Newest Teens Reviews
Teens
Inside My Head by Jim Carrington
Zoe has moved from London to rural Norfolk - her parents are expecting a late baby and they want to downsize, get out of the city, and live in a more sustainable way. Unsurprisingly, Zoe isn't big on this plan. Wrenched from her school and friends, and the vibrancy of the capital, she's convinced that her life has just taken a socking great turn for the worse. Full review...
Rich and Mad by William Nicholson
When Maddy Fisher goes for something, she goes all out. She has decided to fall in love, but not just any kind of love – it has to be the can't-eat-can't-sleep, crazy kind. But then once you get to know Maddy, you'd expect nothing less, for this is a girl who lives with a camel and thinks nothing of choosing her parents' shop over her own well equipped room when she wants to find a bed to curl up in for a think. Full review...
Koh Tabu by Ann Kelley
Bonnie MacDonald is thrilled to be going to a beautiful tropical island with the rest of the Amelia Earhart Cadets, especially as the only adult present will be the incredibly glamorous Layla Campbell, nicknamed the Duchess, who treats them all like adults. But the dream holiday becomes a nightmare - after landing on the wrong island despite dire warnings from the boatman who took them there, a storm kills him and one of Bonnie's friends and wrecks the boat, leaving them trapped with no-one knowing where they are. With the Duchess shining rather less brightly as she’s revealed to be practically useless in the face of danger, it's left to Bonnie and her friend Jas to try and keep the remaining girls alive and find a way to be rescued. Full review...
The Red Necklace by Sally Gardner
Paris's streets are already humming with talk of revolution, when the young gypsy Yann Margoza is summoned to perform his magic at the chateau of a selfish, debt-ridden marquise. He is to tell the assembled aristocracy their future. But what he hoped would be the ticket to a better life turns into a nightmare when he has a vision of the richly-dressed crowd drowning in a sea of blood. Full review...
The Island by Sarah Singleton
Otto has arrived in Goa a couple of days ahead of Charlotte and Jen, his gap year companions. It's typical of Otto to steal what should be shared thunder. He's a lovely lad, but he's a tad selfish and he does like to be first for everything. Each of the three has a different reason for the trip: Otto wants to get some experience for a hoped-for career in photo-journalism; Charlie wants to volunteer and beef up her environmental credentials; Jen has dreamed of journeying to India for as long as she can remember. Full review...
The Chamber of Shadows by Justin Richards
It's London, 1886. A company building those new underground train tunnels finds a hidden vault at impossible depth - and seems to release into the world The Lord of Flies. A mysterious masked stage magician does the obviously impossible. A robotic killer stalks the streets, and a street gang of ruffians-on-the-up decides to solve the mystery. A man in charge of Fortean artefacts at the British Museum has a new employer, asking something much more evil from him. Surely all of that cannot be connected in some way? Surely one book can not have all those dark and mysterious elements we can probably all recognise, and put them into one period thriller without coming over as a horrendous porridge of parody? Full review...
Crashed by Robin Wasserman
Lia lives in a future where minds can be saved even if bodies can't. After a fatal car crash, her brain has been scanned, mapped, saved, and transferred into a machine designed to look and feel human. She'll live forever. We last saw her with her new mech "life" in tatters after Auden's terrible accident and her family's rejection. She can't see a future for herself amongst the orgs any more and so she rejoins Jude and his group of adrenaline junkie mechs at Quinn's mansion. It's a life of extreme thrill-seeking, backed up by Quinn's unlimited credit and Jude's shady contact at Bio Max, who supplies them with dangerous and untested, but exciting and cutting edge mods and updates. Full review...
The Truth About Leo by David Yelland
Leo lives inside his own head for much of the time. You can't really blame him. He's always tired for a start. That's because he's often up early, tidying up the house after one of his father's rampages. His father drinks too much, you see, and sometimes he smashes up the house. Leo can't risk this being discovered because his father's the only person he's got since his mother died of cancer. He misses her like crazy, and he's afraid he'll be taken into care if anyone finds out about his dad's drinking. Full review...
