Lucas Stoffel

You've Reached Sam Book Review: Here is what I can tell you about Dustin Thao after reading both his novels. He writes loneliness the way most writers write romance. It is the thing he keeps his eye on. You've Reached Sam is his debut, and it is where he figured out that grief in YA does not have to be loud.

You've Found Oliver Book Review: When Dustin Thao announced a companion novel to You've Reached Sam, I expected a gentle variation on the original. A different narrator, same grief, same magical realism, slightly different angle. What I got was a book that takes the rules of the first novel and quietly breaks them, and then uses the broken pieces to tell a queer love story that no one else in YA is writing right now.

The Amber Spyglass is the book where Philip Pullman finished building his cathedral and then knocked it down. This is a children's novel about the death of God, the liberation of the dead, the nature of consciousness, and two children who fall in love and must be separated forever. It should collapse under the weight of its own ambition. It doesn't. It soars.

The Subtle Knife introduces Will Parry, and everything changes. Where The Golden Compass was Lyra's book — fierce, adventurous, set in a single extraordinary world — The Subtle Knife is about the spaces between worlds, and the boy who can cut through them. Book Review.

Philip Pullman wrote a children's book where the villains are the Church, the weapon is truth, and the hero is an eleven-year-old girl who lies better than anyone in literature. The Golden Compass is the most subversive, most ambitious, and most beautifully written fantasy novel for young readers ever published, and I will fight about this.

They Both Die at the End: The title tells you exactly what happens. They both die at the end. Adam Silvera puts that information right there on the cover, dares you to care anyway, and you do. You care so much it feels unfair.

Lazlo Strange is a librarian who dreams of a lost city whose name was stolen from the minds of everyone who ever knew it. He calls it Weep, because that's all anyone can say when they try to remember. And from that single image — a city-shaped hole in the world's memory — Laini Taylor builds something breathtaking. Book Review

Different book, different rules. This one is not a memoir and it is not part of The Warboy Chronicles. The Stardust Pirates is a queer YA horror novel loosely inspired by Peter Pan, set on a Philippine island where the magic is ancient and the grief is fresh. I wrote it. Early readers on Goodreads and NetGalley had things to say. Here is what they said. The Stardust Pirates follows Jack, a teenager who has taken on far too much responsibility far too young, and his best fr