The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields

My mother has a friend with a daughter my age. The daughter doesn't like reading, so when this friend finished with her books, she brings them to our house for me, instead. It is through her that I have been acquainted with books like The Cider House Rules, Doctor Zhivago, and now, The Stone Diaries.

It's difficult to explain what The Stone Diaries is about. I could say that it's the epic saga of two families, spanning from the turn of the century to the present, but that makes it sound hideously boring. And in the hands of another, it very well could be, but truly talented authors can take the ordinary and make it relevant; they can turn an individual into a symbol of life, death, and livelihood. That is what Carol Shields has done in this book with the Fletts and the Goodwills, and that's why it won the Pulitzer.

The main character is a girl named Daisy, though for the first hundred pages she isn't even born. We are introduced to her parents, their bizarre union, and dysfunctional but comfortable lifestyle, and their relationship to their neighbors. Daisy's mother Mercy dies giving birth to her, and her father is too heartbroken and destroyed to take care of her. Constantine Flett takes Daisy with her to raise after leaving her husband. And the rest, as they say, is history.

After that, we follow Daisy through her childhood with her friends "Fraidy" and "Beans." We see her experience two marriages--one a failure, and one with a quasi-pedophile, Constantine's son, who was giving her the Eye when she was eleven and now marries her in her early thirties.

The saga continues all the way up to Daisy's death, and then we watch as her children sort through her belongings and unravel the enigmatic tapestry of her life. I suppose this just goes to show that we only really show one face of ourselves to the public, and that we are confined to the roles we play for family, friends, work. Sometimes these roles give us meaning, and sometimes they keep us from fulfilling our potential. Daisy lives her whole life doing what other people tell her to do, and she does these things well but they don't seem to make her happy: her life is one of heartbreak.

I think there are many ways to interpret The Stone Diaries. To me, this has a definitive feminist slant, with a woman ahead of her times wasting away like a flower under those who would keep her from becoming 'overgrown.' It smacks of The Awakening, Madame Bovary, and Mrs. Dalloway. Books like that annoy me as a general rule, because I don't think there's anything empowering about suicide or tragedy, and the same holds true for The Stone Diaries.

However, it really is a beautiful story, a human life that fits in the palm of your hand, and there's something touching and honest about it, something that lacks the pretentions of the aforementioned novels. So I liked this one. That's the fun thing about literature--you can read so much into it, or, if you choose, nothing at all, and just take the book at face-value.

No matter which route you take, The Stone Diaries is a worthy member of the 1001 books list.

The Girl in the Wall by Daphne Benedis-Grab

I was expecting something like Wes Craven's The People Under the Stairs, so I was relieved that this wasn't some splatterpunk fest. It is edgier and darker than your typical YA novel, though. While reading The Girl in the Wall, I kept having flashbacks to all those trashy YA horror novels I read in middle school, where the kids all go to a party and some psycho with a vendetta kills everyone.

In Girl in the Wall, which is narrated by two ex-friends, Sera and Ariel, Ariel is a rich-bitch throwing her "god, it's great to have money" birthday party, as all rich girls are wont to do. Sera doesn't want to go but Ariel's dad is a big cheese and her dad is business partners with his, which means she has to go to the party. Boooo.

Ariel, of course, goes all out in that way that makes you wonder if she thinks Temperance is some kind of third-rate beauty product. This extravagance includes hiring the Patrick Stump-esque emo rockstar, Haden Winters.

The party is brought to an abrupt standstill when armed gunmen show up and take everyone at the mansion hostage, led by a grim, cruel mercenary who they nickname The Executioner. The agents take all their electronics and have guards posted at every door. Sera ends up bonding with the rockstar and the two of them start planning escape plans with the phone she managed to steal from Ariel's newly-dead father.

Ariel, who escapes an untimely death by switching seats with a friend at the last moment, hides in the hollow tunnels spanning through the walls of her father's mansion. She cries and is obnoxious for a while, and ends up partnering with Nico, her family's gardener-turned-agent because they blackmailed him into helping them.

Will they escape or--wait for it--DIE TRYING?

(That was terrible. I'm sorry.)

I enjoyed this. The Girl in the Wall was paced well, and I was impressed by how resourceful the teenagers were, while still acting like teenagers. I strongly suspect this was independently published, as there were many typos sprinkled throughout and mistakes like 'cooking wear', Sera mysteriously becoming 'Sara' in a random paragraph, and Marc's name shifting to 'Marco' for one page. Things an editor would catch.

Overall, though, this was good. Far better than I expected it to be.

3.5 out of 5 stars.

Hot Guys and Cute Chicks by Audrey Khuner

This is a book about incredibly sexy male models posing with baby ducks and baby chickens and it is probably the fluffiest, most squee-worthy thing that I have ever read. Each picture has a cute little caption that tells you a bit about the model (his ethnicity, his career, his likes/dislikes) and then a humorous little note about the baby animal in question that contrasts but compliments the fact about the man.

For example, there was one that was like, "MALE MODEL'S NAME  has nice pecs. BABY BIRD'S NAME wants to peck MALE MODEL'S NAME." You know, cute, harmless, mindless fun.

I am convinced that the world would be a much happier place if cute books of animals were more widely distributed. I can't tell you how big I grinned when I read the two icanhascheezburger adaptions by "Professor Happycat." When I saw that this was available for instant download on netgalley I was sold.

Yes, okay. Having men pose with baby animals is kind of like having women posing with cars. It's a cheap ploy to appeal to our baser instincts, and it's even cheaper because it actually works. However, I'm going to shove my inner-feminist in the closet and continue to giggle over babies and biceps.

