the swallows, an area much like quicksand, were created because the god in the sky was angry.
  • Daphne Leander’s also wrote, “Every moment is a gift, from the frivolous to the dire. The taste of sweetgold, and the rough paper of our favorite books.  I find a god in these things—which god, I cannot say, but I’m grateful to it.”
  • When Morgan meets the person accused of Daphne’s murder, she wonders, “If he asked for Daphne to return to him, his request would certainly be rejected. There are some things that even a god can’t do.”
  • In Daphne Leander’s essay, she wrote, “Each of us has a betrothed so that we won’t have to spend our lives alone. It leads me to wonder to whom the gods are married. The elements, perhaps.  Or do they know something we don’t know about solitude?”
  • When Morgan and a friend sneak out of the academy during lunch, Morgan thinks, “It seems as though something should stop us. The god of the sky himself should send a gust of wind in warning. But nothing happens at all.”
  • Daphne Leander wrote, “Our bodies are burned when we die. All the good in our soul lives on in the tributary, while all the bad in us burns away forever.  This frightens me.  Who decides what is good and what is bad?  Who decides what is saved and what is lost from our souls?”
  • People are dispatched when they are seventy-five. “To live beyond our useful years would be selfish.  That’s how we show our gratitude to the god in the sky . . . We send our ashes up for the sky god to collect.  The ashes become part of a current, a force, instead of just one body.  It’s called the tributary—a perfect harmony of souls.”
  • When Morgan asks her friend if the gods are a myth, her friend replies, “It goes against everything we’ve been taught. We’re living on a big rock floating in the sky.  How many explanations can there be for that? . . . What kind of science could explain how we got here or even why we exist? Of course there are gods.”
  • In Daphne Leander’s essay, she wrote, “We accept gods that don’t speak to us. We accept gods that would place us in a world filled with injustices and do nothing as we struggle.  It’s easier than accepting that there’s nothing out there at all, and that, in our darkest moments, we are truly alone.”
  • In one scene Morgan’s brother prays to the god of the sky and she thinks, “He doesn’t even believe there is a god anymore.”
  • There are several characters who wonder if the gods exist.

No Good Deed

Ellie Hudson is on her way to the Olympics. All she has to do to qualify is participate in a competition in Nottingham. However, a gold medal quickly becomes the least of her concerns when she gets lost below Nottingham Castle and ends up in medieval England.

Frantic to get home (and wondering if she’s suffering from a psychotic breakdown), Ellie is found by a knight in shining armor—literally. Her passport, iPhone, and modern education aren’t exactly useful for surviving in medieval England. Her archery skills on the other hand…might just help her face down a tyrant, join a band of outlaws, and help feed a kindly group of nuns. While the final resolution leaves something to be desired, this is a delightful tale written in a light and enjoyable tone that will leave readers waiting breathlessly for Connolly’s next tale.

Sexual Content

  • When Eleanor makes a comment about James’s body, her friend says, “If you’re defrocking a cleric, little Robbin, you’re a bigger sinner than any of us.”
  • When James puts his arm around Eleanor, she gets distracted. “It was distracting when I’d been trying to keep my thoughts closer to the center of the friend zone.”
  • While at a party, a man doesn’t recognize Eleanor and she assumes it “because his eyes never got any higher than my chest.”
  • While at a party, Eleanor is “checked out” by a man.

Violence

  • Soldiers try to capture Eleanor. As she runs, they shoot arrows at her. When she is caught, she notices a head on a spike, which causes her to jump into the river around the castle to avoid the same fate.
  • When soldiers capture Eleanor, “A soldier’s big hand shoved me between the shoulder blades.”  Eleanor then describes her condition. “My body ached, I had new bruises on my arms and shoulders, my wrists were rubbed raw.”
  • Eleanor is sentenced for her crimes. Someone explains that the sentence, “means the accused is weighed and lowered into a pond, where God will judge his innocence.”
  • In order to prove her innocence, Eleanor is forced to shoot a turnip off of her friend’s head.  The sheriff tells a soldier, “cut that archer’s throat if she deliberately misses again.” Eleanor is able to hit the turnip and save herself.
  • When Eleanor goes into the forest to get an arrow, two men taunt her. One of the men tries to hit her with his staff. “Gigantor gave a pissed-off kind of roar—I barely managed to duck as the big man swung his staff at my head. The unyielding wood came close enough to part my hair.”  When Eleanor ends up in the river, the men think she is dead. She then gets the upper hand and is able to defeat them. No one is seriously injured.
  • The sheriff’s soldiers go into the covenant and destroy the tables of food the nuns had prepared for the poor. They also take the nuns’ goats.  Eleanor thinks, “I hoped all three of them got head-butted in the nuts.”
  • In order to get the nuns’ goats back, Eleanor gets into a fight with two men. One of the men was hit with a rock and knocked out. The other man was hit with a quiver. “The blunt hit Will in the ass, which had to hurt like hell.”
  • Trying to save the nuns’ goats, Eleanor gets stopped by a Lord. When he threatens to take the goats, Eleanor shoots his horse and the Lord falls to the ground. Eleanor ties him up.
  • The sheriff was planning on chopping off a twelve-year-old’s head for treason, until Eleanor intervenes.
  • Eleanor shoots a would-be assassin and saves a life.
  • The prince makes a doctor drink from a glass vial. The vial most likely contained poison.

Drugs and Alcohol

  • Mead is mentioned.

Language

  • Profanity is scattered often throughout the book. Most of the profanity is in the main character’s thoughts and speech. Profanity includes “asshole, hell, dammit, badass, pissed, jackass, shit, son of a bitch.”
  • When soldiers try to capture Eleanor, she “ran like hell.” As she begins to run, she goes through horse manure but figures she was already “in deep shit” so a little more wouldn’t hurt.
  • When the soldiers falsely accuse Eleanor, she thinks, “Those lying bastards.”
  • When Eleanor tricks the sheriff, she thinks, “Holy Crap. That actually worked.”
  • After getting ill, Eleanor wakes up in a convent, but thinks she is in a hospital. “Then I moved my head. God, I must have one hell of a concussion, because I’d had the weirdest dream about church bells and ministering angels.”
  • Several times Eleanor calls someone a “jackass.”
  • When Eleanor hits a man who attacked her she thinks, “Payback’s a bitch.”
  • Eleanor describes the chief forester as having a “don’t-dick-with-me-attitude.” Later she tells him, “your boss is a rat bastard.”
  • One of the characters says his name is Fitzhugh. Then he explains that “The ‘Fitz’ is the Norman way of saying ‘bastard of.’”
  • When Eleanor attacks a Lord, he yells, “Give me your name, you treacherous cur, so I can dig up the graves of your mother and father and piss on their bones.”

Supernatural

  • Eleanor goes through a dark tunnel and when she comes out the other side, she is suddenly in the fifteenth century. No explanation is given for how she mysteriously traveled back in time.

Spiritual Content

  • After getting out of a difficult situation, Eleanor thinks, “I’d asked the universe for a lot today, but I sent up one more prayer: Please don’t let the place be too far.”

 

Blazing the Trail

As the school’s Valentine’s Day dance approaches, Zoe gives quiet and steady Derek a chance to win her heart. The only thing is, Zoe’s not sure her heart doesn’t already belong to rocker boy Jared. However, Jared is the king of mixed messages, ignoring Zoe one minute and then appearing out of nowhere to protect her. However, this time when Jared shows up, he puts the alliance that Zoe has carefully built in jeopardy. And with the Mages out to eliminate all shape shifters, Zoe needs the help of everyone—human and shapeshifters alike.

Zoe is a feisty character who is trying to do what is right. But her heart and her mind don’t always agree on the right plan of action. However, she is committed to keeping her friends alive. This proves to be a difficult task. Even if Zoe knew how to defeat the Mages, she isn’t sure if she can overcome her fear and take action when her life may be the final sacrifice.

Although Blazing the Trail loses some of its appeal, Zoe seems destined to trust those who are not trustworthy and fight the same battles. Although Zoe is likable, the fact that she repeats many of the same events of the earlier books makes her actions, and the book as a whole, more predictable.

Sexual Content

  • Kohana kisses Zoe.
  • Zoe kisses Derek several times in the book. In one scene Zoe, “leaned closer to him, touching my lips to his cheek. I felt him melt. It was strange, realizing that I had some ability to affect his thinking with just a little touch, and it gave me an uncomfortable sense of power.”
  • When Zoe and Derek kiss, “I felt the weight and heat of his hand on my shoulder, the touch of snowflakes melting on my face, the press of his body. And then his tongue met mine. I felt as if I’d touched an electrical wire and pulled back, my breath coming in gasps.”
  • Derek tells Zoe that they must make a union. Zoe knows that “he was talking about sex.” Derek then said that they could start by going steady.
  • One of the characters tells Zoe, “You’re sixteen. I haven’t been for a while. That makes you jailbait, and I’m not going to have any more dealings with cops ever again.”
  • At the end of the story, Jared kisses Zoe “hard. It was every bit as thrilling as the first time.”

