Warcross (#1) by Marie Lu
YA F Lu

When bounty hunter and hacker Emika Chen finds herself unexpectedly entered into the exclusive Warcross championship, she is determined to get to the bottom of a dastardly plot while trying to pull off a win in the worldwide virtual reality game.

Waste of Space by Gina Damico
Coming soon to BPL!

Ten teenagers are conned into boarding a (fake) spaceship, completely unaware of the fact that the entire production is staged. Once the teenagers start to find out about this secret, things go from bad to worse inside the spaceship.

This meme came across my Facebook feed the other week, and I laughed long and hard because A) it's so true and B) I love a good Lord of the Rings allusion. 

HOWEVER, I was also in high school at the heyday of LOTR, when the movies came out. And if you have read the stories or seen the movies, you're missing out on some of the greatest adventure stories that exist! You're also missing out on understanding some pretty great memes. 

Daughter of the Siren Queen (#2) by Tricia Levenseller
YA F Lev

Alosa, after delivering the third piece of the Isla de Canta map to her father, learns some very telling information about her father and some jaw-dropping information about her mother, namely that she's the Siren Queen AND is still alive! In a fit of anger, Alosa does something that she knows will anger her father the Pirate King, but her allegiance to him has flipped completely. She, with her crew's help, will become the Pirate Queen because her father is brute who does *not* deserve the title. They race to the Isle de Canta with the Pirate King hot on their heels. Will they make it or will Kalligan's fleet blast cannonball-sized holes in their ship first? Alosa and her crew --including Riden-- may or may not make it through this dangerous journey alive.

Daughter of the Siren Queen is just as engaging as the first book! It's got lots of action to move the story along, but it also has character development, friendship, and the romance between Riden and Alosa heats up dramatically. Alosa discovers more about her siren abilities and how she can control them, which she uses to her and her crew's advantage.

Daughter of the Pirate King (#1) by Tricia Levenseller
YA F Lev

Daughter of the Pirate King is the story of Alosa and her quest to find, for her father, 1/3 of a map he wants. In order to do this, she must stage her own kidnapping by Draxen, another pirate, in order to search his ship on the sly. There's swashbuckling, deck-swabbing, stealthy sleuthing, kidnapping galore, and reluctant romancing.

I enjoyed Daughter of the Pirate King a lot! A patron recommended it to me, and I'm very glad I moved it to the top of my list. Fans of epic fantasy and girl power will enjoy it, especially if they inhaled Sarah J. Maas's Throne of Glass series. The pacing and style are very similar, as are the protagonists: girls who aren't afraid to play dirty to get what they want and are confident in their abilities and opinions.