For now.

4 out of 5 stars.

The Sea of Tranquility by Katja Millay

Everyone and their mother seems to love this book. I know everyone says that, but in this case it's true. Thousands of ratings, and only 12 of them gave Sea of Tranquility one star. I'll be honest: that's intimidating. But because I've always prided myself on honesty, I am giving this book one star. I'll also admit I couldn't finish this book. Gladly.

Nastya is . . . well, nasty. She's a total bitch, and one of the most repulsive protagonists I've read in a while. I get that she's depressed and has a traumatic past and all (even though I couldn't finish, I did read the spoilers just to get some perspective), but come on.

You can have a horrible character and still make them interesting. It's hard, but possible. I just read The S-Word and that MC was a total witch. But she was interesting, and the plot was engaging, and I wanted to know what she was going to do next, how she'd change.

I had no such investment in Nastya. For starters, she's incredibly self-destructive and she brags about it. It's hard to feel sympathy for someone who is so quick to debase themselves. Gosh, I sure do love throwing up! Man, is it ever so cathartic.

Or,

Golly gee, dressing like a slut is a total hoot! I love pissing girls off by having their boyfriends ogle me, and LOL this way no decent guy is gonna approach me and I won't have to get hurt. Oh and bee-tee-dubs, I'm wearing cute undies, so oops! accidentally-on-purpose crotch-shot!

Or,

Look at those self-congratulatory sluts. Wearing pink like they think they're teen hooker Barbie. I'm not like that. I'm funeral parlor Barbie. That makes me so much better than them. Because pink is for skanks.

Apparently this started out as independently published, and was duly purchased by Atria once they got wind of its success. I could kind of tell, and kind of not. It's good for indie, but goes on and on about nothing. It reads, in other words, like the Myspace journal of a particularly embittered teen desperate for attention.

Plus, the execution begs many questions such as:

WHY are they letting this girl into a shop class with high heels?

WHY does her aunt give her free rein despite the fact that she desperately needs help?

WHY has she not had any therapy?

WHERE are this girl's parents? And WHAT the hell are they doing that's so much more important than taking care of their mentally ill daughter?

WHAT is the point of the male- and female-hating? Making all girls out to be sluts and all boys out to be pimps/johns is just disgusting to everyone.

WHY do all the POV switches sound exactly like the same person?

And so on.

I honestly don't see why this book is so popular. She's like a female Travis Maddox.

DNF.

0 stars.

Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People by Mahzarin R. Banaji

The thing about psychology books is, there's a lot of overlap. We only have so many studies to choose from, and a lot of the really interesting ones, like Asch's Obedience Study, Milgram's Deference to Authority Study, and Zimbardo's Prison Experiment were later deemed unethical because of the psychological turmoil caused.

I know right? And to think, we would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for you meddling humanists.

I was familiar with about 95% of the studies in this book, so that came as a bit of a disappointment to me because when I read psychology books I like it when the author has a fresh, new, interesting perspective to offer instead of a reworded rehash of more of the same.

Blind Spot reads like a light textbook, something a professor might assign in addition to a dryer text--for supplementary reading.

A lot of the studies in here reference the Implicit Awareness Test (IAT), which studies unconscious biases. You can actually take the test here: implicit.harvard.edu. I had to do it for school assignments back in college and it was pretty fun, though I'd prepare yourself for unpleasant surprises and cognitive dissonance. Some people actually flipped out because they were like, "I'm not racist, dammit! This test is wrong!"

It's like, really? It's just a test. Not like there's a group of PC-Police who are gonna haul your ass away because you have a slight bias against African Americans or gays. And really, wouldn't you want to know? That way you can actually do something about it! For example, I found out I was slightly biased against pretty much everyone but Asians and gays, which is weird. But then again, considering all the flack white people get in psychology classrooms, that's not entirely surprising.

Here are some takeaway messages from Blind Spot:

☑ Stereotypes can be self-defeating when activated. Women who are exposed to the stereotype that "women are bad at math" will perform more poorly on standardized tests.

☑ Knowing something to be true and endorsing it as truth are different things. Hence, why people might say they're not racist, and yet still not let their children have their black friend over at their house.

☑ People are predisposed to prefer those of their own ethnic group, and better at recognizing individuals of their own ethnic group. It's a simple point of fact, but not not an excuse for racism.

☑ The "all _____ people look the same" stereotype is called the outgroup homogeneity effect. The effects of this can range from embarrassing (mistakenly greeting a stranger because you thought they were your Asian classmate) to catastrophic (a white witness falsely identifying an innocent Latino man as a criminal).

☑ Words associated with power are generally linked to men, rather than women. Men and women prefer male bosses over female bosses, are more likely to attribute leadership skills to men, and are quicker to associate high-paying, prestigious professions like "surgeon" to men.

Being aware of these biases might give you an icky feeling inside, but that's good. Because we're not the perfect, 100% tolerant people we might want to be. If we accept these biases, and work to improve them, we come closer to achieving not just tolerance, but also acceptance.

2 out of 5 stars.

A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan

The title is a lie.

This is not a book about dragons (at least not to the point where it fits titles). This is a book about a girl who wants to wear pants and study animal anatomy and swear just like real men do!

Hello, Tamora Pierce reject!

OK, so the drawings of dragons were beautiful--but they get spaced farther and farther apart as you read on. It becomes all about stupid old Lady Trent, and how much she hates being a woman.

I GET THAT YOU HAVE OVARIES.

I GET THAT YOU HAVE SERIOUS TESTICLE ENVY.