Tomorrow's Guardian by Richard Denning
Eleven year old Tom Oakley thinks he's going mad when he seems to relive short periods of his life, and dreams about other people from different times. The reality is far stranger – he's a Walker, with the power to rescue those he dreamed about. Travelling to the battle of Isandlwana, the Great Fire of London, and a German U-Boat, guided by the mysterious Professor, Tom saves the lives of soldier Edward, servant Mary, and Able Seaman Charlie, who also have powers. There are others, however, with similar powers, who aren't as pleasant as Tom's new friends – and the four of them, allied with the Professor and his roguish helper Septimus, are pitched into a battle to save the worlds. That's intentionally plural – there are two parallel universes at stake here. Full review...
Blade: Cutting Loose by Tim Bowler
Cutting Loose is the seventh book about Blade, the fourteen-year-old anti-hero who has unerring skill with a knife and a past that won't let him go. Blade is coming to the edge of his resources and he can't go on for much longer. He has done all he can to expose uber-villain Hawk - rescued Jaz, talked to the police, given up his carefully-hidden evidence, set a gang war in motion in the Beast. It's not enough, but it's the best he could do and now he just wants out. Full review...
My Worst Best Friend by Dyan Sheldon
Gracie Mooney and Savanna Zindle are, unlikely as it may seem, best friends. Savanna is popular, beautiful, loud, confident and, well, a little bit stupid. Gracie is short, plain, quiet, and an intelligent lizard-loving environmentalist. Their friendship really shouldn't work, but somehow it does, and they spend hours and hours together, then when they're not together spend hours discussing everything on the phone with each other. You can tell already what's going to happen, can't you? Yes, it's a friendship bust-up just waiting to happen... Full review...
Paper Towns by John Green
17-year-old Quentin Jacobsen has been in love with Margo Roth Spiegelmen ever since he can remember. It's an unrequited love though - neighbours and childhood friends they may be, but their respective places in the High School pecking order are miles apart. Margo is one of the beautiful ones. She's cool, clever and a trendsetter. Q languishes in the middle ranks with his band member mates, Radar, who's an obsessive editor of Omnictionary (read Wikipedia), and Ben, who wants a girlfriend more than anything, but lacks the status to get one. Full review...
Jake Highfield: Chaos Unleashed by Alec Sillifant
What's this that Jake is doing - breaking into a building? Vandalising it with graffiti, having ruined someone's privacy and infiltrated something he shouldn't have done? Three years ago he would have been doing this as a yobbish kick, but now he's a teenage agent of a shadowy organisation called the Academy, and people want him to succeed in his mission. But do they all want that? Who are his taskmasters after all? And what does the Void have in store for his future? Full review...
The Suicide Club by Rhys Thomas
Craig Bartlett-Taylor's third attempt at killing himself is nearly successful – except when he announces in class that he's taken a whole bottle of pills, new boy Frederick Spaulding-Carter steps in and saves his life. Freddy attains instant celebrity as a hero, and our narrator Richard Harper is as impressed as anyone else. Full review...
Dark Life by Kat Falls
Climate change came. The oceans rose. Half the land mass disappeared uner the water. Some of what was left simply crumbled away. Now, Topsiders live in giant tower blocks in a society under an authoritarian regime with emergency powers. Time outside is limited because the sun is so strong it causes third degree burns. Status brings space, not money. Using space to which you aren't entitled brings severe punishment crashing down upon you. It's no wonder Gemma wants to find her brother, who is living as Dark Life on the ocean floor. Full review...
Perfect Chemistry by Simone Elkeles
On the outside, Brittany is the flawless high-school girl. She has the perfect hair, the perfect outfit, and the perfect boyfriend. Any girl should be jealous of her, right? Wrong. Underneath the immaculately applied mascara lies a multitude of family problems, her despair at the thought of her severely disabled sister being bundled off to a nursing home never leaving her mind. She has to keep her hurt hidden to save her image, but surely enough this mask starts to crack as more and more of her life refuses to live up to the expectations she has forced upon herself. Full review...