Violence

  • While performing a ceremony to invoke the ShadowEaters, the ShadowEaters jump their constraints and, “feed on the third guy like a pack of vultures. . . I saw their teeth flash as they bit and snapped. When they retreated just seconds later, smacking their lips, he had collapsed on the ground.”
  • During a Mage ceremony, a girl’s throat is slit.
  • In a battle, Zoe slits a person in half. Then the person loses “the spell light that had filled his skin.” The shape shifters use their singing to destroy the Mages.
  • One of the Wyrd sisters finds the dead and eats them. “She hopped onto his chest in her raven form and ripped his flesh open with her beak. When she tore into his body cavity, presumably looking for that liver, I couldn’t stand it anymore.”
  • One of the Mages tricks Zoe into going with him. When they get to an isolated location, he “Kicked my feet out from beneath me. . .” Using a spell the Mages trap Zoe and intend to use the NightBlade to “cut the shadows away from the bodies of the victims, the better to offer sacrifices to the ShadowEaters.” Kohana saves Zoe, but another boy’s throat is slit. “Blood spurted from his throat.”
  • When a girl takes a picture of Zoe changing into a dragon, she and Zoe get into a fight.
  • In the dream world, one of the Wyrd sisters shows Zoe a battlefield where her friends lay dead.  “I gagged when I saw the eyeball impaled on the end of her knife. She laughed at me, then ate it off the tip of the blade, chewing with gusto.” Zoe also sees her own corpse.

Drugs and Alcohol

  • None

Language

  • Profanity is used often in both the character’s thoughts and words. The profanity includes: hell, holy shit, shit, fuck, bitch, bitchy, and ass.
  • Zoe said she, “was in a pretty crap mood when I got to English class late.” Later she said she was, “feeling a little bit pissed.”
  • When Zoe makes an error, she thinks, “this was a colossal fuckup on my part and I had to try to make it right.”
  • A girl calls Zoe a “bitch.”

Supernatural

  • In her dream, Zoe sees the Wyrd sisters who give her clues on how to defeat the Mages.
  • The Mages invoked the ShadowEaters “to feed them the shadows of their sacrificial victims.” The ShadowEaters hope to gain enough power that they can transcend into another form. “When ShadowEaters ate a shifter’s shadow, the shifter died. It was like the shifter ceased to exist, because he or she couldn’t cast a shadow—or because in eating the shadow, the ShadowEaters stole the shifters ability.”
  • The Mages use “glamours” to hide what is really there.
  • “Mages recruit humans with an innate musical ability. This power—called spellsinging—allows those gifted humans to enchant other humans with their music or their songs.”
  • Zoe’s dead brother appears and helps her find clues to defeat the Mages.
  • Zoe attends the birth of a cat shapeshifter. During the ceremony, the cat ancestors appear, but no one can see them except Zoe.
  • One of the Wyrd sisters gives Zoe her shears which can be used to cut spells.

Spiritual Content

  • None

Flying Blind

Zoe has dragon powers. . .or so she has been told. Zoe is the Wyvern of the Pye: the only female dragon shapeshifter and one with special powers. However, Zoe hasn’t been able to harness those powers and isn’t sure she is special at all. Zoe feels like a normal girl, and she’s struggling because she can’t tell her best friend Meagan about the changes that are about to happen.

Zoe hasn’t yet begun to understand what it means to be the Wyvern or how to change into a dragon, but when her best friend is bullied, her inner dragon makes an appearance. Suddenly Zoe is sent to boot camp with her shape-shifting friends. What Zoe hoped would be a time of learning becomes a time of fighting and her friends are beginning to turn against her. Zoe must learn to master her powers and stop the Mages from eliminating her and her friends—but first, she must convince her friends that she is not the enemy.

Zoe tells her story in a humorous manner, which shows the confusion of being a teenage girl. She isn’t the confident girl she dreams of being, but she’s working on believing in herself. The story contains suspense, action, and a lot of dragon fighting. Even though the fights often cover several pages, the wounds are not described in detail. In the end, Zoe is a very likable character who learns that believing in her capabilities is an important step towards becoming the Wyvern.

Besides the frequent profanity, the only other downside of the book is that Zoe is boy crazy. At the beginning of the story, she has a crush on one boy. On the same day, a young man drives her to boot camp. On the drive, she has sexual longings for him and kisses him on the cheek. Then when she gets to boot camp, she is again contemplating the hotness of a boy at camp.

Sexual Content

  • Zoe goes on a motorcycle ride with Jared. When he helps her with her helmet, “his fingers were warm on my chin as he fastened the strap, and I got all shivery at his touch. . . It was hard to say anything with my heart lunging around my chest as if it were trying to break free.”
  • Several times in the story, Zoe has a sexual longing for Jared and thinks about kissing him. In one instance she thinks, “. . . but he was hot. Having him so near me made bits of me tingle that I hadn’t even known I had.”
  • When Zoe thinks about almost kissing Jared, she thinks, “It would have been educational. An experience. A new sensation. That was the only reason I was curious.”
  • Zoe sees two of the characters, “making out like they’d invented it.” Later the same couple was, “locked into one hummer of a kiss, one that seemed to go on and on forever.”
  • When Zoe goes into her dad’s memory, she is careful. “I didn’t want to poke around too much there, certainly didn’t want to learn things I’d rather not know about my parents—I mean, they must have had sex, right? At least once?”
  • When Zoe asks if two people “did it”, her father “inclined his head, too diplomatic to speculate on anyone else’s sexual relations.”
  • Zoe wonders if she will lose her powers when she loses her virginity. “I was already fond of my powers, such as they were, but not excited by the prospect of lifelong celibacy just to ensure that I kept them.”

Violence

  • Two girls corner Zoe and her friend Meagan in the P.E. shower. During the confrontation, “Yvonne hooked Meagan’s ankle with one foot, jerking it hard. Meagan fell quickly, cracking her jaw on the tile floor. She didn’t move. And there was blood running toward the drain.” Zoe begins to turn into a dragon which scares the girls away.
  • Zoe becomes jealous of another girl and, “was tempted to throw a rock at her head.”
  • Two of the dragons fight. “He slashed, and Adrian flinched as one talon tore at the side of his face . . . Adrian went after him, striking him twice more, than giving him a wallop with his tale. He didn’t cut him; he didn’t burn him—he just thumped him.”
  • While drunk, several humans change into dragons and fight. One dragon is hit with dragonfire while trying to protect Zoe and, “I felt him stiffen in pain. I smelled his scales burning. And I heard the rhythm of his wings falter. Just before we fell out of the sky. Shit.”
  • In a dream, Zoe sees a boy hung lifeless from a tree. The boy begins talking to her, which scares her “shitless.”
  • Zoe turns into a dragon and fights with a shapeshifter. “I slashed at him with my talons, caught him across the snout, and ripped the skin from the corner of his eye to the edge of his nostril. He bellowed in pain, then belted me.” The fight continues for several pages with other dragons joining in. Because they are under a spell, several of the dragons try to kill Zoe and she only escapes because she turns into a salamander.
  • Over several pages, a fight between Zoe and another dragon is described. She “slammed him in the cojones with my tail at the same time that I punched him under the chin. Then he was the one reeling in pain.”
  • One of the characters explains how the Mages want to eliminate all other shapeshifters. In order to take a shapeshifter’s power, a Mage must eat them, “right to the last shred and drop.”
  • The end of the story has a dramatic fight between the dragons and the Mages. The fight includes trying to cast and break spells. Although the dragons use their fire, there is not a lot of description of the damage. When a Mage turns into a snake, Zoe, “stepped on it, hard, and ground my heel down into the floor . . . his scream was very satisfying.” During the fight, a dragon causes an earthquake and the building falls down hitting a Mage in the skull. “It was his blood under the rubble, and I couldn’t feel a lot of regret.”

 

Drugs and Alcohol

  • A group purchases sparkling wine, a case of beer, and a bottle of bourbon. Later, the group gets drunk and begins to fight with each other.

Language

  • There are frequent curse words used throughout the story. The profanity that is used includes: holy frick, bullshit, holy shit, badass, shit, and smart-ass.
  • There are several times that Zoe says or thinks about her emotional state as being “pissed off.” She also thinks that she doesn’t want to “piss off” her father.
  • Zoe’s mom ran a “crapload of red lights.”
  • Once when Zoe talks about rules, one of the characters says, “Fuck rules.”
  • During a fight, Zoe calls a girl “bitch.”
  • When someone loses the dragon’s scales, another character says, “You fucked up.”

