When a social shift at school leaves Anna without her best friend, she turns to books for companionship. When she feels pressure in Chinese class because she doesn’t know as much as the other kids, books are her refuge. But as the people in Anna’s life begin to experience troubles of their own, she learns that sometimes, just like the heroes in her stories, she must step out into the unknown and offer help. Sometimes, Anna learns, this is precisely what makes for the best friendships.
Anna charmed me from the first page. I loved the descriptions of the stories she read, and though I hadn’t read all of them myself, it was easy to understand why the stories mattered to her. I liked that she found herself faced with other people’s needs. Reading is awesome, but sometimes it isolates us from others. And when people in Anna’s life needed things, it drew her out of her books and allowed opportunities for her to have relationships with them. I loved the sweet, subtle way the author explores learning how to be a good friend.
I also liked the sense of community in the story. Anna’s class experience felt very real, and her relationship with the elderly man her mother cares for also felt authentic and added a lot to the story.
Cultural Elements
Anna and her family are Chinese American. She takes Chinese classes with other kids her age, but finds it frustrating not to know as much as they do because her mother insists on speaking English to her at home.
Profanity/Crude Language Content
None.
Romance/Sexual Content None.
Spiritual Content Brief references to Chinese traditions.
Violent Content At one point a man bangs on the door of Anna’s family’s apartment looking for his daughter, Anna’s friend. The girls are scared, but Anna’s parents send the man away.
In Orpheus Chanson’s world, geniuses and prodigies are no longer born or honed through hard work. Instead, procedures to induce Acquired Savant Abilities (ASAs) are now purchased by the privileged. And Orpheus’s father holds the copyright to the ASA procedure.
Zimri Robinson, a natural musical prodigy, is a “plebe”–a worker at the enormous warehouse that supplies an on-line marketplace that has supplanted all commerce. Her grueling schedule and her grandmother’s illness can’t keep her from making music–even if it is illegal.
Orpheus and Zimri are not supposed to meet. He is meant for greatness; she is not. But sometimes, rules are meant to be broken. Here is a thriller, love story, and social experiment that readers will find gripping–and terrifying.
My Review
Two things really stood out to me in this novel. First I love the way the author used musical terminology to describe the world from Zimri’s point-of-view. Because of her affinity for music, this made perfect sense and added a lot of unusual, vivid detail to the setting and characters. I loved that.
I also really enjoyed all the pop culture references tucked away within the story. Each one that I found felt like a bit of a nod to the artist or industry. I literally laughed out loud when Orhpheus’s dad says, “Isn’t it ironic, don’t you think?” And when Taylor Swift made headlines.
In some of the dystopian boy-meets-girl stories where one is the wealthy elite and the other is from the wrong side of the tracks stories I’ve read lately, I felt like the hero and heroine weren’t well-matched. I’d find myself liking one way better than the other or wondering why on earth they wanted to be together in the first place. Not so with Gifted. I loved that Orpheus had such a strong character in his own right and that he had focus and dreams outside the box his parents wanted to carve out for him. I loved that his family weren’t just cardboard characters, too. They had real conflicts with each other and with him that made the story even more complex.
I felt the same way about Zimri. I loved her musical talent, and that there was so much more to her. Her grandmother cracked me up and made me miss my grandmother.
I think fans of Feuds by Avery Hastings will find a gritty dystopian universe here that rivals the Priors and Imps society of that series. Fans of Ally Condie’s Matched series will love the struggle for art and freedom in Gifted. Music lovers will enjoy the pop culture references and imaginative description of the future of underground music. In short, Gifted is a story with a lot to offer. Definitely a great pick for any summer reading list.
Content
Cultural Elements I love the way the author uses character names throughout the story. The hero is named Orpheus, like the poet and musician from Greek mythology. Zimri means “song” in Hebrew. Orpheus’s sister is named Alouette, or “bird” in French, and she’s compared to a caged bird because of her comatose state.
The author describes Orpheus and Alouette as having olive skin and dark hair. Zimri has curly hair and dark skin. Orpheus’s girlfriend Arabella has a surgery on her eyelids at the beginning of the story so that they look wider. Orpheus condemns the fact that her promotional team forced her to have the surgery to change her appearance.
Profanity/Crude Language Content Mild profanity used infrequently. Some crude words used infrequently.
