Newest Teens Reviews
The Ransom of Dond by Siobhan Dowd
Siobhan Dowd wrote just four novels before she died from breast cancer in 2007. All four novels were wonderful and yet they weren't Siobhan's sole legacy to us. Patrick Ness took an idea of hers and, together with artist Jim Kay, turned it into A Monster Calls, which won both the Carnegie and Greenaway prizes. And now we have The Ransom of Dond, Siobhan's last story. Full review...
Alan Turing (Real Lives) by Jim Eldridge
Alan Turing was one of Britain's greatest thinkers of the last century. He did pioneering work on computing and artificial intelligence. He was also a hero of World War II, working in the famous code-breaking community at Bletchley Park, cracking German naval codes used to lethal effect organising U-boat attacks. Turing was the man who beat the Enigma machine. Full review...
Let It Snow by John Green, Maureen Johnson and Lauren Myracle
On Christmas Eve, the night of the worst storm in 50 years, Jubilee Dougal's parents are arrested after a riot over decorative houses. Sent to stay with her grandparents, her train gets stuck. She ditches the train, and ends up in a waffle house with fourteen cheerleaders and various teen boys. Three best-selling authors team up to tell the story of this Christmas in a trio of interlinked novellas. Full review...
The Letter for the King by Tonke Dragt
It's midsummer night, and Tiuri is one of five young men locked up in a chapel with one more night of silent penance between them and the ceremony that makes them knights of the realm, when a stranger lures him outside. The elderly man gives Tiuri the task of delivering a secret letter, and the chivalry and espionage is too much for the sixteen year old to ignore. The bad news begins, however, when he finds the very experienced knight he was to deliver the letter to dying alone on a forest floor, meaning Tiuri must accept the mantle unofficially, and deliver the missive to its ultimate audience – the king of the neighbouring country. The journey will bring the young man right to the cusp of danger, international intrigue and more. Full review...
Haze by Paula Weston
Gaby Winter's life used to be pretty ordinary. Apart the horrific nightmares she sometimes had about a guy and a nightclub and the death of her brother, Jude, things were going okay. Until the mysterious Rafa showed up and told her she was actually one of the Rephaim - a child of a fallen angel - and that she lived a whole other life that she can't remember, where she and Jude were warriors against demons, but on two opposite sides. The other Rephaim thought she was dead. And now they think there's a chance Jude might be alive somewhere too. Full review...
Butterfly Grave (Murder Notebooks) by Anne Cassidy
Just before Christmas, Josh's uncle Stuart falls from a cliff in an horrific accident. Determined to help, Josh, Rose and friend Skeggsie head up to Newcastle for the festive season. Things are awkward between the three. Josh is becoming increasingly paranoid and is convinced they are being followed. Rose is becoming more and more withdrawn, fixating on the deaths she has witnessed. And Skeggsie is resentful at being forever embroiled in other people's problems when he has challenges of his own. Full review...
Close Your Pretty Eyes by Sally Nicholls
Olivia is trapped, in a world somewhat of her own making. She is living a life of endless switching from a set of foster parents, to would-be adoptive parents, to care homes. Whenever she fetches up with nice adults, she worries too much about making mistakes, being too violent, clumsy, needy, noisy, spiteful – and prefers then to go the whole hog and make them despair of ever liking her, of losing all kind of sympathy with her. That way she can relax, knowing the truth, knowing the hatred is there – just as it was when her alcoholic mother was abusing and abandoning her and her baby siblings. Olivia is eleven. But in this one new house, with Jim, and his children, and the fostered young-mother-of-a-babe-in-arms, something is different. Something is definitely older than Olivia, and certainly more evil, and most assuredly better at getting its own way… Full review...
Conquest by John Connolly and Jennifer Ridyard
The Earth has been invaded by the Illyri, a vaguely humanoid race far in advance of humankind, who were able to conquer the planet gently by proving how futile it would be to resist. They are keen to ensure the human race remains compliant, but are mostly keen to avoid bloodshed. Humankind, however, is not a race to take conquest lying down. There is a very active resistance, particularly in Scotland, where the Scots come out of the Highlands to strike on the Illyri garrisons and power bases in cities like Edinburgh. Full review...
