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A Thousand Years of Evil

Jimmy Hankins and Mickey O’Hara, boys in their early teens, are abducted from the streets with many other children in their city, by a band of evil men planning on selling the children as sex slaves through the seedy channels of human trafficking. Then, like magic, Theresa Bordils and Melchior, Fairy King of Avalon, rescues…

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Fascinating YA Science-Fiction Fairytale

The Luna Chronicles consists of four major books—Cinder, Scarlet, Cress, and Winter. Author Marissa Meyer connects each book sequentially, so it’s important to start with Cinder and read your way through to the amazing climax in Winter. Each book is named after one of the primary female leading teens in the Luna Chronicles. First and…

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The wicked Cinderella

I’ve read quite a few fairy tale revisions and watched their counterpart movies and TV shows, but none were as creative and entertaining as Anita Valle’s Sinful Cinderella. Valle’s premise strikes a logical chord. “How could she [Cinderella] stay so sweet and cheerful when she gets nothing but abuse from her family?” With that in…

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The Time Travel Journals

Three years ago I had the pleasure of reviewing both of Marlene Dotterer’s Time Travel Journal novels, Shipbuilder and Bridgebuilders for Big Al’s Books and Pals. I enjoyed those time travel YA books so much, I want to resurrect the reviews for your reading pleasure. Enjoy. -Pop Shipbuilder Casey Wilson, a coed at Queen’s University in Belfast, Ireland,…

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Pop’s Rating System

Pop evaluates a lot of books on his blog, so readers are starting to demand that he rate the books. On Amazon or Goodreads books are rated with one to five stars depending on the quality of the novel. Keeping that rating system in mind, Pop has decided on this following system for his blog. …

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Koolura and the Mayans

In celebration of Koren Thal’s 28th birthday, Solstice Publishing will release for publication Koolura and the Mayans on March 19, 2016. This novel is author Michael Thal’s third installment to the Koolura Series and his fifth published YA novel. In The Legend of Koolura, Koolura Akopyan received extraordinary psychic powers at birth from an alien…

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The Empty World Series

The Empty World Series are four YA science fiction adventure books where characters from our world are transported to a planet light years from Earth through a portal built by an ancient alien technology developed before humans walked the Earth. If Portal Through the Pond (Empty World Series Book 1) holds the theme key to…

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A Brief History of YA Literature

As a teacher fresh out of grad school and subbing for the Los Angeles Unified School District, I began reading YA fiction to uncover gems to motivate my students. I initially discovered Seventeenth Summer by Maureen Daly. Published in 1942 and considered the first book explicitly written for teens, Daly’s novel for girls had a…