I settled in to read a lighthearted YA romp, and found myself completely engrossed in this insane story. Is it realistic fiction? A mystery? Horror? All I know is that I couldn't put it down.

The story starts with one of a group of five friends going missing the summer after seventh grade, and picks up junior year of high school, where the cast of girls that blended into one mushy personality into the intro have blossomed into four unique and pretty fucked up young women.

All four of whom are getting creepy text messages from a person who knows secrets she couldn't possibly know.

But it can't be their missing friend, can it? She's dead, isn't she? Isn't she?

A Jewish myth and a Muslim myth walk into a bar -- wait, let me start over. A golem and a jinni find themselves in New York in 1899. Wecker expertly uses their familiar yet rarely explored mythology to grant new life to a story about immigration and belonging. The story is beautifully crafted, if slow-moving, and the characterizations are wonderful.

This ponderously sad book won't make you cry, but it will leave you in an emotional hole that makes it hard to follow with another book.

This charming book from 1994 describes amazing scientific facts that I didn't know, and projects incredible future possibilities into what we can only dream of today. It was funny seeing him write about information we might receive back from probes in, say 2004, he guessed -- but also heartbreaking to read his optimism from a vantage point of 2017 where the good old US of A seems to be crumbling around us.

This book made me cry more than once, happy tears of hope and optimism and wonder at the amazing man that is Carl Sagan.

The only thing better would be if Ann Druyan, Neil Degrasse Tyson, and Bill Nye got together and doubled the size of the book with new information, observations, and hopes.

This is my new guilty pleasure. I can't get enough of the chaos that Aria, Hanna, Emily, and Spencer are embroiled in. It's a little repetitive and rehashes lots of the moments and tension of the first book, but some new juicy secrets are revealed. Fun and thrilling.

Sykes has invented a wild and wicked cast of characters, all of which have biting wit and dark backstories. I struggled with the world-building; I never got a handle on what the world is like. His descriptions skew artistic over realistic, so I found myself re-reading sections just to make sure I understood what was happening, or what a particular monster looked like. He excels at dialogue, however, and I recommend it to anyone looking for some top-notch wordplay.

WHAT

Currently hating myself for not figuring out who A is.

Set in a future where the pro-lifers and pro-choicers failed the Solomon-esque test, Unwind takes place in an America where parents can retroactively abort their children by turning them into "unwinds" : kids who will be shredded for parts but technically kept alive. Science has stopped as any ailment is simply fixed with the body part of an unwind.

This is not a well-written book. It is largely boring and the characters are interchangeable and hard to root for.

The scene where you witness one character being unwound is gross and heartbreaking and sad.

Everything else is mediocre at best.

A fun, Christmas-themed interlude with four stories about my four favorite trouble-making young ladies.

Why do I care about these horrible people

Why is the suspense so Good

These books are ruining my life