I DON'T CARE. WEAR TROUSERS ALL YOU WANT. JUST GIVE ME MY DRAGONS.

Did I get my dragons?

Well. In a way. It's like asking for an apple and then being handed a green Jolly Rancher. LOL NO.

Not what I was expecting.

I was expecting something like J.K. Rowling's Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. A pseudo textbook written in a tongue-in-cheek style with delightful descriptions and fantastical illustrations.

Nope.

I know a lot of authors get frustrated when readers get mad at a book for not living up to their expectations, and being an author myself, I can understand that.

But that's why you should try to make the title and cover design (if you have any control over the cover--some authors don't) as relevant to your book as possible, to help assuage disappointment.

Having a book entitled A Natural History of Dragons and then making it about some self-obsessed little sociopath who likes to steal books from her father and dissect little doves with a knife is a tad misleading.

Don't you think?

DNF.

1 out of 5 stars.

The Dresden Files: Fool Moon, Volume 2 by Jim Butcher

So it seems like every author and their mother is turning their novels into graphic novel adaptions these days. I happen to like the Dresden series, so I was excited when I saw one of the adaptions on netgalley.

As with any fan, my loyalties lie with the original work.

A lot gets lost in the translation from novel to graphic-novel. The action sequences look really cool in color, make no mistake, and it was interesting to see how the artists interpreted the characters (that is so not how I envision Harry Dresden, bee-tee-dubs), I like reading.

There is not a lot of reading to be done in a graphic-novel.

This was also really really short. About 95 pages. That seems a bit of a rip because graphic-novels are so expensive and this isn't even an adaption of the full novel. They split it into parts to better milk the cash cow. How could you sell out on your fans like that, meanies? :P

This was a fun read, but I don't think I'd buy it. I'd recommend this to hardcore fans who want to own it as a curiosity to show off at conventions. Otherwise there's not much point.

3 out of 5 stars.

Sneak by Evan Angler

Oh dear. This one wasn't for me, either. Netgalley probably hates me. (I was having such a good streak, too. I actually gave a 5-star review! IKR?) Ordinarily I'd grin n' bear it, but I'm coming perilously close to some of my review deadlines, so I'm having to be more choosy.

Sorry, Mr. Angler.

*sigh*

For the same reasons that you might love a book at first sight--beautiful writing, good sense of humor, interesting ideas, novel world views--you can also tell when a book might not be your type.

(It's not me, it's you.)

First off, the world-building is really awkward and confusing. This is exacerbated by the fact that I haven't read book 1 and have no idea what the heck is going on. With later books in the series, it's important to remind readers of what happened before. Not everyone can get their hands on all the books in the series at once. I know the books I own are patchy, like I might have 2, 4, 5, and 8, because I rely on used bookstores and libraries.

By contrast, another book I'm reading (also second book in the series, also haven't read the first book) is excellent at providing enough backstory so that old readers get a rehashing and new readers get enough information to read it as a semi-standalone. Obviously you don't want to bog down your storyline with cut and paste outros (remember those 90's books? remember how annoying that was?), but it can be really, really helpful to us readers when done right!

I feel that in science-fiction novels and fantasy novels especially, it's important to have a handle on what you have created. A lot of the names in here seemed to be bandied around as if for street cred, while I stared at the text and said to myself DOME? Beacon? What?

Then I looked at the shelves and realized that this was christian-fantasy/science-fiction, and couldn't help but wonder if that had a role to play in my dislike of this book, too, because this is the third or fourth CF/CSF book I've won as an ARC (unknowingly), and I hated all three of them.

These are things to keep in mind if you are planning to read this book.

DNF.

0 out of 5 stars.

The Sweetest Dark by Shana Abé

Another beautiful cover hiding a bad book. I shudder to think about the potential allegory in there for my dating life. Yes, indeed.

The Sweetest Dark is typical YA. If you told me that The Sweetest Dark was the pretext for a YA-tropes drinking game, I would believe you. Girl has mysterious power. Nobody understands her boo-hoo her life sucks. Girl goes off to develop mysterious power. Girl finds two Boys that like her because of Reasons. Slut hates her because of the Boys, and because of Reasons.

Cliffhanger?

I don't know, honestly, because I couldn't finish this book. I wanted to, but it was so bad and ultimately I was like, please, darling, not tonight, I have a headache.

It's a shame because there was a lot of potential. I mean, she's an orphan in a Dickensian turn-of-the-century shitbox. She hears music and sees strange colors and one day it drives her mad enough to jump out the window. She lives, but is shipped to a sadistic mental hospital.

This lasts exactly one chapter.

One.

Chapter.

You could write an entire novel focusing around an asylum. And instead, you choose to switch POVs so it isn't even Eleanore narrating anymore--it's an excerpt from the psychiatrist's report.

Lamesauce.

After that, we find her starting at a posh boarding school with no rhyme nor reason. She was selected as the scholarship student for that year (why?) so the school can be like, look, we're not all rich and amazing. Just take a look at Cinderella over there--

Oh, and by the by, right at the beginning Eleanore tells us that she has violet eyes, and that her hair changes colors depending on the light. And even though she's dirt-poor she magically just started speaking with an uppercrust accent and piping out big words. Isn't that impressive? Guess we know why she got that scholarship.

Add to that random POV switches that serve no purpose, lackluster writing, a flamboyant Mary Sue, and the prospect of an annoying love triangle between two domineering alpha males who border on stalkers and would be slapped with a restraining order if they didn't look like young gods, you have a ragebomb waiting to asplode.

DNF.

