1) "Cinder" by Marissa Meyer
Although it packs in more genres than comfortably fit, this series opener and debut offers a high coolness factor by rewriting Cinderella as a kickass mechanic in a plague-ridden future.
Long after World War IV, with a plague called letumosis ravaging all six Earthen countries, teenage Cinder spends her days in New Beijing doing mechanical repairs to earn money for her selfish adoptive mother. Her two sisters will attend Prince Kai’s ball wearing elegant gowns; Cinder, hated because she’s a cyborg, won’t be going. But then the heart-thumpingly cute prince approaches Cinder’s business booth as a customer, starting a chain of events that links her inextricably with the prince and with a palace doctor who’s researching letumosis vaccines. This doctor drafts cyborgs as expendable test subjects; none survive. Cinder’s personal tenacity and skill, as well as Meyer’s deft application of "Cinderella" nuggets—Cinder’s ill-fitting prosthetic foot (loseable on palace steps); a rusting, obsolete car colored pumpkin-orange—are riveting. Diluting them is a space-fantasy theme about mind-controlling Lunars from the moon, which unfortunately becomes the central plot. A connection between Cinder’s forgotten childhood and wicked Lunar Queen Levana is predictable from early on.
Despite the simplistic and incongruous-feeling telepathic-enslaver theme, readers will return for the next installment in this sharp, futuristic "Cinderella" tale. (Science fiction/fairy tale. 12-15)
2) "Year of Wonders" by Geraldine Brooks
Painstaking re-creation of 17th-century England, swallowed by over-the-top melodramatics: a wildly uneven first novel by an Australian-born journalist.
The Year of the title is 1665: the date of the devastating bubonic epidemic chronicled in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. Brooks’s tale, framed by reveries set a year and a half after the plague burns itself out (in “Leaf-Fall, 1666”), is narrated by Anna Frith, an earnest and highly intelligent young widow who buries her own multiple bereavements (first her gentle husband, later their two small sons) in work, aiding her (unnamed) village rector’s wife in treating the sick with medicinal herbs and traditional cures. Brooks is at her best in lyrical, precise descriptions of country landscapes and village customs, and makes something very appealing and (initially) quite credible out of Anna’s wary hunger for learning and innate charitable kindness. But the novel goes awry when the panic of contagion isolates her village from neighboring hamlets, a forthright young woman and her distracted aunt are accused of witchcraft and hunted down, and Anna’s drunken, violent father, who profits as a gravedigger for hire, resorts to providing corpses that will require his services. The excesses continue, as Anna’s stepmother, crazed with grief, seeks vengeance against rector Michael Mompellion and his saintly wife (and Anna’s mentor and soulmate) Elinor, and rise to a feverish pitch when Anna, having found a new innocent victim to nurture and raise, offends the powerful Bradford family and must flee to safety—ending up (in a borderline-risible Epilogue) in North Africa in the sanctuary of a kindly “Bey’s” harem. It’s all more than a bit much: Thomas Hardy crossed with Erskine Caldwell, with more than a whiff of Jane Eyrein Anna’s conflicted devotion to the brooding, Mr. Rochester–like Mompellion.
3) "Firelight" by Sophie Jordan
4) "Dead Beautiful" by Yvonne Woon
Anyone who reads knows that vampires are in. But this hefty novel takes a new and unconventional look at the undead, focusing on story and interesting characters and leaving gore and mayhem hidden in the background. Renée Winters is a sunny California teenager who has a rude awakening when both her parents die mysteriously in the woods. Suddenly in the care of a grandfather she doesn’t know, she’s forced to leave her friends, her school and everything she knows behind. Sent to an exclusive and very private academy in a desolate part of Maine, she makes new friends, discovers new abilities and cannot help but be drawn to a handsome and enigmatic loner, Dante. Feeling as Alice must have when she fell down the rabbit hole, Renée keeps trying to find answers to questions she’s not even sure are real, struggling to reconcile past and present if she is to have any hope of a future. Well written, intriguing and, above all, different, this story ends with much to explore in what one hopes will be swiftly forthcoming sequels. (Paranormal romance. 12 & up)
Book One of Three
5) "Everneath" by Brodi Ashton
Ashton's debut is a melancholy, modern retelling of Greek underworld myths.
Nikki Beckett regains lucidity after a 100-year Feed in the Everneath. Cole, the immortal Everliving who brought her there willingly to feed on her emotions and life, is delighted that she has emerged from the Feed intact and offers her the chance to become an Everliving herself. Instead, Nikki chooses to go back and deliver the goodbyes she neglected when she initially fled the living world, though she cannot tell her loved ones where she has spent the past few months, which seriously hampers the repairing of relationships. Additionally, she has only six months before the Tunnels, the darkest part of the Everneath, claim her as a battery until the underworld drains her out of existence. As readers see her trying to find how to say goodbye, flashbacks reveal why she was in enough emotional pain to agree to go with Cole in the first place. While Cole persistently chases her, wanting her to return as his queen, she resists; choosing Cole means dooming another to her fate. A slightly overextended romantic subplot involving Jack, the boyfriend she left behind, resolves in time for a desperate Hail Mary pass.
The intense prose is slow-motion grieving mixed with mythology, awakening hope and redemption—a mix ideal for angst connoisseurs. (Paranormal romance. 13 & up)
Book One of Three
6) "Legend" by Marie Lu
A gripping thriller in dystopic future Los Angeles.
Fifteen-year-olds June and Day live completely different lives in the glorious Republic. June is rich and brilliant, the only candidate ever to get a perfect score in the Trials, and is destined for a glowing career in the military. She looks forward to the day when she can join up and fight the Republic’s treacherous enemies east of the Dakotas. Day, on the other hand, is an anonymous street rat, a slum child who failed his own Trial. He's also the Republic's most wanted criminal, prone to stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. When tragedies strike both their families, the two brilliant teens are thrown into direct opposition. In alternating first-person narratives, Day and June experience coming-of-age adventures in the midst of spying, theft and daredevil combat. Their voices are distinct and richly drawn, from Day’s self-deprecating affection for others to June's Holmesian attention to detail. All the flavor of a post-apocalyptic setting—plagues, class warfare, maniacal soldiers—escalates to greater complexity while leaving space for further worldbuilding in the sequel.
This is no didactic near-future warning of present evils, but a cinematic adventure featuring endearing, compelling heroes. (Science fiction. 12-14)
Book One of Three
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