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by
Holly Black
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Bookstores are currently overflowing with YA novels about vampires and werewolves, but the majority of the “monsters” in these books seem like fundamentally nice guys. They care about their pack-mates (or whatever they call their supernatural brethren), refrain from eating people, and find themselves inexplicably drawn to accident-prone human girls. They probably tip well in restaurants, and I find most of their undead Boy Scout antics unbelievably boring.
This is why I always enjoy reading Holly Black's YA books. Her characters might be messed up, but at least they're never dull. Her most recent effort is White Cat, a supernatural thriller set in a world where "curse workers" can change emotions, memories, or luck with a touch of their fingers. Curse work is illegal, so most workers drift into criminal careers: con artists, grifters, the mafia. Cassel Sharpe is the only non-worker in his jailbird family, but he's got problems of his own—he killed his best friend, the daughter of a mob boss, three years ago, and his two brothers helped him cover it up. But as his dreams grow increasingly bizarre, Cassel begins to wonder if his memory of Lila's death was magically altered... and, if so, why his brothers lead him to believe otherwise....
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Bridget Jones's Diary is one of those mega-successful books, like the Harry Potter series or Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum mysteries, that it's just plain stupid not to at least try. Besides being a requirement for what my mother calls "cultural literacy", reading Bridget Jones's Diary and its sequel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, is a seriously good time. Loosely based on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, respectively, these books are alternately funny and cringe-inducing. Yet even as you're snickering over Bridget's cheerfully delusional approach to life or shuddering with sympathetic mortification over her latest disaster, you're sincerely hoping that one day she'll finally achieve self-actualization... whatever that turns out to mean.
Note: While Fielding's heroines do frequently wander into ditz territory, they're never entirely incompetent, which is pretty cool. Even poor Bridget is capable of the occasional ass kicking....
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| Aug 01 |  | A Kiss at Midnight by Eloisa James |
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