0 out of 5 stars.

Lockdown by Alexander Gordon Smith

After a horrifying summer in which teenage boys in England slaughter dozens of innocents, the government decides to capitalize on the public's new-found fear of children by building a prison to contain juvenile delinquents: it is called Furnace, and makes Hell look like a pleasant drive in the countryside.

Alex was a petty thief, running with the wrong crowd. One day he got too greedy and realized that he and his partner had walked right into a trap. Terrifying men shoot his friend and frame him for his murder. After a court trial, Alex is sentenced to life imprisonment... in Furnace.

Furnace is freaking scary.

The author did a wonderful job using spare details to his best advantage. Prisoners are kept in cells stacked on top of each other. Their schedules are commanded by shrill, ear-blasting sirens. The warden's men and murderous gangs keep the boys in their place, and when they're not collapsed from exhaustion in the relative safety of their cells, they're doing back-breaking physical labor.

That would all be bad enough, right? Wrong. Because in addition to squalor, the utter absence of supervision and outside intervention has given way to horrific depravity. Boys are dragged from their cells in the middle of the night, and never return--at least, not as themselves. Fleshless dogs chase down boys and tear them to shreds while the guards look on. Men walk around like patchwork Frankensteins.

Attempting to escape, no matter how hopeless, always results in a terrible death. Always.

But Alex and his friends might just have found a way out.

For good.

I loved this. I hated it for scaring me as much as it did, but I loved the originality and the break-neck pacing. That cliff-hanger was evil and now I'm going to have to hightail it to the library for the sequels because oh my God, how could you end it like that? How could you? Excuse me while I crawl into the corner and rock back and forth for a while, while crying, "Nooooo.... noooooo.... NOOOOOOO."

4 out of 5 stars.

The S-Word by Chelsea Pitcher

Wow. Just ... wow.  My heart hurts. I want to cry, but I can't.

Reading Slut was painful--not just because of the content, which deals with a number of icky and all-too-real problems, but also because of the writing style. In a sea of self-righteous and angsty YA, Slut stands out because of the validated and heartbreaking anger of the narrator.

Angie and Lizzie had been best friends since they were young. All of that came to an abrupt standstill when Angie caught Lizzie in bed with her boyfriend, Drake, on prom night. Suddenly, Lizzie went from being an untouchable Ice Queen to the school's scarlet letter harlot.

Except, instead of an A, she got an S. For Slut.

Now Lizzie is dead because she took her own life, but someone has started defacing the lockers again--this time in Lizzie's handwriting. Suicide Slut appears all over the school, in incriminating ink, and torn-out pages of Lizzie's diary are being circulated among the student body.

Is it a ghost? Or someone trying to prevent one?

Slut reminded me of 13 Reasons Why in many ways. The gradual expose, through journal entries instead of cassette tapes, and the way they were used to point the finger at the culprits, really added an original twist to this mystery. There were so many twists, too! I guessed the main one right away, but others came as a nasty surprise. In addition to teen suicide and slut-shaming, Slut also deals sexuality, gender roles, bullying, rape, child sexual abuse, and what it really means to find love and forgiveness.

I loved Angie's character, and how it evolved over the course of the book. She's a bit like the main character of Speechless in the sense that she starts out as an overentitled popular girl who only realizes the effect of her actions upon others later on in the course of the story. As she attempts to avenge her friend's death by fingering the people who "killed" her (or drove her to killing herself), she learns a lot about her own ulterior motives, and the motives of the people who did the terrible things to Lizzie that they did.

Oh my God, and the pacing--the pacing was perfect. Neither too fast nor too slow. As per my prediction, I ended up staying up far too late in order to find out what happened next. It's so wonderful to see all these new 2013 debuts that are creative, and original, and that aren't afraid to paint young-adulthood not as some Sarah Dessen fairyland, but as the savage free-for-all that it can sometimes be.

I was bullied in high school. I'm sure many of you were, too. Slut acknowledges that, and basically says, There but for the grace of God go we. And also, Don't mock them, lest you become them.

I think this is my favorite book that I've won from netgalley so far. Don't wait up! Read this book!

5 out of 5 stars.

Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James

Death Comes to Pemberley takes place six years after where Pride and Prejudice left off. Elizabeth and Darcy are happily married with children, and in the middle of planning a ball. Little do they know that Lydia and Wickham, accompanied by a friend, plan on crashing it--

--and they don't find out, until Lydia runs into their home, dirty and insane with terror, screaming that somebody is dead. When they go out to the woods on the Darcy estate, they find Wickham hunched over the dead body of his friend Denny, saying "Oh my God, I've killed him! I've killed him!" Talk about a party-pooper.

Unlike many Janeite fanfiction, this one comes across as well-researched. I really got the feeling that James read through P&P many times, making sure that she picked up on all the crucial details, and utilizing them in such a manner that they added to the reader's credulity and understanding of the murder that is focal to the plot.

The court trial, and the twist at the end, were probably the best parts. James's stunning conclusion put the first book in an entirely new perspective for me, and actually made a lot of sense.

Sometimes it dragged, but the writing was lovely and I enjoyed revisiting one of my favorite literary couples.

3 out 5 stars.

Exile by Rebecca Lim

I seriously need to stop getting sucked in by pretty YA covers. It means our relationship is inevitably doomed from the start. Is it so hard to find a book about angels that isn't annoyingly angsty?

Our main character, who I'm going to call Fallen, is a fallen angel who can't remember her past. She's currently inhabiting the body of a teenage girl and taking over her life at the moment. She's lived in other vessels in the past, but her memories of them are locked away and cause her physical torment when she attempts to remember.