Romance/Sexual Content A few brief kisses between a boy and girl. At one point Zimri’s boss makes her feel uncomfortable with a comment about making a good team. He places his hand on her thigh.
Spiritual Content None.
Violent Content Zimri’s father died by suicide years before the story begins. He jumped from a bridge. Zimri identified his body later in a hospital. A boy wrecks his car and nearly hits a woman standing in the road.
If someone violates the law, enforcers punish them with a surgery that damages their brains and remove memories or abilities.
Drug Content Orpheus and his friends drink Juse, which alters their behavior similarly to the way alcohol does. After Orpheus disappears, rumors circulate stating that he had drug problems or a Juse addiction.
A nurse sedates a girl prior to involuntary surgery.
Note: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.
About H. A. Swain
Heather Swain lives in a crooked house in Brooklyn, New York with her husband, two children, a barkless dog, and two rescue cats. She is the author of four novels for young adults, two kids craft books, two novels for grown ups, and numerous short stories, personal essays, and non-fiction articles.
The mysterious Cloaked Bandit lives in the forest of Wessex, robbing its nobility to feed peasants displaced when the current Lord usurped the lands. Now he combs the forest seeking the identity of the Bandit, unaware that in fact, she is the rightful heir to Wessex.
When the Cloaked Bandit robs a neighboring noble, Lord Collin recognizes the girl as his childhood friend. Concerned for her safety, he convinces her to stay a week in his home, far away from Lord Wessex’s soldiers. As he learns the terrible truths that led to Juliana’s impoverished circumstances, he vows to do something to help her. Her compassion for the poor moves him, and the injustice of her father’s death stirs him to outrage. But before Collin can enact a plan to right the wrongs in Juliana’s life, she slips away, her feelings for him suddenly more than she can bear. Collin pursues her, but if Lord Wessex finds her before Collin does, his love will be lost forever.
I liked the Robin Hood-ish element of the Cloaked Bandit, and the way Juliana’s band of thieves operates like a family. Fans of the series will remember Lord Collin as one of the three knights who competed for Lady Rosemarie’s hand in marriage. I enjoyed the fact that this story followed him, but I found it difficult to connect with his character. He spent a lot of time obsessing about Juliana’s or his sister’s feelings. I wanted to feel more of the warrior-knight in him, and that stronger side didn’t show until very late in the story. I also found his flippant attitude about his wealth to be a bit strange. It was okay that he started out feeling that way, but I guess I wanted to see more maturity emerge on that front? I don’t know.
Romance dominates this medieval tale. I lost track of how many times Collin or Juliana experienced butterflies in their bellies over being near each other. I had a hard time really buying into exactly why they felt this powerful attraction toward each other. It seemed like the physical attraction overshadowed the development of their relationship. It’s definitely one of those swoony, sweet stories, which is great. I think I just wanted a little more bite or something to balance out that sweetness.
If you like Melanie Dickerson’s medieval fairy tale novels, you’ll want to check out this series by Jody Hedlund. Though A Daring Sacrifice isn’t a true retelling of the story of Robin Hood, it definitely has some similarities. If you’ve already read and enjoyed A Daring Sacrifice, and you’re looking for another story with a bit of a feminist spin on Robin Hood, try Outlaws of Sherwood by Robin McKinley.
Cultural Elements
None.
Profanity/Crude Language Content
None.
Romance/Sexual Content Lots of description of tingling hands and fluttering tummies when Juliana and Collin are in close proximity to each other. A few kisses. At a midnight picnic (with a chaperone) a man places his head in a lady’s lap.
Spiritual Content Juliana wrestles with the morality of her life as a thief. She knows her father raised her to do right, and that stealing is wrong. She looks for the courage to find another way to stand against her uncle. She prays in times of need. One young woman ends the story shaken and disillusioned about love and marriage. She joins a convent.
Violent Content Juliana recalls finding pieces of her father’s body after her uncle tortured him to death. Not a lot of gory detail, but even the straight descriptions are pretty harsh. Something about a young girl finding her father’s body in pieces just can’t be anything other than disturbing to me, no matter how few details there are beyond that. Juliana’s uncle captures a young thief and tortures him in an attempt to find the location of the Cloaked Bandit. The boy suffers broken bones and having his nails removed. The torture itself isn’t described, only his injuries afterward.
Juliana’s uncle arranges to have a young woman burned to death. Later, he arranges to have a man tortured to death.
