Orleans Ain't New, Cher

As the waters receded, New Orleans picked itself up by its bootstraps and flipped Hurricane Katrina a rude finger gesture as she tucked tail and ran. But what would happen if Katrina was only the first in a long line of increasingly more severe storms? Could our beloved N'Orleans and the surrounding delta survive? In Sherri L. Smith's Orleans, we get a terrifying glimpse of a world that we pray doesn't resemble our future. 

Fen survives in the Delta like everyone else. They have no choice. After hurricane after worsening hurricane battered the area into total submission, Delta Fever took over. Delta Fever was unstoppable and the rest of the country had no choice. They built the wall. They separated themselves from the Delta region, and left it to fend for itself. Now, decades later, inside the wall is assumed to be a wasteland with few survivors. Daniel wants to find a cure to Delta Fever, but his closest attempt only made the virus worse. Instead of giving up, he heads to Orleans to gather data that is unavailable outside the wall. 

Once inside, though, he is shocked to find a thriving, albeit bloodthirsty, way of life. Fen, a teenaged O-Pos girl lives that life well. Everyone survives better in a tribe, but when her tribe is brutally murdered and she is left with an infant from the tribes leader, she can only think of taking care of Baby. Although Daniel is a liability, he also helped her and Baby escape the Blood Farm, so she owes him. While she doesn't think she can give him want he is looking for, especially in the lawless city of Orleans, she can certainly guide him there. But there is a lot more waiting for innocent, unsuspecting kids than just Delta Fever. Orleans is full of shadows. 

This was a really interesting post-apocalyptic story. It was terrifying to see how quickly the region spiraled downwards, and how the rest of the country was totally willing to quarantine the area with Delta Fever unrelenting and incurable. I have family who lived through Hurricane Sandy in New Jersey, and it was until I saw the actual destruction a hurricane can cause, I didn't truly understand what a city like New Orleans has lived through. Sandy may have caused a lot of monetary damage that crippled a lot of people, but Katrina crippled a culture. Although they bounced back, as is the nature of those fierce Cajuns, Katrina will always be a part of their culture now, for better or for worse. The idea of shutting out a whole part of the country and calling it quits was terrifying, but how far would we really go if we couldn't control a deadly virus? 

The book is a little confusing sometimes because it is told in Fen's first-person perspective with a mild dialect (perfectly readable, and easy to get used to, but a grammatically incorrect dialect nonetheless), and Daniel's third-person perfect English. The chapter heads weren't marked, so sometimes it took me a minute to realize who I was reading from. This might confuse a weaker reader, so be careful who you give the story to. Still, it is a good enough stand-alone story for any young adult reader. The virus is a little odd in how it affects different blood types in different ways (hence the blood typed tribes), but if you just went with the story, you would certainly enjoy it. I look forward to more from Smith int he future!

Nick Isn't So Invincible!

Nick's realization that there is more out there by way of the supernatural continues in Sherrilyn Kenyon's Invincible, the second book in the Chronicles of Nick. Unfortunately, so do the life-threatening situations!

Nick survived half his school turning into zombies and trying to eat him and his friends, but he isn't knocking his new-found abilities. Although, his ability to see through the glamours of supernatural creatures lets him know just how many creatures there are in New Orleans that are far from human. But, his new boss also gets his mom a new job where she doesn't have to dance, makes more money, and happier, so he can't complain. 

Life in school, however, hasn't improved. As the poor scholarship kid, he is still the outcast among the rich kids, and no one lets him forget it. When the football coach coaxes him back onto the team and blackmails him into stealing things from other kids, Nick knows something is up. He hits up his supernatural and human friends to help him dig up the truth behind this new coach, and what he finds out might be just as deadly as a pack of groaning football jock zombies!

These are fun stories! They are witty, the dialogue is pithy, and they keep you entertained from cover to cover. They are, however, quite young in how they read. The stories are still exciting and hilarious, so that makes these great books for a younger student who wants more mature reading, but still requires age-appropriate content. I might give this to an older student with a lower reading level, but I would make sure it was a student who didn't need more mature subject matter and enjoyed an easy read.

Nick is a typical wise-guy high school student with a chip on his shoulder and an attitude to match. He is fun to read about because he always has a witty quip to put people in their place. This witty dialogue, while quick and perceptive, is easy to follow and keeps the mood of the book light while the content deals with some ugly stuff! I like these books for a range of low-skilled readers, and I look forward to reading the rest of the series!

