Review: If There’s No Tomorrow by Jennifer L. Armentrout

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If There's No Tomorrow book coverI’ve read and enjoyed another Armentrout book (I even used it for a comparison title for Finding Frances). So I was curious about this one. The back cover description didn’t excite me a great deal, but I found it on audio at the library and decided I needed to listen to it.

The beginning of the book is focused on Lena, who seems to run with the popular crowd despite being a total book nerd and having a quiet personality. This is probably because of her friendship with Sebastian, her next-door neighbor and forever crush. Sebastian is a football star and recently broke up with his long-time girlfriend, but Lena knows he isn’t available since he doesn’t like her that way. On top of the Sebastian problem, she’s plays volleyball with her friend Megan, who’s way more talented than Lena is. Despite that, their coach has told Lena he thinks she has a shot at a scholarship if she steps things up and plays well this season. It’s the end of summer before senior year and things are looking good.

Everything changes the weekend before school starts, when Lena and four of her friends make a very bad choice that ends in tragedy. The rest of the book is Lena dealing with survivor’s guilt as well the more palpable guilt of someone who feels genuinely responsible for the incident. She initially is unable to deal with it at all and shuts her friends out, which creates a lot of tension. One of her friends returns the sentiment and Lena has no idea how to fix it. Sebastian challenges her the most and she risks damaging their friendship because she refuses to talk to him. She’s basically frozen in place.

The meat of the book is her struggle to start living life again, and it’s a slog for her. But she does come out of it and it is rewarding to see it happen.

I have to admit that I wasn’t a fan of all the characters. High school football players and their friends are not my favorite type of people, if I’m going to generalize (which apparently I am). Sebastian kind of annoyed me because I didn’t really believe he was as good as we were supposed to accept. But I know a lot of people will have no problem buying into him. And there is a full cast of characters, all a little different from each other while still being believable high school students.

Good for fans of Armentrout and pretty much any teen who could use a little reminder of her lack of invincibility.

Review: A Tragic Kind of Wonderful by Eric Lindstrom

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A Tragic Kind of Wonderful book coverAs readers of this blog will have noticed, I enjoy reading about teenagers’ experience with mental illness, and this book definitely fits that bill.

Mel Hannigan has a lot to deal with. She has bipolar disorder. She also had an older brother who she was really close to who died a few years earlier. She has a couple of friends currently, but lost three close friends the previous year because of her illness and a fight with one of them. Nobody outside her family knows about her bipolar disorder. She also works at a nursing home, which is where she feels most comfortable now. This is where she meets David, a boy her age who helps to start breaking down some of the walls she’s constructed around herself. But it’s not an easy or painless process.

The book opens with a memory that leads up to—but doesn’t include—Mel’s brother Nolan’s death (what happened to him is a mystery that isn’t revealed until the end). Then we jump three years ahead to Mel at 16. She is dealing with her bipolar disorder reasonably well, considering how severe it is. She tries to keep it under control with medication and mood charts, and keeps it secret from her friends because she doesn’t think they’d react well.

Her mood tracking is pretty interesting—she thinks of four components of herself (head, heart, health, and “host” (which corresponds with her overall mood plus the combination of others)) and tracks how each one is doing in order to understand her state of mind as well as possible. This is pretty important to her because her bipolar is fairly extreme and she regularly experiences mixed states and even dysphoric mania (which is depression mixed with very high energy, highly dangerous in terms of suicide risk).

Mel starts getting to know David at the nursing home at the same time as her old friend group has a major event that means that she might be able to refriend them. Things are shaky on all fronts, however, and when something devastating happens, Mel’s mental state worsens and everything goes wrong. You wonder how things are going to turn around and it’s both heartbreaking and satisfying to see it happen.

I think this book does an excellent job of conveying one experience of bipolar disorder. It’s not everyone’s experience of it, but seeing one could help a reader understand it better. But it’s also just a good story.