Saving Silence by Gina Blaxill
Sam moved to London fairly recently and has struggled to settle in. Imogen has never had problems making friends, she's a former head girl and a school sports star. She's tried to make friends with Sam, however, but he doesn't seem interested - until one night when he approaches her out of the blue, only for someone to speed towards him and try to knock him over. Imogen saves his life - but why would anyone try to kill him? And has she put herself in danger by getting involved? With Sam reluctantly telling Imogen a secret, the pair are left frantically trying to save themselves from some seriously nasty people. Full review...
The Trap by Andrew Fukuda
The Trap is the third and final book in this sequence about a world in which vampires rule and humans are hepers, eaten almost to extinction.
We left Gene and Sissy, along with Epap and David, on the train that delivers hepers from the Mission to the City, destined for the Ruler's feast table. Gene now knows that he and Sissy form the Origin, the cure that will return Duskers to humans formulated by Gene's missing scientist father. But is that all there is to it? Where did the Duskers come from? Can Gene and Sissy end their plague? Will they all make it out alive? And what of Ashley June, newly turned to Dusker? What does she know that Gene and Sissy don't? Full review...
Shadowlark by Meagan Spooner
Lark escaped the city of her birth after being tortured and stripped of her magic by its architects. Lark's post-apocalyptic world runs on magic and there isn't enough of it about. So Renewables - people whose magic will replenish after it is drained - are in demand - not as people but as a resource. But the architects have made Lark different. She can drain the magic of others and use it herself. We last saw Lark when she escaped the Iron Wood and went in search of her missing brother Basil. Full review...
Debutantes: In Love by Cora Harrison
Poppy and Daisy Derrington leave Beech Green Manor to launch themselves in London. The pair know they need to marry well as their father is in dire financial straits - but marriage is something of a distraction to their real dreams of films and music. Can they find themselves love and happiness in the Roaring Twenties? Full review...
The Naturals by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Cassie Hobbes doesn't feel like an average teenager. Average teenagers don't lose their mothers to unsolved murders. Average teenagers can't profile other people within minutes of acquaintance. Average teenagers aren't headhunted by the FBI to train as specifically-talented crimefighters. Cassie Hobbes is special. Full review...
ZOM-B Baby by Darren Shan
WARNING! If you haven't read the first book in this series, STOP READING NOW! NOW! Spoilers ahoy!
Gone? Good.
The story so far Full review...
How to Love by Katie Cotugno
Katie Cotugno's debut novel How to Love is, unsurprisingly, all about love. It has at its centre Reena and Sawyer, a gritty portrayal of first love. But it also has family love, friendship, and all those other kinds of loves. Full review...
The Killing Woods by Lucy Christopher
Popular girl Ashlee is dead. They’re saying the father of her less-popular classmate Emily is responsible. She cannot accept this, cannot accept that her own father could do something like that, but all the evidence points that way. Emily can’t stop thinking about it. She starts investigating what really happened in the woods that night, but the more she uncovers, the more uneasy she feels. Could her father actually be the one who killed Ashlee? And should she stop digging before she unearths something really unpleasant? Full review...
She Is Not Invisible by Marcus Sedgwick
Laureth is used to her father's writerly obsessions and enthusiasms. She's accepted the fact that he will hare off across the world in search of some obscure information for a story, and the fact that he rarely asks her about herself and her life at school, preferring to lecture her instead about his latest theory. He even pays her to answer the fan mail on his website for him. And, like it or not, there's nothing she can do about the barely suppressed hostility that has grown in recent years between her parents. Full review...
The Twistrose Key by Tone Almhjell
Lin and her family are living in a rented house in the city because Lin's mother has been given her dream job as professor of traditional songs at the university. Lin's novelist father doesn't mind: he can write and play at riddling in the city as well as anywhere. But Lin hates it. She misses the farm where she was brought up and she misses playing at troll-hunting with her friend Niklas. But most of all, she misses her pet vole, Rufus, who is buried under a rosebush. Full review...
Young Sherlock Holmes: Knife Edge by Andrew Lane
All Sherlock's deductive powers are called into play as he struggles to find out exactly what is happening in a remote castle on the coast of Galway. How did the servant die, and why did she lose her shoes? Is there really a Dark Beast roaming the local beaches and caves as the villagers claim? And more significantly for world peace, is the self-proclaimed psychic Ambrose Albano a fraud, or can he really find out, and thus reveal, the secrets of international espionage from those beyond the grave? Full review...