Juliana describes the servant uprising that led to her father’s death. Collin describes another battle in which soldiers and civilians are injured or killed.
Drug Content
Servants give ale and wine to guests at a dinner party. Collin and Juliana both drink ale.
Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher through the BookSneeze.com® book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”
Those are the rules Natalia must live by under the protective dome. Radiation and violent infected will kill anyone who ventures outside. Then Nat spots the impossible through the curved surface of the dome: survivors on the outside. When soldiers seize one of the men, Nat wrestles with conflicting desires. Should she find him and learn more about the world outside or keep her head down as her grandmother always admonishes her? When the outsider shares an impossible gift with Nat—a picture of her that her parents carried on their last mission outside the dome—she begins to fear that her leaders keep dark secrets.
As soon as I saw the premise of this book, I knew I had to read it. A close friend in junior high school and I used to talk about writing a story about a girl who lived in a bio dome and a boy from the outside. I love that Melanie McFarlane has done it!
The story moves very quickly. Sometimes I liked this, because it felt like things were always happening. Other times it felt rushed, and I wished for more pauses to stop and examine the story world or to better transition from one scene to the next. Sometimes I lost track of the setting because things happened so quickly. I’d think Nat was in the hall, but then suddenly she’d flop onto her bed, and I’d be like, wait, what?
I liked the development of the romance. I liked that Nat finds herself caught between two boys who passionately believe in their politics, and that her own political beliefs emerge independently. I kind of kept rooting for Jak (What is it about the perfect best friend that always makes me want him to emerge as the hero?) even though I liked Evan. There were definitely some twists that kept me turning pages where it came to the romantic elements.
Over all, I thought this book was okay. It didn’t blow me away, but I wasn’t sorry I read it. I think fans of Matched by Allie Condie might really enjoy There Once Were Stars. For more information about the story, check out my interview with author Melanie McFarlane.
Cultural Elements
Everyone appears to be pretty homogenous within the culture of the dome.
Profanity/Crude Language Content
Mild profanity used infrequently.
Romance/Sexual Content Boy/girl kissing. A few times Nat stretches out on a bed with a boy.
Spiritual Content None.
Violent Content Nat’s parents died on an expedition outside the dome. Their bodies had been mutilated. Few details given about the incident. A disease turns people violent and causes their bodies to decompose while they’re still alive. (Sounds like some kind of zombie virus type deal.) Nat witnesses a few people infected with the disease. A man purposely infects himself as part of a murder/suicide plan.
Drug Content
None.
Note: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.
Seventeen year-old Carrington Hale is at the top of her class, a sure pick for some lucky man on her day of Choosing. Only, no one chooses her. Devastated and forced to leave her family behind, Carrington joins the masses of other unworthy, unchosen girls to serve as Lints, laborers whose only value lies in completing the menial tasks assigned to them.
Authorities are troubled by the murder of several Lint workers. The brutal killer must be stopped before he undermines the Authority of the Law and upsets the people. To reassure the people, when widowed leader Isaac makes the unorthodox request to choose a second bride, the ruling leaders ask him to choose a girl from among the Lints. And Carrington realizes this may be the second chance she’s been hoping for.
I liked that this wasn’t strictly a dystopian story. It definitely had all the elements of one, but it’s also the story of the pursuit of a serial killer. I’ve never seen a mash-up of those two genres before, and I think it really worked.
That said, I’m super squeamish to violence, particularly anything sexual or creepy, so this was not an easy read for me. If you have similar sensitivities or abuse history, consider this a trigger warning. You might want to steer clear of this one. The details are limited to a few scenes, but it definitely creeped me out.
I enjoyed Carrington and Remko’s characters a lot, though. She’s a great strong yet sensitive heroine. Remko definitely fits that strong silent type, so he definitely had me won over. I loved the banter between him and his friend Helms.
Since this is a Tyndale book, I expected a strong spiritual element, and there definitely is one. I felt like the story was a bit all humans are good, it’s the system that tries to tell you otherwise. I didn’t think it translated well to Christian doctrine. That said, often Christian fantasy follows the thread of a Creator God and leaves out the Jesus elements of the faith, so maybe I’m being too strict in my interpretation. But that was my opinion. For more on that, see the Spiritual Content section below.
Profanity/Crude Language Content
None.