Edits In

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I got my edits back from my editor at Wild Rose Press Friday. It was interesting, because there really weren’t that many things (she told me it was a very clean manuscript). It turns out I use the word ’t-shirt’ a lot—and their convention is to write it ’T-shirt’. So she changed that in each instance. And she did not approve of my many ellipses, so she removed most of those. And they don’t allow you to have more than one sentence-terminating punctuation mark, so I had to change a handful of ?!’s too just ?’s. I also overused the word ‘smile’ (there were 111 instances of ‘smile,’ ‘smiles,’ and ‘smiled,’ plus 25 of ‘smiling’) and had to rephrase my way out of more than half of them. They also have a specific convention they follow for texts, which I had done differently. (They do them in italics surrounded by em-dashes, like —wassup—) But that was really it. I went through it Friday night and yesterday and did a quick final read through this morning, and sent it back to her. So things should proceed reasonably quickly now. I’m hoping I’ll have a release date soon. 

Other than that, I’m currently working on the last part of my book in parts (it used to be a collection of short stories, but I decided to not require them to stand entirely on their own, because they’re all about the same girl, anyway.). This is the book that the short story I’ve posted on this site, “Now Would Be Good,” will be a part of (though I’m going to have to rework that part a bit). I’ll have that done and somewhat polished by the end of the year, which means when I start the spring semester of my MFA, I will have all the raw material of my thesis. I’ll get feedback on that part and the end of the last one, and then I’ll be ready to start putting everything together as an actual thesis. I’m really hoping to get it mostly ready in that semester so that the fourth semester will be easy. 

I still have queries out on Ugly, plus one partial. I had another partial out, but it came back a no. She gave me some actual feedback, some positive and some more critical, which will be useful if I hear the same things from other people. The main critical point was that she didn’t always understand Nic’s motivation and choices. I don’t plan to change those, but it might be important for me to clarify her reasoning. 

Review: Girl Gone Viral by Arvin Ahmadi

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Girl Gone Viral book coverI stumbled across this book at Barnes and Noble and was really excited by the blurb. Supposedly, 17-year-old Opal Hopper is a big coder—she creates virtual reality worlds and so on. I thought this would be really interesting because a) girl coder and b) I wanted to see how the author makes coding interesting.

But this is one of those cases where the blurb doesn’t match the book very well, as she doesn’t really do much coding. Her friend Shane does the majority of it to create their channel on WAVE, the biggest virtual reality platform in this near-future story, while Opal becomes the accidental star of the channel. Opal, Shane, and their friend Moyo have teamed up with Kara, actress and fellow student at their challenging boarding school (PAAST), to compete in a contest by the company that runs WAVE. The prize is (among other things) meeting the company’s founder. Opal is convinced that the founder knows something about her father’s disappearance, and she has been trying to talk to him for 7 years, with no success. So she’s pretty desperate to win the contest, and that takes up the majority of the first part of the book. Kara is normally the face of their show, but when she ends up with food poisoning, Opal takes the stage and rather unintentionally starts something big.

Because Shane hacked some personal WAVE data and gave it to Opal, and she explored the data and discovered that people have empathy for a famous movie star with a reputation for breaking down in public. Now, the data scientist in me is quite skeptical about her managing to do this over a weekend (that’s not how data science works), but okay, I can suspend disbelief enough to go with it. Anyway, with Opal on camera, things explode from there.

While I did like the book, it wasn’t what I expected. It’s set in a technologically advanced America where virtual reality and augmented reality are the norm. But in a lot of ways, it doesn’t feel that different from our world, especially with the politics that seep into the story in surprising ways. But the most unexpected thing was Opal herself. I liked her even though she was nothing like I expected, as she turned out to be pretty self-absorbed and selfish at times and played some unpleasant social games. But she was interesting and I enjoyed seeing her grow and finally understand what happened to her father. The book ends a little abruptly after she finds out and I wondered what was going to happen next. Sequel, maybe?