Supernatural

  • Much of the book deals with the dragon culture. For instance, each dragon has a unique ability such as being able to see into the future, being able to communicate with the earth, being able to fix a dragon’s scales, etc.
  • If someone can take a person’s clothing while they are changing into a dragon, the dragon must fulfill three wishes.
  • Zoe has dreams that are more like visions. During one dream, a woman shows Zoe that if she shuts her right eye, she can see supernatural elements of the world.
  • Zoe has a rue stone which is, “kind of like tarot cards for Vikings. They carved symbols on small stones, then used them to tell the future.”
  • Zoe has a range of dragon powers such as being able to give people dreams, as well as being able to use her mind to locate where people are.
  • Dragons can beguile humans, “essentially it’s a kind of hypnosis that works on humans.” Usually, dragons use it to make humans forget they saw a human transform.
  • Mages can cast spells, but Jared uses his voice to conjure a spell to break the Mages’ spell.
  • Two ghosts appear to Zoe to show her how to break a spell and win the fight against the Mages.

Spiritual Content

  • At one point, Zoe prays, “to every deity I’d ever heard of. One of them must have listened.”
  • Zoe and her father discuss reincarnation. Her father says that Donovan’s named his son Nick. “It wasn’t just to honor a lost comrade. Donovan believed that Nick was Nikolas reborn.”

Winging it

It’s tough enough being the only girl dragon shifter, but when Zoe is forbidden to tell her best friend, Meagan, about her powers, Zoe realizes that living in two worlds is complicated. When Meagan begins to question Zoe’s friendship, tensions heat up.

When Zoe’s father grounds her, her mother leaves her father, and Meagan makes a new friend, Zoe doesn’t think things can get worse. Then she discovers that the Mages have laid a trap to destroy the shape shifters. Zoe must find a way to help her friend Meagan as well as save the dragon shifters without revealing any dragon secrets.

Winging It begins building suspense from the first page and will keep the reader interested until the last battle. Teens can relate to Zoe because she is smart, strong, and truly cares for others. Like any other teen, Zoe isn’t always sure of herself, but she always strives to do what is right, even if that means keeping secrets from her parents and her best friend Meagan.

The second book of The Dragon Diaries brings in interesting new characters—Derek, a shape shifting wolf, Jessica, a shape shifting jaguar, as well as Sigmund, Zoe’s dead brother. Sigmund brings a bit of humor to the story because even though he’s dead, he likes to tease Zoe as well as help her. Zoe spends more time in the supernatural world in Winging It, however, the setting is clearly fantasy and does not resemble real life in any way. The only down side of the book is the frequent and colorful profanity.

Sexual Content

  • Zoe has a crush on a twenty year old man. Her father tells her, “You are thinking of love and romance. Jared is thinking of now, he is thinking of sex, and he almost certainly does not have your welfare at the forefront of his thoughts.”
  • One of the characters said that a boy, “seems to think that love, romance, and sex are the same thing.”
  • Jared kisses Zoe. “That barest touch filled me with yearning and made me shiver. My heart was thundering, doing that crazy thing of matching its beat to his. Our noses were almost touching, his hands framing my face and I didn’t want to step away from him. Ever.”
  • One of the character’s said that he’s dating a girl, but, “It’s no big deal.” His friend thinks they are dating for the sex.
  • One of the characters kisses her boyfriend “with enthusiasm.”
  • At the end of the book Zoe kisses a boy. “It was sweet and lingering, and an entirely different kind of kiss than I’d had with Jared. Our lips clung a bit and I bumped his nose with mine when I stepped back.”

Violence

  • Meagan is attacked in the school bathroom. Suzanne punches her and breaks her glasses. Zoe turns into a dragon and the girls flee.
  • Kohana and Zoe shape shift and fight. When Kohana throws a thunder bold at Jared, Zoe stops it by throwing herself in its path.
  • At a party, the Mages attack Zoe and her friends with a spell. Zoe slams two Mages’ heads together and knocks them out. One of the shapeshifters, Jessica, is trapped. “I could see Jessica’s limp form on the floor, her shadow in tatters and her body motionless, the golden swirl of spell light illuminant.”
  • The Mages trap Zoe and her friends in a drainage pipe and use a spell to try to drown the group.
  • There is a fight between Kohana and Zoe’s friends. Derek is hit by a lightning bolt. Zoe rips out some of Kohana’s feathers because, “there was power in the feathers.” The fighting ends when Kohana and Zoe transport to the dream world.
  • The Mages plan to sacrifice someone during a ceremony. The fight scene that follows goes on for several pages. During the fight, the ghosts of all Wyverns past appear and Zoe sees where the past Wyverns made a mistake which caused the current situation. During the fight, Kohana “tackled the woman and she screamed as she fell. I saw that he had ripped out her eyes with his claws, then left her writhing in anguish and bleeding in the snow.” The fight ends when Zoe goes into the Mage’s memories and uses her dragon fire to destroy them.

Drugs and Alcohol

  • After the dragon broke up a fight in the school bathroom, some of the kids are debating if Suzanne was “smoking something.” They also refer to a “toke.”
  • Zoe and her friends go to a party where there is alcohol, “pot, incense, and cigarettes.”

Language

  • Profanity is used frequently throughout the book. The profanity includes: bullshit, damn, ass, crap, holy frick, hell, fuck, piss, bitch, shit, and holy shit.
  • When Zoe upsets her friend, she thinks, “Meagan is not a bitch—that I made her sound that way said more about me than her.”
  • Later in another fight with her father, Zoe yells, “You should give us the chance to not fuck up our lives by trying to make your stories come true.”
  • Zoe calls the girl who attacked Meagan an “uber-bitch.”
  • When Suzanne’s boyfriend breaks up with her, she said, “Trevor just dumped me for that slut.”

Supernatural

  • The Mages want to eliminate all shape shifters in order to gain the others’ power. Mages can also gain power by consuming other people’s spells. “Mages recruit humans with an innate musical ability. This power—called spellsinging—allows those gifted humans to enchant other humans with their music or their songs.”
  • One of the characters can read minds as well as cast spells.
  • The dragon shapeshifters can beguile others. “Beguiling is kind of like hypnosis and it’s a dragon trick . . . We conjure flames in our eyes; the humans look closer; we make suggestions.”
  • Zoe’s father uses dragonsmoke as a protective barrier. “Humans can cross easily, but a dragon can cross the dragonsmoke of another with only explicit permission.” Zoe’s father uses it to ground Zoe and makes sure she doesn’t leave the house.
  • In her dream, Zoe sees the Wyrd sisters who give her clues on how to defeat the Mages.
  • Meagan mentions her mom’s visionary sessions, and later in the book her mother said she will do a visioning for Zoe’s mother.
  • Kohana, another shapeshifter, can appear in Zoe’s dreams.
  • One of the Wyrd sisters tosses Zoe into the land of the dead, where Zoe meets her dead brother. Later in the story, he appears in the real word. When he appears, Zoe is the only one who can see him.
  • One of the characters uses tarot cards to help Zoe.
  • Zoe jumps into her mother’s memories and, “poked around, stirring a few things that seemed evocative of when she’d met my dad, and then I hoped for the best. And got the heck out of there before I learned too much.”
  • One of the Wyrd sisters blows kisses to a statue and it comes to life.
  • Zoe’s dead brother appears and helps her find clues to defeat the Mages.

Spiritual Content

  • One of the characters has been reincarnated; however, she does not remember anything from her past life.

Broken Crowns

Interment is falling out of the sky. If the king on the ground can’t be stopped, he will destroy Internment. Morgan and Pen must come up with a plan to save their home, even if they can never return themselves.

Broken Crowns is the third and final installment of the Internment series. For readers who enjoyed the first two books, Broken Crowns will keep them enthralled with Morgan’s story. The relationships between the characters drives the story.

The story has several surprises and ends with a satisfying ending. The story isn’t as fast-paced as the first two, but the character’s voices shine through. DeStefano creates characters that the reader will wish they could invite into their homes for a visit.

Sexual Content

  • Judas and Morgan discuss when they kissed in the previous book.
  • The prince is attracted to other men.
  • There are several references to “attraction camps” where people who are attracted to the same sex are sent. It is implied that the people are tortured. The prince takes Morgan to the camps and sees some of the patients who have had surgeries on their brains.
  • Pen’s father sexually abused her when she was younger. It is not talked about in detail. However, when her mother found out about the abuse, her mother used a tonic to “drown her thoughts.”
  • Basil and Morgan kiss. “Somehow, one of his hands has made it to my thigh, and I feel the fabric of my dress moving up and up and he knots the fabric in his fist . . . He kisses my neck, and I wrap my arms around his neck to draw him nearer still.”
  • The princess knows that her father would have, “made me have a termination procedure if he’d known about this baby in time to stop it.”

Violence

  • The king slashes Pim’s throat. He then attacks Morgan. “. . . The knife is hovering over my face, shaking uncertainly, as though the blade itself isn’t sure which of us to kill . . . I grab the knife from the king’s faltered grip and I plunge it into his throat.”
  • The prince said he was afraid that his sister would be sent to the camps because of her petulance. “I thought that if she resisted, she’d be whisked off to one of those camps and that her brains would be scooped out with a spoon until she was nothing but a blubbering mass of compliance.”
  • Nim’s father and grandfather are killed, but the deaths are not described.

Drugs and Alcohol

  • At a party, guests drink “tonic.”