The Box of Red Brocade (Chronoptika) by Catherine Fisher
Ok. Let's catch you up. Jake's father is still lost in time. Venn's wife is still dead. Summer, the Queen of the Shee, still hasn't made Venn her husband. Sarah still hasn't prevented the destruction of the future by Janus. And the Scarred Man still hasn't done, well, whatever it is that he's trying to do. The Chronoptika, a mirror made of black obsidian and a time travel device, connects Jake, Venn, Sarah and the rest, but they all want different things from it. Can they all be satisfied? It doesn't look likely. Full review...
Fire With Fire by Siobhan Vivian and Jenny Han
With Reeve hospitalised after the terrible events at the end of Burn for Burn, Lillia, Kat and Mary must face the fallout. Mary is desperate for revenge despite the other two starting to have cold feet, but they agree to go through with their plan in order to give her the satisfaction of seeing his heart broken. As Lillia pretends to fall for the boy, though, she sees another side to Reeve and starts to wonder if he's as bad as Mary says he is. Can their friendship hold up under the strain of all the secrets and lies? Full review...
Wereworld: War of the Werelords by Curtis Jobling
With the Catlords at each other's throats, there appears to finally be a chance for Drew Ferran and his allies to win the war and bring peace to Lyssia. Stacked against him, though, are still fearsome foes - including the dreadful Wyld Wolves, mockeries of lycanthropes. Meanwhile Drew's adoptive brother Trent, bitten by one of the vile creatures, knows that he is doomed to become one but is determined to gain his revenge before he loses control. As the opposing forces gather, huge armies could decide the fate of the Seven Realms... but in Icegarden, perhaps the most deadly force of them all still has a part to play in this war. Full review...
The Company of Ghosts by Berlie Doherty
Morag's family has its very own island. Tiny and remote, it is truly wild and wonderful. And the offer to spend some time there with them couldn't have come at a better time for Ellie, whose parents have just divorced. She'll be able to escape Mum and Angus. And she'll be able to paint for her father. But things don't work out quite as planned. To begin with, awkward, diffident Ellie has to spend the first night on the island alone with George, Morag's brusque older brother. And then George returns to the mainland to pick up supplies. He doesn't return.
Abandoned, Ellie begins to see shadows. Hear footsteps. Feel icy kisses on her cheek each time she falls asleep... Full review...
Model Misfit (Geek Girl 2) by Holly Smale
Harriet Manners has the opportunity of a lifetime. She's been asked to go and model in Japan, a country she's always wanted to visit. Struggling from a break-up with Nick, best friend Nat being sent abroad for the summer, and her father and Annabel preparing for a new baby, this should be exactly what she needs. Of course, for Harriet, life is never quite that simple... Full review...
In Bloom by Matthew Crow
Member of a loving but dysfunctional family, life has rarely been straightforward for Francis Wooton, and he is no stranger to heartbreak. Despite this, he's always maintained sensible plans, to get good grades in his GCSEs and A Levels, and get into University, where he'll finally meet his real friends and the girl of his dreams. Unfortunately, a whole new world of worry presents itself when he is diagnosed with leukaemia. He knows his mother and brother will do everything and anything they can to support him, but even they can do little to ease the constant nausea, the all-pervasive pain, the horror of imminent baldness and the general bleak agony that cancer brings. But every cloud has a silver lining, and it is at the hospital unit that Francis first sets eyes on Amber, a girl unlike anyone else he has met before. Amber makes Francis feel more alive than ever, and if anything can help cure the despair of cancer, first love might just be it. Full review...
Unbreakable by Kami Garcia
Set up centuries ago to fight the threat of a malevolent demon, the Legion is a secret society consisting of just five members at any one time, tasked with the responsibility of fighting and exorcising spirits. When all five members are murdered on the same night, their responsibility suddenly falls to five teenagers. Twins Jared and Lukas, Priest and Alara have been trained from a young age in the skills required to track, fight and destroy vengeance spirits. However, for Kennedy, who knows nothing of her mother's role in the Legion, everything is overwhelmingly new and highly dangerous. She will have to learn fast, as she cannot afford to be a liability as the team prepares to take on a mission with the utmost of stakes. Full review...