Romance/Sexual Content Brief kisses.
Spiritual Content Carrington’s people believe a sort of perverted version of the Bible, handed down to them by a historical leader. According to the rules, women are unworthy second-class citizens to be helpers and laborers. A spiritual revolutionary named Aaron challenges the ideas of the current leadership, telling his followers, you are blameless, perfect, worthy.
The twisted version of scripture used by leadership to control the populace reminded me a little bit of the book used by leadership in Delirium by Lauren Oliver. I found Aaron’s teaching to be really more Unitarian than strictly Christian, if that makes sense. I felt like the idea that we are blameless and perfect sort of flies in the face of the Christian doctrine that it’s only by Jesus’ sacrifice that we are found blameless.
Violent Content and Trigger Warning An assassin slashes the throat of a guard before killing himself.
A man at first woes his potential bride with kindness, but soon turns to threats and abuse.
A serial killer has been killing women laborers using bleach internally and externally. Some scenes feature the killer with a bound victim who begs for help.
Rhona remembers dying on the battlefield as Camus held her. When she wakes in a chamber, far from the battlefield, she learns a startling truth: she’s not the original Rhona. She’s a clone.
She races home to a hidden military base where her team of resistance fighters waits for her to lead them against the Machines who’ve chosen to end humanity as a logical solution to establishing world peace. There, she must convince her former allies and the man who first loved Rhona that she’s capable of leading them in a war for humanity’s survival.
I liked that this book paired the elements of a robot/artificial intelligence uprising and the morality/personhood of a human clone together into one fast-paced, fascinating tale. I liked that the plot hinged on whether Rhona could prove her value, not just as a military leader, but as a human being.
I wanted to see that idea juxtaposed against the value of artificial intelligence to kind of explore at what point a machine gains value as an independent life form, if ever. I just thought that would have been interesting—to have a clone on one side of the battle lines compared to AI on the other. Instead, the machines, though highly intelligent, remain largely personality-less, which is okay. However, for the directions the plot pursues, it made sense.
For some reason I really struggled with Camus’s name. I kept forgetting what it was and then wasn’t sure how to pronounce it, which I found a little distracting. I liked that he had this really strong, strategy-oriented approach to life. Rhona’s strengths and weaknesses were very much opposite to his. The fact that they so obviously needed each other and that together they could be such effective leaders definitely amped up the tension between them. Everyone wrestled with whether or not to allow Rhona to resume her former post as commander.
Another total gem in Machinations—the dialogue. I loved Rhona’s snappy one-liners and the way she often said completely absurd things to diffuse tension or make a point. The way she interacted with other characters made her believable and distinct, so I immediately liked her.
What I really didn’t like? The cover. Nothing about that image connects me to the story. I wanted to see the fierce Alaskan winter landscape, the machines. Something like that. The image of the girl on the cover doesn’t look like a warrior back from the dead. I don’t think I’d have picked this up off the shelf in a bookstore.
If you liked These Broken Stars by Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner or Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, give Machinations a read. The humor is toned down a little bit compared to Illuminae. The balance of romance to sci-fi reminded me a lot of These Broken Stars.
Cultural Elements One of Rhona’s allies is a German man named Ulrich. He expresses himself in German several times, which I enjoyed. I loved it because I actually understood a lot without needing the context or explanation in the narrative. Other than that, most of the named characters appear to be either white American or European. A Japanese doctor treats Rhona’s injuries, and he speaks to the leadership on her behalf. The narrative describes one woman as having dreads and the appearance of an Amazon warrior.
Profanity/Crude Language Content
Moderate profanity used moderately frequently.
Romance/Sexual Content Camus tests Rhona, asking her about various memories, including the last time they made love. For two sentences-ish, she briefly remembers (more the romance of it than the particulars.)
Spiritual Content Vague references to prayer. Because Rhona is a clone, the story delves into whether or not she is actually the real Rhona. Is she a slightly different person with the same inherent value, or merely a copy, a scientific abomination? The story discusses some issues of morality concerning human cloning.
Violent Content When the story opens, Rhona dies of a gunshot wound. Rhona and her allies fight the armed machines. Later, one of Rhona’s allies talks about a former capture by the machines in which he was brutally tortured. He shows scars on his arms from electric burns.
Drug Content
After battles or other trauma, medical staff administer medicine to manage pain and hysteria.
Note: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.
