Johnston weaves a beautiful tale of sisterhood and love, while re-creating the story A Thousand and One Nights. Similar to the original story, this is a desert setting and the king has taken 300 wives, one from each village, before coming to the village of our unnamed heroine. She asks her sister’s mother to help ready her for the king. She wants to take the focus off of her sister and offer herself to the king instead, in order to save her sister. She is swept away with the king, as he has chosen her, and taken to his palace.
The princess is soon to be married and not very excited about the prospect. She believes a life of matrimony will be the end of her ability to live her own life and make her own choices; she will be required to live and choose for the king and the kingdom.
The wild, unpredictable shapeshifter Nimona has just appointed herself sidekick to archvillain Lord Ballister Blackheart, promising to aid him in his quest to prove to the kingdom that the Institute of Law Enforcement and Heroics is up to no good. But NImona doesn't play by the normal rules, and she quickly has everyone in an uproar wondering just who she is and where her mysterious powers come from.
Vango is a thrilling adventure mystery set in Europe on the cusp of the second World War, focused on the mysterious identity of a young man on the cusp of adulthood. Not even Vango, said young man, knows the mystery of his origins, and no one believes he is constantly watched and hunted by shadowy figures. They consider him paranoid. Talented, pleasant, and promising, but strangely paranoid.
I wish Kurt Vonnegut were alive to read this masterful literary homage. I'm not the only one who sees the connection. Margaret Wappler writes in the October 23, 2015 issue of the New York Times Book Review: "King’s devotion to a passionately experimental style, in a genre often beholden to formula, is inspiring. Kurt Vonnegut might have written a book like this, if he had ever been cyber-bullied on Facebook."
Alternating chapters tell the intertwined stories of Laia and Elias, who find their paths converging through Keris Veturius, Commandant of the Martial Empire's elite military academy. The Commandant loathes Elias, her accidental son whom she tried to abandon as a newborn, only to see him rescued by others and become the top student of her current graduating class. Elias wants nothing more than to escape his future as an enforcer of tyranny, but to cross the Commandant and the Empire is sure death.
Alix's exclusive school is targeted by an anonymous group of vandals who turn out to be radical activists out to get her father, putting her and her family in danger. The group claims that Alix's powerful father helps corporations that knowingly allow innocent victims to die in order to make enormous profits from unsafe products cover up their wrongdoings, and they want her to help blow the whistle on his misdeeds.
The older I get, the more I think maybe I belong in jail.
Gerald has anger control issues. He's had them for as long as he can remember. Anger has always been his defining emotion. His retreat, his solace, his catalyst for action. His self-image.
Reality Boy is a work of fiction that shows the awful truth about Reality TV. But don’t let the word “awful” turn you off. This is an amazingly well written book. The author, A.S. King, does something magical: Just as you begin to lose faith in the human race, she shows us how it's all going to be OK. For Gerald. And for us.
Young Rachelle was trained to protect her people from the dark creatures that surround them, which she has always been determined to do. But she hasn't wanted to simply defend, she wants to boldly attack them. She learned the hard way that, unfortunately, sometimes the only effective way to attack the darkness is to embrace it. Now she clings desperately to her soul as one of those creatures, trying to hold off the darkness within herself while still protecting the people. And her work has moved her from a woodland village to the court of the king.
