Book cover of The Designate

Book description

Everything that could go wrong, went wrong.

Sea level increase? Fifty feet.

Weather? Hurricanes and crippling drought.

Government?

Don’t even get me started.

I don’t think that people a hundred years ago would have believed the way things are now.

I’m just Riley, a girl stuck in what’s left of…


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Why read it?

1 author picked The Designate as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This is book one of the Lens series, a young adult dystopian thriller. I quickly abandoned the rest of my TBR to fly through the entire Lens series. Riley Taylor is a normal teenager forced into the military out of necessity. But this military isn’t like ours. It’s a death sentence for the impoverished class and criminals recruited under false pretenses.

I loved the good versus evil trope, with the good not being completely good and the evil having redeeming qualities. Life isn’t always black and white, and Cantwell portrays that tension beautifully. The entire Lens series is…

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December on 5C4 by Adam Strassberg,

Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!

On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…

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