A Discovery of Witches Review–Paranormal Romance Beyond High School

A Discovery of Witches coverWitches, vampires, and demons, oh my! I can never resist a good paranormal romance/urban fantasy. I’ve been seeing this Deborah Harkness series absolutely everywhere, and though I had no idea what it was about, I decided I needed to buy the first book just based on the number of times I’ve seen its intriguing cover. And now that I’ve read A Discovery of Witches, I can tell you it does not disappoint. It’s got everything—a variety of supernatural creatures, a centuries old mystery, secret organizations, magic, time travel, romance… On that note, the love story here is rather Twilight-esque, so if human women swooning over hot vampires is not your thing, this book might not be for you. But A Discovery of Witches stands quite apart from your average teen vampire romance—mainly because, well, it’s not about teens. Continue reading A Discovery of Witches Review–Paranormal Romance Beyond High School

Afterworlds Review–All of the Genres

Some of you may be familiar with Scott Westerfeld from his delightfully disturbing dystopia series Uglies. In Uglies, we saw that Westerfeld has the potential to get very dark in the doom and gloom of a futuristic totalitarian government kind of way. Westerfeld’s latest book, Afterworlds, goes down a completely different path, but may be equally entertaining to dark-minded readers.

Afterworlds coverI don’t even know how I would classify the genre of this book. There are really two different stories going on in alternating chapters: a simple realistic coming of age story of Darcy Patel—a teenage writer struggling to navigate the adult worlds of New York City, publishing, and true love; and then you have the story of Darcy’s novel about a teenage girl named Lizzie who becomes a psychopomp and falls in love with a death god as she struggles to come to terms with her new relationship with the dead. It’s really in this second story that the darker elements come into play.

Continue reading Afterworlds Review–All of the Genres