Tapas and Tears by Chris Higgins
It's tough being fourteen. You're old enough to be getting to grips with who you are and what you like, but other people – parents, friends, teachers – often seem to think they know better than you do about what's best. Jaime is on the shy side. She's not a huge fan of meeting new people, and she's never strayed far from her mum's side before, so a fortnight alone in Spain is the last thing she wants. But, a school exchange is exactly what she finds herself signing up for and before she knows it, she's bundled off for two long weeks – but will it all be fun in the sun, or, as the book's title seems to hint at, are Tapas and Tears on the horizon? Full review...
Where I Belong by Gillian Cross
Khadija - although this is not her real name - is a young Somali girl, sent to Britain by her father. She's supposed to get an education and earn some money and then return, equipped to help bring prosperity to both her family and her impoverished country. She's an illegal immigrant, posing as a sister to Abdi. Abdi is a second generation Somali immigrant. He was born in the Netherlands and came to Britain when he was very young. He feels a connection to the land of his parents, but struggles to make sense of it as he has never been to Somalia. Freya is the daughter of a world-famous fashion designer, Sandy Dexter. She's aware of her privileged status, but she feels lonely and unloved. Her mother's passion for design doesn't leave much room for a daughter, and her father's abiding love for the woman he married makes Freya feel like everyone's second choice. Full review...
Tripwire by Steve Cole and Chris Hunter
Felix's father was a bomb disposal expert. He died on Day Zero - the day global terrorism united and destroyed Heathrow Airport, killing countless thousands of innocent people. It changed everything. Bent on avenging his father, Felix has signed up to a training program for the Minos Chapter - a shadowy counter-terrorist unit of underage operatives. He knows the risks if he's successful, but what he doesn't know is that another, even more devasting, Orpheus attack is imminent... Full review...
Extras by Scott Westerfeld
In the future city of this book, many people live with what is called a reputation economy. With everybody practically a cyborg, they're online permanently, using optical and brain implants to see everybody's status, output and more. Many people have hovercam companions, to make their own documentaries and film their own lives. They rely on metablogs to interact and keep their popularity up. They continuously spread their opinions and interests in order to become more well-known. A girl called Aya is struggling to get any renown, but things change, when she meets other people doing incredibly notorious things, but in complete secrecy and anonymity. Full review...
Dreaming of Amelia by Jaclyn Moriarty
New scholarship students Riley and Amelia are so mysterious that everyone at Ashbury High School is talking about them. Add to that the creepy happenings around school, and Lydia Jaackson-Oberman's PC actually typing its own messages to her, and it seems pretty appropriate that the Higher School Certificate question these teens are answering for much of the book is on Gothic Fiction. Full review...
Fish in the Sky by Fridrik Erlings
'I've got a dad in a shoe box and a mum who's struggling for her life against a famished cannibalistic sewing machine.'
Oh dear! Josh Stephenson is just thirteen. His father is separated from his mother and works away on a ship and so he's a much-missed presence in Josh's life (the shoe box). Money is tight with only one parent at home, so his mother works multiple jobs, some of them at home (the sewing machine). Josh occupies a middle position at school: neither clever nor stupid; neither jock nor geek. He and his best friend Peter are natural history fanatics and they spend a great deal of time watching documentaries on television, or planning their own. Full review...
Blue Bloods by Melissa de la Cruz
Blue Bloods is the first book in a series aimed at teenagers and it's about vampires, currently a popular theme in young adult novels. However Melissa De La Cruz offers an original twist on this topic: the Vampires are known as 'Blue Bloods' and they're part of the New York elite. They're rich, young, beautiful and popular. Thought to be immortal, their world is shattered as one of them is found murdered. Full review...
