Reading Level: Young Adult

Where She Went

Three years ago, Mia’s life changed forever. Mia lost her family in a devastating accident. And when she woke up from a coma, she decided to walk out of Adam’s life. Forever.

Now Mia is a rising star at Julliard and Adam is a rock star, with a celebrity girlfriend. They live on different sides of the country, but fate brings them back together for one night. As Mia and Adam spend an evening exploring the city that is now Mia’s home, they revisit the past. But is one night enough time to open their hearts to each other? Can they build a future together or will Mia walk out of Adam’s life one more time?

Told from Adam’s point of view, Where She Went focuses on Adam’s emotional state. After Mia left, Adam relies on prescription drugs and sex to cope with life. The story is emotionally gripping but darker than the first book in the series. Where She Went deals with many adult topics and not all readers will be ready to dive into the book.

Sexual Content

  • A reporter asks Adam about his girlfriend. “. . . Are you and Bryn Shraeder having a baby?”  Adam replied, “Not that I know of.”
  • Adam thinks about seeing Mia’s eyes, “in the eyes of every other girl I laid on top of.”
  • When Mia and Adam talk, she mentions staying the night at a man’s house. Adam feels “sucker-punched” and thinks, “You’ve been with so many girls since Mia you’ve lost count, I reason with myself. It’s not like you’ve been languishing in celibacy. You think she has.”
  • An actress was nominated for “The Best Kiss Award” but did not get it. She said, “I lost to a vampire-werewolf kiss. Girl-on-girl action doesn’t have the same impact it used to.”
  • Mia talks about her friend who would like to get married, but gay marriage isn’t legal in the state where she lives.
  • Adam and Mia go back to his place. “The minute the door clicked shut behind us, she’d pounced on me, kissing me with her mouth wide open. Like she was trying to swallow me whole . . . as she kissed me, my body had begun walking up to her, and with it, my mind had gone, too.” Before anything more serious happened, Mia started crying and then left.
  • Mia invited Adam to her grandparents’ place and she kissed him. “Not the usual dry peck on the lips but a deep, rich, exploring kiss. I’d started to kiss her back.” Adam remembered Mia’s tears the last time they were together and stopped.
  • When Adam is on the road with his band, he had sex with a string of different girls. One time, “. . . with Viv’s hand playing on the small of my back, I was rearing to go. I spent the night with her at her apartment. . .” The next morning one of his friends said, “Good thing I hit Fred Meyer for the economy box of condoms before we left.”
  • Mia and Adam have sex. The scene is described in detail over several pages. “I run my fingers along her neck, her jawline, and then cup her chin in my hand. . . And then all at once, we slam together. Mia’s legs are off the ground, wrapped around my waist, her hands digging into my hair, my hands tangled in hers. . .”

Violence

  • None

Drugs and Alcohol

  • Adam takes an anti-anxiety prescription drug when he’s feeling “jittery” and sleeping pills.  However, he still has trouble sleeping despite “a medicine cabinet full of psychopharmacological assistance.”
  • When talking to a reporter at a restaurant, Adam orders three beers.
  • Adam thinks about famous rock stars who “drugged themselves into oblivion. Or shot their heads off. What a bunch of assholes. . . You’re no junkie but you’re not much better.”
  • Adam goes on a date with a girl and they “sat on the beach, sharing the wine straight out of the bottle.”

Language

  • Profanity is used often throughout Adam’s thoughts and characters’ words. Profanity includes: ass, crap, damn, dick, pissed, prick, shit, and fuck.
  • Adam thinks that “there is no fucking way” he will fly on Friday the thirteenth.
  • Adam gets angry with a reporter and yells, “This has fuck to do with music. It’s about picking everything apart.”
  • Someone calls Adam a “Prissy, temperamental ass.”
  • Mia said, “Your professor sounds like a dick!”

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • None

 

Deception’s Princess

As princess of Connacht, and the last of six daughters, Mauve’s life should be perfect. As she matures, rich and powerful men begin to notice her because of her beauty and dowry. After all, who wouldn’t want to marry Mauve and become the next high king?

But Mauve must learn how to keep her suitors at a distance without offending them. She must learn who can be trusted and who is an enemy.

When Mauve becomes friends with Odran, the son of a visiting druid, she learns what true friendship is. But she also learns that having a friend can lead to danger—both for herself and Odran. In the end, will Mauve stay loyal to her family or will she choose to follow her own heart?

Mauve is a feisty heroin with the spirit to go after what she wants. At times she can seem ungrateful and selfish. As she tries to figure out who she is, she often endangers herself and those around her. However, the reader can understand her struggle to find a path of her own.

The book is interesting, but it is not a page-turner because of a lack of action. However, because most of the violence is not described, the book is suitable for younger readers. Additionally, the ending is satisfying enough on its own that the reader can choose to end the series after book one or to continue on to read the second book, Deception’s Pawn.

Sexual Content
• The queen has asked the fosterlings girls to try to find out where Odran disappears each day. When Mauve finds out about it she thinks, “Our fosterlings girls aren’t hunters, and flirting with Odran won’t work, but what if they flirt with someone who is a hunter? A good one? There were any number of young men under our roof who fit that description and who would willingly trade their tracking skills for kisses and the promise of more.”
• Odran slips his arm around Mauve’s waist and they kiss. “His lips still held the taste of the bread I’d brought for us to share and had a faint savor of sweetness. I was so startled by his kiss that though I kissed him back, I stood like a stone in his arms.” After the first kiss, “He was about to gather me into his arms again, but I was quicker. Now I knew what I wanted, and I was the one who led the way. Oh, such a soaring feeling. So sweet, so free, and so wrapped in its own enchantment that we hovered in a moment outside of time.”
• In another scene Odran and Mauve kiss. “He moved so desperately fast that our teeth collided and my mouth was crushed . . . I thought I was going to die from lack of breath and I didn’t care…I yearned for him all the more and held him fast.”

Violence
• Mauve’s friend Kelan is killed because “he claimed he overheard my darling mutter that someone else deserved that damn piece of meat. False! False! He refused to hear my beloved’s oath that he’d said no such thing, challenged him to fight it out and killed him at the second blow.” Later on, Mauve finds out that her father ordered Kelan’s death because Kelan taught her how to use a sword.
• Odran’s father finds out that he has been helping injured animals. Odran’s father is so upset that he kills the animals. “The blackthorn stick lashed down. There was a sickening sound of impact and agonized yelp, and Muirín lay stretched dead of the floor. I was still frozen by the horror of that small broken body when Master Íobar strode to where the hare crouched, trembling, and destroyed her too.” When Mauve and Odran question Master Íobar, he strikes Ordan.
• It is hinted that one of the men hits his servants.

Drugs and Alcohol
• Often the king entertains guests. During the nightly feast there is mead. One evening the men are “overcome by all the mead and Gaulish wine they’d been drinking.”

Language
• Damn is used by one of the servants.

Supernatural
• None

Spiritual Content
• Because the story takes place in Ireland, there are references to the Fair Folk, the Otherworld, as well as important times of year such as, “Samhain, the time of shadows, the turning of the year from light to dark. The border between our world and the realm of the spirits grew as thin as frost on a blade of grass. Few dared to venture outside on that night for fear of meeting the fair folk or the dead.”
• A druid is a major character in the story. Maeve explains, “. . . druids and bards were often touched by Lugh, the god of poets.” Later in the story, the men plan to take a trip to, “watch horses run and men compete in countless athletic games to honor the god Lugh . . . ”
• Mauve’s father is afraid of a druid because “he is a man who can speak to the gods! He reads their desires and commands our sacrifices . . . he has the power to curse us down to the marrow of our children’s bones!”
• As Maeve takes a walk she thinks, ”this snowfall was a gift from the Fair Folk, from the gods, a magical spell that transformed familiar places with glittering enchantment.” Later on in the story, she thinks, “the gods seemed to listen.”
• Mauve becomes upset when an animal she was caring for dies. “I don’t know if he buried the body or left it for Flidais to find. Goddess of wild things, lady Flidais, take back your own, I prayed. Let the last gift of his body feed your other children. Let his spirit find peace.”
• Mauve keeps a piece of her dead friend’s sword. When she does she thinks, “At Samhain, when the dead bring their grievances to the living, no angry spirit came to haunt me. That was how I knew I’d done the right thing.”
• When Mauve’s mother becomes pregnant, “there was no counting the number of offerings my parents made to the goddess Brigid in her role as blesser and helper of childbirth.”
• Mauve’s friend Odran takes care of injured animals. His mother taught him how to care for animals. As he tells how he learned his skill, Odran explains that his father did not like the animals but, “Mother’s friend was there to remind him that he owed my life to Flidais, the goddess who cares for wild things.”
• When the king announces that he will not travel to Tara for the rites, a druid yells at him, “Are you so weak that you’d sacrifice the safety of your people, the fate of all Èriu, and the gods’ favor because you must cling fearfully to one woman’s skirts? I tell you, you will bring a thousand curses on everything you love if you follow any path that keeps you from your appointed place at Tara this Samhain. I know it for every one of those curses will come from my mouth and break over Cruachan like a thunderbolt mighty enough to shatter stone!”
• A series of pranks occur and the people blame it on the fair fokes. One man suggest that, “Lord Eochu’s druid ought to read the omens and see what he’s done to offend the gods.”