This is a sci-fi book, but it’s pretty soft sci-fi, as it doesn’t focus on the technology—it explores the social impacts instead. So a lot of readers should enjoy it.

Review: Hold Still by Nina LaCour

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Hold Still book coverI previously read another of LaCour’s books (The Disenchantments) and liked it quite a bit, so I picked up this one. It chronicles a little over a year in Caitlin’s life immediately following her best friend’s suicide. Caitlyn’s basically shell-shocked by Ingrid’s death, mostly because she never saw it coming and feels like she should have known to be a better friend.

Ingrid dies right at the end of their sophomore year. Caitlyn’s parents take her away to a coastal town in northern California for the summer so she can be away from the place where Ingrid is no more. Soon enough it’s time to go back to school. She looks forward to photography class, a class she and Ingrid shared and loved. Caitlyn imagines their teacher being happy to see her and even comforting her. But instead, Ms. Delani gives her the cold shoulder. It floors her. The other kids aren’t very sympathetic toward Caitlyn—some try but fail, while others are as heartless as you’d expect. The first weekend after school starts, Caitlyn finds Ingrid’s journal under her bed. Ingrid must have put it there on purpose, knowing what she was going to do.

Finding the journal is both good and bad. It helps Caitlyn let go, but reading it also causes her great pain, so she can only take it a few pages at a time. Things move on at school. Ms. Delani still ignores Caitlyn and Caitlyn retaliates by turning in horrible assignments. Caitlyn sort of befriends a new girl, Dylan, and then messes that up. A boy named Taylor who she’s known for a while has been talking to her, too. Her father has given her a big stack of wood because apparently when she was young, she made something with wood, and her parents think it might help her heal. She leaves it there until winter, when she finally starts a project.

It’s a long, slow road to recovery for Caitlyn, one we travel with her. But she does get there.

This is an emotionally draining book, for sure, but it’s so good. If you like moving contemporary YA, I recommend it wholeheartedly.

Moving Along

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I don’t even remember why I missed posting last week. I think I was studying for the math class I just finished. I took the final for it yesterday. This was just a precursor—a review class—of what’s to come in August, when I’m starting the real classes. It’s going to be tough, but I’m hoping it’s worth it to my money-making career. 

As far as writing goes, I’m waiting on edits from my editor for Finding Frances. She should have them to me by the 29th, if not sooner. Then I’ll have 30 days to follow her suggestions (whatever they are; I have no idea what to expect). Apparently after that, things move fairly quickly. I’m hoping the book’s out by November. 

I’ve also got two partial requests out on Ugly, which is good, even though I’ve gotten about fifteen rejections. 

Review: I, Claudia by Mary McCoy

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I, Claudia book coverI, Claudia is a fascinating study in teenage politics gone wild in a setting where the student government at an elite prep school has practically unlimited power. The book covers three years of said government, with vastly different rulers over the years. It’s not a surprise that Claudia herself gets involve in governing, but the way things go isn’t predictable and is very interesting.

In the beginning of the book, Claudia is about to start her freshman year at Imperial Day Academy, where her sister, Maisie, will be a junior. She spends some time with her sister and her friends and ends up visiting a fortune teller that freaks her out by reading her surprisingly well. Claudia describes herself as ugly. She also talks about her limp, which comes from one leg being shorter than the other. She believes she’s not much of a catch, but she seems okay with that. She thinks,

… I was glad to be thought bookish and eccentric, but ultimately harmless. I was grateful for my unremarkable ness, for my parents’ indifference to me, that my classmates found me boring or strange.

Nothing I did mattered.

And because of that, I was free.

She’s free to do what she wants, and one notable thing she does is study history. The novel is full of her insights into current situations with reflections on past ones, which I really enjoyed (even if I didn’t always know the events she was referring to, it was still really cool).