Language

  • None

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • Nim burnt his car as an offering to save his sister. When Nim’s sister recovers, Morgan thinks, “It makes me wonder if their god is real. It makes me wonder if any god is real, or if it’s only easier to believe in that than the arbitrary series of events that make up all our lives.”
  • When one of the characters is about to die he wonders, “if his spirit would be taken to the tributary, or if he’d go to whatever afterlife the ground believe in, or if there was nothing at all.”
  • The people from Internment believe in the god of the sky.

Burning Kingdoms

They escaped Internment, but will the ground be a refuge or a prison? When Morgan and her friends left Internment, they never imaged what life would be like on the ground. There are many new wonders, but there are also the horrors of war.

Celeste is determined to return to Internment so she can save her dying mother—and she needs the king’s help to get her home. Morgan has the ability to help Celeste convince the king to help. However, in order to help Celeste, she must betray her best friend, Pen. As Morgan struggles to make the right decision for her friends and for Internment, the war on the ground intensifies.

Soon the characters are caught in a trap of the king’s making, and they aren’t sure what will become of them. Burning Kingdoms, the second book of The Internment Chronicles, has danger, suspense, and a new set of characters.

Burning Kingdoms focuses more on the character’s relationships with each other than on the challenges of being in a new world. The story is interesting, but the world on the ground is not really unique or intriguing. The ending of the story throws in some complications—Pen’s relationship with her father and Morgan kissing Judas—however, the complications distract from the story and leave the reader wondering why they were added.

Sexual Content

  • Celeste talks about her brother. “What would they do with a prince who dreams of falling in love with another prince?” She then talks about how she worries that her brother would be sent to an “attraction camp” to cure him. “There are tonics involved and surgeries that are worse than death . . . If Papa were ever to find out, I truly worry that Az would end himself.”
  • Morgan kisses Judas (to who she is not betrothed to). “He’s closer, and I reach for his shoulder. It’s jagged with bone, and I’ve wanted to touch it since the night he pinned me against that tree in the moonlight . . . My heart is like this world’s rain hitting against the window. I can’t breathe. I had thought all kisses were like the ones I’ve shared with Basil, that they started out timid and uncertain. But this one goes through the skin.”
  • The story implies that Pen’s father abused her. Pen feels ashamed. “A horrible thing happened that day. You wouldn’t have understood. You were only a little girl.”
  • Morgan and Pen talk about Judas’s kiss. “. . . But I realize that she’s right—that something in his eyes when he looked at me, when he kissed me, even when he plucked the leaf from my hair, was wanting.”

Violence

  • Two bombs land in the middle of a busy city, killing many. “The screams have all faded to whimpers and groans; Birdie is one sobbing girl among hundreds . . . The first bomb was just to get everyone to the harbor . . . All the survivors would come here and be caged animals.”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • Several of the characters go into a club and get drunk. “By the fourth or fifth glass, Birdie has stopped spluttering the stuff back up before she can swallow it.”
  • Several times throughout the story, the characters drink alcohol.
  • Pen spends much of her time drunk. “She prefers gin to sleep.”
  • A group, including Morgan, goes on a yacht and drinks champagne. Pen gets drunk and dives into the water. When Pen doesn’t resurface, Morgan jumps in after her and finds Pen unconscious.
  • While in the hospital, Morgan is given something to help her sleep.

Language

  • The only profanity in the story is when a driver mumbles, “goddamn snow” during a blizzard.

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • Throughout the story, there are references to Internment’s belief in the god of the sky. They believe that when someone dies, “we burn the bodies of our dead so that all the bad in them can fall away, while all the good becomes a mass of colors in the sky that can’t be seen by the living.”
  • Two of the characters discuss their different beliefs. On the ground, they burn offerings. “If there’s something you really want to ask of our god, you burn something that’s of equal importance.” Once a year on Internment “we burn our highest request and set it up on the wind to be heard.” At the end of the story, one of the characters sacrifices his car, which is his most precious possession, in the hopes that god will make his sister well again.
  • One of the characters tells a story about the god of the sky. “If people were going to be greedy, he could take the source of that greed away. That’s why it’s against the law for any king to pass a bill that would charge for wind or solar energy.”
  • On the ground, people believe that Ehco was the first creature of the sea. “. . . The God told him [Echo] that when he put mankind in the world, mankind would sometimes ask the God for things he wouldn’t be able to do. And mankind would grow angry with him—and would grow sad, and that anger and sorrow needed someplace to go, and so it would be Ehco’s job to consume it and keep it in his body so that it didn’t destroy the world.”
  • Pen and Morgan question their beliefs. “Lately I wonder if the god of the sky even heard us when we were in the sky.”
  • Pen is reading the ground’s religious book, The Text. In the book, “their god creates light, and the earth and things . . . And then this god of theirs creates the first man and woman, and a page or two later their children are throwing stones and murdering each other. It doesn’t bode well for the dawn of humanity, does it?”
  • The Text has a story about the ark. “Their god flooded the world to start over. So when their god doesn’t like someone, he tries to drown them.”
  • When having a funeral, one of the characters is worried about not having a priest. “The priest has to say the burial prayer. If he doesn’t say the prayer, how will Riles be able to get to heaven?”

Enchantment

As a child, Ivan stumbled across a slumbering princess in a forest clearing. Terrified by the beast that guarded her, he fled. But years later he is compelled to return by the need to determine if his princess was a childhood fantasy. Unfortunately for him, she was not.

Ivan is thrown into a world a thousand years in the past. Despite the fact that he is already engaged to a simple American girl, Ivan discovers that he is expected to marry the princess. If he fails to do so, the kingdom will become forfeit to the evil witch, Baba Yaga. However, Ivan must prove to himself and to the kingdom’s subjects that he truly is worthy of their princess.

Filled with culture, magic, and an interesting look into how modern people would fare in ancient times, Enchantment is a joy to read. However, some adult themes make this novel appropriate for a more mature audience than Card’s most famous book, Ender’s Game. Nevertheless, this is an intriguing story that will draw you in for an enjoyable tale.

Sexual Content

  • When Katerina meets Ivan and knows they are destined to get married, she thinks, “And in the marriage bed, wouldn’t he lie more lightly upon her than any of the hulking knights who had looked at her with covert desire?”
  • When the king meets Ivan, the king makes, “a reference to the presumed consummation of their marriage.”
  • Baba Yaga thinks about her husband, who is also a god. “He was the only male she’d ever slept with that she couldn’t kill no matter how much she sometimes wanted to.”
  • Baba Yaga tells a bear that if he betrays her with another woman, “your balls fall off.” She then tells him to, “Stick to swans and heifers or whatever it was that Zeus had a taste for. Or she-bears. But as far as humans go, you’re mine.”
  • When Ivan and Katerina are married, Ivan thinks that he had hoped to marry out of love. When he thinks of his marriage night he is concerned. “To bed a woman who was only doing it because her people were being held hostage. How is this going to be distinguishable from rape?” In a book that Ivan had tried to read, the author “had written that ‘all women love semi-rape . . . But the idea seemed so loathsome to him that even if it were true, he did not want to know it . . . To sleep with an unwilling woman—Ivan was not even sure he would be able to perform.”
  • At the wedding, Ivan is unsure what to make of the guest’s behavior. “The crude comments about how he was going to keep the princess turning on the spit longer than a suckling pig gave him a new appreciation for the Jewish ban on pork. And the children who asked if they could come play in the tent that his erection would make of the bedcovers left him speechless.”
  • When Ivan’s fiancé finds out that he married Katrina, she is upset. One of the reasons she is upset is because she and Ivan never had sex and people teased her saying he was gay or had a childhood injury. “They kept thinking up some new malady to explain his lack of sexual drive. ‘He has elephantiasis of the testicles’—that was a favorite—‘his balls weigh thirty pounds each.’”
  • When Ivan and Katerina consummate their marriage, the act is not described in detail, but Katerina thinks about what she had been told. The advice is told over a page and includes,  “Most of them spoke of the casual brutality of men, like dogs that mounted bitches, boars on sows. It will hurt. . . One took her aside warned her not to cry out in pain—some men will think it should always be like that, they’ll come back for more of your pain instead of for your love . . . If you don’t make him welcome, he’ll find someone else who will. Other told her to be grateful when he found someone else, because then he’d only bother her when it was time to make babies.”

Violence

  • Baba Yaga used magic to turn her husband into a bear. “Yaga found her husband tearing at a human thigh. It was disgusting, the way he let blood drool onto his fur, making a mess of everything. One the other hand, the ligaments and tendons and veins stretched and popped in interesting ways.”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • None

Language

  • Profanity is used rarely throughout the book, including bitch, damn, and shit.
  • Katerina tells Ivan, “Not everyone is as tall as you. . . I don’t imagine you could even lie down straight in a regular house. Not without sticking your head out the door and your ass in the fire.”
  • The king calls the witch a “great bitch.”
  • Shit is used several times. One example is when the bear tells Baba Yaga that when he kills men, he doesn’t need a sword, “I roar at them and they shit themselves and run stinking into the woods.”
  • Ivan thinks he wasn’t worthy of Katerina and that, “the only men who tried to date such women were the arrogant assholes who thought every woman wanted them to drop trou and let the poor bitch have a glimpse of Dr. Love.”

