When I picked up Cherie Priest's I Am Princess X, it was on the advice of a trusted bookseller for a (then) thirteen-year-old friend of mine. Then an older reading friend raved about it too. At last, I picked it up, and was pleased to find it was my first
Jessamy is eight years old. When readers meet her, she is in a closet. She doesn't mind readers knowing, but she is hesitant to admit it to her mother, who has believed her to be outside. This is but the tip of the iceberg which comprises Jessamy's interior truth, and
At the beginning of the novel, where an epigraph might appear, is a note from the author, explaining that Uglies was shaped by a series of email exchanges between Scott Westerfeld and author Ted Chiang about his story “Liking What You See: A Documentary”. At the end of Ted Chiang's
When I was a girl, I had the same kind of advent calendar that Derek McCormack describes receiving every year from his mother, the flat ones made of cardstock, with winter scenes decorating them, little images behind each flap as you discovered them. No toys, no candies. House of
When I was a younger reader, I avoided stories about boys. A friend of mine sought them out because the boys had all the best adventures and the girls were always learning how to be 'good'; I kept reading stories about girls in search of the ones who were 'bad'
