In this high fantasy steeped in Hindu legends, narrator Priya Ayyar uses accents and character voices to distinguish the wide variety of creatures inhabiting a richly magical world within a world. Teenaged humans Vikram and Gauri are adversarial royalty who find themselves competing as a team in a magical Tournament of Wishes. Along the way, they find danger, fear, desire, and love. Chapters alternate in the first-person viewpoints of fierce and proud Gauri, witty and wily Vikram, and Asha, a curious vishikanya with a killing touch. Slightly marring an otherwise enthralling story are Ayyar's occasional tendencies to use stilted phrasing in long passages and to drop out of character voice for Gauri. On the other hand, Ayyar’s presentation of Vikram is playfully perfect. L.T. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
This month in YA fiction, Sarah J. Maas is back with a standalone Catwoman tale, but Selina Kyle’s not the only female kicking butt and taking names in August. How about an all-female sailing crew, a spy mistress, a bounty hunter, a reality death-show competitor, and a royal body-double for your #squadgoals? Rounding out the […]
Walk through a book that feels like a ballad, return to the word-drunk world of Weep, discover new tales set in beloved fantasy realms, and dive into retellings that feel completely new. These are the fantasy books we’ll be building cottages in the woods out of this late summer and beyond, to lure in readers […]
When I was a kid, I never saw myself on the page. Like never. Occasionally, there’d be a brown person on the screen—like the monkey brain eaters from Indiana Jones And the Temple of Doom, or Apu from The Simpsons. Such stellar representations, no? Yup. (You can read some of my thoughts on that in […]
There’s just something about a good fantasy novel that glues it to your hand. Or, more accurately, there are several somethings. Fantasy stories excite and transport you, and they do it with style, in a way that crosses borders and spans generations. How do they do it? With a few time-honored, universally pleasing characteristics that […]
Meet the Young Adults, the B&N Teen Blog’s swat team of awesome teenaged bloggers. YA literature is a strange and wonderful landscape of books that should be read by everybody, but each month we highlight the perspective of teens reading the best of the best books written for and about them. Check back monthly to see what they’re recommending […]