We did not listen. We ignored all the signs. What if the drought never ended?

Now Arizona, California, and Nevada are struggling over water rights to the dwindling Colorado River. Catherine Case builds arcologies in Southern Nevada. They are luxurious, water-rich sanctuaries that insulate its residents from the surrounding brutal, scorching hot desert environment. An abundance of water is pushed through the arcologies to build and sustain them, while the water-deprived locals struggle to obtain the most minimal rations. Read More »

Solar flares have hit the earth, killing most of the population. What is left of humanity has gathered together in small communities, just trying to survive. Mark and Trina were in school together, riding the subway home when the flares hit. They were saved by Alec, an old former soldier, and have been together ever since. Read More »

I have not read the previous three installments and there are eighteen books total in the series. If you love the 1980s science fiction/fantasy novels, then surely A Cat of Silvery Hue will be your cup of tea. I enjoy fantasy and love action and violence scenes, and A Cat of Silvery Hue had these in plenty. What I wanted more of was the evolution of the characters, especially the main characters. I felt that I did not know them at all-how they thought or why things were done. Read More »

Seventeen-year-old Patsy Klein’s difficult-yet-bearable life gets shockingly, infinitely more complicated the day a representative from Valor Savings shows up at her door, presenting her with a “wonderful opportunity.” Valor, along with other undisclosed shareholders, having paid off the United States government’s debts, now plans to call in its own debtors in enforcement of its fine-print agreement. Her mother’s debt is being called in, the sinister man explains to Patsy and her mom, presenting them with two options. One, they can forfeit their lives, or two, Patsy can join Valor’s team of “bounty hunters” providing an assigned list of ten people the same choices. Read More »

Nat is one of the marked-people whose eyes are a different color, who bear some kind of mark on their body and possess some kind of power. Not accepted in society, the marked are either executed or shipped off to government facilities where they are studied and used.

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Months have passed since Nat and Wes said their goodbyes. Nat is busy defending the Blue from government attacks, and Wes has resorted to racing cars while waiting for news about his sister. When Nat receives a telepathic distress call from her Sylph friend, Liannan, she sets off to find and save her. Read More »

Ashley Myers knows that she is living a life that is not her own. As a CIA agent, she was sent to the town of Wayward Pines looking for other agents who had gone missing. That is the last she remembers about her previous life. Frozen for over one thousand years, she is revived and told she had been in a car accident. Her “husband” and “children” are people she has no memory of. Her past life is what she remembers, but there is no escape. Read More »

The extraordinary House Immortal introduces a world two hundred years in the future, where resources are governed by eleven Houses and doled out as considered appropriate by their leaders. Matilda Case wants to continue to live and work below the radar, taking care of her farm populated by animals created (literally) by her father, her only constant company her grandma and her farmhand, Neds (the plural due to the fact that Ned possesses two heads). With her parents dead, killed several years earlier, and her brother, Quinten, missing for three years, life on the farm can be challenging but not more than Matilda can handle, as long as she does not call undue attention to herself. Read More »

When Alice Davenport’s father dies, her perfect childhood comes to an abrupt end as she and her mother are forced to move. When her mother is around, which is not often, she does not pay much attention to Alice, so Alice learns to take care of herself. One day, Alice wakes up to find that her mother has not come home and that horrific storms have left London flooded. Read More »

Farah lives in a post-apocalyptic world where everyone has roles. With most plant life being considered poisonous as a result of chemical warfare, most people live in villages set up in the desert. At Farah’s age, everyone has a job that is supposed to help them choose their eventual role in the village. Farah is a nightwatcher, assigned to a tower as a look-out to keep her people safe from the undergrounders-pirates who destroy villages and take what they want, disregarding the rules set in place to keep peace between the villages. Read More »

Tris and Tobias are struggling to deal with the fact that everything they thought was the truth was not. Life outside the city is not what they have been led to believe their entire lives, and the city itself is the biggest lie of all. Divergents are the genetically pure, not the pariahs that the factions have labeled them, and the factions are actually the damaged. Read More »

Beginning a few weeks after the events of the previous installment, Marked, book three in the Mindscape Investigations series, finds Adam Ward, telepath consultant to the police department, leaving yet another successful interrogation to go help Isabella Cherabino, his partner and not-so-secret crush, with a murder case. On his way, Adam receives a message to call Kara, his ex-fiancée, immediately. The two have a recent history of helping each other out when necessary, so Adam decides he will return the call a bit later. Read More »

Because It Is My Blood picks up shortly after the first book in Gabrielle Zevin’s Birthright series, All These Things I’ve Done. Anya Balanchine’s sentence at Liberty is coming to an end, and she finds out that her nemesis, Charles Delacroix, has something to do with the easy time she has received there. Although she promised to stay away from his son, that becomes impossible when an anonymous donation lets her back into Holy Trinity. Read More »

A future where chocolate and coffee are banned could be pretty bleak, and if your family is the US’s top exporter of chocolate, that means your family is a bunch of criminals—a mob, actually. This is the predicament that sixteen-year-old Anya Balanchine finds herself in. As if she does not have enough trouble keeping track of her older, mentally-challenged brother and her spunky, younger sister while their guardian, their grandmother, is on life-support, she is accused of poisoning her ex-boyfriend with chocolate. Read More »

Enclave, the terrific first installment in the Razorland trilogy, grips the reader from the first page. In an unspecified future, a young woman faces her naming ceremony, a ritual that involves various artifacts from the past and drops of her blood. Read More »

Darla has always had a knack with the old outlawed technology heaped in the ‘Boneyard’. This knack has helped her survive since branded a Dissident as a child. She has even managed to avoid the Yardman until now. Read More »

Imagine a world both transformed and devastated by technology, where the resulting Tech Wars forever altered a way of life everyone takes for granted in the twenty-first century. In an unspecified future year, telepaths with a wide range of ability levels prove a major force driving in society—governed, employed, and often exploited by The Guild. An uneasy truce exists between law enforcement and the Guild, though sometimes circumstances force the two groups to work together. Read More »

Tris and Tobias were able to stop the simulation that the Erudite faction engineered to wipe out the Abnegation faction, but not before Tris lost both her mother and father and was forced to shoot her friend, Will. Now, hiding in an Amity safehouse, burdened with the guilt of Will’s death and knowing that her parents died for her, Tris struggles to recover. Read More »

In Beatrice’s world, society is divided into factions and each faction has a different job to perform. This was done to avoid the conflicts that brought about the end of society as we know it today. Once a year, all 16 year olds are given an aptitude test to determine their placement within the factions. There are the Candor (the honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), and Erudite (the intelligent). Read More »

Feisengrad was a difficult book to rate. Brave New World is one of my favorite novels, and 1984 always leaves me deep in thought. I did not enjoy Animal Farm as much as the others, but Feisengrad was different for me. I feel it was more crass, and at times almost “too clever,” but the author did a good all-around job of setting up Feisengrad’s world and life. Read More »