And now, here’s the review for the last book that I read in 2009, Poi­son Study by Maria V. Sny­der. This is the first book in her young adult fan­tasy Study tril­ogy.

Yelena is sched­uled to be exe­cuted because she killed the young man who raped and hor­ri­bly abused her. But she is spared and offered the job of being the poi­son taster for her country’s Com­man­der (leader) instead. It’s a dan­ger­ous job, but it’s bet­ter than the hangman’s noose. Soon, Yelena is learn­ing all about poi­sons, thanks to her mentor/boss Valek, as well as try­ing to avoid a pow­er­ful gen­eral, whose son she killed. But there are other peo­ple who want Yelena dead, and being the poi­son taster is just the begin­ning of her troubles …

I’ve heard lots of good things about this book over the years so I decided to check it out. I enjoyed it a lot. Yelena is a strong, capa­ble hero­ine, and I also liked Valek’s manner-of-fact man­ner. The magic and poi­sons were inter­est­ing, plus Snyder’s descrip­tions are very lush and ele­gant in places, as you’d expect in this type of epic fan­tasy YA.

My only quib­ble is the fact that every­one in the book wanted to either a) use b) kill or c) profit from Yelena and her skills and magic. Seri­ously, it seemed like every­one was out to get the poor girl all at once and all at the same time. I would have liked just a lit­tle less of that kind of non­stop action and more scenes with Yelena and Valek. I also found the Commander’s zero-tolerance pol­icy to be a lit­tle strange (you can’t kill any­one for any rea­son, not even in self-defense like Yelena does).

But over­all, if you’re look­ing for a new YA book to try, check out Poi­son Study. Thumbs up.

Up next: Deep Kiss of Win­ter by Kres­ley Cole and Gena Showalter.

Books in my TBR pile: About 20.