Supernatural

  • Time travel, magic, witches, and old Russian gods are integral parts of the storyline.
  • Baba Yaga is an evil witch who uses magic and spells to try to gain a kingdom.
  • Mikola Mozhaiski is the bear god. Some people thought Mikola Mozhaiski kept Baba Yaga in check.
  • A magical bear, who is a god, was watching over Katerina as she slept.

Spiritual Content

  • Katerina is a Christian. She believes in Mikola Mozhasiski and the Holy trinity. “. . . unlike God, you couldn’t pray to Mikola Mozhaiski, you couldn’t curry favor with him, he asked of you neither baptism nor mass.”
  • Ivan is a Jew who practices his religion. When Katerina first meets him she wonders why a wolf hasn’t sent him on to heaven. Then she thinks, “Well, not heaven. He was a Jew.”
  • Katerina’s father would like her to choose another husband, even if it means they will have to fight to keep the kingdom. Katerina said, “Father, I am a Christian . . . But the armies of Rome have been defeated many times since they converted to Christianity. Maybe when God has some great purpose, like converting an empire, he gives victory to is follows. But Christians can die.”
  • Katerina prays. “And in that moment, she had prayed, O Mikola, O Tetka Tila, O Lord Jesus, O Holy Mother. . . then she realized that she had prayed to Jesus third, not first, and when she spoke to the Holy Mother, it was not so much the Blessed Virgin as her own dead mother to whom she prayed. No doubt this was damnation, and she sank down into sleep, into despair.”
  • Baba Yaga asked the bear to kill someone and she reminds him that he is immortal. Baba Yaga mocks him saying, “You’ve lost faith in yourself. Isn’t that rich? A good who has become a self-atheist!”
  • When Baba Yaga told bear he should have remained a weather god, he said, “Weather god was never my option. This people didn’t need a sky god. They needed a god to keep winter under control. Like any good king, we respond to the needs of the people. We become what they need us to be.”
  • One of the characters, Dimitri, has a dream and thinks the Winter Bear has determined that he should marry the princess. Even though the priest has forbidden him to perform the old rites, Dimitri still performs them because the “Christian God had not replaced the old gods. Father Lukas was full of lies. And the Winter Bear was full of promises.”

The Lost Gate

Danny seems like an ordinary boy. He’s smart, he enjoys long-distance running, and he teases his younger cousins. But among the North family, where children are expected to create fairies or speak with animals, “ordinary” is an embarrassing curse. Danny is a pariah among his own family until he realizes that he has one of the most powerful gifts that exist. The only problem is, people with this gift are so powerful that the law calls for their death.

Danny flees his home and goes to live with the non-magical druthers, who he has watched from a distance his entire life. As he learns to live with these people, he must explore his powers and test the boundaries of what he can do. According to legend, there is another world that used to be connected with Earth. Danny might be the only person alive who can reestablish this lost connection, but unknown consequences may be triggered by such an act.

The Lost Gate is not meant for the same age group as Card’s well-known Ender’s Game. Due to a large amount of adult language and explicit sexual content, this book borders on the edge between the Young Adult and Adult genres. Due to this high level of adult content, this book may be unsuitable for most teens.

Sexual Content

  • Danny gets his cousins in trouble accidentally. The cousins were particularly annoyed because Danny’s inquiry had led to Auntie Tweng finding their files of pornography.”
  • Danny tries to teach his cousins, but they insist on messing around. “The miniature female bodies they were forming out of fallen twigs, leaves, and nutshells were shaping up with huge breasts and exaggerated hips. Forest fairies, a drowther would have called them. Or sluts . . . all two of the forest fairies turned to face him. Two of them flaunted their chests; the other turned around, thrust her buttocks toward him, and waggled it back and forth.”
  • A man sees a naked person. ” ‘Is that a dingle or a dong?’ whispered Father. ‘Is he a man yet or not?’ “
  • When Danny is accused of shoplifting, a detective asks him to turn out his pockets and lift up his shirt. Danny asks, “You like to look at the naked bodies of little boys?”
  • A guy asks Danny if he is going to, “Look for some nice man who’ll give you a good place to live as long as you let him do a few little—?”
  • Bexio marries King Prayard. “Prayard gave every outward respect to his wife, even to the sharing of her bed at least once in every month; her lack of children was blamed entirely on Bexoi’s barrenness and not on lack of effort by Prayard.”
  • When asked to turn out his pockets by a pair of security guards, Danny takes his clothes off and gives them to the security guard. “I’m letting you examine my clothes for yourself . . . so I don’t have you putting your hands all over me,” Danny said. Then he, “turned his back to them, bent over, pulled down his tighty-whiteys, and spread his butt cheeks.”
  • Danny meets, “a woman—no, a girl of about sixteen—wearing a man’s oversized white button-up shirt . . . and quite possibly nothing else, which Danny found distracting. He couldn’t take his eyes off her, yet felt he had to look almost anywhere else.”
  • Eric asks if, “girls [are] all born with the ability to rip your balls off with a look?”
  • Lana is horny and crazy. She tells Eric, “I could have unzipped your pants instead of talking.”
  • Lana makes a pass at Danny. “She brought her face very close to Danny’s and locked her arms around his waist. Now her breasts were pressed against him and her breath was right in his nose and mouth and her lips were brushing his as she talked. ‘Jailbait boy, why aren’t you kissing me yet?’ . . . she basically rode him down onto the carpet . . . The pertinent fact, however, was that she was straddling him, and he was feeling things that he’d never felt before . . . She knelt up higher, reached behind and between her own thighs, snaked her fingers into Danny’s waistband on both sides, and started to pull down his pants and underwear . . . ‘Help me get her off him before she rapes him,’ said Eric to Ced.”
  • Eric jokes about bestiality, “Danny’s from the farm, he just wasn’t used to doing it with girls . . . Come on, you can’t tell me you didn’t get some quality time with that special ewe.”
  • Ced says, “She just has trust issues with men. Her mother had a lot of boyfriends and if they paid extra, she threw in Lana as a bonus.” When he hears this, Danny “wasn’t quite sure what Ced meant. Or rather, he was, but he couldn’t believe such a thing could be true.”
  • Danny thinks about how stupid he is. “SO stupid that when I just realized that I’d probably get killed, my only thought was to wish Lana would come up here and hump my brains out before I die.”
  • Ced jokes about ejaculation. ” ‘You know I hate being tickled!’ Lana screamed in his face. ‘Well, maybe the kid hates being half-raped,’ Ced answered mildly. ‘So now you’re even.’ ‘Now I have to change my pants!’ she said. ‘Bet he did, too,’ said Ced.”
  • A man checks Danny and his friends to see if they’re wired. “Yeah, well, you’re clean enough. You, George, drop trou or I’ll feel you up and maybe I’ll accidentally hurt your nads for calling me a perv.”
  • When Danny thinks about what he could do with his gates, “he had darker thoughts, ones he was ashamed of. If he wanted a career as a peeping tom, he could do it from his own bedroom and no one would ever know.”
  • Veevee says, “I’ve never been so happy to find out that another person existed since my mother first put her titty in my mouth.”
  • Stone guesses that Lana will, “probably become a secretary, seduce the boss, break up his family, and then make his life a living hell till he divorces her . . . But if he can’t keep his fly zipped, he’s the natural prey of angry damaged women who are careless about underwear.”
  • Danny tells a girl at his school that, “for a girl who doesn’t care if anybody likes her, you sure go to a lot of effort to show off cleavage,” and “I’ll be studying your cleavage all year.”

