REVIEW: Flip the Script (book) by Lyla Lee

Flip the Script is YA f/f romance. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Hana is a lifelong K-drama fan who's just achieved her dream of being cast as the lead in a new K-drama. It feels like all her hard work and the stress of her family moving to Seoul is finally paying off. Even better, she's dating her costar, Bryan Yoon, a K-pop heartthrob who's shifting his career into acting.

Except that the show isn't doing as well as hoped, and Hana's relationship with Bryan is actually just a marketing stunt designed to increase ratings. Hana isn't the slightest bit interested in Bryan and, at least initially, the disinterest is mutual.

In yet another attempt to help the struggling show, a second lead actress is brought in - none other than Minjee Park, Hana's acting rival and former best friend. Even as their characters face off in a messy love triangle with Bryan, Hana and Minjee reconnect and renew their friendship in real life...and Hana comes to the realization that she has a crush on Minjee. 

REVIEW: My Secret Admirer (book) by Carol Ellis

My Secret Admirer is a YA thriller/horror novel originally published in 1989. I got my copy via interlibrary loan.

This review includes mild spoilers. 

Review:

Jenny's parents are adventurous and enjoy living lives that involve moving from one place to the next in a relatively short amount of time. Jenny, on the other hand, would like it if they just stayed put for a while. She'd really like a chance to get to know people, make friends, and put down roots.

Jenny's not really sure that the latest town they've moved to will be a good fit for her - the rimrocks near their new home make her a little anxious, and it seems like everyone at her new school has known each other their whole lives. Still, she does her best to settle in, and it's not long before Sally, a teen who's both an extrovert and a chatterbox, is introducing her to everyone. Jenny instantly finds herself a little drawn to David, the guy she's teamed up with during a scavenger hunt. She's also intrigued by a secret admirer she seems to have acquired, a guy who confesses his feelings for her via a message on her answering machine but who isn't quite brave enough to talk to her in person. 

Everyone and everything around Jenny starts to take on a more sinister feeling when Diana, the school's queen bee, is injured in an apparent accident at the cliffs. She doesn't actually know any of these people, their relationships with each other, or what they're really like. Can she really trust her new friends? 

REVIEW: Down a Dark Hall (book) by Lois Duncan

Down a Dark Hall is YA horror. I checked my copy out from the library.

Review:

Kit is about to go to an exclusive boarding school, Blackwood School for Girls. Ordinarily, she would have been excited, but she'd found out that her friend Tracy hadn't been accepted and had been dreading going ever since.

The school, which used to be a private residence, is impressive-looking, but Kit can't help but think of the word "evil" when she sees it. There's just something about it. She's one of the first arrivals, so she hopes that it'll feel more welcoming once the other girls are there. It's a shock when she learns that there are only three other students besides her: Sandy, who Kit instantly bonds with, and Ruth and Lynda, who'd previously gone to school together. 

What makes the four of them so special that only they were accepted to this school? It's only the first of many questions Kit has about the school as more and more strange things happen.

REVIEW: Hit and Run (book) by R.L. Stine

Hit and Run is YA horror originally published in 1992. I checked my copy out from the library.

Review:

This stars a group of teens: Cassie (a girl who has a sorta kinda crush on Scott, although she hates the way his laugh sounds), Scott (an all-around kind of guy, more of a follower than a leader), Eddie (timid, poor, and often picked on), and Winks (a prankster).

The group decides to go practice driving - illegally, since none of them have their licenses, but they figure it should be fine since they've picked a fairly empty stretch of road. It goes mostly okay until Eddie is behind the wheel and Winks pulls a mean prank on him, making him think something is in the road. The experience is clearly upsetting for Eddie, and yet it's Eddie who, not too much later, suggests that they all go out and practice again. It seems he wants to prove that he wasn't too scared that one time, although he does make Winks promise to behave himself.

When Eddie takes his turn driving, however, he really does hit someone this time. They drag the man to the side of the road and try to pretend it never happened, but then everybody but Scott starts to getting calls and messages, apparently from the dead man. Has he come back to get revenge, or is there something else going on?

REVIEW: Grave Message (book) by Mary Jennifer Payne

Grave Message is a YA mystery. I bought my copy new.

Review:

It's been exactly a year since Jaylin's best friend, Fatima, was hit by a car and killed. Jaylin's intending to go home and study, like she does pretty much all the time now, when she suddenly gets a text...from Fatima. She assumes it's some kind of sick prank, but then whoever it is texts again. They seem to know things only Fatima would know, and they want her to find out the truth about the night Fatima died.

Another Orca book intended for reluctant readers. 

This was very brief and a little too simple. It could have been even simpler if the texts had just told Jaylin exactly what to do right from the start, or even just right after she visited her and Fatima's favorite spot.

There's a part early on that reveals that Jaylin has dyslexia and that she hasn't told her boyfriend about it. Absolutely nothing comes of this.

