Reviews written by Lelia Taylor

After our mindbending landing on the moon back in 1969, we’ve faltered in our quest to explore space. Mars seems like a barely attainable dream and no one apparently wants to go back to the moon. Imagine, then, the massive effort to go to Jupiter’s moon, Europa, to build a...

The insatiable oasis will hunt down the thieves of this book and tear them apart, limb by limb, devouring their screaming souls and spitting out bones. The first thing that caught my eye about this book was the absolutely beautiful and brilliant cover. Elynn Cohen is...

Marty is a flawed character in any number of ways, not least of which is his propensity to do what's best for himself even if it's not legal or good for anyone else; in fact, he has been known to actually put others in harm's way. Despite that, he works...

At a time when young adult fiction is overrun with dystopian themes that are often only mediocre at best, Otherborn is kind of remarkable, especially for a debut author. I’m a big fan of dystopian works and can say I even enjoy some of the less-than-stellar attempts but this one...

The phrase “hit the ground running” takes on new meaning in Echo and this is absolutely not a bad thing. Most of the time, we have to wade through a lot of worldbuilding and character development before the story actually gets going good but not this time. Ms. Brewster has...

I read a lot of dystopian fiction, so much that I sometimes find myself on the verge of boredom just because so much of what’s available is a lot like all the other dystopians out there. Finding one that’s actually different has become something of a personal quest and I’m...

Authors work hard to find ways to make their novels a bit different from others of the same genre/subgenre so I give Susan Waggoner credit for coming up with the empath idea. Unfortunately, I think she may have tried a little too hard because I felt as though there were...

High fantasy, the kind with a quest, is not on my list of things I really like to read and, yet, here I am, about to share my thoughts on There Comes a Prophet. Is it high fantasy? No, not at all, but it is most certainly a quest. This...

Imagine a tale of two warring kingdoms that each have “possession” of a wielder of magic. Imagine also that one of those magicians, for lack of a better word, is hailed as a conquering hero while the other is no more than a weapon held prisoner for years and forced...

Two very uncommon teens discover each other, and their respective talents, at a high society charity auction just before a band of masked intruders breaks in and a heist begins. It begins but why doesn’t it end as quickly as most such things do, allowing the robbers to abscond with...

Angie’s parents have experienced what every parent fears, the abduction of a child with no resolution, no knowledge of what really happened on that fateful day. When Angie suddenly reappears three years later, the repercussions are not what we might imagine, should we find ourselves in such a situation. I...

At a time when young adult fiction is overrun with dystopian themes that are often only mediocre at best, Otherborn is kind of remarkable, especially for a debut author. I’m a big fan of dystopian works and can say I even enjoy some of the less-than-stellar attempts but this one...

Finding a young adult science fiction novel that’s fresh and interesting is not always such an easy thing to do but Stephanie Karpinske is on the right path with The Samantha Project, albeit with a few flaws. On the mildly negative side, I found Sam and her parents to be...

The phrase “hit the ground running” takes on new meaning in Echo and this is absolutely not a bad thing. Most of the time, we have to wade through a lot of worldbuilding and character development before the story actually gets going good but not this time. Ms. Brewster has...

I’m a big fan of dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction and it’s even better when I find both in the same books so Storm and its predecessors are right up my alley. It also doesn’t hurt that Evan Angler is a good writer and reading his work is no hardship. Besides...