Emerald Green

The pieces are starting to come together, and the truth is terrifying. The Count is a powerful man who has killed many people in order to keep his plan in place. Gwen has her hands full stopping him, but her friends and family aren’t helping. Gideon’s behavior baffles and frustrates Gwen, who isn’t sure if she can trust or depend on him. And Charlotte’s jealousy of Gwen might unravel their entire family.

The ghost gargoyle Xamerius is one of the best parts of Emerald Green. Xamerius is realistic, humorous, and much better than a pet.

The trilogy remains strong with this final installment. Gwen is finally getting an idea of what she must do, but that doesn’t hamper the suspense in any way. The stakes are high, and conflicting motives create conflicts that will either bring about the end of mankind or save it.

Sexual Content

  • While Gwen and Gideon are talking, she thinks, “Now kiss me: I want to know if stubble feels prickly.”
  • Gwen and Gideon kiss several times. In one scene, “his left hand was buried in my hair and his right hand began stroking my throat, slowly wandering down.” The mood is interrupted when Gwen’s phone rings.

Violence

  • Gideon and Gwen are trying to escape from a man who intends to kill them. Gideon takes a heavy candleholder off the wall and throws it at the man. “It hit Sir Alfred on the head with a nasty sound, and he dropped to the floor like a stone.” Another man stabs Gwen.
  • When Gideon and Gwen travel back in time, they are in danger of meeting a former version of Gideon. In order to prevent that from happening, Gwen hits him over the head, knocking him out.
  • Someone shoots Gideon. “Gideon’s blood was all over the place. The hem of my dress was sucking it up like a sponge.”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • Gwen comes up with a plan to go back into the past and vaccinate the boy who is a ghost in her school thereby preventing his death.
  • One of the characters mentions a guard who had a hangover.
  • Several of the adults have a whisky when they are upset. Gwen’s grandfather has two whiskies and later in the book Gwen’s grandmother gives her son-in-law a whisky.
  • One of the characters takes “Alcott’s miraculous potion,” which makes him act strange. He tries to force Gwen to take the potion as well. As he talks, he says, “I’ll wager these lips have never done anything forbidden, am I right? A little of Alcott’s miraculous portion here will change that.” Gideon thinks the potion was opium.
  • After Gideon comes back from his time traveling, he is in shock and the doctor tells someone to get him a whisky.
  • At a teen’s party, someone spikes the punch, and many of the teens attending get drunk.
  • When one of the characters tries to get Gwen to take cyanide, someone hits him over the head with the butt of a pistol.

Language

  • When Gwen finds Gideon lied to her, she wonders, “why the hell she ever fell for the guy in the first place.”
  • The ghost gargoyle Xamerius calls Gideon a “bonehead.” Later, when someone tries to hurt Gwen, Xamerius calls the person a “bastard.”
  • Gwen, who is upset with Gideon, calls him a “bastard.”
  • Gwen tells her friend that she is “shit-scared of falling in love. . .”
  • Xamerius, the ghost gargoyle likes to narrate Gwen’s actions. In one scene he said, “and there was deathly silence in the room. . . All eyes rested on the girl in the piss-yellow blouse. . .”
  • One of Gwen’s friends calls someone an “ass-hole.”
  • Damn, shit, hell, and oh my god are used.

Supernatural

  • A ghost named James stays at Gwen’s school. She is the only one who can see him.
  • Gwen sees a ghost of a gargoyle who used to guard a church.
  • Gwen and Gideon have a gene that makes them time travel. A secret society has a chronograph that allows the two to have control over when and where they travel to.
  • When Gwen is stabbed with a sword, she dies. “I was hovering in the air, weightless, bodiless, rising higher and higher in space.” Later she finds out that her special power is that she cannot be killed by another person. She can only die if she chooses to sacrifice her life for another.
  • A ghost that thinks Gwen is a demon says, “I will never leave the side of this diabolical creature until I have fulfilled my task. I will curse every breath she takes.” Xamerius eats the ghost.

Spiritual Content

  • One of the characters, who is trying to kill Gideon and Gwen said, that the person helping him is doing it because he will gain, “the certainty that the angels in heaven will praise his deeds is worth far more than gold. We must rid the earth of demonic monstrosities like you two, and god will thank us for shedding your blood.”
  • A journal entry recounts a story of a girl who was said to be “with child by a demon.” The person writing the journal thinks the father would, “rather accuse his daughter of witchcraft than accept the fact that she does not comply with his concept of morality.” Later, the journal describes an “exorcism” that caused the girl to, “foam at the mouth, roll her eyes, and speak confusedly in tongues, while Father Dominic sprinkled her with holy water. As a result of this treatment, Elisabetta lost the fruit of her womb that same night.”

Ruby Red

Gwen was supposed to be the ordinary one, and her cousin Charlotte was destined to be extraordinary. When Gwen accidentally time travels, the reversal of fates leads to more trouble than anyone could have imagined. Everyone has their own motives and as Gwen begins to unravel secrets that are hundreds of years old, she begins to wonder if anyone is on her side.

To add to her trouble, Gwen is forced to travel with Gideon—a handsome, but insufferable boy, who doesn’t trust Gwen. As the two travel back in time, Gideon and Gwen must learn to help each other because danger hides behind every corner.

Ruby Red is an enjoyable read with a unique plot. Full of twists and turns, Gwen and Gideon’s journey through time has plenty of mystery, suspense, and adds a dash of romance. This rich story will keep you well up into the night and leave you wanting more. Sporadic violence may not be appropriate for children, but this young adult novel will be perfect for most high school readers.

Sexual Content

  • When Gwen travels into the past, she sees herself kiss a boy. “The girl who looked like me had planted her lips right on the boy’s mouth. He took it passively at first, then he put his arms around her waist and pulled her closer.”
  • Gwen thinks about a boy she dated who “wasn’t into kissing. What he liked was leaving love bites on my throat to distract my attention from his creeping hand . . . I was constantly trying to keep Miles’s hands out of my shirt.”
  • Gideon comes to Gwen’s school to talk to Charlotte. Gwen’s friend wonders if Gideon is gay.  And then they see him kiss Charlotte on the cheek.
  • While in a church confessional, Gideon kisses Gwen. “. . . when his lips touched my mouth, I shut my eyes. Okay. So now I was going to faint.”

Violence

  • Someone uses his mind to hurt Gwen. “Bewildered, I looked from his mouth to his hand. It was more than four yards away from me. How could it be around my neck at the same time? And why did I hear his voice in my head when he wasn’t speaking.” The character scares Gwen but doesn’t hurt her.
  • Gwen and Gideon are attacked and the fighting is described over six pages. The coach driver was shot and, “part of his face was missing and his clothes were drenched in blood. The eye of the undamaged part of his face was wide open, looking into nowhere.” Someone shoots at Gideon and then he has a sword fight with two men. Gwen describes the fighting from her point of view. “The man who’d been hit was now lying on the ground twitching and making horrible sounds.” In the end, the fight is ended when Gwen kills one of the attackers.
  • After the fight, Gideon and Gwen discuss what happened. Gwen was upset and said, “I didn’t expect it to be like . . . like cutting up a cake. Why didn’t that man have any bones?”
  • Gideon holds a gun to a woman’s head because he thinks the woman and her husband are going to try to hurt Gwen. When the butler gets ready to hit Gideon, Gideon and Gwen run away.

Drugs and Alcohol

  • None

Language

  • Gwen thinks, “I realized how pathetic I sounded—but what the hell, I was feeling pretty pathetic right now.”
  • Gwen is hiding in the bathroom stall at school. The door had scribbles that said, “Malcolm is an ass, life is crap, and other, similar remarks.”
  • “Damn” is used infrequently and “hell” is used several times. The profanity is only used in stressful situations.
  • Gwen thinks “Oh my God” often.
  • When Gideon is holding a gun to his wife’s head, a character calls him a “bastard.”

Supernatural

  • A ghost named James stays at Gwen’s school. She is the only one who can see him.
  • At the end of the book, Gwen sees a ghost of a gargoyle, who used to guard a church.
  • Gwen and Gideon have a gene that makes them time travel. A secret society has a chronograph that allows the two to have control over when and where they travel to.
  • Gwen’s aunt has visions. When trying to explain them, Gwen’s mother says, “I think Aunt Maddy really sees what she says she does. But that doesn’t mean her visions predict the future, not by a long shot. Or that it has to mean anything in particular.”
  • One of the characters can talk into people’s minds and as well as physically hurt them with his mind.
  • Several of the characters talk about Gwen having the “magic of the raven” but no one, including Gwen, knows what the power is.

Spiritual Content

  • None

Sapphire Blue

Gwen keeps hoping things will get easier, but it seems the universe has other plans. She and Gideon kiss, only to be interrupted by a gargoyle demon who imprints on Gwen and insists on following her everywhere she goes. If her new friend wasn’t enough, Gwen runs into her grandfather in 1948. The two bond and hatch a plan that may just keep Gwen alive.