After a year at the school (when a lot of interesting things happen involving the Honor Council that Maisie’s on, where we see how they run the school and how irrelevant adults are there), Maisie convinces Claudia to run for student senate for her sophomore year. She’s shocked when she wins. She and a boy named Hector are the two sophomore representatives. Claudia sort of accidentally brings down the entire senate and ends up as vice president. Everything steps up from there and eventually we get to the watershed point.

All of this is framed in a series of therapy visits where Claudia (as a self-described “teenager in crisis”) is explaining what happened to her up to this point. We know something big must have gone down by the end of the book since she’s in therapy, but we don't know exactly what that is.

This unusual book is worth your time if you appreciate genuine novelty and a good story. Claudia’s a great character who finds something in herself she never expected to be there.

Review: You Bring the Distant Near by Mitali Perkins

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You Bring the Distant Near book coverI think this book came to me through a book club I’m in and I’m glad because I loved it. I’m not quite sure why I love books about identity so much, but I do—it’s probably one of the reasons I like YA so much.

You Bring the Distant Near is, as I mentioned, all about identity. That is racial and ethnic identity, but also everything else that makes a girl who she is. It’s really about four girls—sisters and their daughters—but the mom/grandma has a few scenes that add a different perspective to the story.

We start off with Sonia, at eight years old in 1965. She and her sister, Tara, live with their parents in Ghana. In this scene, Sonia’s mother (Ranee) ruins a swimming race she was going to win, which reveals quite a bit about both of them. But then the book jumps forward to the mid-seventies, when the family moves to Queens. Both Sonia and Tara settle in well enough. Tara channels Marcia Brady to fit in as much as possible while Sonia embraces the feminist movement. Then they move to New Jersey, where Tara finally gets her official start in drama. The story jumps ahead two more years, when they are both nearing real adulthood, and continues until we see them married. Then we jump to 1998, where we meet Sonia’s daughter Chantal and Tara’s daughter Anna. Chantal is as American as can be and when Anna comes over from Mumbai to go to high school with her, it’s a real struggle for Anna because she’s used to life in India. By the end of the book, Chantal and Anna are grown but their futures are yet to be decided. Possibilities are everywhere.

Okay, having written all that, the theme of identity may not seem obviously present, but it’s absolutely crucial to everything that happens. Ranee is distrustful of anyone who isn’t Indian (preferably Bengali) or white, which is a challenge for her in Flushing, Queens. Sonia hates her mom’s racism and her restrictions that keep Sonia basically locked up in the apartment. Tara’s always looking for her identity by trying on different personas, Twiggy the British model and Marcia Brady to name a couple. She’s able to manipulate her accent how she wants. Both she and Sonia push against their mother’s idea of who they should be to be good Bengali girls. They fight against what they perceive as outdated traditions at their father’s funeral (I don’t know the right word), shocking all the Bengalis in attendance. When we get to Chantal and Anna, the struggle for identity is even stronger, particularly for Chantal because her father is black. But it’s there for Anna, too, who wants to hold on to her own Indian identity even when in America. The final question of identity comes into play with Ranee herself, an interesting surprise near the end of the story.

Although the story jumps ahead at several points (which I don’t always love), it’s told in chronological order and is easy to follow. And as I’ve implied above, the characters are all complex and interesting. I personally most identified with Sonia, but any reader should be able to find one of the girls to relate to. The character arcs are clear even if there isn’t a strong plot that spans the whole book (I don’t think one is necessary).

I think anyone who enjoys exploring identity will enjoy this book, but it will especially appeal to Indians and other people who have strong ties to countries other than the one they live in. It’s a well-told story.

Success!

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The waiting is over. I signed a contract with Wild Rose Press for Finding Frances on Monday. I don’t have many details at this stage, but I did have to submit some information for the cover designer, as well as the blurb, tag line, dedication and more. My next step is getting the final manuscript to my editor. I never heard back from Pearl Jam, which is a bummer, but not the end of the world. I’ll just have to go with my own made-up lyrics. 