Her lover, an angel named Luc(ifer?) is a total manipulative ass-clown, typical of this genre, who holds back information "for her own good," but probably because he gets off on the power trip. He tortures her in her dreams because he can, and sends her on sadistic scavenger hunts to unlock the secrets of her past. Because that, and calling your love interest a "stupid creature" is what romance is all about.

That's right. Take those roses and shove 'em.

Fallen's current vessel has a pretty shitty life. She works in a coffee store, has a mom dying of cancer, and is friends with a stripper with an abusive boyfriend (?). You know, the typical vida loca of all teenagers.

I'm bummed, because Lim has a nice writing style. A little flowery, but poetic. Her characters are just so punch-in-the-face-worthy that I couldn't get into the storyline. This whiny Mary Sue/abusive Alpha Stu trope seriously needs to die, and then never be resurrected again. Ever. I can't count how many potentially good books were ruined because of unnecessary romance subplots and crappy characterization.

Please, write an angel story that doesn't suck.

DNF.

1 star.

The Spider by Colton Worley

My first reaction when I saw the cover of this book was, "That is a Spiderman suit--with the colors reversed!" He also shoots webs. Except they're made out of lasers and come from guns. But still.

Unlike Peter Parker, however, Richard Wentworth is ex-military. He became a vigilante because he felt like New York was becoming too terrible a place. It opens up with your usual sin city montage with robbery and rape and violence, with the Spider swinging in to kick ass.

The Spider is friends with the police commissioner who suspects his real identity, but acts as an enabler to him nonetheless because of the good he does. The commissioner's wife, Nita, was an old sweetheart of Richard's, though their relationship broke up after he had to play dead for his final military assignment. She knows his secret identity, and acts as a Mary Jane/Lois Lane damsel in distress. She's even a reporter.

The Spider also has a gadget-guy.

When he's not serving super-sized justice out to the city of New York, Wentworth is angsty and antisocial. He has daddy issues. He has to be alone so nobody will get hurt. If you are thinking that you've heard this plotline before, damn right. It's the plotline of every superhero movie out there.

The villain(ess) in this volume looks like a Vegas showgirl freshly escaped from an Egyptian-themed casino. Some are born to villainy, some have villainy thrust upon them. Vegas lived a life of horrible injustice, death, rape, and abuse which taught her that being just as bad as her abusers was the only way.

She steals a top-secret gas from Wentworth's father and tweaks it so that it turns people into zombies.

Oh noes!

I enjoyed reading this, but it was nothing special. I did think it was cool, however, that the superhero action scenes were done more like a traditional graphic novel, and yet the scenes with Wentworth living his ordinary love were drawn with such degrees of realism that they almost looked like photographs. I'm not sure if this was intentional but it provided an interesting juxtaposition between his fantasy life, and his grim reality.

3 out of 5 stars.

Forever by Judy Blume

Don't be fooled by that Sarah Dessenesque cover, lovelies. There's no fluffy, innocent puppy love in this baby. Nope. This book is about

SEX. (Now that I have your attention...)

People get their panties in a twist over sex. Literally and figuratively. Ironically, the people whose panties are most twisted figuratively, probably aren't getting any of the literal variety. I know. Sad.

It's like adults think that some kind of sex fairy is going to magically appear and magically fill their child's head with all that icky information (where do babies really come from? is it the same place where pee comes from? what are those colored rubber plastic things in the square wrappers? why is mommy walking funny?) they must never, ever speak of, because if you even talk about it, you're going to get pregnant, and probably an STD, and die. And then go to hell.

Even though this book was written in the 1970s, the topics mentioned are still relevant--and controversial--today, so I can only imagine the uproar Forever made when it first debuted. Let's make a check-list of all the brimstone and hellfire this book reeks of, shall we?

✓ marijuana
✓ teen pregnancy
✓ sex
✓ STDs
✓ underage drinking
✓ contraceptives
✓ abortion
✓ sex
✓ being gay

Katherine and Michael meet at a New Year's party and do that thing where you start a relationship with someone and decide that you've got everything in common, even though you've actually got nothing in common. Right away, Michael begins pressuring her for sex, nonstop. Pushing, and pushing, and pushing.

I got annoyed, because Katherine was always like, "No..." but he'd keep on doing whatever it was he was doing until she eventually relented. NO MEANS NO, BITCH. Oh, and his penis is named "Ralph." Gag.

(An oddly appropriate name, in that sense, as ralph really does mean "to gag." Let's cease and desist now.)

Anyway, Katherine manages to beat away Michael and Ralph's tag-teaming for a while, but eventually they have SEX. They have sex responsibly, but of course, Michael tries to wriggle out of using a condom. Oh, and he had VD at some point but he doesn't have it anymore, he swears. And Katherine is like, "..."

Yeah, that was my reaction, too. NO GLOVE, NO LOVE.

Speaking of "...", this book is almost as full of ellipses as it is about sex. The way everyone is always taking these big gaspy pauses, you'd think you were in a porno or something. "Once... upon... a time. Two teenagers... had SEX. Oh, baby, yes."

It's not even good sex. Forever has some of the most awkward sex scenes EVER. Like, real life awkward. I felt awkward reading it, in that, "OH GOD. MY PARENTS MUST HAVE HAD SEX OR I WOULDN'T EXIST LA LA LA LA NOT THINKING ABOUT THAT" sort of way.

So I'm all for sexual education and empowerment, but it would have been nicer with less selfish characters.