Strong characters keep the Ruby Red Trilogy interesting. Gwen’s best friend Lesley uses the internet to run down leads for Gwen. James, a ghost (who doesn’t know he’s a ghost), teaches Gwen how to survive in the eighteenth century. Gideon is full of contradictions, which frustrates and confuses Gwen.

The second installment of the Ruby Red Trilogy, Sapphire Blue keeps the mysteries coming. Woven into action are dynamic relationships that make the characters seem real. Gwen’s relationships with her gargoyle friend and her grandfather are rich. A count, who could be evil, is thrown into the mix which will keep the reader interested in the story.

Sexual Content

  • Ruby Red ended with Gideon and Gwen kissing, which is where book two begins. Gwen thinks, “Wow, could Gideon kiss! I instantly felt green with jealousy of all the girls he’d learnt to do it with.”
  • When traveling to the past, Gwen tries to explain how in her time period, she’s not too young to kiss a boy. She tells her grandfather that, “All the girls in our class are on the pill but me. . . Oh, and of course Charlotte won’t have anything to do with sex either. That’s why Gordon Gelderman calls her the Ice Queen.” When her grandfather asks, “What kind of pill?” Gwen thinks, “Oh, my God, in the year 1948, they probably had nothing but cow-gut condoms, if that.” They then decide that neither of them wants to talk about sex.
  • Gwen gets upset because she thinks Gideon is “snogging” with Charlotte and her at the same time. At the end of the argument, Gideon kisses Gwen. “His hand began stroking my hair, and then, at last, I felt the gentle touch of his lips . . . It wasn’t a gentle kiss anymore, and my reaction surprised me. I had no idea how, but at some point in the next few minutes, still kissing without a break, we landed on the green sofa, and we went on kissing there until Gideon abruptly sat up. . . ”
  • Charlotte is jealous and tells a boy that Gwen’s best friend isn’t “very discriminating. Particularly when she’s had a drink. She’s done the rounds of almost all the boys in our class and the class above us. I’d rather not repeat what they call her.” The boy asks, “The school mattress?”
  • When Gwen travels back in time to attend a party, a woman talks about Lady Brompton, who is flirting with Gideon. Lady Brompton is a widow who, “found consolation long ago in the arms of the Duke of Lancashire, much to the duchess’s displeasure, and at the same time she’s developed a taste for rising young politicians.”
  • At the party Gwen attended, she is surprised when one of the men, “made a grab for my décolletage from behind.” Later, the same man, “was unashamedly groping Lady Brompton’s bosom, on the pretext that she had a stray hair lying there.”
  • When someone offers Gwen alcohol at a party, she thinks, “My only experience with alcohol date to exactly two years ago.” She then remembers how a drink that consisted of vanilla ice cream, orange juice and vodka. She recounts the different effects it had on different people.
  • At breakfast, Aunt Maddie tells the group, “You can always leave out breakfast and save the calories to invest in a little glass of wine in the evenings. Or two or three little glasses of wine.  The gargoyle ghost replies, “A liking for the bottle seems to run in your family.”
  • Gideon kisses Gwen and she thinks, “the kiss was more intoxicating than yesterday’s evenings punch. It left me weak at the knees, and with a thousand butterflies in my stomach.” Later in the book, Gideon kisses Gwen several more times.
  • One of the characters tells Gwen that Gideon’s goal was to make Gwen fall in love with him. Then the man tells Gwen that Gideon is with Lavinaia who “is one of those delightful women who enjoys passing on the benefit of their experiences to the opposite sex.”

Violence

  • At the beginning of the book, a character kills a man, but the murder is not described.
  • When Gideon goes back in time, someone hits him over the head, but he is not seriously injured.
  • Gideon sees men fighting with swords. When Gideon recognizes one of the men, Gideon jumps in to help him. Gideon, “ran the man through the chest with it. Blood spurted from the wound, flowing profusely. . .” The remaining man runs away.

Drugs and Alcohol

  • A journal entry tells Gwen about a time when two people went to a party and, “had unfortunately landed in the goldfish pool after the excessive consumption of alcohol.”
  • In a journal entry, a novice went missing and when he reappeared, “unsteady on his feet and smelling of alcohol, suggesting that although he failed the test, he found the lost wine cellar.”
  • When Gwen and her grandfather pass a sleeping guard, Gwen’s grandfather said, “I’m afraid he’ll never make the grade to Adept if he goes on drinking like a fish. . .”
  • When Gwen travels back in time to attend a party, a woman offers her punch saying, “No one can endure this fully sober.” At first Gwen “sipped the punch hesitantly,” but then she proceeds to get drunk.

Language

  • When running across a river, a character said, “Bloody hell . . .We must run if we don’t want to fall into the middle of the river.”
  • During an argument, Gwen tells Gideon that he is “such a shit.”
  • A gargoyle ghost yells at Gideon, “Leave her alone. Can’t you see she’s unhappy in love, bonehead?”
  • Profanity is used in the book, usually in times of emotion. The profanity includes: hell, damn, and shit.

 

Supernatural

  • Gwen can see ghosts. A gargoyle ghost, Xemerius, explains how he is different than a ghost. “Ghost are only reflections of dead people who for some reason or other don’t want to leave this world. But I was a demon when I was alive. You can’t lump me in with ordinary ghosts.”
  • James is a ghost who Gwen can see. However, James, not realize he is a ghost, thinks he is sick and having “fevered fantasies!”
  • Xemerius gets angry when someone calls him a ghost and yells, “I’m a demon. . . A powerful demon. Conjured up by magicians and architects in the eleventh century, as you reckon time, to protect the tower of a church that isn’t standing any more these days.”
  • When Gwen goes back in time, she opens a book with the picture of “a demon of the Hindu Kush, who brought disease, death and war.” Gwen is surprised when the demon begins talking to her. They have a short conversation. When Gwen turns the page, the demon disappears.

Spiritual Content

  • One of the people that Gwen meets in the past said, “There is nothing the church fears more than the discovery by human beings that God is not sitting far away in heaven, determining our fate, but is within us . . . It is always refreshing to discuss such blasphemous notions with you children of the twenty-first century, who do not bat an eyelash at the thought of heresy.”

The Breathless

Ro’s body was found lifeless on the beach. No one knows what happened. All they know is that Ro’s boyfriend, Cage, disappeared the same day and hasn’t been seen since. The mystery behind her death turned Blue Gate Manor into a house of sadness and secrets.

One year later, Cage shows up looking for Ro with no memory of anything that happened in the last year. His confusion only adds to the mystery of Ro’s death because even though he was the last person to be seen with her, he has no idea how she died or if he caused her death. Ro’s sister, Mae, doesn’t trust him, but she decides that helping Cage is the only way to find out what happened to her sister.

Then Mae finds a little green book that belonged to Ro. She hopes the book will unlock the secrets behind Ro’s death. As she follows clues in the book, she discovers her family is hiding a dark secret about her ancestors. Danger lurks around every corner as Mae hunts for answers that might be better left undiscovered.

The very first sentence of The Breathless grabs the reader’s attention and never lets go. Graphic descriptions bring this creepy Gothic tale to life. Full of magic, love, and loss, The Breathless is a captivating story that will give sensitive readers a fright they will not soon forget. This is not a good book to read for those who are prone to nightmares.

Sexual Content

  • Cage is watching a girl on the beach. The girl, “licks her fingertips before she turns the page and he wants to be that book.”
  • While sleeping, Ro’s boyfriend thinks about a time when she “pulls him down next to her and leans into him, all oil and legs and her red bikini top loose. He holds his breath as she unties her top, lets it fall.” He wraps his arms around her in the dream and then wakes up.
  • One of the characters is in love with a girl and they kiss. “She leans forward and kisses him and his stomach drops and then the world drops way until her lips finally leave his.”
  • When Mae starts to cry, Cage hugs her. Then he thinks about kissing her. “He was going to kiss her, it was all he wanted, and the next thing he knew she was pulling out of his arms, and stepping back.”
  • When Cage is burning with fever, Mae undresses him. When she goes to take off his pants he said, “Mae, we can’t.” She replies, “Cage, that’s not what I’m doing.”

Violence

  • Cage wakes up in a hospital, unsure of why he is there. He climbs out a window to escape. When a security guard tries to stop him, Cage hits the man. “His fist collided with the man’s face. The security guard crumpled to the ground.”
  • Elle points a rifle at Cage. At first, Elle thinks she hit her sister when she fires because “The house was bleeding. Thick, dark red droplets were splattered across the floor.” However, Elle only shot the red polish in Mae’s pocket.
  • Grady’s girlfriend, the “witch’s” daughter, has his child. When Grady’s father discovers Grady’s secret, the father sets the house on fire and Grady’s girlfriend dies. Then Grady kills his father with an ax. “The first thud makes his ears ring, and they’re still ringing as he drags his father’s body from the house . . . He feels like his lungs are going black, his heart too. But there’s no stopping now.”
  • Elle hits a deer with her car. Mae “knelt down beside the deer, taking its head in her hands, watching its lungs going fast as it panted, a shard of glass in its neck. Its heartbeat thudded against her, echoed inside her, fainter and fainter . . . The deer’s blood was slick in her hands and she stared at the shards of glass in its neck.”
  • One of the characters tries to raise Ro from the dead. In order to complete the ritual, he drugged his sister and then put her into a lake to drown. She is saved. Later the character intends to kill her so she can’t tell anyone what he did, but “he realized he couldn’t do it. Not when she was blinking up at him, asking questions.”
  • Mae’s father shoots Cage. “And then came the blast that thundered in his ears and he was falling, the gravel rising up in front of him. . .”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • Mae’s father often drinks whiskey.
  • In a flashback, Ro is smoking a cigarette. “It’s slender and smells of cloves.”
  • A character steals pills from his mother’s supply and gives them to his sister.
  • When Cage is on his way to see his mother, he doesn’t want to . . . “meet her new boyfriend but what he really doesn’t want to see are those pill bottles of hers, the way they make her angry. She’s angry that she’s sick, always has been.”

