Today @KirkusReviews...

...I wrote about Paul Griffin's Burning Blue, a book that incorporates the two elements most common to this year's YA Cybils nominees, but that was published just a hair too late to be eligible:

The mystery at the heart of Burning Blue is this: a beautiful, brilliant, popular, genuinely nice girl gets a faceful of acid from a sports bottle-wielding assailant. But no one got a look at Nicole Castro’s attacker, and with a suspect list that includes both everyone (because her various perfections are so jealousy-inducing) and no one (because she’s so nice), the police investigation stalls out. Enter Jameson “Jay” Navarro, quiet hacker-about-town.

And last week, I wrote about Nancy Kress' Flash Point, which bears striking thematic similarities to a book I wrote about earlier this year:

Just like Jeanne Ryan’s Nerve, Flash Point explores the lengths people will go—how much they will endure, how many lines they will cross, how much they’ll be willing to bend their own personal code—to get what they want. Flash Point, though, shoots higher: in contrast to the more simplistic, plot-driven Nerve, Kress focuses more on the personalities involved and on the moral and emotional complexities of the situation.