The new year will bring some great reads for female fans of young adult fiction hungering for something new.
Fans of Marissa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles series can dig into book number three in February. Cress is based on the story of Rapunzel, but her tower is a satellite.
Alison Watson, teen services coordinator at the St. Albert Public Library says they can’t keep the books in Meyer’s clever series on the shelves.
“The author’s sort of gone off in a different direction than a lot of the other YA authors,” Watson says. “She’s melded fairy tales with kind of a science fiction, futuristic setting. The first book was Cinder which was a little bit like Cinderella, and then she had Scarlet which was Little Red Riding Hood.”
There are also a few other series releases hitting shelves in 2014. The third book in Veronica Rossi’s Under the Never Sky series, Into the Still Blue, will be available at the end of this month.
“I don’t want to say too much about it because I don’t want to give anything away,” Watson says. “But if teens like Hunger Games, that’s a really good series.”
Teen girls seem to be gravitating toward books with protagonists like The Hunger Games’ Katniss Everdeen.
“Strong female characters who can take care of themselves – that seems to be quite important,” says Watson.
Tales of vampires and zombies, though still popular, are giving way to dystopian themes in young adult tales.
“Divergent is the name of the trilogy by Veronica Roth, and after Hunger Games was published, this was the next, in my opinion, really great dystopian trilogy,” says Watson.
Though there are no new releases currently scheduled, the Divergent trilogy is an excellent series for dystopian fans that haven’t discovered it yet. The first two books in the series were Divergent and Insurgent, and the newest title in the series, Allegiant, was released in October.
“You probably notice there’s a lot of sort of paranormal, fantasy that’s very popular right now,” Watson says. “There’s not as many reality books as there were maybe ten years ago.”
One popular book based more in reality is Fangirl by author Rainbow Rowell that was released in September.
“It’s a sort of coming of age tale of a fan fiction writer and her first love,” says Watson. “So it’s reality, it’s contemporary, it has all these elements of modern life in it. That one is, I think, going to continue to be popular.”
Another new title dropping at the end of this month is Unhinged, the sequel to Splintered by author A.G. Howard.
“It’s a sort of modern day Alice in Wonderland series where the main character, Alyssa Gardner, her mother suffers from mental illness and she’s worried that she might also be going a little bit crazy herself.”