Language

  • “Shit” is used often throughout the book by several different characters. In one scene, Mae’s father said that there are “plenty of pieces of shit around these days.”
  • “Hell” is used several times. When Mae is caught spying on her sister, Elle says, “What the hell, Mae.”
  • Mae’s father says “goddamn” several times. One time he swore when he almost hit a girl with his truck.

Supernatural

  • The story revolves around Mae trying to understand a book that Ro had owned. The book has several spells, including one to bring back the dead. “Besides the raising ritual, there were other spells: some for curses, some for love, so many she hadn’t been able to get through them yet.”
  • Mae finds a room that has jars of animals used for rituals. In one jar “chunks of a hairlike substance were at the bottom. Floating inside the jar was a pale cat skull.” Another jar had a bird claw and a horse’s hoof. “Bits of tissue swirled into the murky water, and long dark hair was layered at the bottom. . . A hank of what looked like the horse’s dark mane fluttered at the bottom, next to bone.”
  • Mae remembers a time when her sister tried a ritual. When her sister turned around, “her dress had been a different color. . . Dark, dark red, steaked with blood.”
  • Mae discovers that the raising ritual requires the payment of a “human life for human life.”
  • A “witch” and her family live nearby. They use a ritual that can bring the dead back to life.

Spiritual Content

  • None

ADRIFT

Matt went to the party to see a beautiful girl. He never expected that decision would alter his life forever. In a strange turn of events, Matt and John end up adrift in a boat with three rich kids. They assumed they would be rescued quickly. They assumed wrong.

Matt and John are used to banding together to help each other. By when five people are fighting for survival, it’s difficult to know how far each person will go to stay alive. When Matt begins to fall in love with Driana, conflict builds. The group needs to work together to stay alive, but growing mistrust makes that impossible. After all, no one wants to be the first to die.

Adrift is a gripping tale that will capture readers’ attention right from the start. Even though most of the action takes place on a boat in the open sea, there is plenty of suspense to keep the story interesting. The story doesn’t only focus on the struggle of being lost at sea, but sprinkles in mystery because something happened in the past—something bad—and that secret has shaped both Matt and John.

Besides being an entertaining story, Adrift is easy to read and shows the complicated nature of humans.  Although the story explores the idea of killing a sick person to save oneself, in the end, the characters act with compassion. One positive aspect of this story is that characters show the importance of telling the truth—even if the truth is ugly.

Sexual Content

  • Matt and Driana kiss twice. The first time Driana, “kissed my eyes and then my lips . . . We kissed and kissed.” The second time Driana, “kissed me fast and then pulled away, and then she leaned in for a longer, harder one and lingered, and then she pushed away really hard. . .”

 

Violence

  • One of the characters tries to hug a dolphin. “It bucked, and its tail kicked up into the Windsurfer. . . Maybe I only imagined the bones crack, but her arm from her elbow down was facing the wrong way, and a slick red bone tip pierced her skin. . . blood pulsed from the rip in her arm . . . ”
  • John and Matt were told about a character whose, “mother was gunned down in front of her. . . A drug deal went bad and Stef’s mom was hit in the cross fire. . . Stef was holding her when she bled out. She was five years old, and she remembers it like it was yesterday.”
  • Throughout the story, the death of John’s father, Mr. Costello, is talked about. In the beginning of the book, the reader gets snatches of information such as, “When his father’s blood spattered my face.”
  • Several years before the story begins, John’s father is shot. The incident is described over several pages. Matt tells the story. He said, “It wasn’t the blood that freaked me out. . . Mr. Costello took all three bullets fired into the front seat. His body is pinned against the driver’s side door.”
  • At a baseball game, there is a group of men who are spitting at the coach. “Mr. Costello helps him up. He drags him to the ball-field exit and throws him into the parking lot.”
  • John tries to kill a baby porpoise, so they can eat it. John hits him with a harpoon, drags it onto the boat, and then hits it one the head with a hammer. “I heard a popping sound, and then another one when John swung the hammer into the porpoise’s temple. The porpoise writhed and bucked and flopped right out of the boat.”
  • When a shark tries to eat one of the boys, John hits it with a hammer.
  • One of the boys goes “out of his mind.” Dri is trying to comfort him when, “He screamed and flung her off. Her head smacked the bench cabinet. Blood drops hit the water on the deck and spread out like exploding red stars.” Matt steps in between the two and, “Drove the heels of my hands into JoJo’s chest. . . JoJo came back at me with a fist to my shoulder. The force of the punch tumbled into my spine, my legs. . . I hit the floor of the boat hard enough to see stars. . .”
  • JoJo jumps into the open ocean and is eaten by sharks. “. . . a shark bit his shoulder and shook him to tear away the skin. He didn’t have time to scream before another shark clamped its mouth over his head.”
  • John hits Matt. “When I turned back his fist smashed my face. Lights out.”

 

Drugs and Alcohol

  • There are several detectives looking for the missing teens. A detective’s memo stated, “Also, Castello’s mother was hospitalized with alcohol poisoning. Apparently this wasn’t the first time.”  Later Matt said, “After Mr. Costello was killed, she drank to the point she couldn’t work.”
  • One of the characters takes drugs for his depression. “One is pink, the other yellow, another light blue.”

 

Language

  • None

 

Supernatural

  • Matt occasionally sees a ghost. “I meet him [the ghost] in my nightmare. He lay in the front seat of the car with his skull smashed in. Mr. Costello opened his eyes and cried blood tears. The ghost had never spoken to me before, but that morning he said, Matt, it’s time to wake up.”
  • Matt says that Mr. Costello’s ghost is everywhere. “He looks so lost and sad. Like he wants to tell me something, but can’t talk because his neck is all blown out. His voice is gone.”
  • At the end of the story, Matt says, “. . . sometimes Mr. Costello is there . . . Once in a while he follows me. He doesn’t mean any harm, and he isn’t bleeding anymore. The wounds are gone. He can talk now, but he doesn’t.”

 

Spiritual Content

  • While looking at the sky, one of the characters says, “To get to see this? God loves us. Truly we are loved.”
  • A character asks Matt if he is a believer, then goes on to say, “I believe God sent you both. You especially. . . You have a talent for remaining calm. This is the way God made you.”
  • In a conversation, Matt is told, “God is watching out for us.” When Matt is asked if he believes, he replies, “Only when I’m taking a test I didn’t study for.”
  • There are several references to God such as, “Thank God we have more money than they do.”
  • One of the characters says, “The universe provides.” In response, John thinks, “For some people, the universe provides. The rest of us scramble.”

Landry Park

Madeline has lived a life of comfort and luxury; however, she has been given little control over her life. Life in the United States is ruled by the rich gentry, and the seventeen-year-old is expected to find a rich husband and run the family estate. Only Madeline has no desire to marry. Her one desire is to attend university.

When one of Madeline’s friends is attacked at a party, Madeline is determined to discover the truth behind it. As Madeline leaves the family estate, she discovers that people are not always what they seem, and the life of the servant class, the Rootless, is not what she envisioned.

As Madeline tries to secretly help the Rootless, she accidently discovers that gentry boy David Dana has secrets of his own. Although she is attracted to him, he is promised to another—but that doesn’t stop Madeline’s heart from wanting.

Soon rumors of war and rebellion break out, and Madeline finds herself in a dangerous web of secrets and lies—and David may be the only person who can help.

Landry Park takes the reader into a world where slavery still exists. The gentry want to keep the Rootless under their control, and anyone who tries to help the Rootless have a better life is seen as a threat to the Gentry. Madeline is trapped between her desire for a comfortable life and her desire to help the Rootless. As the reader enters the world of the Rootless, there are some graphic scenes of sickness and death.

Although the story is interesting, Madeline’s desire to have her comfortable life and her unwillingness to take necessary risks make her less likable. The ending has a few surprises that will delight the reader.  However, because of the disturbing themes of death, slavery, and marriage, this book is not suitable for younger audiences.