If you're over 18 (or whatever the consensual age is where you live), you should watch this video on Youtube. It's called Realistic Hollywood Sex Scene, and pretty much the best thing ever.

2 out of 5 stars.

P.S.

SEX.

Luminous by Dawn Metcalf

This is one instance where it is perfectly safe to judge a book by its cover.

I'll admit, I was a bit spooked by the 3.25 average rating on Goodreads, but I was intrigued by the summary, lured in by the cover.

The summary really does not do Luminous justice. It makes the book sound like an eclectic mess of ideas, all swirled together like badly mixed paint, when in actuality, it is one of those dead/dying-girl-goes-on-a-magical-journey-of-self-discovery-type books.

Only, this one isn't a rip-off of Lovely Bones. It is 100% original.

We have our main character, Conseula (I know what you're thinking. No, no, I clean), who's a bit of a bubble-head, and on the fringe of her social scene. She falls down and discovers a lump on the back of her neck, and when she pokes it, she discovers that she can take off her skin and travel around like a skeleton, crafting skins of her own making out of anything from birds to blazes.

This is because Consuela has recently become a part of the Flow. The Flow is a world that overlaps with and intersects with ours, but is completely distinct. It kind of reminds me of the dream sequences in the anime version of Paprika. The inhabitants of the Flow each have their own special abilities, which they use to a) keep the Flow running, and b) save the lives of humans on Earth whose time is not yet up.

How cool is that? They're basically like a bunch of wizardly guardian angels.

But all is not perfect in the Flow. Someone is going around and killing the other guardians, and once you die in the Flow, you die for real. That's when Consuela learns that the Flow is an in-between place to serve as a sort of limbo for those trapped in stasis between life and death. And in order to survive, she will have to go out of her comfort zone and learn to feel comfortable in her own skin (pun intended).

It was so refreshing to find a YA book with a completely original plot, and well thought-out world. The fact that Dawn Metcalf's writing is absolutely beautiful doesn't hurt, either. Her writing is as pretty and sparkly as a bunch of colored butterflies flitting around on the pages, and tickling the fancies of word-connoisseurs.

Yes, the characterization was a bit flat, but I didn't notice it too much. I was too amazed by the novelty of the concept, and the lovely way it was written. This was an amazing debut, and now that I know what the author is capable of, I'll definitely be holding her to higher standards for her later works (which I want! NOW).

4 out of 5 stars.

White Horse by Alex Adams

I have a weakness for post-apocalyptic and dystopian science-fiction. They're the ultimate social commentary: don't do X, or it will destroy the world. You can't get more extreme than that.

I started out really liking White Horse because the premise was so intriguing. Decimating plagues aren't novel by any means, but I thought the idea of an epigenetic mutation as opposed to a bacterium or a virus was a nice touch. The name of the mutation? The eponymous White Horse.

Alex Adams is not a bad writer, and for a debut author she does many things right. She has a vast vocabulary that she is not afraid to make use of, and some of her metaphors were striking and very on-point.

However, sometimes her ability to be verbal borders on the verbose, especially later on in the book, and many passages seemed overwritten, at least to me. She also has the unfortunate tendency to turn everything--and I mean everything--into a metaphor or simile, and some of these don't even make sense or purpose.

"The chain-link fence wears a wire crown, a tiara a former beauty queen has cast aside (115)"

"Spit flies from his mouth: a wet, clear blob with a yellow center. Egg-like (128)"

"Scientists scream, but they're soon silenced with money stuffed down the throats of their pet research projects (134)."

"They cling to each other as though the other is a life vest (136)."

"I...consider the words on my internal Scrabble board (147)."

"The kid is a whole litter of still-blind-puppies full of enthusiasm (149)."

"I pick through the pages as a soothsayer might a tangle of entrails (152)..."

"...he lies there, limbs flailing like a lobster freshly plucked from its saline home (155)."

"The sky is the flat and constant gray of a paint swatch (169)."

"We're all just meat puppets with an invisible hand inside us, making us dance and live (183)."

It gets a bit tedious at times, and bogs down the flow of the prose. In fact, Karen's review is a concise and eloquent summation of everything that I did not like about this book.

Also, I must add that the concept of TMI seems to be a foreign one to Alex Adams. While I do not approve of censorship in media, and feel that people should have access to what they want to read (within reason), I do not at all recommend this book to people who are faint of heart. Gritty and unsavory metaphors aside, White Horse deals with many icky and distasteful subjects such as rape, incest, graphic violence, gory abortion scenes, abuse in many forms, name-calling, and so much more.

White Horse was trying to be science-fiction-masquerading-as-literature, I feel, in the style of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy (Oryx and Crake, Year of the Flood, and the as-yet-untitled third book that I am already going grabby-hands over).

Unfortunately, it did not quite succeed.

DNF @ p. 220.

1.5 out of 5 stars.

Moscow but Dreaming by Ekaterina Sedia

I was first acquainted with Ms. Sedia's unique style through her Russian steampunk/alternate history novel, Heart of Iron. While I wasn't crazy about her characterization and pacing, I was awed by her beautiful prose, and thought to myself, "Here is an author worth keeping an eye on. With a little tweaking, she can do great things."

So you can imagine my pleasant surprise when I saw her recent anthology of short stories, Moscow but Dreaming on netgalley.

Was I on that like white on rice? You betcha.

Moscow but Dreaming is a collection of fantasy, surrealism, and magic-realism. Not all of the stories take place in Russia, but many of them do. A couple take place in the United States, I believe one took place in Africa, and one of my favorites was based on Japanese myth.