And Waiting Some More

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Right now the biggest thing going on is I’m waiting to hear about Finding Frances. It’s been with the senior editor for two weeks, and the editor I’ve been talking to said it should take no more than three. So hopefully I’ll find out this week if they’re interested in publishing it. I’m pretty sure I’m going to do it it they want to publish it. 

I’m on my break from the MFA now, not going to be back until January. I’m going to finishing the collection of stories about Sarah, as there’s just one left to write (and four to revise…). 

The other thing I’ve been focused on is getting Ugly out to quite a few agents, hoping that one of them will be interested. I also entered it into the BookLife Prize, a contest from Publishers Weekly that considers unpublished and self-published books. It received 9 out of 10 points and I got a really nice report back from them (they read the whole thing and give you some feedback). I’m including it here:

Plot: This story has many subplots that weave together seamlessly, with the most poignant being Nic’s struggle to identify her gender and sexuality. Things come to a swift, yet satisfying, conclusion.

Prose/Style: Vincent’s prose is straightforward and clear. Her talent shines as she develops Nic’s voice throughout the novel; Nic is unafraid and unforgettable

Originality: Nic is not your average teenage narrator. Her cynicism and honesty make even the most basic observations feel refreshing.

Character Development: Vincent’s characters are well-developed and in tune with their emotions. The story’s protagonist, Nicole “Nic” Summers, is surrounded by a cast of complex family members, friends, and frenemies.

Blurb: Readers will rally behind fifteen-year-old Nic Summers as she navigates the pitfalls of adolescence in this moving and timely YA novel.

—The BookLife Prize

Review: Dryland by Sara Jaffe

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Dryland book coverI read this quiet book in just two days, which says something because my reading pace has slowed to a crawl at this point (I’m still 14 whole books behind on my Goodreads challenge).

It’s 1992 and Julie is a slightly lost fifteen-year-old who doesn’t really like anything. Her best friend, Erika, is far more engaged in more typical teenage pursuits than Julie, like boys. Julie’s older brother was a highly competitive swimmer who almost qualified for the Olympics and disappeared from Julie’s life to move to Germany afterward. It’s not clear that she technically misses him, but it is clear that his leaving has unmoored her. She follows Erika around for lack of anything better to do—hitting the arts and crafts market, watching skater boys, and doing yearbook at school. At yearbook, she meets a couple of other girls, Alexis and Melanie. Alexis seems to take a shine to Julie, offering her snacks and inviting her to join the swim team. Early in the book, she also meets Ben, an old friend of her brother.

Julie does join the swim team and Erika joins with her. But Julie, ever-unmotivated, struggles in practices. She can’t seem to keep going and randomly stops in the middle of her swims. Erika, who’s got a crush on one of the other swimmers, talks her into going to some parties. All Julie wants to do is leave, but then things get surprising and complicated with Alexis. She hangs out some with Ben, who never comes across as a creepy older guy for reasons that become clear later and actually seems to fill a role her brother might have formerly filled.

Throughout the novel, I wondered if she’d ever find out what was up with her brother, if she’d get over whatever was keeping her from trying at swimming, and what would happen with Alexis. Because the possible lesbian overtones are there from the beginning, though it’s clear to the reader that nothing is really clear to Julie.

The book does a few interesting things, craft-wise. For one, there are no chapters. And Jaffe doesn’t present dialogue in the conventional way. It appears without quote marks, often embedded in paragraphs. This gives the entire story a stream-of-consciousness feel (though I’m not saying it goes far enough to actually be stream-of-consciousness). The prose is subtle, lyrical, and full of great imagery. It’s also set in Portland, Oregon, which adds a dreary backdrop to the story (which sets the mood perfectly).

I recommend this to anyone who wants a thoughtful coming-of-age story. It will especially appeal to older readers who remember the early 90s, but younger readers will also appreciate its rawness and honesty.

Review: Cures for Heartbreak by Margo Rabb

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Cures for Heartbreak book coverI’ve already reviewed Rabb’s other book, Kissing in America, which I really liked. So I had high expectations for Cures for Heartbreak, her first.