Sexual Content

  • When Madeline and her mother are discussing marriage, her mother tells her she can’t marry Jamie because he’s too poor. Madeline thinks, “Jamie wasn’t interested in marriage. At least, not with me or any other girl.”
  • Madeline reflects on a childhood friend who, “dared a servant boy to kiss her on the mouth and then watched without emotion when the boy and his family were removed to a distant farm.”
  • Madeline explains that “gentry boys and girls dated—and often did more than just that—before their debuts, but strictly speaking, both parties were expected to arrive at the marriage bed untainted and untouched.”
  • Madeline’s father has a mistress. Madeline’s mother and father fight and the mother yells, “How dare you skulk around with Christine when it was my family’s money that kept your precious estate alive? My money is the reason you didn’t marry that whore and then you went and wasted it all away.”
  • Madeline has a crush on David and when he looks at her she thinks, “I felt the ghost of his kiss on my lips, felt the ghost of all the kisses I had craved and desired, and all the kisses I had yet to dream of, and then his mouth parted slightly and I wondered if he was dreaming of those phantom kisses, too.”
  • At her debut, Madeline kisses her date, Jude. “He took my whole face in his hands, so gently that his fingertips tickled my jaw, and kissed me harder, his mouth firm and warm. It felt nice, in a distant, premeditated sort of way. I wished I was kissing David.” Later as they are dancing, Jude kisses her again.
  • Madeline discovers her friend, “pressed against the wall, kissing someone with ferocious intensity.”
  • A character describes how, “no matter how many women I bedded or how much I drank, I felt as if this life were tenuous.”

Violence

  • In the beginning of the book, a girl was attacked and the girl’s screams are heard. Madeline tries to discover the truth behind the “attack.” Later in the story, Madeline discovers that Cara was attacked by her mother. “She hit me and I fell into the brambles nearby. She hit me again and again.”
  • A character talks about when he realized the servant class, the Rootless, had terrible lives.  He talks about how the penalty for stealing gentry trash is death. “And the bodies strung up on the estates numbered in the hundreds.”
  • There is a battle between the military and the Rootless. David describes his experience. “. . . I’ll tell you what it’s like to watch the man next to you blown to bits and to see your friend’s hand shot off by an armor-piercing round and to have a mouth so full of char and dirt that you can’t taste food for weeks.”
  • In a later scene, David describes the battle with the Rootless. “There was one man, good as dead, holding his innards and trying to crawl to safety. I thought he was an Easterner, so I left him behind. But when we collected the bodies, I recognized him. He was one of ours and I had left him there to dies like a beast in the mud.”
  • When Madeline’s father threatens to make a child swallow “gibbet food,” a radioactive tablet that will kill him, the Rootless attack. Madeline’s father is attacked and, “they [the rootless] pinned him down and forced the gibbet food inside his mouth for several minutes. Not enough to kill him, but enough to burn his mouth. Enough to give him severe radiation poisoning and probably cancer. . . the lower half of his face was unrecognizable—dark brown with blisters covering his lips and tongue. Bloody ulcers were beginning to form at the corners of his mouth. . .”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • Throughout the book, the characters are seen smoking opium. In one scene, Madeline talks about how the Gentry boys, “spent most of their days playing golf or tennis while working their way through hundreds of dollars of whisky and opium.”
  • When a girl is attacked, a doctor gives her sedatives.
  • At parties, the characters drink whisky and spiced wine.

Language

  • Cara says she feels “like shit.”
  • Hell is used several times. For example, when Madeline accuses a boy of hurting Cara, he asks, “Why the hell do you think I would do something like that?”

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • None

Invisible

Doug Hanson is not normal and the kids at school know it. But that doesn’t stop Doug from having a crush on Melissa or from being best friends with Andy, a popular football player.

Doug spends his spare time creating a bridge out of matchsticks for the model railroad in his basement. The one thing that Doug looks forward to is when his neighbor Andy comes home, and they talk out of their bedroom window. It doesn’t matter that Doug and Andy don’t spend much time together; Doug knows that Andy will always be there for them.

When Doug gets caught watching Melissa undress in her bedroom, things take a turn for the worse.  Now Doug is a target of the football players, the police are watching him, and the principal is on his tail.  To make matters worse, his parents are thinking about putting him into a private school for students with emotional problems.

Invisible is an easy-to-read story that focuses on Doug’s difficulties. Towards the end of the story, mystery is added because Doug keeps alluding to something that happened in the past. In the end, this mysterious event gives the reader a surprise ending.

The author adds drama through Doug’s difficulties, but because Doug obviously has problems, it is sometimes hard to empathize with him. Even though Doug knows it is wrong, he spies on his crush, Melissa. Because of Doug’s actions and his disturbing thoughts, the reader can understand why other students do not like Doug.

Sexual Content 

  • Doug has a crush on Melissa. While at school he stares at her. During one scene he thinks about her body. “I wonder what her breasts look like? I happen to know that girls’ nipples come in different sizes and colors. I imagine Melissa’s being the small, pink variety.”
  • Doug likes to climb up a tree and watch Melissa in her bedroom. He watches her begin to undress, but does not see much. Melissa’s father catches Doug and runs him off the property.

Violence 

  • Doug thinks about, “some Buddhist monks who poured gasoline over themselves and set themselves on fire. They did it to protest a war.”
  • Although there is no actual violence, Doug thinks about a conversation he had with Andy.  “Would you rather be strangled by a serial killer or devoured by rats? We both went with a serial killer.”
  • A group of “football goons” beat up Doug. “Freddie draws back on enormous foot and kicks me hard in the ribs, I curl up and try to roll way, but they are on me, three of them, kicking me from every side . . . One of them stomps on my chest; air hisses from my lungs.” Doug ends up in the hospital, but the boys are not punished.
  • While Doug is in the hospital he thinks about getting revenge. He wants to catch a rat and, “put it in a steel box with a hole against his body so that the only way for the rat to get out is to chew its way through Freddie’s’ stomach. Or I could soak his Nikes in gasoline and light them on fire while they are on his feet.”
  • Doug fills his railroad cars with the phosphorous and then watches them crash and catch on fire.  “I look up at the sky and see flames spreading across the basement ceiling . . . I am burning and I am blind and I can’t find the stairs . . .” Doug ends up in the burn unit.

Drugs and Alcohol 

  • There is one reference to “stoners” who attend school with the narrator.
  •  Doug takes Proloftin (or is supposed to). He doesn’t like the pills because they make him sleepy, but they help, “me being locked up at home and not being able to see Andy.” His psychiatrist and his parents keep asking him to take the pills, but he doesn’t.   

Language 

  • When the boys are beating Doug, he is called an “asshole,” a “perv” and a “goddamn peeper.”
  • Dough thinks about beating the “crap” out of someone.

Supernatural 

  • None

Spiritual Content 

  • None

The Selection

Gorgeous dresses, spectacular meals, a handsome prince, and the chance to become a princess. It was everyone’s dream . . . and one girl’s nightmare.

America Singer only signed up for the Selection to appease her family and boyfriend. She didn’t expect or even want to be chosen. But it no longer matters what America wants. She is taken from her family and forced to join thirty-four other girls in the palace, all of whom are hoping the prince will chose to love and marry her.

America is the only girl in the competition who wants to lose, but as she gets to know Prince Maxon and becomes his friend, her desires become unclear, even to herself.

As the competition drags on, America is exposed to the rebel attacks that are a regular part of the royal family’s existence. While everyone else dismisses the attacks as random acts of violence attempted to usurp the throne, America begins to suspect there is something bigger going on.

America’s personality shines throughout the story. She is strong, funny, and unpredictable. Instead of acting like a love-sick teen, she talks to Prince Maxon as if he were the enemy. And while the other contestants faun over the prince, America stays true to herself. Although there are many predictable parts to this story—the mean girl, girl drama, a love triangle—the plot is still enjoyable. The story has the same premise as the television show The Bachelor, but the book is teen-friendly.

Sexual Content

  • America and her boyfriend kiss several times. In one scene they are lying in bed, fully clothed, kissing, and she thinks, “I was nowhere near ready to stop” and “this is why people got married so young.” Then when America thinks about marriage she worries because only the upper class can, “regulate having children.”
  • When America is told the rules of the Selection, she has to sign a form stating that she is a virgin. She is told that she cannot refuse the prince, no matter what he asks, “dinner, outings, kisses—more than kisses—anything. Do not turn him down.”
  • As part of the Selection, the girls talk about which girls the prince has kissed.
  • Another girl who is part of the Selection asks what someone did to become so popular and then states, “A girl has more than one way she can pay for what she wants.”
  • The queen’s sister tells one of the contestants about the queen having multiple miscarriages.
  • Towards the end of the book, America and her ex-boyfriend are kissing in bed, fully clothed. Afterward she feels bad about cheating on the prince, even though the prince is dating other girls.

Violence

  • When America thinks the prince is going to kiss her, she knees him in the groin.
  • Several times rebels invade the palace and the girls must hide from them. Although the story describes the damage that the rebels cause, little actual fighting is described.
  • During one of the rebel attacks, a maid is terrified when a rebel gets ahold of her, licks her face, and starts dragging her off somewhere. As part of the description, it says, “I’m not sure they (rebels) have very many women with them, if you catch my meaning.”
  • There is some brief mention of the contestants fighting. One girl slaps another across the face, and a girl rips another’s dress.

Drugs and Alcohol

  • America is offered sleep aides because she has trouble sleeping.
  • America is described as running like a drunk.
  • At a banquet, the queen’s sister is drinking alcohol, and one of the contestants talks about how the queen’s sister has had too much to drink.

