Lucid Dream: The Dream Thieves by Maggie Stiefvater

Listening to other people describe their dreams can be the most boring thing in the world. I know this. And yet I still can’t stop myself from telling people, “I had the craziest dream last night…” Dreams come straight from our raw emotional cores, which makes them a powerful experience that so colors the waking world that we need to share them with someone else just to continue our day. This also makes them extremely difficult to describe. “I saw this pink poodle, only it wasn’t a normal poodle, it was really scary,” doesn’t cover the visceral terror you felt when staring into the black, soulless eyes of a girly hell-dog. Dreams have unstable settings, as well as mysteriously vanishing and reappearing characters, and unresolvable plot holes. And yet Maggie Stiefvater’s The Dream Thieves, a book about dreaming, perfectly evokes the otherworldly feel of those nighttime phantoms while still maintaining a stable base of story.

Untold by Sarah Rees Brennan: I Promise I Won't Spoil the Ending

Sarah Rees Brennan is really good at endings. The conclusions of her Demon’s Lexicon books were good, with big reveals and thrilling battles. But she really perfected the art in Unspoken, the first Lynburn Legacy book, aka the novel with an ending that turned the internet into one giant shocked, crying animated gif. The ending of Untold is another doozy. But since I can’t talk about it here without majorly ruining the reading experience of those who have not yet read it, let’s discuss some other things that Sarah Rees Brennan is really good at: writing awesome dialogue and confounding narrative expectations.

Days of Blood and Starlight: Laini Taylor Strikes Back

Last year, I had a conversation with a friend about Book Twos in trilogies, how often they are either boring retreads of Book One or sacrificing excitement and plot for Book Three setup. “I think you have to go full Empire Strikes Back with it,” I told her. Hyperdrive doesn’t work, Han gets captured and frozen in carbonite, Luke loses a hand; in other words, everything goes wrong. So I was overjoyed to see Kevin Nguyen of Grantland call Days of Blood and Starlight “Young adult fantasy’s Empire Strikes Back…” And after reading it, I have to agree wholeheartedly.

The Kairos Mechanism by Kate Milford

I believe I have made it clear that I love Natalie from Kate Milford’s The Boneshaker. So when I discovered that Milford had written The Kairos Mechanism, a companion novella to The Boneshaker, I knew that above all, this meant one important thing: I would get to spend more time with Natalie.

The Kairos Mechanism finds Natalie struggling to understand the things she learned in The Boneshaker about her town, her mother’s role in the town, and her mother’s illness. But before she gets a chance to do much wondering, trouble arrives in the form of two soldiers returning the dead body of the town saloon-keeper’s younger brother. His younger brother who died in the Civil War several decades previous. His younger brother whose perfectly preserved body is that of a young man.

As Natalie tries to help these soldiers and to once again save her town from dark forces, she displays all the bravery, ingenuity, and intelligence that made me fall in love with her in The Boneshaker. But The Kairos Mechanism is not just a chance to spend more time with a beloved fictional friend, it is also a twisty thrilling adventure in its own right, simultaneously entertaining and deepening the mythology of Natalie’s town, Arcane, Missouri. Here’s hoping there is more to come from this fascinating town and stupendous character.