One Big Paranormal Motley Crew!

Life is hard for any teenager. But if your father is an evil, sadistic jerk serving time and your mom is a stripper, life is downright miserable. In the first book of The Chronicles of Nick, Infinity, Sherrilyn Kenyon tells the story of a normal boy who is anything but normal.

Nick lives among thug football players, crazy voodoo hunters, and some real New Orleans characters, but he just can't seem to stay out of trouble. His mother tells him on a daily basis how hard she works to take care of him, and he wants nothing more than to make her happy, but things around him always fall apart. When another football jerk taunts him into reacting (by mentioning his mother's profession, of course), he gets suspended from school. What he didn't realize was he was safer being out of school than in it that week. 

When one football player attacks another and tries to eat him, people start to wonder what on earth they have been doing. When a whole rash of "zombies" start running around trying to kill people, they start to get worried. In New Orleans, of course, nothing surprises people. When the "zombies" (who aren't really zombies, but just kids who are under a voodoo trance) get out of hand, it's crazy Bubba and his clan who know exactly what to do. What Nick doesn't know, though, is everyone around him, including his classmates and his new employer, are not what they seem. But can all these paranormal beings stop brainwashed zombies from trying to eat their way through the city?

OK. So there was every kind of paranormal creature stuffed into one book. Sometimes that is fun, sometimes it can be a little overwhelming. In this book, I teetered on the edge of both sentiments. I found myself confused sometimes and others I had to laugh at how everyone just accepted werewolves and shapeshifters as something they figured existed anyway, and just hadn't seen for themselves yet. Sometimes, the addition of yet another paranormal creature made the story feel a little anticlimactic. I asked myself, "Really? No one thinks this is strange?" Maybe that is just the interpretation of the New Orleans culture coming through in this story, but it struck me as odd. 

Another struggle I had with this story is all the added angles flying in and out of the story. Sometimes there was so much going on it seemed confusing, especially when a new angle (like Nick's dad) was introduced, but never fully developed or explained. Since this is an ongoing series, I assume those things are being addressed later, but it makes the first book more difficult to digest at this point. Other than that, this was a fun book. I think the maturity level and reading level make it a decent middler reader book for your older middle school students through less mature young adult readers. I am anxious to read the next book in order to find a little resolution for my many many questions. At least I hope there is a little resolution!

Athena Won't Know What Hit Her

Greek Mythology is so full of interesting stories and characters. The Gods alone are full of material to play off and manipulate into new stories with familiar faces. Kelly Keaton did just that with her first book, Darkness Becomes Her where Athena was an almighty beast of a Goddess who had no problem torturing and killing beings for her own enjoyment. Now, in A Beautiful Evil, we watch Ari, a gorgon girl who hasn't yet come into her own, give Athena a run for her money.


Now that Ari knows what she truly is, the mixture of a gorgon (offspring of Medusa) and Son of Perseus (hunters sworn to kill gorgons and other magical monsters), she realizes how unique she really is. But her impending doom of soon becoming a monster who cannot even be touched without turning people to stone is not what troubles Ari... It is the fact that Athena has her father and Violet, one of the kids who took her in when she found herself in the destroyed Garden District of New Orleans. Ari knows she is no match for a God like Athena, but that won't stop her from hunting Athena down.


Sebastian and the rest of the kids who live with Ari are determined to find Athena, but they have to do so with the help of the Novem, the elite of magical folks who own and run the city of New Orleans. Ari is granted access to the secret library which is stored in Pandora's Box (but not really a box) and holds the secrets of the universe. It is there that she gets the idea of locating Athena's temple and hitting her where it hurts, but the only problem is, the entry to her temple isn't so easy to locate or to open. Hidden in the middle of the wasteland of beasts and soulless creatures of New Orleans, the location of the door might be just as dangerous as what lies on the other side. But there is only one way for Ari to get her father and Violet back, and she has no intention of leaving them to Athena's murderous rage. Even if it means releasing the gorgon inside her.


I really loved the first story, Darkness Becomes Her, but this sequel fell a little flat for me. I did like it, but not as much as I liked the first book. At times the story seemed incredibly rushed. A character would be attacked and die in the course of four paragraphs and *poof* just like that the action had moved on around them. The pace of the book left me a little confused at times, and more than a little frustrated at other times. The way things ended in the final showdown(s) was also symptomatic of this bizarre pacing and I had to reread it to make sure I understood everything that had happened. My other criticism was the supporting characters. In the first book, they were just as awesome as Ari, and you couldn't get enough of them. In this book, they really are secondary characters and their charm is lost in how rarely they appear. I am not sure if I want this series to continue to a third book after reading this sequel, but the author definitely left it open for another book.