Language

  • America wonders, “How the hell did I get here?”
  • The word “damn” is used several times.

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • Although religion is not discussed, it is illegal for people to have sex before marriage.

 

Stone in the Sky

Years ago, Tula was left for dead on a remote space station. During her time on the space station, she has made a home for herself. When a spacecraft crashes on the abandoned planet below, the pilot discovers a rare and valuable plant. Soon others flock to the planet and the space station in hopes of becoming rich. Along with masses of aliens, Tula’s old enemy Brother Blue appears on the space station. And he hasn’t forgotten that Tula knows too much about his past.

Soon Tula must flee the Space Station in hopes of proving that Brother Blue is not who he claims. As Tula travels, the reader is taken on an incredible adventure through space. Away from the space station, Tula soon discovers that there are some who can be trusted and some who need to be feared. And in order to help the people she loves, she will have to take risks that may lead to her own death.

Stone is the Sky is an exciting and well-written story. The story brings back some of the same loveable characters that appeared in Tin Star. The story contains several surprises that make Stone in the Sky worth reading. Like the first book, the violence and sexual content is relatively mild.

Sexual Content 

  • Tula kisses two different characters.
  • Tula is thinking about a rush on the planet below the space station. “The rabble had come first, but when the truth of it had spread out to other systems, more sophisticated types came to the Yertina Feray with dreams of making a fortune down on Quint. And with them, came the people who saw a fortune to be made in the supporting of those heartier types. Gigolos and whores. Seedy merchants. Con artists. False prophets. Robot vendors.”
  • Tula has a romantic relationship with an alien, Tournour. In one scene, Tula, “cupped his hand and took the moment in. . .his arms encircled me, and I leaned my head on his shoulder. This was as close as we got, and it felt good. But I couldn’t deny that it was different than being physically with Reza. That was what my body longed for now that Reza was so close. I wanted to talk to him with my body.”
  • In one scene Tula describes a romantic moment. “Then he put his arms around me and pulled me to him. I could feel my body tense and then relax until I leaned my head on his strong chest and slowly slid my arms around him. He held me all night, and I marveled at the pure astonishment of skin and heart.”
  • Tula and Tournour are having a discussion when “my mouth was so close to his antenna that my lips brushed them. He shuddered. I couldn’t tell if it was with pleasure or disgust, but he held me tighter.”
  • At the end of the story, “Bitty and Myfanwy were closer than ever, and I knew by the way that Myfanwy gently rubbed Bitty’s back, or the way that they would whisper to each other, that something was growing between them. One day they would be more than friends. It made me feel better that the reason why Myfanwy had never cared for Caleb was a matter of attraction and not the fact that she had never seen what a good-hearted person he was.”

Violence

  • Tula and a group of humans are kidnapped on a spaceship. While on the ship, pirates invade and a fight ensues. “Bitty jumped in front of me and slashed a Hort’s appendage off. The Hort screamed at a pitch that I couldn’t hear, but I could feel. Dark liquid spilled to the floor, making it slippery. Bitty shoved the Hort to the ground and with a battle cry sunk her knife into its chest.”
  • Brother Blue shoots a character who crumples to the floor dead.
  • At the space station, two people can fight in a hotch. This is a way to settle disagreements.  During a hocht, Brother Blue pulls a knife and stabs Bitty. “There was blood everywhere, and the blood was not mine…/Bitty was clutching her side, holding the stab wound to staunch the blood.”
  • Tula finally gets her revenge on Brother Blue. They fight and then Tula sets the self-destruct button on a robot. “Sparks shot out of Trevor (the robot) arcing towards anything that could conduct electricity, including Brother Blue who crackled and lit as he was surrounded by light. He convulsed and his skin turned from pink to gray. His eyes bulged. His lips burst. His body swelled . . . Brother Blue fell in a heap to the floor, a mess of charred, melted skin. He was dead.”

Drugs and Alcohol 

  • Kitsch Rutsok’s bar is a popular hangout place on the space station. Tula thinks, “If people wanted the hard stuff, to get intoxicated, or to find comfort in the arms of someone for the night, they went to Kitsch Rutsok’s.”

Language

  • None

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • None

Tin Star

Left for dead at a space station far from Earth, Tula is focused on getting revenge. Revenge for the beating Brother Blue gave her. Revenge for the death of her family and the other members of the group who had hoped to colonize a planet. In order to get revenge, Tula must first learn to survive in the underguts of the space station.

Luckily, an alien named Heckleck befriends Tula. Heckleck teaches her how to trade with the natives and gives her a desperately needed friend. Just when life on the space station began to seem normal, three humans crash land on the station, and Tula wants to use this opportunity to get her revenge. She soon discovers that taking down Brother Blue may mean the end of Earth. Should she take this opportunity to destroy her greatest enemy or protect the planet that she loves?

Tula and Heckleck are loveable characters that show that friendships can grow despite physical differences. Even though Tula trades with questionable people, she has an honorable code of ethics that she lives by. This code allows other characters to trust and respect her.

Because the story is written from Tula’s point of view, the reader has the opportunity to feel her pain, understand her desire for revenge, as well as see her desire to do what is right. The author uses vivid description to bring Tula to life and make the reader care for her.

Although the book has some violence and sexual content, these scenes are not described in detail, and they are in the book to advance the plot, not merely to add to the entertainment factor of the book.

Overall Tin Star is an entertaining book that gives readers a glimpse into a believable space world, where different species learn to care for each other despite the harshness of life.

Sexual Content

  • At the space station, two people can fight in a hotch. This is a way to settle disagreements.  Tula is forced to fight one of the humans in a hocht. During the hocht, Tula thinks, “I had never been this close to a man . . . his mouth was near my ear, his breath hot. He had some stubble on his cheek. His skin was warmed. His smell filled me . . . I wanted to both pull away and also pull in closer but my eyes kept going over to Reza, who was watching from the side. I stumbled backward. Wishing that I was doing this dance with him.”
  • When Tula is talking to an Earth boy, she describes, “His lips were just inches away from mine. I was on fire. As Reza spoke, I could feel his breath on my face, and I opened my lips hoping to catch his words in my mouth.” Later in the same scene, Tula thinks, “Every part of me reached for him. I ran my hands through his hair. He smelled kind. I had no words for pain, for despair, for loneliness. I put my lips on his. Our hands found each others’ skin. My body trembled. I had to stop before I exploded . . . I had gone hungry at times during my time here, but truly I had been ravenous for touch. I knew that I would not be able to survive without it anymore. It was nourishing, intoxicating, and addictive.”
  • When a female Earth girl is trying to manipulate Tula, the girl uses physical touch. “She put her hands on my shoulders. She kissed me. It was a warm kiss. Full of affection and softness. But it was so different from Reza . . . She kissed me again. The kiss was electric, but had no warmth to it. No love. She was trying to manipulate me, and to get what I wanted I would have to go with it . . . After a while we stopped kissing. I held her in my arms the way that I held Reza, but it was far from the same.”

Violence 

  • Brother Blue punches Tula in the face. “He hit me again, and now I was too stunned to scream. He did not stop until I was limp . . . It was only when he thought that I was dead that he moved away from me. . .”
  • Heckleck, a bug-like alien, uses his tongue that, “looked like a sharp pointy bard” to injected Tula with nanites, which gave her the ability to understand Universal Galactic as well as breathe the air on the space station. After Heckleck injects her, she feels ill and wonders if he was, “calmly waiting to finish me off at his leisure, picking off parts of me when needed.” She then goes on to think, “Maybe this insect-like alien had done me a kindness. After all, I had just thought about killing myself and had been too cowardly to do it.”
  • Heckleck gives Tula a cloth that contained a digit from someone’s crew member. Tula is instructed to, “tell him to give you the item, or I’ll send the rest of the crew member to him in pieces.” He then threatens to kill Tula if she betrays him.
  • Tula thinks back to her childhood fights. “There was hair pulling with my friend over a doll we both wanted. There was a slap and a push I gave to my sister, Bitty, when we were fighting.  There was a kick to the groin I’d given a boy at school who had tried to paw me at a party.  Then I turned my thoughts to the fights I’d witnessed. My father, drunk over the holidays, fists in front of him, always jabbing at my equally drunk uncle, face covered with his arms but his stomach getting pummeled. I remembered the bully from school, Mika, fighting the scrawny Stan: Mika moving quick from side to side while Stan crouched low, always hitting Mika’s spleen. And of course Brother Blue, standing over me and kicking in my ribs.”
  • Tula and an Earth boy fight in a hotch. They push and hit each other, and at one point Tula, “brought my knee up to his groin.” In the end, Caleb allows Tula to beat him.

Drugs and Alcohol 

  • Kitsch Rutsok’s bar is a popular hangout place on the space station.

