Friday Five: Upcoming YA

I just finished reading Allegiant by Veronica Roth. If you’ve maybe been hiding under a rock for the past few years, Allegiant is the third installment in Roth’s Divergent trilogy, a thrilling series set in a dystopian Chicago where all citizens are separated into factions based on their most prevalent personality traits. Aside from causing a seemingly endless stream of tears, reading Allegiant has also gotten me thinking about what other books I’m most looking forward to, particularly in the young adult genre. So here are my most anticipated young adult books to be released (in order of release date, of course!):

• Going Rogue by Robin Benway (Also Known As #2) - January 14, 2014
• Hollow City by Ransom Riggs (Miss Peregrine #2) - January 14, 2014
• The Infinite Sea by Rick Yancey (The Fifth Wave #2) - May 6, 2014
• Isla and the Happily Ever After by Stephanie Perkins - May 13, 2014
• Lair of Dreams by Libba Bray (The Diviners #2) - August 5, 2014

All of these books are sequels or, I guess, pseudo-sequels in the case of Isla and the Happily Ever After. It’s just so easy to get caught up in young adult series nowadays. They tend to be fast-paced, exciting, and romantic - a perfect storm to get readers wanting more. It’s hard to say which of these titles I’m MOST excited for, but if forced, I would probably choose Lair of Dreams by Libba Bray, the second book in The Diviners series. The Diviners was released in September 2012  and follows spunky teenager Evie O’Neill as she is sucked into a world of murder, evil, and supernatural abilities in 1920s New York City. I'm really excited to see what happens in Lair of Dreams after Evie goes public with her supernatural ability.

The first releases I'm looking forward to are in January of next year which seems too far off. I can't imagine waiting for August!

Review: Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

448 pages, will be published on September 10, 2013 by St. Martin’s Griffin

Cath Avery doesn’t like change. She doesn’t like starting her freshman year of college away from home. She doesn’t like that her twin sister and built-in best friend, Wren, is too busy drinking excessively and fraternizing with fraternities to room with her. She doesn’t like that her mother - the mother who left ten years earlier without another word - suddenly wants back into their lives. And she doesn’t like being away from her sometimes manic, but always loving father. Cath doesn’t like change, but she loves Simon Snow, the magical book series that has been a constant in her life for as long as she can remember. When she worries that her roommate, Reagan, hates her or that Reagan’s boyfriend Levi hangs around too much, Catch dives into the world of Simon Snow fan fiction, working on the magnum opus that she’s been writing for two years.

Simon Snow may bear some parallels to another famous boy wizard, but Cath’s story is unlike any I’ve read before. Catch is smart, brilliant even, but anxious and often incapable of dealing with life’s curve balls. When Cath’s handsome fiction-writing partner betrays her, she fumbles without fighting back. When she finally realizes that Levi has been hanging around for her and not her roommate, Cath doesn’t know how to react. But eventually she learns to allow the people around her, including Levi, to help when she needs it most. As Cath and Levi grow close, Cath’s other friendships and relationships waver. I found this wavering to be the best part of Fangirl. Because Cath’s life isn’t just a love story, or a story that ends when she gets into a relationship. Her life is about the strain that college puts on her relationship with Wren. It’s about her father’s work, his absentmindedness, and his devotion to his daughters. It’s about her passion for writing, her fear of creating something new, and her relationship with the fictional characters that she’s known for more than half of her life.

Fangirl can go from laugh-out-loud funny to tear-jerky within a page. It’s immensely readable because Cath is such a complex, relatable character. I felt her anxiety and fear, her joy and uncertainty as I turned the pages. And I couldn’t wait to see how her story, and Simon’s, ended.

Rating: 5/5