The Book Plank

Best Young Adult of 2015 Young Adult the genre that triggers young minds (and old). Writing Young Adult fiction is a league of itself. Though of course each story has it's roots in one or another genre, Epic or Urban Fantasy inspired. They set themselves apart when it comes down to telling the story and more importantly the focus on the protagonist, often these are young heroes or heroines who go through a remarkable transition. For me the combination mentioned above was most notable in the following books. Brandon Sanderson took over the Young Adult world by storm with his novel Steelheart . This year Firefight was released and wow. Storytelling at it's finest. The one sentence I always take into account now when reading the Steelheart series is. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Brandon Sanderson also cleverly questions what it is to be an Epic. Uprooted by Noami Novik really surprised me. It was my first book that I read from her, the synopsis of the s...

Way Down Dark by James Smythe, The Australian Trilogy #1 There's one truth on Australia: You fight or you die. Usually both. Seventeen-year-old Chan's ancestors left a dying Earth hundreds of years ago, in search of a new home. They never found one. The only life that Chan's ever known is one of violence, of fighting. Of trying to survive. But there might be a way to escape. In order to find it, Chan must head way down into the darkness - a place of buried secrets, long-forgotten lies, and the abandoned bodies of the dead. Seventeen-year-old Chan, fiercely independent and self-sufficient, keeps her head down and lives quietly, careful not to draw attention to herself amidst the violence and disorder. Until the day she makes an extraordinary discovery - a way to return the Australia to Earth. But doing so would bring her to the attention of the fanatics and the murderers who control life aboard the ship, putting her and everyone she loves in terrible dang...