Week 39 Review: Feral Youth

From Goodreads:

At Zeppelin Bend, an outdoor education program designed to teach troubled youth the value of hard work, cooperation, and compassion, ten teens are left alone in the wild. The teens are a diverse group who come from all walks of life, and they were all sent to Zeppelin Bend as a last chance to get them to turn their lives around. They've just spent nearly two weeks learning to survive in the wilderness, and now their instructors have dropped them off eighteen miles from camp with no food, no water, and only their packs, and they'll have to struggle to overcome their vast differences if they hope to survive.

Inspired by The Canterbury Tales, Feral Youth features characters, each complex and damaged in their own ways, who are enticed to tell a story (or two) with the promise of a cash prize. The stories range from noir-inspired revenge tales to mythological stories of fierce heroines and angry gods. And while few of the stories are claimed to be based in truth, they ultimately reveal more about the teller than the truth ever could.

My Review:


Authors: Shaun David Hutchinson, E.C. Myers, Robin Talley, Tim Floreen, Stephanie Kuehn, Susanne Young, Marieke Nijkamp, Justina Ireland, Brandy Colbert, Alaya Dawn Johnson
Read: September 25th, 2025  
Source: Own 
Reason Why: Love these authors, and it's a SAC 2025 Book!  
Publisher: Simon Pulse 
Published: September 15th 2017

5/5 Hearts

5/5 Books

5/5 Stars

Week 24 Review: His Hideous Heart

From Goodreads:
Thirteen of YA's most celebrated names reimagine Edgar Allan Poe's most surprising, unsettling, and popular tales for a new generation.

Edgar Allan Poe may be a hundred and fifty years beyond this world, but the themes of his beloved works have much in common with modern young adult fiction. Whether the stories are familiar to readers or discovered for the first time, readers will revel in Edgar Allan Poe's classic tales, and how they've been brought to life in 13 unique and unforgettable ways.

My Review:
Yeah, this book was a fantastic read! I loved all the different stories, there was a variety of genres, but they were all retellings of stories that were set roughly in the same genre. Basically horror. And YA is just so wide, it can encompass a variety of genres, it's a big reason why I love it so much!

One of my favourite stories in this was Rin Chupeco's, because of the way it was told, it was the narrator telling the story to a friend, basically. And it was such an interesting mystery, and that twist was pretty epic! Loved how it ended!

I really enjoyed the worlds of the Emily Lloyd-Jones's story, as well as Lamar Giles's and Fran Wilde, The first and the last were both futuristic, and I really enjoyed the details that were in them, and Lamar Giles was an interesting paranormal mystery, and was so interesting to read!

One thing is that this book also contained the original stories that this anthology were retelling. And the style of the writing, it just wasn't for me, so I didn't read them. As I loved the ideas and pop culture from the original stories, the writing style just wasn't for me.

This was a fantastic, creepy, wonderful anthology, and I enjoyed it a lot!

Authors: Kendare Blake, Rin Chupeco, Lamar Giles, Tessa Gratton, Tiffany D. Jackson, Stephanie Kuehn, Emily Lloyd-Jones, Hillary Monahan, Marieke Nijkamp, Caleb Roehrig, and Fran Wilde
Read:  June 6th, 2020
Source: Ebook.bike
Reason Why: There's lots of great authors and it's a great concept for anthology, and it's a 2020 Retelling Book and a SAC 2020 Book!
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Published: September 10th 2019

5/5 Hearts

5/5 Books

5/5 Stars

Week 32 Review: Delicate Monsters

From Goodreads:
From the Morris-Award winning author of Charm & Strange, comes a twisted and haunting tale about three teens uncovering dark secrets and even darker truths about themselves.

When nearly killing a classmate gets seventeen-year-old Sadie Su kicked out of her third boarding school in four years, she returns to her family's California vineyard estate. Here, she's meant to stay out of trouble. Here, she's meant to do a lot of things. But it's hard. She's bored. And when Sadie's bored, the only thing she likes is trouble.

Emerson Tate's a poor boy living in a rich town, with his widowed mother and strange, haunted little brother. All he wants his senior year is to play basketball and make something happen with the girl of his dreams. That’s why Emerson's not happy Sadie's back. An old childhood friend, she knows his worst secrets. The things he longs to forget. The things she won't ever let him.

Haunted is a good word for fifteen-year-old Miles Tate. Miles can see the future, after all. And he knows his vision of tragic violence at his school will come true, because his visions always do. That's what he tells the new girl in town. The one who listens to him. The one who recognizes the darkness in his past. 

But can Miles stop the violence? Or has the future already been written? Maybe tragedy is his destiny. Maybe it's all of theirs.

My Review:
I enjoyed this book a lot. Unfortunately, not as much as I thought I would. I thought that this book had the potential, from the synopsis to be one of the best books read in 2015. It make it that far. It did reach pretty high, and get there, but not best book material for me!

To be honest, I just didn't connect to most of the characters, Sadie, who makes or finds trouble when she's bored. Emerson, who just seemed at first like a teenage boy, but had a darker side to him. Miles was about the only one that I liked.

Some of the characters thoughts and actions, especially Sadie's, they just seemed a bit more complicated then a high schooler. Just seemed a bit unrealistic, if it had been toned down a bit, it would've fit in really great, but oh, well! Worked with her character!

I did read the ending when I was only a little bit into the book, so I knew where things were going-that there were some twists, and I wanted to know how they would get to that point. That was a kinda sad journey to go on, because this book is called Delicate Monsters! So that ending was pretty fitting!

This was a really great book, and I enjoyed it a lot!

Author: Stephanie Kuehn
Read: August 4th, 2015
Source: NetGalley
Reason Why: It sounded really great! And it's a SAC 2015 Book!
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: June 9th 2015

5/5 Hearts

4/5 Books

4/5 Stars