Jennifer Hubert's Blog, page 12

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

Sixteen year old Starr Carter has to navigate two different worlds that couldn’t be further apart: Garden Heights, the poor, mostly black neighborhood where she and her family live, and Williamson, the pricey, mostly white prep school she attends. She is pulled in one direction by her loving but strict family and culture, and the […]

Genuine Fraud by E. Lockhart

Tourist. Traitor. Psychopath. Spy. Who is Jule West Williams? A steely-eyed orphan who fought her way into the Ivy League with nothing but grit and determination? A heartbroken teen who just wants to be loved and accepted? Or a master manipulator with no conscience who will stop at nothing to secure her future? Only YOU can decide […]

My Sister Rosa by Justine Larbalestier

Che’s sister ten-year-old Rosa isn’t like other little girls. She’s not afraid of anything, not heights or strangers or big dogs. She thinks it’s funny when someone gets hurt. She doesn’t make friends, she uses them. She wonders what it would feel like to kill something bigger than a bug. Che knows this because he […]

2016 Top Five

Dear Teen Peeps, In years past, I have faithfully posted a Top Ten Books list. But this year, I haven’t read nearly as much YA as I wanted to/should have, due to number of tedious reasons, the main one being that I was was supes busy working on many other adult-ish writing/reviewing projects. (Adulting. So […]

This is the Part Where You Laugh by Peter Brown Hoffmeister

Travis isn’t laughing much this summer. He lives in a trailer with his beloved grandma, who has terminal cancer. His grandpa is high all the time on his grandma’s medicinal marijuana. He searches the streets weekly for his mother, a homeless drug addict, and dreams of giving her all his saved landscaping money for a down […]

Scythe by Neal Shusterman

In the future, humans have managed to eliminate poverty, disease, war, crime and even death. Any physical pain or injury is healed through “nanites” in the blood, and all wants and needs are provided for through the Thunderhead, a god-like global cloud computer that benignly monitors life and keeps everyone safe and content. But since […]

Saving Red by Sonya Sones

  Ever since her older brother Noah disappeared, Molly feels like she doesn’t have a friend in the world except her service dog Pixel. So when Red, a fun-loving homeless teen and Christo, a super cute new guy, come into her life on the same day, she feels as though she’s hit the jackpot. There’s […]

Watched by Marina Budhos

Naeem has run out of choices. Failing out of school and picked up for shoplifting with a bag of weed in his backpack, the Muslim teen is forced to turn informant for a pair of detectives looking for terrorists nests in the vibrant, immigrant NYC borough of Queens: “I love Queens. I love its smells, its […]

Ashes by Laurie Halse Anderson

SPOILER ALERT! Before reading about the long awaited and eagerly anticipated conclusion to LHA’s wonderful, wrenching Seeds of America trilogy below, please make sure you have already experienced the awesomeness that is CHAINS and FORGE. Once you have read and fully absorbed Isabel and Curzon’s previous adventures, then by all means, READ ON. Isabel is […]

The Sun is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon

This is a book about black holes and bright suns and multiverses.  There are pink headphones, red neck ties and vinyl records. Someone has to stay and someone ends up leaving. There are no car chases, but there’s plenty of kissing and one fist fight. Poetry and physics are discussed, along with a smattering of […]