This book is relatively compact, with a lot packed into only 230 pages. At the opening, fifteen-year-old Mia’s mother has just died twelve days after receiving a diagnosis of melanoma. Mia is heartbroken because the two were very close. Mia and her older sister fight all the time instead of providing comfort to each other. Rabb effectively shows Mia’s bereavement and her acting out in ways the reader can understand. Then Mia's father has a heart attack, which he survives, but it ushers in new hospital time. Mia is still trying to recover from her mom’s death all while dealing with everything else a teenager has to deal with, especially school and (sometimes inappropriate) crushes, and now she has to worry about her father, too. The book’s really about Mia coming to understand that love is complex and that it isn’t lost when you find a way forward.

Mia’s a very well portrayed character—authentic and compelling. We see her father through her embarrassed and frustrated eyes, and he’s a good character too. They get closer after her mom’s death and her older sister’s departure, with their weekly trips to Wendy’s. Of course the writing is also lovely, evocative and full of moving details.

I’d recommend this to anyone who enjoyed Kissing in America (though that one is a little funnier than this one) or who likes to see portraits of people dealing with grief in the best way they can.

Progress for Now

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I finished up my second semester of the MFA. Now that’s on hold until January, when I can start the third semester (stupid work vacation policy…). It was a good semester, where I got a lot of work done (I’ve done 36 of the 45 total short papers I have to do in my first three semesters) and some good creative work, as well. I’m still working on the short story collection about Sarah. I got one story completed and about two-thirds of the next one done. I’m working on finishing the second one. Then there is one more to write, and I’ll have drafts of all six stories. I expect to get this done during my semester off. 

This week, I finished up judging for the two contests I judged for this year. Judging is mentally exhausting. I sort of want to just lie down and sleep for a week now. 

Something I’m excited to get back to is the Ugly manuscript. I had one rejection from an agent, but the other agent and the two editors haven’t responded (since November), so I’m assuming those are no’s, as well. So I’m free to make the rest of the edits my last reader recommended. Then I’ll start sending it out en masse. 

In other news, I heard back from the editor who has Finding Frances. She’s waiting on a report from a reader (she has to send an official reader’s report to the senior editor and I guess this person has been slow in getting to it). So it’s still in the running. I also made a little progress in getting the permission for the lyrics I need in the book—I have spent hours researching how to get this permission with no success—then someone pointed out I should just contact the band’s fan club. I did this and they told me they forwarded the email to the appropriate person. Of course, I haven’t heard back in the several days since then, but it’s progress. And I still have a solution even if I don’t get the rights—I wrote “song lyrics” for a made-up song and use that in the appropriate places in an alternative manuscript. It’s just that the real band has much better lyrics. 

More waiting. The publishing industry is slow.

Review: The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things by Carolyn Mackler

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The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things book coverThis book originally came out in 2003, but Mackler revised it in 2018. She didn’t make major changes, but did upgrade it to fit with today’s technology a little better. One of my writing friends recommended the book to me because of the kissing in the beginning (it was relevant to a story I was writing). I’m glad she did, because I quite enjoyed the book.

Virginia is a fifteen-year-old fat girl who feels like a failure next to her perfect family. On top of that, her best (and only, really) friend moved across the country for a year. And she’s got this weird kissing thing going on with a boy (rather unfortunately) named Froggy. Her mom is pressuring her to lose weight. After her perfect brother—the one she’s always looked up to and loved tremendously—does something truly awful, she has to reevaluate everything about him and their relationship. This causes lots of additional stress in her life. The possibility of a trip out to see her best friend makes everything seem bearable again—until her mom nixes that. Virginia has a lot of things to figure out, and I think she does a great job of doing just that. She’s kind of remarkable—despite all the things going against her, she maintains a reasonably positive attitude. (And it’s believable even to grumpy old me.) One exchange Virginia has with her dad (after he tells her it looks like she’s lost weight) near the end of the book made me particularly happy:

“Dad? We’re trying to be more open with each other, right?”