Violence

  • Danny’s existence breaks a treaty so, “if he screwed up and got caught, [his family] would have killed him and still would kill him just as quickly as anybody else.”
  • Danny said if someone was caught fooling around with a sheep, “Grandpa Gyish would have him killed. Great-uncle Zog would do it himself . . . And then they’d bury him in the family graveyard on Hammernip Hill.”
  • When Danny is burgling a home, he finds a trap door. “A horrible smell rose from the hole. He knew the smell. A dead animal . . . [he] found what he was halfway expecting—four bodies lying tied up on the floor. The man was the one who stank—bullet hole through his forehead, and his body was rotting. But the other three—one white woman, one black woman, and a white pre-teen girl—were not rotting. They weren’t conscious either, however, and Danny guessed that they had been here a pretty long time without water—long enough for the husband to start stinking.”
  • Eric loves breaking into people’s homes. “To be inside a stranger’s home, while they’re there asleep, knowing you didn’t trip any alarms . . . you can go wherever you want, take whatever you want. You’re like an angel, you’re so powerful . . . Yeah I walked around a little. Took a couple of things. Looked at a couple of girls who slept naked on a hot night. Who wouldn’t?”
  • Lana threatens to “kill you, you little prick,” with a table knife. Danny is pretty sure she is joking.
  • When Danny threatens the safety of some mages, Stone slaps him. “To Danny’s shock, Stone slapped him across the face— Danny staggered to the side and he couldn’t help it that tears came to his eyes.”
  • Danny and Eric are attacked by a criminal. “Eric was right behind him, but then he heard a cry of pain and a thud and he whirled around to see Eric sprawled on the floor, writhing in agony, and Rico just unwinding from a massive swing of the bat . . . ‘Hold still and take your medicine,’ said Rico, ‘Or I’ll just keep smacking your buddy’s head till it pops like a melon.’ “
  • Eric chews a man’s thumb off. “Eric had twisted himself into position to gnaw on Rico’s right thumb. It was spouting blood, which was pouring out of Eric’s mouth. He had a feral look in his eyes . . . He was growling like a dog, like a bear. Then he fell backward and spat out the thumb. And spat again and again, trying to get the blood out of his mouth.”
  • Leslie points out that Danny, “could gate your way into my chest and pull my heart out right now. Or squeeze it hard and make it stop.”
  • Danny witnesses an assassination. “Then he gripped the top of her head and pushed the needle-like blade into her eye, then churned it around the fulcrum of the hole in the bone through which the optic nerve would pass . . . When Luvix drew out the blade, a spurt of blood followed it, and brain and eye matter seemed to cling to it.”
  • Hull is killed for knowing too much. “She stepped into the darkness of her room, holding no candle because she knew the place by heart. She only heard one breath, one step, and then the dagger was in the top of her spine, just under the neck. Which whack, back and forth, and she felt no pain as she dropped to the floor . . . Alone in the dark, her brain starved from lack of air, and without pain or even fear, Hull died.”
  • A woman is stabbed. “The soldier stabbed into the cave with his pike . . . Her bleeding body tumbled from the cave mouth toward the lake.
  • Wad’s son is killed. “He found Trick’s body smothered under the gown of the last nurse who had been on duty . . . For a moment he thought of a terrible justice: putting the body of his son back into Bexoi’s womb, to share the space with his half-brother, only a month away from birth . . . the body would decay and rot inside her, and soon wreak vengeance on his monstrous mother and his usurping wombmate.”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • Ced says, “I told you to just walk in, morons. Anybody rings the bell, we assume it’s the law. I was this close to flushing my stash.”
  • Ced smokes a joint.
  • Eric hides his money from his family because” ‘They’d just drink it up.’ ‘What’ll you do with it?’ asked Danny. ‘New clothes. A bus ticket. And then I’ll eat and drink the rest till I have to start begging again.’ “
  • A man tries to kill a queen with a vial of poison. Later, the queen uses that poison to kill the assassin’s co-conspirator.
  • The queen tried to trap Wad with poison. “Queen Bexoi engulfed the wooden doll in unnatural flame that created bitter smoke. The doll had been painted with something, and the smoke from its burning dulled his mind.”

Language

  • Bastard is said several times. When Danny leaves his family, he thinks, “Well screw you, all you cheap murdering bastards. If you think I’m ever coming back, think again.”
  • The words crap, shit, and damn are said often. For example, a detective tells Danny to “Put your damn pants back on!” Eric says he, “Came back for Christmas. Say hi to my mom, tell my dad to eat shit and die.”
  • Bullshit and Asshole are used several times. Eric tells his friend that, “Your stepdad isn’t the only asshole on planet Earth.”
  • Hell is said a few times. Eric tells Danny, “You must be one hell of a lucky thief to get away with all this on your first try.”
  • Lana says, “. . . on Wednesdays I’m such a slut.”

Supernatural

  • “School was something the children endured in the mornings, so they could spend the afternoons learning how to create the things that commoners called fairies, ghosts, golems, trolls, werewolves, and other such miracles that were the heritage of the North family.
  • People born to magic families who lack magic are called drekka, which is a derogatory term. None magical people are called drowther.
  • People with magic have affinities with certain elements or animals. “His father, Alf, a Rockbrother with an affinity for pure metals, had found a way to get inside the steel of machines and make them run almost without friction, and without lubrication . . . Danny’s mother . . . [was] a lightmage who had learned to change the color of reflected light so that she could make things nearly invisible, or hide them in shadows, or make them glow bright as the sun.”
  • Danny thinks about when magical families lived like gods. “When the Westilian families ruled the world as gods of the Phrygians, the Hittites, the Greeks, the Celts, the Persians, the Hindi, the Slavs, and of course the Norse, the lives of common people were nasty, brutish and short . . . The world would be better if there had never been such gods as these. Taking whatever we wanted because we could . . . who did we think we were?”
  • Danny can make gates in space that lead from one place to another—
  • A boy lives in a tree for several centuries. “The bark didn’t tear, it merely opened, or not even that, it simply receded so that his face emerged as if from water.”
  • Danny considers manmagic, “truly evil. To take possession of the mind and body of another human being? That would be slavery. Not that anybody would mind if one of the Family did such a thing to drowthers.”
  • Danny and his parents theorize that spacetime (everything in the causal universe) is a prankster. Danny believes he serves spacetime by being a jokester and a prankster.
  • Westilians can create clants, which are bodies they control. Some look like fairies made out of twigs, but some can create “a perfect image . . . Wad marveled at how smoothly and gracefully it moved.”

Spiritual Content

  • When Danny runs away from home, he steals clothes and shoes from Walmart.
  • Danny and Eric make money by begging and stealing.
  • Danny thinks, “The god of these Americans wasn’t one of the old pantheons of the Norths or the Greeks or the Indians . . . The god was the people themselves. Imagine—a nation that worshiped each other. Not individually, but as an idea.”
  • When Danny finds a family tied up, he calls the police. But Eric says, “They’ll never recover from the experience, their lives will be shitty, they’ll wish they had died, so what exactly did you accomplish?” Danny argues, “If I hadn’t called the cops it would have been the same thing as murdering them myself.” Eric says, “No, it wouldn’t . . . It would be the same thing as never going into the house and therefore not knowing.”
  • Danny doesn’t kill a criminal, but he allows the criminal’s partner the opportunity to kill him. The partner takes the opportunity.
  • Veevee finds a gate inside a church. She mentions that if she went through it, then the pastor would “probably interpret it as some kind of heavenly visitation. Those Semitics are so eager to believe that their gods are still talking to them.” Danny says that he, ” ‘always thought their God was . . . ‘ ‘Really God?’ she prompted, amused. ‘A myth. Like Santa Claus,’ ” Danny replies.
  • A girl accuses Danny of healing her. “Wow,” Danny says, “For a girl named Sin, she’s doing pretty well with faith healing.”

by Morgan Lynn

Visitors

Two Riggs means twice the adventures—and twice the trouble. Now that Rigg has a copy, they have decided to diverge. One will attempt to get to Earth and stop the invasion. The other will explore the wallfolds of Garden and decide if the walls should stay up or come down.

The Rigg that goes to Earth is willing to destroy his parent planet if that is the only option for protecting Garden. He quickly discovers that the situation is not that simple. Earth may be in as much danger as Garden from an enemy that cannot be fought or reasoned with.

Meanwhile, the original Rigg explores his own world. He encounters slavery and murder, and is faced with the dilemma of how to use his powers. As a time traveler, he can change anything he wants, but should he? If he allows people to die, is he complicit in their murders? He cannot save everyone…or can he?

The final installment of the Pathfinder series has everything from Neanderthals to alien races. The brain-tickling problems that come with time travel continue, this time compounded with moral questions. Just because Rigg can save a life doesn’t mean he should, but how can he let people die horrific deaths when he has the power to change the outcome? At what point does free will become an illusion? Visitors again expands Rigg’s world from a few wallfolds to several populated worlds, and provides readers with an extremely satisfying ending.

 Sexual Content

  • Umbo and Param kiss several times. Years later, when they are married, Param is irritated that her husband never asks for intimacy or “even wait[s] around as if hoping.”
  • Leaky wonders if she is infertile or if her husband is.
  • Leaky admits she had a botched C-section and was so, “torn up inside the midwife said [she’d] never be able to bear.”
  • Ram plays matchmaker with Noxon and Deborah, to which Deborah says, “We didn’t agree to mate and make babies.”
  • When speaking of Neanderthals and Erectids (extinct species), a man describes their mating as “being kidnapped and sequestered” while his daughter insists it is “rape.”
  • Square, one of the first people to grow up with a facemask, discusses the need for him to mate with Umbo. “And when you take a mate and we find the best way to get facemasks on your babies.”
  • Noxon is copied, and both copies are in love with Deborah. The Noxon who was not exposed to radiation decides he will be Deborah’s husband because his gametes are likely superior to the Noxon who was exposed to radiation.
  • Noxon kisses Deborah. “Whereupon Noxon sprang from his chair, took her into his arms, and kissed her . . . She responded with as much enthusiasm as was appropriate with her father present. Which was to say that, upon repetition, in private, the whole business seemed to work much better.”

