If you're new here, why not subscribe to our email updates or follow us on Facebook? You can also add us to your Google Reader. Thanks for visiting!  Note: this review is for book five in a series, and will no doubt contain spoilers Regular readers of this site will know that both my husband and I are ardent fans of Michael Grant’s Gone series. And the...

Michael Grant is an author who has no problem killing his darlings–and I’m not just talking pretty adjectives here, but whole characters, too. In fact, Grant seems to take rather a good deal of joy in torturing them, tormenting them, and eviscerating them in as gory a manner as possible. While Grant’s characters don’t exactly have a fun...

More than half a year has passed since the adults of Perdido Beach suddenly vanished, leaving a motley horde of juveniles to fend for themselves. In that time these kids have faced devastating hunger, worsening living conditions, internal fractiousness, and eerie preternatural events. But while things have reached an uncomfortable stasis,  with a truce of...

Perdido Beach, three months after the FAYZ. There are no adults. There is no food. There is no order. Tormented by the hunger that gnaws at their bodies and increasingly fearful of the creeping monstrosities lurking in both the dark of night and in the light of day, those who remain find themselves growing paranoid, resentful, desperate. Battle lines are being...

Getting rid of the adults is a common trope of young adult and middle grade fiction: shunting parents, guardians, or other authority figures off to one side allows young protagonists to solve their own problems without tiresome adult intervention. It’s a trope that facilitates empowerment, independence, and often just a bit of trouble. After all, among...