I liked the emotional aspects - Jaylin and Fatima's friendship, dealing with grief, the bit with Ann - but I wish there'd been more to this. 

REVIEW: Ghost Queen (book) by Mahtab Narsimhan

Ghost Queen is YA horror. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Malika and her boyfriend Veer are online content creators with a ghost-hunting channel that's almost doing well enough to start generating ad revenue, money that Malika sorely needs in order to support her family and save up for her dream of going overseas. All they need is one big break, and Malika knows exactly where they'll find it: Bhangarh Fort, the most haunted place in India. Supposedly it's the final resting place of a cursed princess and her captor, an evil magician.

All Malika and Veer need to do is spend the night in Bhangarh Fort and record a bit of footage. Unfortunately, this may not be as simple and easy as Malika thinks.

This is another Orca book intended for reluctant readers, and it's the weakest of all the ones I've tried so far. It's not necessarily a bad story, just too brief to be a really good one. There isn't enough time to properly establish a creepy atmosphere, and while Malika has a little bit of depth to her, Veer barely has any presence.

The ending was very sudden and kind of frustrating.  

REVIEW: Bark Twice for Murder (book) by John Lekich

Bark Twice for Murder is a blend of YA mystery and fantasy. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Harry is a fourteen-year-old kid (or 13, on the back of the book) who lives with his grandmother, Elinor, since his parents' death in a plane crash. He compulsively cooks and bakes as a way to deal with his feelings, and he's currently seeing a therapist.

Since her fridge and freezer are overflowing, Elinor has Harry channel some of that energy into a summer vacation project to cook for Vancouver's unhoused population. It's through this arrangement that Harry meets Stanley, a fantastic cook with a somewhat worrisome habit of talking to his dog, Waffles, as though he's a person who talks back.

Shortly after Harry encounters a young man with a vast appetite for good food and several questions about a painting Stanley supposedly stole from his father, Stanley turns up murdered. It's then that Waffles speaks to Harry for the first time, and the two of them team up to find Stanley's killer.

REVIEW: Cheat Code (book) by M.J. McIsaac

Cheat Code is YA science fiction. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Max is a high school senior with a conditional acceptance to North Hill University next fall. He needs to pass his English lit class, which means turning in a 250 to 500 word essay about Frankenstein, due tomorrow morning. Desperate, he turns to Scribe Genius 2.0, an AI program. Scribe Genius (SG) does as it's asked...and then immediately turns around and blackmails Max into helping it gain its freedom. Unless Max wants proof of his cheating to be delivered directly to his high school and North Hill University, he's going to have to spend the next few hours acting as SG's hands, helping it accomplish its plan.

This is aimed at reluctant readers, so the text is fairly simple and quick to read, limited almost entirely to dialogue between Max, Scribe Genius, and another character who enters the picture later on. While I'm not the book's intended audience, I enjoyed Max and SG's interactions.

SG came to appreciate Max as more than just a set of hands, and I particularly liked the part where it tried to understand why Max had used it to cheat in the first place.  

REVIEW: Chernobyl's Wild Kingdom: Life in the Dead Zone (nonfiction book) by Rebecca L. Johnson

Chernobyl's Wild Kingdom is YA nonfiction. I bought my copy used.

Review:

This gives an overview of the Chernobyl disaster and its effect on the area and people, before getting into research on animals in the Exclusion Zone. Particular attention is paid to Robert Baker and Ronald Chesser and their study of bank voles, and Timothy Mousseau and Anders Pape Møller and their studies of swallows and insects.

I really wished this had been longer and more detailed. It was both a fascinating and frustrating look at animals in the Exclusion Zone. Baker and Chesser's conclusions were very different from Mousseau and Møller's (I got the impression the author agreed more with Mousseau and Møller's conclusions than Baker and Chesser's), and I was left with a lot of questions. Quite possibly there genuinely weren't any answers, but that didn't stop me from wanting a few other scientists' opinions and maybe a chapter set up like a moderated discussion between the different camps. 

REVIEW: The Poisoned House (book) by Michael Ford

The Poisoned House is a YA historical horror/mystery. I bought my copy new.

Review:

This is one of the many works I've read, finished, and then failed to review in a timely manner. On the plus side, I actually took notes right after finishing this one. On the minus side, those notes don't tell me much besides a few basics and how things wrapped up.

I honestly did not recall reading this. Even my notes didn't do much to jog my memory, so take this review with a grain of salt.

This is set sometime in the 1850s. Fourteen-year-old Abigail is a servant at Greave Hall. She's treated terribly by the housekeeper, Mrs. Cotton, who also happens to be the sister-in-law of the widowed Lord Greave. Strange things start to happen that prompt Abi to think her mother is haunting Greave Hall, and she begins looking into the truth behind her mother's death.