Violence

  • Umbo realizes Param will have to marry him or kill him because he could become a political threat to her. “It should be clear that in order to keep you from being a divisive force in the kingdom, she either has to marry [me]…Or kill me.” Param decides to marry him.
  • To explain Rigg’s face, Ram Odin lies and says Rigg’s face melted in a fire.
  • Umbo’s father hits Umbo and breaks his son’s skull. “Father began striking him with the flat of the blade, hitting him on the shoulders and the side of his head, until young Umbo hung limp and unconscious . . .‘”I think the skull is broken here. Look how it’s swelling, but it looks dented anyways.’”
  • Rigg visits a tiny town where a young girl was raped and murdered. “He tried to kiss her and she was still too young and small to put up much of a fight. When he was done with the rape, she was crying and her clothing was torn . . . he dragged her to her feet and strangled her. It was brutal. He held her up and she flailed and kicked, but her arms weren’t long enough to reach his eyes and her kicking him did no good.”
  • When exposed, a murderer commits suicide.
  • In one version of the future, Loaf’s throat is slit, his wife is run through with a sword, and their baby is thrown out of a second-story window. Umbo is told that this is what happened as he does not witness any of it.
  • A man kills Deborah. “He had a fist-sized stone in his hand and he was bringing back his arm and before Noxon could come out of sliced time to shout at Deborah the stone was already in the air . . . It struck Deborah on the side of the head . . . and dropped her instantly.”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • None

Language

  • Shut up is said several times.
  • Son-of-a-bitch is said once.
  • Ram asks the expendable if he has an anus and if it works.

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • Rigg and Ram discuss the morality of going back in time and preventing a young girl from being raped and murdered. Ram says, “You can’t just go killing people because you know they’re going to do something terrible…because until he does the murder, he doesn’t deserve to die.”
  • Rigg comes to the conclusion that while he has, “this godlike power to force other people not to do evil…choos[ing] not to use it doesn’t make [Rigg] evil.” He decides on a course of minimal change.
  • Umbo wonders if the replication of genes is all there is to life, since “we evolved so that our greatest pleasure comes from sex.”

by Morgan Lynn

Ruins

Rigg and Umbo have started to hone their time traveling skills—and just in time. They discover that in the not-so-far future Earth visits Garden with the intent to completely destroy Garden. Now the two boys race to figure out why their parent planet would destroy a colony they created. Something the Earthlings found on Garden horrified them, but what?

Garden cannot fend off these attackers, so Rigg will have to find the motive behind the attack and change the past to stop it from ever happening. As Rigg searches for answers, he travels through different wallfolds. One is extinct of all human life, another seemingly populated by poop-throwing yahoos and sentient mice, and in a third, the people have evolved to live in the sea. But wherever he goes, Rigg finds people who want to manipulate him. With no one willing to tell him the whole truth, how can Rigg decide which path to take?

The second installation in the Pathfinder series takes the story up a notch. By expanding Rigg’s world from one wallfold to four, the reader is shown several different paths the human race could have taken. The what if’s are tantalizing. The world Rigg explores is as interesting and exciting as the actions he takes. Ruins is in no way linear. Now that Rigg and Umbo are skilled time travelers, their paths jump forward, go backwards, and sometimes cease to exist entirely. While these time jumps may cause one to stop and ponder for a while, they are written in a way that is relatively easy to follow.

Sexual Content

  • When discussing a parasite, it is said that “the only part of the earthborn brain it could control was the wild, competitive beast, bent on reproduction at any cost . . . That sounds like soldiers on leave.”
  • Rigg notes that some mice are mating. Later, when starting a colony, Loaf says the mice are “mating their little brains out.”
  • The humans that live under the ocean are naked. Larex comments on how Rigg is staring, to which Rigg replies, “I’m fifteen years old, I think . . . my eye goes to naked women.”
  • Umbo explains that when they change something in time, children will be born, but the “mix of genes . . . will be different. Perhaps conception will happen on a different day. Or a different sperm will win through.”

Violence

  • Yahoos, creatures that appear to be similar to humans with little intelligence, throw poop at Umbo and Loaf. “The watcher flung something out of his lofty perch. It splatted against Umbo’s cheek and shoulder. It stank. It clung . . . it was nightsoil. Presumably the watcher’s own.”
  • Param is murdered. When she is skipping time, the mice move a metal rod into the space she is about to occupy. When she and the rod collide, “Param felt a searing agony in her throat, the heat of billions of molecules being torn about . . . she lived just long enough to feel the heat pulse through her entire body, every nerve screaming with the pain of burning to death in a searing moment.”
  • To keep the mice in line, Olivenko points out that the humans “can break their little skulls under our feet.”
  • Rigg and Loaf discuss the morality of preemptive killing.
  • When Ram Odin tries to stab Rigg, Rigg jumps into the past and kills Ram with a knife. “He was also completely aware of the knife in Ram Odin’s hand, the hand that was darting forward to plunge it into Rigg’s kidney . . . In the very moment he caught Ram Odin’s knife, Rigg shifted half an hour back in time . . . the knife easily passed between the ribs of Ram Odin’s back and pierced his heart. A little flicking motion and both ventricles of Ram Odin’s heart were split open. The blood of his arteries ceased to pulse. He slumped over and, without time even to utter a sound, he died.”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • None

Language

  • The words “pissed” and “butt-ugly” are used once.

Supernatural

  • Symbiotic creatures evolve so they can live in conjunction with humans. They attach to the human body and, depending on the breed, can provide benefits such as breathing underwater and increasing a person’s speed, eyesight, etc.

Spiritual Content

  • Rigg discovers the Odinfolders have meddled in genetic alteration, and selectively bred themselves for traits they considered desirable.
  • Humans are defined as any creature, no matter how diverse, that is descended from what we consider a homo sapien.
  • Mice were bred for intelligence, to the point that Rigg says their souls look very similar to human souls.
  • Param briefly wonders if death is better than life.
  • Rigg accidentally copies himself by time traveling. Vadesh warns him to be careful or he will “run out of souls to populate these bodies that you accidentally make.”

by Morgan Lynn

Pathfinder

Rigg is as unimportant as a young boy can be. He lives in almost complete seclusion in the far northern woods of his wallfold. He and his father are trappers, coming down from the mountains only to sell their furs. But Rigg has a talent. He can see the path left by every living being that has traversed Garden. This skill comes in handy when tracking animals, but it is not until his father dies that Rigg beings to realize the full extent of his powers.

With his dying breath, Rigg’s father tells him a secret—he is not Rigg’s father. Shocked and hurt, Rigg must travel into the heart of civilization to find his family. He explores his terrifyingly powerful talent on the way, using it to get out of trouble time and time again. But when he arrives at his wallfold’s capital, he realizes that his talent may be most useful in protecting himself from his very own family.

Orson Scott Card creates a fascinatingly unique world. His detailed understanding of physics and his elaborate exploration of time travel puzzle and delight. Rigg’s story is wonderful to follow. It is exciting, dangerous, and enthralling. The skill in which Orson Scott Card builds this world will quickly suck readers into a wonderful trilogy. There are adult conversations regarding sex and violence, but the adult content is not described in detail.

Sexual Content

  • Loaf tells Rigg that he threw out this first wife when he came home from a lengthy trip and discovered she had three children from three different men. Loaf says she was lucky he didn’t kill her, as was his right.
  • Rigg hangs a purse of jewels under his clothes, around his waist. Loaf says, “I think you carry in your crotch most of the wealth of this wallfold . . . but that’s how all young men feel, isn’t it!”

Violence

  • Rigg’s father dies when a tree falls on him and he is impaled. His father calls out to him, “I have been pierced by two branches, completely through my belly.” Rigg does not see this directly, and his father makes Rigg promise, “You will not come look at me, now while I’m alive or later after I’m dead. I don’t want you to have this terrible image in your memory.”
  • Rigg tries to save a boy from falling off a waterfall. In the process, he nearly knocks a man over the falls. “The weight of Rigg’s head and shoulder striking the man caused his leg to buckle, and the man twisted, started to topple forward. I came to save a boy and now I’m killing a man.”
  • Umbo thinks his brother was pushed over the waterfall by Rigg. Umbo throws rocks at Rigg, nearly knocking him over the falls. Later a mob, stirred up by Umbo, comes for Rigg. Nox talks the mob down. “Why do you want to believe the worst? Why are you hungry to do a killing here today?”
  • Umbo runs away because his father beats him, and after his little brother dies he was scared his father would kill him. “Perhaps Umbo was afraid . . . Everyone knew how Tegay beat him when he was angry.”
  • Loaf met his wife after a battle. He was on the ground with a gash across his stomach. His wife found him, stitched him up and took him home. “By scavenger law I’m her slave,” Loaf says.
  • When captured, a general threatens to torture and kill Rigg’s friends.
  • A man talks about his great-grandfather, who was given, “a slow and gruesome public death . . . with his body parts fed to the royal hunting dogs.”
  • Rigg hits a man on the forehead and pees on the same man during an attempt to escape his own assassination.
  • Ram Odins’ neck is broken by expendables, machines that look human. “The expendable reached out with both hands, gave Ram’s head a twist, and broke his neck.”
  • Peasants broke into the house the former princess was living in, and forced her to surrender all her clothing.
  • Loaf injures a drunkard who was close to hurting his wife. He does this before his wife would have killed the drunk to save herself from harm.

