VOYA: This is an intriguing, powerful narrative told through seventeen unique points of view, each of which have some sort of contact or connection to a school shooter. […] The storytelling is wonderfully intense and distinctive on such a difficult, tragic topic. Readers will be captivated, not wanting to put the book down, but also needing a break due to the extremely engaging, emotionally charged content of characters’ feelings and thoughts. No clear, neat, and clean answers are given as to why someone would commit such a heinous crime but all the points of view humanize everyone involved, including the shooter, making for uncomfortable, realistic, hard truths about society and culture in America. This exceptional book will haunt the individual reader for days and it is a perfect book for group discussion in a book club or classroom setting. This tough topic but excellent book is a must-have purchase for all young adult collections.
Sep 292015
September 29, 2015
Library Journal: VERDICT: The author blends familiar steampunk and fantasy elements (airships, wizardry, and heroes from a monarch’s guard) in a fresh and wonderful way that results in a fantastic ride. This should well satisfy fans of fantasy, sf, or their stepchild steampunk.
RT Book Reviews: Planetfall is a strange but mesmerizing book in which almost nothing is as it seems. The protagonist is… fascinating, and the book reads at once like a character study, a mystery, a hard science fiction tale about the survival of colonists on an alien world, and surrealist science fiction about alien life. Above all, this is a book about the price of secrets.
Publishers Weekly: The mysterious Need network, an anonymous social network that springs up overnight, claims that it can fulfill the deepest desires of the students at Nottawa High School. At the center of the storm is 16-year-old Kaylee Dunham; while her classmates mainly seek material gain, her priorities lie with finding her younger brother a kidney donor. Need’s users must follow its directions like lemmings, and a web of deceit and cruel pranks quickly becomes dangerous and deadly. Charbonneau (the Testing trilogy) focuses on a handful of classmates, mostly telling the story from Kaylee’s perspective, but shifting into third person to expose other characters and help the roles they play coalesce into a thrilling narrative. Even after the diabolical source of Need is unmasked—albeit through the cliché of the villain explaining the plan in full detail—Charbonneau still has a few surprises in store to leave readers questioning their trust in (and anonymity of) the internet and the selves we expose when we think no one is watching.
B&N SF&F Blog: The Traitor Baru Cormorant is riveting, immersive, and tough to talk about without spoilers. To give away too much is to risk losing some of the tension that will keep you compulsively turning pages, though the ending is less a surprise than an inevitability toward which you careen helplessly. The writing is so tight, the plot so well-constructed, that if you were to surreptitiously read the ending first–or the original short story of the same name–you would still find yourself addicted.
Kirkus: Extraterrestrials offer depressed, acerbic Henry Denton the chance to save the Earth from certain destruction by pressing a red button. The stalk-eyed, variably tentacled sluggers’ repeated, humiliating abductions and habit of dumping Henry in strange places with minimal clothing make Henry’s life tough, but the focus here is less on the aliens and more on the button. Bullied at school, pushed around at home, and reeling from his once-boyfriend’s suicide, Henry doesn’t think he wants to press it. “If you knew the world was going to end but you could prevent it, would you?” becomes a sort of refrain throughout, and each character who answers not only reveals his or her own carefully imagined depths, but also sheds light on Henry’s existential dilemmas. Whether Henry is hooking up in secret with the popular golden boy who torments him in public, watching his beloved Nana lose her memories, or being physically and verbally assaulted at school, at parties, and online, he maintains a biting, vulgar wit. There is both a budding romance and, via Henry’s older brother, a baby on the way, but the novel meticulously avoids easy fixes for Henry’s nihilism. Instead, his journey is subtle and hard-won, with meditations on the past, the present, and the future that are equal parts sarcastic and profound. Bitterly funny, with a ray of hope amid bleakness.
Locus: One of McCammon’s great achievements in this novel is the horrifying sense he conveys of humanity reduced to the equivalent of so many ants in a field, being stomped on by warring combatants. The scenes of battle between the two armies and the firepower and weapons they yield are spectacular and vivid. […] Readers familiar with Stinger will find that many of the relationships, interactions, and plot twists in that novel resonate with those in The Border, though without directly paralleling them. It’s a credit to McCammon’s craft as a writer that two books separated by almost 30 years show such a consistency of vision and imagination.