Super fun new speculative fiction

I'm super excited to get to be a part of the CYBILS awards this year.  In case you don't know what that is, CYBILS is a group of people who blog about literature for young people and each year, they give out several awards in different categories.  I'm SO lucky this year to get to be part of the first round panelists for speculative fiction (which some people call fantasy fiction).  I've got a lot of reading to do over the next few weeks, but I thought I'd share a couple of the best ones here.

My first new favorite is science fiction.  It's called "We're Not From Here" by Geoff Rodkey.  This story starts with Lan, who is living with his (or possibly her-in the book, Lan's gender is never specified, which was amazing to me!) family on Mars.  Earth has become uninhabitable and Mars is on it's way to also becoming uninhabitable.  Happily, there is another planet (very far away) that is willing to take them.  So Lan's family along with another 2500 escapees from Earth and Mars, go into suspended animation for 20 years to reach their new home.  Except that when they get there, the leadership of the new planet doesn't want them any more and there's no where else for them to go.  Lan's mother persuades the leadership of the planet, Choom, to allow their family to come as an experiment and live there.  Part of what makes this book terrific is the idea of what it's like to go and live somewhere completely alien to you, the other part is the dialogue, which is hilariously on pitch.  The characters in the book are interesting and mostly people (and creatures) I'd like to get to know better.  I thought this one was terrific and I'm hoping there is going to be a sequel.

My second new favorite is a combination of fairy tale and magical mystery.  It's called Twinchantment by Elise Allen.  The story opens with a tragic back story.  An evil magician comes to the king and kills off his family, except for one young son.  The new king defeats the evil magician along with a good magician and they banish all magic (except for the good magicians, who end up as a magical army) to a magical prison.  The story flashes forward several generations to a new young king and his pregnant queen, who is viciously attacked by the same evil magician.  The queen appears to survive the attack unscathed and gives birth to a beautiful baby girl named Flissara.  Except that Flissara is actually twins (which are considered exceptionally evil magic) and so they have been carefully hidden for their entire 11 nearly 12 years, with only one of them ever seen at a time.  The queen is attacked again and lays dying and girls decide they must go to the evil magical prison, get the evil magical wizard, and make him reverse the spell.  Except, things don't go according to the plan.  I really liked this one a lot.  The girls appear to have dark skin and dark curly hair (YAY for an African American princess magician!!!) and have completely different skill sets-Fliss is athletic and strong but struggles with making decisions and interacting with people.  Sara is artistic and a wonderful storyteller but is clumsy.  Together, they are strong and I loved, that as the story progressed, they both found that they didn't have to be limited by what they first thought were weaknesses.  I loved the dialogue in this one too and I loved the little surprises from different characters along the way.  This was a really fun book to read.