Book Review: The Future Will Be BS Free

The Future Will Be BS Free by Will McIntosh

Publication Date: July 24, 2018

Read Courtesy of NetGalley.com

The plot is a winner; the characters are secondary. If you read The Future Will Be BS Free with this in mind, you'll have a good time. True, it's another teen-saves-the-world sci-fi action adventure, but it's also thought-provoking. My favorite line in the book is, "Secrets aren't the same as lies." Here's the true moral dilemma faced by the characters, as well as by the government, as well as by the reader. The intriguing aspects of their invention are if technology has the ability to differentiate between a lie and a secret, and how soon in the future could this become our reality. Even though the details of why and what kind of war there was are vague, that didn't detract from my enjoyment of the cyborg aspect of the characters that evolved from the back story. They were fun, tough underdogs, and I found myself rooting for them - especially because these cyber-enhanced characters had more personality than the main, teen characters. Don't let the underdeveloped teen characters deter you from sitting back and enjoying the tension - both in action in in morality.

Book Review: The Handsome Girl & Her Beautiful Boy

The Handsome Girl & Her Beautiful Boy by B.T. Gottfred
Courtesy of NetGalley.com
Publication date May 8, 2018

The premise of this book makes you want to like it -- non-judgmental self-discovery should be everyone's luck to have. However, in order to get there, these characters took us on a shallow roller coaster ride of stereotypes. I liked the main characters as people, but everyone else around them played to the message instead of the story. If I suspended disbelief and went with the flow, I enjoyed the story, the struggle, the humor, the self-deprication. Granted, I'm not a teen in 2017-18, but I really wonder how authentic the thoughts and dialog were as opposed to being manipulated to convey a message. I understand it is fiction, so this book provides a point-of-reference for jumping into a dialogue with teens about gender issues. Teens reading this as fiction will enjoy it; teens hoping for a template for a self-help guide will be disappointed.

Book Review: The 11th Hour

The 11th Hour by Kristine Scarrow
Pub Date 20 Mar 2018
Through the courtesy of www.Netgalley.com

I didn't want to like this book at first. I felt like I was listening to whiny teenagers. And I was, but that ended up being the beauty of the book. The characters were real; they were real teenagers. What's even more impressive about this tale is that it occurred in such a short amount of time. In spite of this pace, Kristine Scarrow created great tension and anticipation as the reader comes to the realization about Annika's predicament in tandem with Annika's own awareness. Scarrow uses a successful and tight he-said/she-said, back-n-forth delivery of the dialogue and action, regardless of (or in reflection of) the turmoil of the teenage mind, the disordered mind, or both. The addition of resources is an absolute plus.