Specials by Scott Westerfeld
In the un-named city of the future, all the adults are living in the delusion that their city is right. After a teenage life as an ugly, they all undergo a welter of medical procedures, to make their minds and bodies conform to the bland, but gorgeous, society norm. But one young woman is not like that. She is going to a party, looking ugly, and she knows it is not what we look like, but how special we feel inside, that is of most importance. The good news is that this woman is our returning heroine, Tally. The bad news is that her ugliness is a temporary disguise, and worse than that - she knows how to feel special inside, because she IS A Special. Full review...
Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver
Samantha 'Sam' Kingston is, in many ways, your typical American high schooler whose concerns are pretty predictable: boys, friends, fashion, weird parents, annoying little sisters. Today it's Cupid Day, a chance to show off just how In you are at school, as measured by the number of roses you're sent, but Sam's not too worried about that. She knows she's part of a group who, by most definitions, would be called popular, and though sometimes inside she might feel on the inside a little like an imposter, on the outside, well, she's the definition of in. Full review...
Guilt Trip by Anne Cassidy
Two years ago, Ali and her friends saved Daniel Feeny from committing suicide. They became local heroes and were looked up to as good examples of modern day teenagers. Ali was on her way to Cambridge, Stephen about to start his own business, Jackson getting ready to be reunited with his brother in Brighton where he'd also study history, and Hannah joining her mother's hairdressing business.
Then something dreadful happened. Five weeks later, Daniel was dead, and the gang of friends who had been adjusting to life as heroes were responsible. Full review...
Dark Secrets: Legacy of Lies and Don't Tell by Elizabeth Chandler
After years without seeing her grandmother, Megan receives an invitation - or perhaps a summons - to visit the old lady at her house in the town of Wisteria. Reluctantly, she goes there to please her mother, but finds out that despite the invitation, her grandmother doesn't seem happy to see her, and neither does her cute but sullen cousin Matt, who's currently living there. More worryingly, the house seems strangely familiar, because she's seen it many times in her dreams... Full review...
Crawlers by Sam Enthoven
Why are the men that want to take over the world using evil alien beings always so stupid? Steadman is stupid. Ever since the Great Fire of London trapped her in an underground dungeon in 1666, the Queen has been neutralised. Even then, the great and the powerful couldn't quite bring themselves to kill her. She had too much potential. But they did have the sense to keep her safely locked away. But now Steadman thinks he knows better. He thinks he can rule the world through the Queen and he's set her a test. If she passes, he will set her free. Full review...
Pretties by Scott Westerfeld
In the unnamed city of the future, all the adults are pretty. They've had mental and physical surgery to make them calm, placid and perfectly aesthetic human beings. If they have any trouble as young adults it is the problem of what to wear at parties, or how to get rid of their hangovers when they wake up at 5pm. Unfortunately, one of these bright young things is our heroine, Tally, one of the few people in the world to have learnt how damnably horrid and sapping the life of Riley can be. Full review...
Uglies by Scott Westerfeld
"This city is a paradise, Tally. It feeds you, educates you, keeps you safe. It makes you pretty." And that's meant literally. As soon as they're sixteen years old, ugly people like Tally are completely rebuilt - no more freckles, dull eyes, rough skin, or ideas about biting their fingernails, and made a pretty. It's scientific, and obviously of benefit, considering the parties, status and love afforded to pretties. But is it essential? When her best friend is prettified Tally finds a new friend, Shay, who has secrets to share in the few weeks before the operation they're due to have on the same day. Secrets of another place, another way, and of people staying forever ugly - through choice. Full review...
Talk to the Hand by Nicole Dryburgh
We first met Nicole Dryburgh in her book The Way I See It, which she wrote at eighteen, and which detailed her battles with cancer and the loss of her sight. We loved the warts-and-all picture of her life that she gave us then, and so we were really pleased to see that she's written a second book. Full review...
Witchfinder: Dawn of the Demontide by William Hussey
Jake is a rather solitary person. He's bright but bored by school and he's obsessed with horror comics. He owns an amazing collection and he knows all the stories and myths and folklores off by heart. Little does he realise that everything he reads about is real, and the Demontide is almost upon him. Full review...