Anthologies are difficult to rate, because the quality of the stories therein can be very uneven. It's a chance for authors to experiment with different styles, tenses, narratives, and techniques, and that certainly shouldn't be discouraged. I must say that the stories Moscow but Dreaming opened with were a poor choice, as they were all the weakest of the bunch. I nearly put this book down as DNF because I was so unimpressed.

But I skimmed over the first three short stories, and then quickly found myself immersed in her beautiful writing, exquisitely wrought narratives, and fantastic plots. Oh, if only she had opened up with those later stories instead. I hate to think of how many people might give up because of the tepid opening.

I loved her integration of Russian folklore in these stories. I loved how she wasn't afraid to give a story an unhappy ending if it suited. Many were bittersweet, some were happy, some confusing, but all of them were interesting. In here, you can find everything from man-beasts, to zombie cities, to talking toys, to Faustian bargains. Each story was its own distinct entity, separate from the rest, but sharing a common theme.

With the exception of the opening stories, I really enjoyed Moscow but Dreaming.

Highly recommended to fans of China Mieville and Neil Gaiman.

3.5 to 4 out of 5 stars.

The Twisted Window by Lois Duncan

Back in junior high school, my favorite books were those R.L. Stine-esque thrillers about deadly parties, deadly vacations, deadly grudges, etc. etc. Some of them were about vampires, some about monsters, some were about serial killers. In retrospect, many of them were quite trashy and most of them did not hold up well at all over time.

When I found out that Open Road Media was rereleasing some vintage YA on netgalley, I was really excited and applied for everything. Who doesn't love a critical rehashing of their childhood nostalgia?

The Twisted Window is about a junior in high school whose name is Tracy, but I'm going to call her Idiot. Idiot's parents were movie stars and she never got over her mother getting killed by a mugger. She lives in Texas with her aunt and uncle, and has decided she doesn't want any friends. She hangs out with Slut at lunch, but only because being alone is the kiss of death. Mostly, she whines about how lame Texas is in comparison to New York, and what a podunk state Texas is.

One day, Slut and Idiot see a new boy at school, Attractive Psychopath. AP is drawn to Idiot because she is exactly what he needs for his plans. We are treated to vague ramblings in his POV about how he needs someone who looks mature, and who is also a loner. Yeah, because that's not creepy at all....

Anyway, it turns out that Idiot knows that everything he is telling her is a lie. She knows he doesn't really go to the school, she knows he was following her on the walk home, and when he shows up at her aunt and uncle's house uninvited (remember, kiddies--this is before there was MapQuest), she goes with him anyway. Alone. Because he's good-looking, and that means psychopathy is a-OK!

Idiot learns that AP wants her help kidnapping his sister back from his allegedly abusive stepdad. He claims that his stepdad was sore over his mother winning custody, and so he ran off with his half-sister. He has found out that his half-sister, Mindy, lives in this town. He wants Idiot to get hired as the family babysitter so he can kidnap Mindy as soon as his evil stepdad and his new wife leave. Nothing sketchy 'bout that at all!

As you've probably guessed, there's a twist. The twist is lame, but I do appreciate the effort.

Also, the 50s slang in this book is so bizarre. Because this was written in the 80s and takes place in the 80s, and yet there was mention of a cellphone? And AP refers to Slut as a "hot little number." And parents are referred to as "my folks," and I think there might have been a gee whiz or two in there. That was a little odd.

I vaguely remember reading Lois Duncan as a kid and not being impressed. I feel the same, only more so.

1.5 out of 5 stars.

The Damnation Affair by Lilith Saintcrow

Let me start by saying that I love what this book was trying to do. Fantasy westerns are pretty cool, and have so much potential in their rural settings, harsh climates, and tough-customer locals for kick-ass plots. I mean, just look at Stephen King's Gunslinger series.

By contrast, The Damnation Affair comes off as very wooden and dull. The plot is bogged down by excessive wordiness in the descriptions and dialogue, and a striking lack of action sequences. I know flowery prose is expected for period novels like these, but that doesn't mean that they are being given permission to be boring.

One example of a period fantasy novel that was done exceptionally well is Soulless. The writing sparkles with wit, and Alexia is totally kick-ass. Cat, on the other hand, is rather passive and one-dimensional. Most of The Damnation Affair consists of people standing around and observing.

I'm happy that Saintcrow put so much effort into this short story, but I just couldn't get into it. That seems to be becoming a pattern with me, lately.

DNF.

1 out of 5 stars.

Surrender by Rhiannon Paille

I hate giving ARCs bad reviews. Especially when they have such pretty covers. You know what it's like? It's like kicking a cute little puppy that has decided to sit on your porch hoping you will pet it.

To be fair, this book wasn't exactly what I had signed up for. I was hoping more for urban fantasy and instead found myself stuck with a high fantasy novel. I've never been a fan of (most) high fantasy books. I guess it's because I associate it with role-playing games like dungeons and dragons, and reading it makes me feel a bit silly.

If fantasy runs more to your taste than mine, you might consider checking this out. If you, like me, were hoping that this was urban fantasy, or paranormal romance, think again.

Because I like looking at the positive side of things, I will say that my experience with this book has taught me the importance of not judging a book by its cover, and actually checking out the summary on GR.

Netgalley gives me a serious case of the grabby-hands. What can I say?

DNF.

1 out of 5 stars.

Lords and Ladies by Terry Pratchett

Faeries and elves, like vampires, have been ruined by what serves as vogue in current YA mythology (with few exceptions). Faeries are effing creepy. They steal you away and replace you with evil faerie copies (changelings), or they might keep you around as a plaything until it's time to send you to hell (tithes). Faeries, in short, love screwing with humans.