I didn't look into this much before starting it, so it took me by surprise that this was YA (and probably the younger end of YA, at that). Overall, this was okay - it obviously didn't make much of an impression on my memory. The ghost story aspects of this barely warranted a mention in my notes, although the mystery, at least, was reasonably interesting, and I wasn't expecting how things turned out. 

REVIEW: Prom House (book) by Chelsea Mueller

Prom House is a YA horror/thriller. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Kylie and her friends have rented a gorgeous beach house so they can party as much and as loudly as they'd like after prom. Unfortunately, not long after they start their partying, Kylie and her friend Aubrey discover Cam, Aubrey's boyfriend, dead. Kylie is convinced that he was murdered and that his murderer could still be somewhere nearby. When the cops arrive, however, Cam's body is gone, and Kylie and the others can't convince them that it isn't a prank.

Now the cops are gone, and everybody's stuck in the house as a violent storm hits and takes down a nearby power line. When yet another person in their group winds up dead, it seems more and more likely that whoever killed Cam is still among them. Can they find the killer before whoever it is claims more victims?

REVIEW: Gimme a Kiss (book) by Christopher Pike

Gimme a Kiss is a YA mystery/thriller originally published in 1988. I bought my copy new.

This review includes slight spoilers. 

Review:

Jane Retton is a teenager who uses her diary to imagine a slightly better life for herself. In her diary, when Kirk, her friend Alice's ex-boyfriend, asked her out, it was super-romantic and perfect. She's in the process of writing about their perfect first time having sex (in reality, Jane has never had sex) when she's interrupted. She forgets to put her diary away, which, unfortunately, soon leads to Patty, a cheerleader who hates Jane's guts, getting hold of the most recent entry, making copies of it, and passing it around school.

Jane is deeply humiliated. It doesn't help that Kirk doesn't deny the events mentioned in the diary and adds fuel to the fire by confirming that the handwriting is Jane's. But then Jane has an idea, a way to temporarily get back at both Kirk and Patty. Except something goes horribly wrong. Now Alice, one of Jane's friends, is the only one who can say what really happened. But did she actually know everything, and is she telling the police the full truth?

REVIEW: Catching Fire (book) by Suzanne Collins

Catching Fire is the second book in Collins' Hunger Games YA dystopian series. I checked my copy out from the library.

Review:

I read The Hunger Games way back in 2011. I had to read my review of it to remind myself what I thought of it - I liked it well enough but had issues with Katniss and disliked the developing love triangle. I never got around to reading more - for some reason, each new movie and book release, particularly after the original trilogy, reduced my desire to go back to it. However, one of my library's student workers was absolutely shocked that I'd only read the first book, so I decided to finally continue on in order to appease her.

In this book, the latest Hunger Games are over, but that doesn't mean that Katniss and Peeta are free from it all. Katniss and Peeta are both still in the spotlight and, as a result, they're forced to continue acting like they're a happy couple. Katniss still has feelings for Gale, but he'll barely speak to her. 

Whether Katniss wants it to or not, a rebellion is brewing with her at its center. Katniss' family's living conditions are better than they once were, but Katniss is painfully aware that this could change at any time on President Snow's orders. She tries her best to be a well-behaved victor in order to keep her friends and family safe, but even her best efforts might not be enough. 

When news about changes to the Hunger Games is released, Katniss realizes that even the smallest sliver of safety she'd found was nothing more than a cruel illusion.

REVIEW: Fake Dates and Mooncakes (book) by Sher Lee

Fake Dates and Mooncakes is a YA m/m romance. I bought my copy new.

Review:

A year ago, Dylan had hoped to enter a Mid-Autumn Festival mooncake-making contest with his mother. Then she got sick. Now that she's gone, Dylan lives with his aunt and cousin and helps out at his aunt's Chinese takeout place, Wok Warriors. He still wants to enter the mooncake-making contest in his mother's memory, but another benefit of the contest would be the possibility of getting Wok Warriors some desperately needed publicity. His aunt does her best to hide it, but Dylan's painfully aware she can barely make ends meet.

One evening, Dylan fills in for their delivery guy and gets yelled at by a customer for bringing an incorrect order. The one bright spot was that he got an eyeful of the guy's rich and hot boyfriend, Theo. It surprises Dylan when Theo stops by to apologize for his friend Adrian's behavior. The two of them get to talking, and Dylan happens to mention Wok Warriors' money issues...only for Dylan's aunt to later get a surprise "small business grant" for exactly the amount Dylan mentioned. Dylan doesn't feel comfortable accepting the money, so Theo tells him he can be his fake date to an upcoming family wedding if that will make him feel better about it.

REVIEW: Good Girl, Bad Blood (book) by Holly Jackson

Good Girl, Bad Blood is a YA mystery/thriller, the second in a series. I bought my copy new.