The Dream Thieves by Maggie Stiefvater
With the ley lines waking, things are changing around Cabeswater. Ronan is getting more and more adept at bringing his dreams to life, Gansey is needed at home, and Adam has made some mysterious new friends. At the centre of it all, Blue has to try to cope with her curse and her feelings for the Raven Boys. Full review...
Resist (Breathe) by Sarah Crossan
Resist carries on where Breathe left off. To catch you up: deforestation has resulted in environmental catastrophe and the world is a ravaged place in which there isn't enough oxygen to fully sustain human life. A corporation, Breathe, runs the Pod, whose inhabitants are divided into Premiums (plenty of oxygen) and Auxiliaries (barely enough). Outside, drifters struggle to survive. With one alternative to the Pod - The Grove - destroyed by the Pod Ministry, Alina, Bea and Quinn, our three central characters, set out on separate, but equally perilous, journeys to find the other, Sequoia. And back in the Pod, Ronan is rethinking the world he thought he lived in but didn't. Full review...
Ninja: First Mission (Ninja Trilogy) by Chris Bradford and Sonia Leong
If you are looking for adventure, Ninja First Mission will certain come up trumps. This book never has a slow moment. But even as the story races along at breakneck speed, there is plenty to think about as well. This book has as much to offer the deep thinker as the adrenaline junky. Tata, a young Ninja in training, is desperate to prove himself. He has failed the test for his black belt three times, but this was just a simple test. The sacred scrolls of his clan have been stolen, and all of the fully fledged Ninja but one are away on another mission. Tata faces another test, but this time the stakes are life and death, not only for himself, but for his clan. In order to succeed Tata must learn to find victory in failure. Most of all he must learn to believe in himself. Full review...
Tiger Lily by Jodi Lynn Anderson
Before Peter Pan belonged to Wendy, he belonged to the girl with a feather in her hair...
Tiger Lily tells the story of Neverland after Peter Pan arrived but before Wendy came. Our narrator is Tink, the silent, sometimes jealous, fairy. And our heroine is Tiger Lily, the native girl who is strange even to her fellow villagers. Tiger Lily doesn't believe in love stories but when she meets Peter Pan in the forbidden woods of Neverland, her heart burns with a fire she had never expected. Full review...
United We Spy (Gallagher Girls) by Ally Carter
The Circle of Cavan are still on the hunt for Cammie Morgan. Their other plans, though, might be even more terrible than their hunt for the young spy. Can Cammie and her friends save themselves, and take down the Circle before they carry out their deadly mission? Full review...
The Skull in the Woods by Sandra Greaves
Dartmoor wasn't exactly Matt's first choice as a place to spend his school holidays. He barely knows his Uncle or cousins, and there was obviously some bad blood between members of the family. But his father was away for the summer, as were most of his friends and he couldn't stand another day in the house with his mother's new boyfriend, especially as their relationship was dashing any hopes Matt might have held of his parents ever reuniting. But whatever the trouble may have been between Matt's mother and his now dead Aunt Rose, his Uncle Jack has welcomed Matt into his home and treated the boy with all the kindness one might expect for a prodigal son. His youngest cousin Kitty seems delighted to have a new member of the family to play with as well, but Tilda, who is near his own age can't stand him and is determined to have this interloping city dweller out of the way as quickly as possible. Matt treats Tilda with same contempt, with the two children carrying on where their feuding parents left off. Full review...
The Waking World (The Future King) by Tom Huddleston
Many tales have been told of the boy who became our greatest king. Very few have spoken of the future...
Aran is the son of one of the Island's wealthiest Laws. He lives in the underground farmstead of Hawk's Cross. He wants for nothing. But Aran is not entirely happy. Rumours are everywhere and the Island is under threat. Bands of fierce men known as Marauders are beginning to attack further and further inland, burning homes and taking slaves. Aran wants to join the fight against them but that task has been given to his older brother. Aran's future lies in overseeing the farmstead and it's not a future he wants. Full review...
Fire & Ash by Jonathan Maberry
ALERT! Spoilers for early books in the Rot & Ruin series are scattered throughout this review. So if you haven't read the others, get thee over to my words about book one. Full review...
Untold by Sarah Rees Brennan
Kami Glass' hometown is about to become ground zero for a sorcerer fight for supremacy. And the sorcerers aren't bothered about humans becoming collateral damage - in fact, one faction wants a human sacrifice to increase the power of their magic. Full review...