This series is age appropriate for young adults and has a good heft of choice language. The story lost its way a little in this second installment, but if a kid enjoyed the first book, they would most likely still enjoy this one. The mythology in it is interesting and I love the twists on old "tried and true" stories. The reading level is fairly simple, but combined with the language, it might be best for a low-skilled older student who needs something accessible to read. 

Darkenss Lit Up My Day!

Greek Gods? Love 'em! Shape shifters? Can't wait to see what they'll "pop" into next! Vampires? Oddly intrigued, but hate to admit it. Witches, wizards, and warlocks? Put a spell on me baby! New Orleans French Cajun culture... oui! Put it all together and what do you get? No, not seven separate books, silly. You get Darkness Becomes Her, by Kelly Keaton, and you are going to love it!

Ari had a strange childhood. Given up at the age of four, she was bounced from horrible foster home to horrible foster home until she was taken in by loving bail bondsmen, Bruce and Casey, who not only love her, they teach her to kick some butt (and full weapons training of course). But Ari needs to know what happened to her mother, so she tracks down the mental institute her mother was committed in when she died. It is there she learns her mother committed suicide shortly after giving Ari up. Ari collects her mother's possessions and in the box, she find a letter from her mother telling her to run, and run fast. Ari ignores the letter at first, but when a big scary man speaking another language attacks her and is impervious to bullets, she knows her mother wasn't crazy after all.

Barely escaping with her life, Ari is determined to find out what really happened to her mother. So she ventures into New 2, what is left of New Orleans. Around the time Ari was given up, a wave of hurricanes all but destroyed New Orleans. The US wanted to abandon it entirely, but a group of 9 New Orleans families came together and bought the city from the country, making it the only privately owned city in North America. New 2 is rumored to be lawless and a paranormal haven, but not many people dare to enter (except a few silly tourists). The culture still exists, but as Ari arrives, she realizes so does a whole population of "freaks"- strange people who turn out to be as paranormal as the rumors said they were. Apparently the 9 families who own New 2, Novem, are made up of vampires, witches and warlocks, and shape shifters. They work together to take care of the city and keep it safe from the real nasties out in the ruins.

When Ari arrives, she is "adopted" by a group of freaks who live in an abandoned house. Sebastian, the leader, agrees to help her find information about her mother. Instead, they find Sebastian's grandmother knew Ari's mom and even paid her hospital bill when Ari was born. When they go to the Novem, of which Sebastian's grandmother is part of, they find there is a terrible curse on Ari's family where the women in her family all die by 21, but not before delivering a baby girl. Sebastian's grandmother agrees to help her fight the curse, but before she can, Ari is kidnapped by a supernatural soldier and taken to a hidden prison. It is there she learns the truth of who she is. She manages to escape and help the other prisoners- a harpy, a shapeshifter woman/spider, and even Sebastian's father, who he thought was gone forever.

The prisoners tell her it is the petulant Greek Goddess Athena who imprisoned them, and it is Athena who cursed Ari's family. It turns out, Ari's curse goes farther back than she or anyone else expected. Now she has the Novem who want to keep her as a weapon, an angry goddess who is simply a jerk, and Ari finds out she can be a real danger to everyone, her friends included, when she comes of age. But Ari won't just give up. She is determined to take control of her life, even if it means showing a Greek God who is really the boss!

This was SUCH an interesting book and it took so many twists and turns I had no idea what was going to happen. I read it in one sitting and was really annoyed when anyone interrupted me because it was so addictive! The interwoven myths and supernatural creatures are so cool, and the truth behind Ari's curse dates right back to Greek mythology. There is another book planned for next year, and I have already pre-ordered it! I can't wait!

There is some forceful language in the story, but most of it is totally deserved (wouldn't you throw out a curse word or two if an awful goddess cursed your family for countless lifetimes and is trying to cook your brain?!). The content can be violent at times, but is nothing gratuitous or violent for the sake of being violent. Instead, it is just the nature of such a story with life and death situations around every bend. This is a great book for almost any student, as it is fast-paced, exciting, and the characters are awesome. You won't be sorry if you pick up this book... but you might be trapped where ever you do because it is too good to put down until you reach that last page!