The Master of Misrule by Laura Powell
In the Arcanum, fortunes could be won and lost. The bizarre otherworld, just the slightest shift away from our own, had been home to a life-altering game of chance, power and intelligence, based on the tarot. Four teenaged Londoners had been witness to this, then players. But they'd found it wanting, and to level the playing field, had thrown out the rulebook. With that, however, the referee is no more, and the Lord of Misrule is in charge. Free, too, to smother all of Britain with his unique brand of scratch-card lottery. Soon all humanity might be out of luck. Full review...
In the Trees by Pauline Fisk
Since his mother died, Kid has been staying with Nadine and flipping burgers in a fast food joint after school. It's not an exciting life, but he isn't unhappy. And then Nadine gets a boyfriend and the flat gets rather cramped. And then a box of his mother's possessions arrives. Inside, he finds a photo of the father he's never met and a copy of his birth certificate, which tells him that his father comes from Belize. And suddenly, Kid makes a decision. He's going nowhere fast in London, so he's going to head out to Belize and find the man in the photo. He's on a plane within days. Full review...
No Way Out by Gene Kemp
Alex and Adam are twins, and they're telepathic to boot. They're very close, but are also like chalk and cheese: Adam's looking forward to their holiday on Uncle Ben and Aunt Sadie's farm, but Alex can't think of anything worse. Adam is always happy to read to their little sister Emmy, but Alex resents the attention she gets (she's disabled, y'see). By and large, they're just ordinary kids, with ordinary grumbles. When the car they're in goes through thick fog and crashes, they find themselves in a town from times past, with inhabitants who don't want to let them leave, and who have an eye on Emmy. Full review...
No and Me by Delphine de Vigan
Lou is a clever, clever child with an IQ approaching 160. She's thirteen, but she's been moved up two years at school and she compares her flat chested, nervous self somewhat unfavourably with her fifteen-year-old peer group. Funnily enough, her only real friend at school is Lucas, who's seventeen and such a rebel that he's been moved down two years. Things at home aren't great for Lou. Her baby sister died a few years ago and her mother has been severely depressed ever since. She barely talks, seldom gets dressed. Her father is worn down to the bone with worry and Lou doesn't get a great deal of attention from him either, so distracted is he. Full review...
The Diary of a Dr Who Addict by Paul Magrs
Davey, in his first term at secondary school, is horrified. Not only is his best friend trying to grow up through the use of a home gym, and standing him up on the first morning of term, he also seems to be becoming dismissive of The Show. Still, he is trying to be esoteric - just like his sister, painting her face to look like Bowie album sleeves of all things - and Davey knows better. He knows everyone should be enthralled with the spectacle of Tom Baker falling off a building and becoming Peter Davison. Full review...
Shadow Dragons (Imaginarium Geographica) by James A Owen
If you want to know where Tolkein, C S Lewis and their ilk got their ideas from, you might consider their jobs. No - not their work in Oxbridge universities. In this book, at least, John, Charles and Jack are guardians of a very important book, the Imaginarium Geographica, within which lives a lot of secret, vital information, and almost the soul of the land. They might not get a surname so we know immediately who is whom. They might be from a different world - there is certainly enough talk of those in these pages. But we'll see them meet a vanishing Cheshire cat, a certain Spanish knight we might have thought fictional, and more, en route to a quest of Arthurian proportions. Full review...
Mortlock by Jon Mayhew
Abyssinia, 1820. Three Englishment search for the Amarant, a mythical flower with the power over life and death, in a strange desert oasis. On finding the flower surrounded by decaying faces, they realize that it is cursed, and take a blood oath never to remove it.
London, 1854. 13 year old knife thrower Josie performs with her guardian the Great Cardamom, an especially gifted magician who we quickly learn is Chrimes, the coward of the original three Englishmen. Their relatively peaceful existence is shattered when three macabre Aunts (note the capital letter, never a good sign…) descend on them, and Cardamom instructs Josie, with his dying breath, to find the twin brother he'd never told her about and destroy the Amarant. Full review...