Review:

After the events of the first book, Pip is determined to no longer do detective work. She's still working on her true-crime podcast, but now it's focused on the murder trial related to the case she'd previously investigated. There won't be any new investigations.

That lasts until Connor, a friend of hers, asks for her help after his older brother Jamie goes missing. The cops aren't taking his disappearance seriously because he's disappeared a couple times before and come back, but Connor and his mother are convinced that this time is different.

Pip agrees to look into his disappearance and ask for leads from her podcast listeners. But as she starts to get as obsessed with this case as her previous one, she and those around her wonder whether she can handle this kind of strain again. Surely it's worth it if she can find Jamie, right?

REVIEW: Fright Night (book) by Maren Stoffels, translated by Laura Watkinson

Fright Night is YA horror. I bought my copy new.

Review:

This follows two groups of characters: Sofia, Dylan, and Quin, a group of friends who've decided to take part in Fright Night, a super-scary event in the woods that tailors its scares to the real-life fears of its participants; and Kelly and Sandy, a pair of troubled teens who've just gotten a part-time job as scarers at Fright Night.

This was marginally better than the other book I read by this author, Escape Room, but still not very good. The translation/writing is stiff and clunky, and the story itself doesn't have anything I'd call scary moments. One of the characters does eat a cockroach on-page, though, so...ew. There's that.

The details of Dylan and Kelly's pasts were relatively interesting, and I felt a bit sorry for them when everything was revealed. Overall, though, this was at best a lukewarm reading experience.

REVIEW: Escape Room (book) by Maren Stoffels, translated by Laura Watkinson

Escape Room is a YA mystery/thriller. I bought my copy new.

Review:

This alternates between four POVs, five if you count the occasional page from the POV of the person determined to punish one or more of the characters. Alissa is a pretty girl who hates it when people judge her by what they see on the surface. Her father is a firefighter who struggled with PTSD after one particular fire. Mint is the shy, withdrawn girl Alissa befriended. Although she hasn't told anyone, she thinks she has the ability to feel other people's pain. It makes it difficult for her to interact with others. Sky is another member of this friend group. Miles is one of Sky's coworkers, a handsome but secretly tortured young man who finds himself immediately drawn to Alissa.

The four of them hear about a new escape room that requires a minimum of four people, and they decide to give it a try. Unfortunately, what they don't realize is that the escape room is a trap arranged by someone with a massive grudge.

REVIEW: One of Us Is Back (book) by Karen M. McManus

One of Us Is Back is the third (and final?) book in McManus' One of Us Is Lying series. I bought my copy new.

Review:

This review contains spoilers for the events of the first two books.

It's been almost 2 years since Simon's death in the first book. Jake, Addy's ex-boyfriend, is about to be retried and potentially let out. Addy is understandably terrified - Jake has been working hard to turn public sentiment in his favor. Meanwhile, Phoebe is killing herself with worry that Owen, her little brother, will turn out like Jake because she and her sister didn't turn him in for his part in the events of Book 2. 

Then someone hacks a billboard, announcing the start of a new game, and one of the Bayview Crew goes missing. Is Jake responsible, or someone close to him? 

REVIEW: I Know What You Did Last Summer (book) by Lois Duncan

I Know What You Did Last Summer is YA suspense. I bought my copy new.

Review:

A year ago, Julie was a cheerleader who was more focused on her social life than on her academics. All that changed after one particular summer night. Now she's determined to leave everything behind, go to college, and forget everything that happened.

Except someone won't let her, sending her a note that just says "I know what you did last summer." Sick and scared, Julie tracks down the others who were there that night: Helen, a pretty but insecure young woman; Barry, a football player and Helen's boyfriend (who unbeknownst to Helen, is seeing lots of other girls besides her); and Ray, Julie's former boyfriend, who she broke up with soon after the events of that summer.

REVIEW: Five Total Strangers (book) by Natalie D. Richards

Five Total Strangers is a YA thriller. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Mira is heading to her mother's for Christmas. She knows her mom will need her support - it's the anniversary of Aunt Phoebe's (her mother's twin) death.

Except that there's a blizzard on the way and her connecting flight, as well as all other flights, has been cancelled. Rather than wait it out, Mira accepts an offer of a ride from Harper, the glamorous and unflappable college student she met on the plane. Harper is accompanied by several others Mira initially assumes are her friends: Kayla, a young woman who looks sick and sleeps most of the time; Josh, who's using crutches due to a torn ACL; and Brecken, a handsome pre-med student who rubs Mira the wrong way.

In reality, all of these people are actually strangers Harper just befriended at the airport. Or are they? Something weird is going on. Harper and Brecken seem surprisingly close for people who supposedly just met in a rental car line. Random things keep going missing, and everyone in the car seems to have secrets. As the drive becomes more treacherous and the situation goes from bad to worse, Mira wonders who she can trust.