Dad nodded, but his forehead was wrinkled in confusion.

“Then I have to tell you that I’d rather you don’t talk about my body. It’s just not yours to discuss.”

Overall, the book has a good message about body image and other issues important to girls. I’d recommend it to anyone interested in a fun read that still manages to be quite substantive. There's even a sequel I'm going to check out.

Review: Zombies Vs. Unicorns edited by Holly Black and Justine Larbalestier

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Zombies Vs. Unicorns book coverThis is fun collection of mostly urban fantasy stories centering on (duh) zombies or unicorns. It is framed as a competition between the two editors, where Team Zombie is led by Justine and Team Unicorn by Holly. There are twelve stories in the collection but I was only able to read ten of them due to a weird printing error (pages from one story later in the book replaced pages in two other stories earlier in the book). Not sure how that happened with a major publisher like Simon & Schuster, but okay…

The first story is “The Highest Justice” by Garth Nix, on Team Unicorn. It’s a fairly simple fantasy story about a princess being given what’s rightfully hers with the help of a unicorn dispensing justice.

“Love Will Tear Us Apart” by Alaya Dawn Johnson is the first Team Zombie story. It’s about a zombie named Grayson who’s got a big crush on a boy named Jack. There are some pretty funny moments in it. When he’s talking about how he doesn’t know who he was before he caught the prion that makes him a zombie, he says about the prion:

That means it has to be drunk, snorted, dripped, or anally inserted. Yeah, I don’t want to know what the fuck I was doing either.

The story’s told mostly in second person (“you”), which I am not a fan of. (Actually, it drives me crazy and I sort of hate it. But I didn’t hate this story, mostly because it moves at a fair clip.)

The next story is “Purity Test” by Naomi Novik, a unicorn one. It’s also funny. An evil magician has been kidnapping baby unicorns and an adult unicorn is on the hunt for a virgin to help stop the bad guy.

The next two stories—“Bougainvilla” by Carrie Ryan and “A Thousand Flowers” by Margo Lanagan—are the ones that got the pages from another story dropped in the middle of them. So I can’t say anything about them.

“The Children of the Revolution” by Maureen Johnson is another zombie story. It too is funny (this is a theme for much of this collection). In this one, a college girl dreamily follows her boyfriend to England to pick berries only to find that this is backbreaking, soul-destroying work. After he abandons her for the greener pastures of London, she ends up getting a gig babysitting some weird kids. Some very weird kids.

“The Care and Feeding of Your Baby Killer Unicorn” by Diana Peterfreund gives an interesting take on unicorns. Maybe they’re not what they’re supposed to be—maybe they’re vicious killers. But what about a baby one?

“Inoculata” by Scott Westerfeld is another zombie story. A few years after the zombie apocalypse, some teenagers are bored living with each other and a handful of adults, running pointless drills to stay prepared. So one of them figures out a way to make things more interesting—for both the kids and the zombies.

The next story is “Princess Prettypants” by Meg Cabot and it has the honor of being my favorite story in the collection because of its humor. A seventeen-year-old is given a unicorn for her birthday and doesn’t know what to do with her—until she figures out a perfect way to use her, to great effect.

“Cold Hands” by Cassandra Clare has a slightly different take on zombies (the book says it’s like the voudin tradition of the possessed dead) that leads to a very different love story.

Kathleen Duey’s “The Third Virgin” takes a dark look at the downside of being a unicorn with healing powers. It’s told from the perspective of a unicorn who just wants it to all be over.

“Prom Night” by Libba Bray is definitely the most haunting in the collection, ending with a surprise for the reader and a promise of an unpleasant surprise for the characters.

A lot of these stories are fairly long, but they also are pretty deep. They explore different themes and in the end, I can’t say whether zombies or unicorns won. That will have to be up to you. But if you like fantasy/dystopian, you might enjoy this collection even though it’s almost ten years old.