Showing posts with label 2022 Best Young Adult Novel Lodestar Finalist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2022 Best Young Adult Novel Lodestar Finalist. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 16, 2022

Victories Greater Than Death (Unstoppable #1), by Charlie Jane Anders

Tor Teen, ISBN 9781250317315, April 2021

Tina Mains knows she doesn't have to worry about being ordinary. She's known since she was quite young that she's the clone of an alien war hero, hidden, disguised, on Earth, and when the time comes, the beacon implanted in her body will activate, and her life will change. In the meantime, she just has to survive high school.

When it happens, though, suddenly she's being hunted by the enemies of the woman she was cloned from before the starship that will take her to her destiny even arrives. When it does, barely in the nick of time, she and her best friend, Rachel, are injured, and need the resources of the ship's sick bay before anything else.

But the ship is more battered, worn, and short of crew than it is a shiny, powerful battle cruiser, and it turns out that the Royal Fleet has been counting on the return of their late hero more than she had imagined possible. Tina, Rachel, and four more teenagers they recruit using video games, soon find they will need to learn fast, and start coming up with their own ideas, if they're going to face anything other than the defeat and destruction of the ship they're on.

Friday, July 29, 2022

Iron Widow (Iron Widow #1), by Xiran Jay Zhao

Penguin Teen, ISBN 9780735269934, September 2021

Huaxia is trapped in a brutal war against the invading Hundun' They fight the Hunduns' powerful machines, called husks, with Huaxia's own Chrysalises, which are more powerful and more flexible--but which can be made only from captured Hundun husks.

The Chrysalises are piloted by two-person teams, a boy and a girl, using their spirit force. It takes two, but the girls rarely survive a battle, and it's the boys who become celebrated war heroes. The boys are pilots; the girls are concubine-pilots, mostly anonymous. They're genuinely young, in their teens and early twenties, with even the most successful pilots not lasting past 25.

Zetian, 18 years old, a frontier village girl, is finally ready to stop fighting her family, and enlist to become a concubine-pilot. Her motive isn't patriotism or glory, though. Her older sister enlisted before her--and was murdered by her pilot, Yang Guang. Her goal is to avenge her sister's death, and kill Yang Guang.