Language 

  • None

Supernatural 

  • None

Spiritual Content 

  • While discussing the dead, Heckleck said, “But the dead, they have ghosts. Ghosts are very useful for haunting. Never forget the dead, Tula. They have their function. They sometimes speak at the most useful or inopportune times.”
  • Tula likes to go to the Gej temple. The Gej were a highly spiritual race who are no longer at the space station. When Tula had an item that she did not know how to trade she would, “bring it to one of the shrines and place it as an offering. I liked making offerings to gods I did not know. It seemed somehow more pure. Did the Gej have one god or many? Were they even gods at all?  I wasn’t certain. But when I put a cracked gem down or a burned a sole stick of incense, it called me as if I was wishing on fallen and forgotten stars. Perhaps I’d given a gift to a deity who cared only for love. Perhaps I’d placed a trinket on a devil. I couldn’t be sure, and I didn’t care.”

Crossed

Cassia has risked everything.  The Society sent Ky to the outer providence, and Cassia is determined to find him.  When the chance comes, she sneaks onto an air ship to be used as a decoy in a war against an unnamed enemy.  However, Cassia and another girl, Indie, are soon able to escape, and they go on a dangerous trek through the Carving to search for Ky and the Rising.

Ky will fight for life and for his chance to find his way back to Cassia.  When the society takes him back to the land of his childhood, he runs for the Carving.  However, he is not alone. He has his friend Vick, a young boy named Eli, and an enemy chasing him.  Ky knows the Society is his enemy, but are the inhabitants of the Carving enemies as well?

As Ky and Cassia search to find each other, the point of view changes back and forth between the two characters.  Even though the top of each chapter is labeled with the character’s name, the characters’ voices aren’t distinct.  Instead of hearing the characters, the reader only hears the author’s voice.

Unlike the first book, Crossed is not as suspenseful or enjoyable.  The Society is clearly fighting an enemy; however, there is very little action.  The reader only sees the fighting through the dead bodies left behind.  Besides having little action, it is not clear who the enemy is or what they want, which makes it hard to decide if the enemy is someone to feel sympathy for or to hate.

Cassia gave up everything to find Ky—her family, her home, her place in society—yet Ky still doubts her love for him.  Ky has a secret about Xander that he thinks will make Cassia reevaluate her love for both of them.  He worries that she still loves Xander even though she has proven that she will go to any lengths to be with him.  Instead of creating suspense, the love triangle feels forced.

In the end, Ky and Cassia must split up to make it to the Risings Camp.  Even though Ky is only days behind Cassia, when he arrives he finds Cassia has joined the Rising and been sent back into the Society so she can help their cause.  It seems unrealistic that Cassia would leave Ky after having risked everything to be with him. Instead of leaving the story with a satisfying ending, the author sets it up for another sequel.

Sexual Content

  • There are several scenes with kissing.

Violence

  • Air ships come to kill the inhabitants. The deaths of the people are not described in detail.
  • Ky teaches the Aberrations how to use gun powder in their guns. When the air ships come, they fight back. This is when Ky and two others decide to run to the canyons and try to escape.  The fighting is not described in detail, but they hear the others scream.
  • Ky thinks back to the time the air ships came and killed his entire village.
  • Ky remembers how the Officials came to take him from Patrick and Aida. He had to be gagged.  He remembers having, “blood in my mouth and under my skin in bruises waiting to show.  Head down, hands locked behind me.”
  • In the previous book, an Anomaly killed Ky’s cousin. His death is referred to, but the details are not discussed.
  • An air ship sends bombs into a river, damming it. They then inject poison into the water.  During this time, one of Ky’s friends is killed.  “Whatever fell hit with such impact that it looked like it sent Vick flying; his neck was broken.  He must have died instantly…I look at those empty eyes that reflect back the blue of the sky because there is nothing left of Vick himself.”
  • One of the characters talks about how many people in his village have died. “People died that way. They dropped like stars.”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • The teen and adult citizens must always carry a “tablet container,” which holds three pills. The green pill makes people feel calm.
  • The society has told people that the blue pill gives nourishment if they need to go without food for some reason; however, it contains something that will, “stop you. If you take one, you’ll slow down and stay where you are until someone finds you or you die waiting.  Two will finish you outright.”
  • The red pill people only take when the government tells them to; the citizens do not know what it does, because it wipes people’s memories.  They do not remember the last 12 hours of their day, which includes the part of them taking the pill.
  • Xander stole blue pills to give to Cassia in the hopes that if she were hungry, she would be able to use the pills to survive.

Language

  • None

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • When Ky buries a body he thinks, “part of me wants to believe that the flood of death carries us someplace after all. That there’s someone to see at the end.”
  • Ky and Cassia find a picture that they think shows angels. Ky said, “Some of the farmers still believed in them.  In my father’s time anyway.”
  • One of the characters recites a poem.  “. . . They perished in the Seamless Grass-/No eye could find the place-/But God can summon every face/On his repealless-list.”  He then goes on to say that some of the villagers believed in life after death; however, he does not.

Matched

Every aspect of Cassia’s life is perfectly planned out for her—her profession, her future husband, her dwelling. If she follows the path the Officials have planned she will be happy.  Or so she thought.

During Cassia’s matching ceremony, she is ecstatic to find out that her perfect match is her best friend Xander.  But in a strange twist of events, when she opens a file that is supposed to contain facts about her matched, Xander, another’s face appears. The face of a boy named Ky, her first matched, who was discarded by the Officials as an aberration. It only takes an instant to plant doubt into Cassia’s mind about whom she will choose to love—Xander or Ky?

As Cassia struggles to choose between Xander, who will give her a perfect life, and Ky, who can give her passion, she begins to question the foundation of her society.  Is it as perfect as it appears?  And can she live in a world where every choice and every freedom—including the freedom to choose love—is taken away?

 Matched is an entertaining book that revolves around Cassia’s discovery that her society is not all that appears.  She soon discovers that although she loves Xander, she feels a passion for Ky that cannot be matched.  The book also incorporates Cassia’s relationship with her parents into the story.  It is clear that Cassia’s parents love her and want what is best, even if that means going against the Officials.

Cassia struggles with her conflicted feelings for Ky and Xander, which is a topic that teens will be able to relate to.  Because Cassia generally cares for both boys, her decision is that much harder to make.  However, the plot does not only revolve around Cassia’s love triangle.  Instead, the author includes Cassia’s family’s and friend’s experiences to show that the Society isn’t always what it appears. Unlike many teen books, Match portrays a two-parent family that is not dysfunctional. They genuinely care for each other.   The violence in the book is not described in detail, which makes this book suitable for younger readers.

 Sexual Content

  • There are several scenes with kissing. In one, Cassie can, “feel is arms around me and the smoothness of the green silk as he presses his hand against the small of my back and pulls me closer, closer . . . his lips meet mine, at last.  At last.”

Violence

  • In the past a boy was murdered. Although how it happened is discussed, it is not detailed or graphic.  However, Cassia wonders if they, “let that Anomaly (murderer) out on purpose? To remind us?”
  • There is film that shows a, “sinister black aircraft appear in the sky and the people run screaming away . . . One of the actors falls on the ground dramatically. Garish red bloodstains cover his clothing.”  Some of the viewers laugh, and it isn’t until later that Cassia finds out that the scene was footage of an actual event.
  • When a boy is taken away from his family, his adoptive parents make a scene. The father tells people, “the war with the Enemy isn’t going well.  They need more people to fight.  All the original villagers are dead.  All of them.” Then two officials pin their arms behind their backs, gag them, and take them away.  Afterwards, the officials make the citizens take a pill that erases the entire scene from their memory.
  • One of the characters draws the scene of how his village was wiped out by ammunition falling from the sky. “His parents died. He saw it happen.  Death came from the sky, and that’s what he remembers every time it rains.”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • When people turn eighty years old they die. Most people do not realize that the reason they die at that age is because their food is poisoned.
  • The teen and adult citizens must always carry a “tablet container” which holds three pills. One pill makes people feel calm.  One pill gives nourishment if people need to go without food for some reason. The other pill people only take when the government tells them too; the citizens do not know what it does, but later in the story Cassie finds out that it wipes people’s memories.
  • When a character has an anxiety attack she takes her friend’s “green tablet” because she had already used her own. “Almost immediately, her body relaxes.”
  • In a dream, Cassia’s friend takes a green tablet, then a blue tablet. Cassie then gives her friend a red tablet.  Her friend falls down dead.  “Her body makes a heavy sound when it falls, in contrast to the lightness of eyes fluttering shut…”
  • Cassia considers taking the green table to calm herself down, but she decides against it.

Language

  • None

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • When Cassie thinks about how the Society doesn’t have the death penalty, but they kill the elderly, she thinks that people survive because of natural selection, “with the help from our gods, of course—the Officials.”
  • When Cassie has a choice to make regarding another person she thinks, “If I get to play God, or angel, then I have to do the best I can for Ky.”

Reached

The Rising was supposed to be the answer.  It was supposed to be the cure for the Society’s ills.  It was supposed to bring Cassia, Xander, and Ky choice.  But so far, all the Rising has brought the Society is a deadly plague that has the power to kill millions.

Cassia still seeks to find her way back to Ky.  However, her main goal is to show others that they have something of worth—the ability to paint, to sing, or to write.  As Cassie tries to find her way back to Ky, she struggles to know who to trust.

Xander is quarantined in a hospital, trying to treat those affected by the plague as well as trying to help find a cure.  However, time is running out. The plague has mutated, and the cure that the Rising was supposed to deliver is no longer working.  People are dying and Xander is determined to help them.

