In 2017 I shared Favorite Book Features on my favorite books. This year I’d like to start a new series—features on my favorite authors! I’m going to return to my favorite books shelf and look into some of my favorite authors. I’ll share about their books I’ve read and why they’re an awesome author. Today’s featured author is the incredible Neal Shusterman!

Neal Shusterman is a successful novelist and writer for television and film. He grew up in Brooklyn, New York and went to UC Irvine. He now lives in Southern California with his four kids. Shusterman is the author of the Unwind Dystology, the Skinjacker Trilogy, the Arc of a Scythe, the Accelerati Trilogy (with Eric Elfman), the Nation Book Award-winning novel Challenger Deep, and many other books for teens and kids.

The Skinjacker Trilogy—Everlost, Everwild, and Everfound—follows Nick and Allie as they navigate Everlost, the world between life and death where kids who “don’t get where they’re going” end up. It is a mysterious and dangerous world, full of lost souls and crossed-over objects, and if you stand in the same place to long you sink to the center of the earth. I’ve definitely never read anything quite like this before.

Like with Everlost, Shusterman blew my mind again with the Unwind Dystology. This series (Unwind, Unwholly, Unsouled, and Undivided) takes place in the future after the second civil war was fought over abortion. Now children cannot be aborted, but from ages 13-18 they can be “unwound,” a process which results in 100% of their body being donated, so they’re not technically dead. These books are eerie and exciting and wonderful.

I think my favorite thing about Neal Shusterman’s writing—besides the incredible stories he comes up with—is his awesome omniscient narration. Most of the time I don’t like omniscient stories because I want to stick close to the main characters, but Shusterman uses the omniscient narrator to take you into the both the villains’ and side characters’ heads and beautifully characterize them in even as little as a paragraph. He puts the omniscient point of view to its best use by really getting deep into all of the characters (no matter how brief) to give the readers all of the perspectives on the situations in the book. These two series are both unique and really cool, and his narration makes the books some of my favorites and Shusterman one of my favorite authors.

Though I haven’t read many of Neal Shusterman’s books, I absolutely love the ones I have read, and I can’t wait to try more!

Have you read any of Neal Shusterman’s books? Which ones are your favorites?