Drugs and Alcohol

  • Rigg is attacked by soldiers who are drugged to the point of being unable to recognize when they received, “orders [that] would lead directly to their deaths.”

Language

  • Bastard is said once.

Supernatural

  • Rigg and several others have the ability to manipulate time to different extents. These abilities are genetic.
  • Some people in Rigg’s wallfold have genetically induced powers such as projecting a wall with their minds.

Spiritual Content

  • The people of Rigg’s wallfold pray to many deities such as the Wandering Saint.
  • Rigg briefly wonders if he is a demon, since he has strange abilities.
  • Rigg and his friends take a pilgrimage to the Tower of O, a strange structure of unknown origins that is the oldest structure in the Wallfold.

by Morgan Lynn

The Elite

America isn’t sure if she wants to win Prince Maxom’s heart. The other six selections’ girls don’t share that uncertainty. They all want Maxon to choose them to be the next princess of Illea and are ready to fight America for Maxom and the crown.

When America is with Maxom, he sweeps her off her feet, and the choice seems obvious. Then her heart becomes confused whenever she sees her childhood sweetheart, Aspen. With Aspen back in her life, and both Aspen and Maxom competing for her heart, America’s indecision grows.

America is a strong character in The Selection, but she loses much of what makes her likable in the second installment of this series. In book one she is strong and funny, but in this book she degenerates into an indecisive and, quite frankly, whiny brat. The story is dragged on because America can’t decide if she wants to marry the Prince or Aspen.

The book loses the romance and suspense of the first book. Though there are exciting and fun scenes, they are sparse. If you enjoyed The Selection, you may find yourself reading The Elite out of obligation, rather than enjoyment.

Sexual Content

  • America kisses both Malcom and Aspen at different times throughout the book.
  • After one of the contestants gets married, she talks about the first time she and her husband shared a bed. It was, “a little uncomfortable at first. The second time was better.”
  • One of the contestants is seen lavishing affection on Maxom and kissing his neck.

Violence

  • After being found together, a contestant and a guard are caned for treason. During the caning, the guard’s back is described. “His skin was already torn, pieces hanging sickeningly. Blood was trickling down, ruining what used to be his dress pants.”
  • Two of the elite get into a fight. They use their nails and fists causing mild injury to each other.
  • The rebels attack the palace several times. In one scene a guard is hit by a bullet and blood pours from his chest.

Drugs and Alcohol

  • At a banquet hosting the Italian monarchy, wine is served. When a member of the monarchy wants America to talk about Maxom, she offers America wine in order to get her to talk.

Language

  • The words hell and damn are used in the heat of emotion.

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • None

Dreamland

Odea can walk people’s dreams. But walking in other’s dreams can be dangerous. Her mother has taught her the rules—never interfere, never be seen, and never walk the same person’s dream more than once.

Odea doesn’t understand her mother’s rules, or why her mother covers every mirror. Odea doesn’t understand her mother’s need to surround herself with clocks. And she definitely doesn’t understand why her mother keeps them on the move. Even though she doesn’t understand her mother, Odea has never questioned her mother’s reasons.

Until Connor moves next door. In the effort to get to know Connor, Odea begins walking his dreams.  But then, a series of events occur that makes Odea question everything. Her mother disappears, a mysterious boy begins to follow Odea in the dream world, and monsters begin chasing her. Odea isn’t sure who she can trust in the dream world or her own.

Dreamland pulls the reader into Odea’s story right from the start. Odea and her friend Gollum are both loveable outcasts, whose interactions are entertaining and endearing. However, it’s not just the characterization in Dreamland that pulls the reader into the story. Anderson creates a story that is believable, interesting, and full of suspense. There are multiple plots that run throughout the book; however, they are weaved together perfectly to make the story both easy to read and entertaining. In the end, the mystery of Odea’s mother is solved in a satisfying manner. Dreamland will captivate teenagers without the use of descriptive violence or sex scenes.

Sexual Content

  • The narrator thinks about a rumor in which a girl’s, “sole form of exercise came from. . . showing off various parts of her anatomy to different horny senior boys beneath the bleachers . . .”
  • Odea comes upon a boy who is swimming naked in a pond. “Then it hit her: he was swimming naked. He was naked right then. Which meant she was having a conversation with a naked boy.”
  • Odea dreams about a boy and thinks about the fact that she has never kissed anyone, but would like to. Then Odea’s enemy appears in the dream, “Her hair shimmered in the sun and her boobs floated like overturned cups on the water. Then they were kissing . . . She could hear the suction sound of their lips and the lapping of their tongues and the whisper of his fingers on her back and shoulders.”
  • Odea wonders if her, “real father was horrible, a criminal or a drug addict or someone who trafficked kiddie port.”
  • Conner and Odea kiss. “They moved together, finding each other through the soft pressure of their tongues. She brought her hands to his head; she leaned into him; she wanted to taste him and become him and be carried in these seconds forever.”

Violence

  • Odea throws some picture frames at her mother. “Her mom screamed. The glass shattered. The frame thudded to the ground. ‘God, Dea.’ Now her mom was shouting. ‘Jesus. You nearly gave me a heart attack.’” After a brief argument, Odea’s mom slaps her.
  • Part of the story revolves around the death of Connor’s mother and brother. The kids at school think that “He killed his mom. His brother, too. Beat his mom’s brains out, then shot his brother in the head the day before Christmas. He was, like, seven.”
  • Odea goes into Connor’s dream, where he sees men kill his mother and one-year-old brother.  Connor also tells Odea about the night they died. “The first shot didn’t kill her. It wasn’t meant to kill her . . . I heard my mom say please and no. I was so scared I couldn’t move. Couldn’t even hide . . . Then I heard . . . a crack. We found out later that it was her skull. He took the lamp from the bedside table and just hammered her head in . . . They shot Jake in the middle of the forehead. Execution-style.”
  • In a dream, two men “with a face like a hole and long, black fingers,” chase Odea. “As the men reached out their liquid fingers to her and unhinged their jaws, roaring, as if to swallow her whole—as she felt their wet breath on her throat and neck, their eager, tasting tongues, black as rot—a narrow opening was revealed . . .” Odea is able to escape.
  • After Odea’s mom disappears, the police begin following her. Odea is driving, trying to lose the police, when the faceless men from the dream world appear. “She screamed and wrenched the wheel to the right. The car jumped the gutter and plunged into the field. . . She bit down on her tongue and tasted blood. Then the black arms of the tree reached out to embrace her and she moved into the dark.”
  • A reporter tells Connor and Odea a story. “When I was three, my mom was killed by an intruder. Shot three times, point-blank range. Nearly took her head off . . . She worked as a stripper to keep the lights on and everybody knew it. . . Some junkie busted in, shot my mom, snatched the money, and ran.”
  • While in the psychiatric hospital, Odea sees, “a quick glimpse of naked skin—a man and woman together.” Then as she is walking with Connor, she thinks, “of the vision she’d seen in the gap between the curtains and wondered what it would be like. With Connor.”
  • While in a motel room, Odea “heard a headboard knocking against the wall and the sound of a woman moaning. She could feel her whole body blush.”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • After two mean girls confront Odea, they leave, “asses bumping right to left, the smell of booze trailing them.”
  • Odea is put in a psychiatric hospital because the police think Odea tried to commit suicide. While there, the nurses give her medication.
  • Odea remembers a time when her mom let her drink eggnog that had too much rum it.

Language

  • Profanity is used infrequently throughout the book. “Fuck” is used several times. Other profanity includes: ass, shit, and damn it.
  • Bitch is used once.
  • Gollum calls someone “an evil hell spawn.”
  • The narrator calls her cat an “asshole.”
  • Odea calls her car a “piece of shit.”
  • Odea remembers a time when a boy called her mom “a whore. She gives it out in the parking lot of the Quick-E-Lube.”
  • When Odea asks about the death of his mother and brother, Connor said, “fuck you.”
  • In the hospital, Odea’s nurse’s name was Donna Sue. Odea thinks it, “seemed like a name she might have made up to keep her patients at ease while she was busy sticking needles in their arms and probing their asses.”

Supernatural

  • Odea can travel to other people’s dreams. “Then there was a parting, as of a curtain, and Dea felt a soft sucking pressure on her skin and suddenly she had skin again, and ribs and lungs expanding inside of them. She came out of the dark like surfacing after being underwater and she was in. She’d made it. She was in Connor’s dream.”
  • In an effort to help Connor remember the night of his mother’s death, Odea goes into Connor’s mind while he is awake.
  • Odea uses a mirror to travel to the dream world where her mother is being held captive.

Spiritual Content

  • Connor tells Odea that he doesn’t believe in God or heaven. She then thinks, “She didn’t know whether she believed in God.”
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