Ky and Indie are piloting a plane, taking the cure to those in need. However, Ky wonders if the Rising can be trusted and if he will ever be reunited with Cassia. The rebellion has started.  But will it change Society for the better or destroy everything?

 Reached jumps from three different character’s points of view: Cassia, Xander, and Ky.  As the point of view changes, the reader is able to see all sides of the rebellion.  Although it is clear that Xander cares for people, he still has very little medical training, which makes it is hard to believe that the Rising comes to rely so heavily on him to find the cure for the plague.

Xander still hopes to win Cassia’s heart.  This part of the plot seems forced, especially since Cassia made the decision to love Ky in book one.  Xander knows this and yet, he still wonders if they will end up together. The conclusion of Reached, leaves the reader with more questions than answers.  However, the book is good for junior high readers because most of the violence is not described and the sexual content contains only brief kissing.

Sexual Content

  • Two teenagers are having an argument when “over his shoulder he says something crude to Indie—what he’d do to her and with her if she weren’t crazy.”
  • Indie kisses Ky. “Her hand slides into my hair, her lips press against mine.  Nothing like Cassia.  I pull back, breathless…”

Violence

  • When a man discusses his job, an Army officer comes in and drags him away. “His mouth is gagged and his words unintelligible, and above the cloth his eyes meet mine.”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • One of the characters describes disease-proofing tablets that are given to babies when they are seven days old. The tablets keep the babies safe from illness and infection.
  • The Society has a red pill that is given to its citizens to make them forget the last 12 hours. Cassia and a group of workers are given one to swallow.
  • The Society has been affected by a plague; Xander, as well as others, are giving patients medicine and hoping to find the cure.

Language

  • Ky thinks, “I have to keep running in this damn cure even if it means I can’t get to Cassia as soon as I like.”

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • Ky wonders about what happens when people die. “I don’t know what happens when we die.  It doesn’t seem to me like there can be much past this.  But I suppose I can conceive that what we make and do can last beyond us.”
  • Ky thinks, “long ago people used to say what they wanted out loud and hoped that someone would give it to them. They called it praying.”
  • The Society stores DNA samples of its citizens in the hopes that one day they will have the technology to bring people back to life.

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.

Can’t Look Away

Clothes. Make-up. Her Vlog. Popularity. Torrey cares about them all.  While at the mall trying to film her newest Vlog, Torrey and her sister, Miranda, fight. Miranda leaves and is killed by a car.  When her sister dies, Torrey’s life falls apart.

Because of Torrey’s popular Vlog, many bash her online. When Torrey goes to a new school, she wonders who wants to be her friend just because of her online presence. Things get even more complicated when the popular girls invite Torrey to be a part of their group. When Torrey begins to fall for Luis, who the popular girls hate, Torrey begins to wonder if being part of the “in crowd” is worth it.

Mixed into the conflict of trying to fit into a new school, Torrey is also trying to figure out how to deal with the death of her sister, Miranda. When Luis introduces her to the tradition of the Day of the Dead, Torrey wonders if there is a way to remember Miranda without the pain.

Even as Torrey’s family is dealing with the death of Miranda, Torrey’s focus is on herself. She feels guilty about how she treated Miranda, but Torrey also feels frustration that her mother is focused on grief instead of her. She also wants to prove to the online world that she isn’t as bad as some people think.

When Torrey begins attending a new school, she focuses on how to become one of the popular girls, and how to hide her growing feelings for Luis. At the beginning of the story, Torrey’s main concern is her image. Everything revolves around her.

As Luis introduces Torrey to his world, one where death is just a part of life (his father runs the local mortuary), Torrey begins to face her own feelings about death.

Luis is a welcome addition to the novel. Besides being a sweet love interest, he is a likable character who takes the reader into the world of the funeral business, which gives the story an interesting angle.

Can’t Look Away deals with the tough topic of death in a way teens can relate to. Although it deals with many teen issues—friendships, popularity, and family problems—the book doesn’t come across as preachy. Instead, the first-person narration allows the reader to see the difficult emotions that Torrey faces when she loses her sister. And in the end, Torrey realizes that true friend are more important than popularity.

Sexual Content

  • Torrey kisses Luis several times, but it is not described in detail. “When Luis pulls slowly away, I can still feel the touch of his lips on mine.”
  • At a party, Luis kisses Torrey. “He runs his fingers lightly through my hair. Then he kisses me. And I melt into mush.”
  • Torrey thinks about what it could feel like if Luis touched her.

Violence

  • None

Drugs and Alcohol

  • None

Language

  • None

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • There is a brief conversation about what happens to people after they die. One person says they believe in God and that “if some kind of afterlife exists, then dying wouldn’t be bad after all.”
  • When talking about death, one person says they think people can “stay around” after they die. “I think there could be reasons sometimes for them to stay . . . It’s a very small space between the living and the dead. Why wouldn’t there be some overlap?”
  • Part of the story revolves around the Day of the Dead. Torrey goes to her sister’s grave on the Day of the Dead in order to put her sister’s favorite things on her grave. “Whatever made the dead happy in life, they are to have it again.”

How to Say I Love You Out Loud

Jordyn has a secret to keep. When she moves to an elite new school, Jordyn knows that her secret cannot get out. When charming Alex Colby kisses her, Jordyn demands that they remain “just friends.”  When her best friend tries to get Jordyn to open up, Jordyn pushes her away.

Suddenly, Jordyn’s life takes a turn for the worse when her autistic brother is forced to attend the same school as Jordyn. Can Jordyn keep everyone from knowing that the crazy new kid is her brother? And if her friends find out the truth about her brother, will they alienate her?

Jordyn must decide if she should show others her true self and risk revealing the truth about her complicated family life. If she decides to let others in, will she lose Alex and her best friend?

Jordyn’s fear of rejection is something that every teen can understand. Jordyn struggles with the conflicting emotions of loving her brother but being embarrassed by his behavior. Even though Jordyn’s family life is messy, how to say I love you out loud portrays a loving, two-parent home that sticks together and does the best they can; this is rare in teen literature today.

Another positive aspect of the book is that although it deals with teen issues, there is nothing that is too shocking. Even though the teens in the book cuss often, it is nothing that a typical teen isn’t exposed to in a high school hallway. How to say I love you out loud is an enjoyable romance that shows the importance of showing people your true self and realizing that no one’s life is perfect.

Sexual Content

  • There are several references to people hooking up. The term is used, but not explained.
  • Alex’s girlfriend gives him a “quick, flirty kiss.”
  • In the school hallway, “Leighton’s back is against the wall and Alex has one arm above her head, keeping her in place, his body pressed against hers . . . their mouths mashed together.”
  • During a swim party, Jordyn and Alex go into a supply closet looking for bug repellent and end up kissing. The kissing scene lasts for about a page. “. . . We had no trouble finding each other. His hands fell to my hips like they belonged there. I felt myself being pressed against the rickety wooden shelves, the firm, warm heat of his bare chest against my damp skin.” After the kiss, Alex apologizes, “Didn’t mean to be a dick.”
  • Jordyn thinks about Alex. “I want to hold his hand. I want to touch his face. I want to memorize his expressions when he’s sleeping, all over again. I want to feel the pressure of his lips against mine. I just want him.”
  • Jordyn and Alex hide in a coat closet and kiss. “Alex raises his head, finding the other side of my neck with his lips. He plants the smallest of kisses there and I hear my breath vibrating in the air between us . . . my hands running over the planes of his strong back as I claim his body with no fear of the consequences. We fumble in our attempts to get close enough, determined to close the distance that never should have existed in the first place.”

 

Violence 

  • Jordyn’s autistic brother gets upset and takes off running, taking off his clothes as he runs. It takes three staff members to control him.

Drugs and Alcohol 

  • When Jordyn goes to a staff party, her friend asks, “Did Petersen show up really drunk again? Hit on any of the lifeguards who aren’t even legal yet.”
  • Jordyn and some kids from school go to a party where they drink alcohol and some of the kids smoke pot. Jordyn drinks, “hot chocolate that has been spiked with a liberal dose of peppermint schnapps.”

Language 

  • Profanity is scattered throughout the story on a regular basis. The profanity includes crap, pissed, hell, and bullshit.
  • Most of it appears in the teens’ conversations. For example, “. . . it would have been really nice to actually feel like I have my shit together before walking in there.”
  • Jordyn thinks that she, “sure as hell is not trying to steal anyone’s spotlight.” Later she describes her day as “long-assed.”
  • Jordyn’s in Advanced Placement U.S. History and, “the essay tests are rumored to be a bitch.”
  • A teen boy describes Jordyn’s brother’s behavior and said, “Dude, it was fucking nuts.”
  • When Jordyn and her mom get into an argument, Jordyn thinks, “I can feel the acid in the pit of my stomach . . . when I’m being a bitch.”
  • Alex asks Jordyn, “Jesus Christ, Jordyn, can we please have an honest conversation for once? My God, don’t act like you don’t know.”
  • A girl calls Jordyn a “slut.”

Supernatural 

  • None

Spiritual Content 

  • None

 

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.”
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