Material Girls by Elaine Dimopoulos Project Runway meets Nashville meets intelligent YA dystopia in this brand new book by my writing buddy Elaine. Told from two points of view, Material Girls tells the story of Marla Klein and Ivy Wilde, two girls living in a society where fashion and fame are everything and teens call all the shots. But when Marla is fired from her cushy job as a fashion judge and pop star Ivy Wilde begins to teeter in the charts, their lives unravel slowly

Material Girls by Elaine Dimopoulos Hi all! This week I wanted to plug a book by one of my very good friends, Elaine Dimopoulos. Elaine and I are writing buddies, which means once a week, every week we sit at a cafe together and write (except for, you know, if one of us has a baby or something). We’ve both had our shares of ups and downs in our writing lives and our personal lives, so we take some time to talk about it and encourage each other, but mostly we sit together and

We have a guest post at Monkey Poop today. Writer Elizabeth Eckhart compares two book to film YA dystopias, The Hunger Games and Divergent. Take it away, Elizabeth. Comparing Divergent to The Hunger Games by Elizabeth Eckhart Since the release of Twilight in 2008, movie studios have been scrambling to replicate the franchise’s worldwide success with a series of adaptations of popular Young Adult book series. However, most of these attempts to make lightning strike twice have

The Chaos Walking trilogy by Patrick Ness is a YA dystopia series about a planet where men’s thoughts can be heard out loud by everyone due to an alien virus. This series is amazing. The strangeness of the premise (and the obvious statement about our information-overloaded society), the break-neck pacing, and the violence made it hard for me to connect all the way with the main character, Todd, in the first book–but by the end of the third book, I loved the series even more t

An amazing book. I thought I’d read it already in the sixth grade and had hated it, but in fact I’d read The Wish Giver and was too scared to pick this book up because of the frightening old man on the cover. Now I wish I’d had the courage to read it because I wonder what sixth grader me would have thought. The story is about a young boy named Jonas who lives in a very orderly world filled with numerous rules for living. As you would expect, the book emphasizes the importance

While Anderson’s ability to immerse himself into his character and into the world he creates kind of turned me off in Octavian Nothing, it was masterfully done here. I was hooked from the hilarious first line: “We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.” HA! I think this book would appeal to adults who aren’t typical YA readers. Especially those who like sci fi/tech kind of books. *spoilers below* The ending of  Feed really left me thinking–n

Anyway, the book is about a young girl named Tally who is living in a post-apocalyptic future where everyone gets major reconstructive surgery to look “pretty” as soon as they turn 16. But of course things don’t turn out the way she hopes and she has to decide whether to betray her friend and get the operation she wants or to stay “ugly” forever. This book has it all: romance, adventure, plot twists, and unforgettable characters. My only problem with it though was that I didn

I am working on a new novel and wanted to find out about the current market for my book proposal. My book could be classified as an “eco-dystopia” according to my writing group buddy Peta, which I took to basically mean a book that is a dystopia (see more about that at Peta’s blog) that centers around ecology, kind of like the movie Wall-E where the basis of the dystopic setting has to do with the large amount of garbage that humans produce. But before Peta mentioned it, I’d