Lords and Ladies pokes fun at the "Oh, but they're just a bunch of harmless tinkerbells, eh?" stereotype (I imagine he'd have just as much fun riposting the emo fae-boys that are just SO LONELY OH GOD I JUST NEED TO BE LOVED so prevalent these days). It's got elements of A Midsummer Night's Dream in it, but Pratchett satire can be all-encompassing. Everything from sex to sorcery, he laughs at everything.

(Even Death.)

Lords and Ladies is the fourteenth book in the Discworld series. They can all serve as standalones, however, so if you find yourself with a Pratchett book that isn't The Color of Magic (a.k.a. the first book), never fear! It isn't even one of the best novels in the series, but some people like reading Discworld in order just because of the hipster cred.

It features the three witches, Margrat (the overweight but generally kindly witch who tends to be the odd one out), Nanny Ogg (rapacious and lecherous, hornier than a horny old goat reared on Viagra), and Granny Weatherwax (she could look up at the sky and, with a single glare, and make the gods desperately feel like their mothers are calling them). They need to save the world from evil elves intent on crashing a wedding--

Oh, and taking over the world.

I always experienced mixed feelings about reading Terry Pratchett books. The quality varies by quite a bit, so you never know if you will be embarking upon one of the better journeys until it is too late. Also, his beginnings are a lot stronger than his endings. I suspect that this ties into his attempts to be all-encompassing; if you're going to create a gigantic world, it might be hard to girdle it, if you know what I mean.

Lords and Ladies was a fun, lighthearted read that I really appreciated after all the dystopian sci-fi I've been reading. I don't think I'll ever be one of those die-hard Discworld fans, but I do read the ones I come across.

Recommended for fans of fun, flippant fantasy fiction (try saying that five times fast).

2.5 to 3 out of 5 stars.

Double Identity by Margaret Peterson Haddix

***contains spoilers***

Every time I read a book by Margaret Peterson Haddix, I can't help but think, "Oh, Ms. Haddix. You have such interesting, intelligent ideas--and yet, your attempts to dumb them down for a middle-grade audience totally cripple the execution. Please, won't you try writing a full-length mature YA/adult novel? I bet it would be aces!"

She never does, though. Which means that at the end of every single one of her works, I'm like, "...Fine. Be that way."

Double Identity is a story about a thirteen-year-old girl whose parents are definite candidates for Neurotic of the Year. Her mother always cries and her father hides his pain on the inside. They don't let her have friends or stay home alone, and they take overprotective to new levels of scary. Bethany wants to be her own person and take her life on by the horns. Her parents, however, have different ideas--

And then one day, they drop her off at the home of a heretofore-never-mentioned aunt and are like, "Bye! Be a good girl! Don't ask questions!" Because that's what good-parenting is! Hiding facts from your kids for their own good, never mind the fact that they've spent thirteen years living a lie.

Bethany's Aunt Myrie makes mysterious comments about Bethany looking an awful lot like somebody named Elizabeth, which Beth overhears by eavesdropping, but she doesn't ask who that is. Then Beth starts to wonder why everyone in this new town is looking at her strangely, as if they've seen a ghost? What are her parents running from? And who the eff is Elizabeth? WHY DIDN'T YOU ASK YOUR AUNT THEN?

I get that the book is supposed to be about Bethany learning to assert herself but for crying out loud, kids are curious. Have you ever tried keeping kids out of things they're not supposed to get into? It's hard. Even the shy ones will try to wiggle a peek over your shoulder when they think you're distracted.

While reading this, I kept having flashbacks to The Adoration of Jenna Fox. The ideas and execution are similar, but TAoJF was better, I think, because it catered to a more mature audience. I had a better feel for Jenna's character, and the mystery of her "double identity" was more nail-bitingly edgy.

Bethany, on the other hand, spends most of her time whining and thinking and basking in misery. She played a very passive role in this book, and her character was as amorphous as a petri dish of stem-cells.

(nyuck, nyuck, because she's a clone, see? see what I did there?)

Quite honestly, I feel like things fell apart in Double Identity towards the end of the book. Like the author was in such a hurry to wrap things up that she just randomly joined random plot points and hoped they fit. The sappy-sweet ending was a bit too convenient, too. I mean, after all those years of stress and anxiety, would everything really be resolved so quickly?

"Oh, you silly parents. You embezzled money to clone your daughter and then creepily made her life a shrine in homage to the dead daughter you cloned her from, while lying to her and the people you stole money from. But it's okay because it was done in the name of love and everybody learned their lesson!"

*sigh*

2 out of 5 stars.

Deenie by Judy Blume

I live in a predominantly Republican town, with a significant population of Mormons. As you might imagine, this affects the selection of books available in the local library. Since book-banning is, quite rightfully, regarded as a barbaric practice--frequently conjuring up images of a bunch of crazy religious Southerners waving pitchforks and brandishing torches as they burn the offensive works of authors such as Darwin and Descartes--this is a touchy subject among the librarians, and they will deny it if confronted.

And yet, how to explain the lack of young-adult books dealing with sexuality, school shootings, violence, drugs, and various other problems that those with delicate sensibilities would rather sweep under the carpet and pretend that they don't exist rather than confronting them head-on? It isn't just young-adult books, either. We have no erotica--not even literary erotica like The Story of O and Sabine, or the supposedly high brow Claiming of Sleeping Beauty. Even Kleypas's raunchier works are conspicuously absent.

There is a point to this rant that is pertinent to my review of Deenie. I was surprised to find that some of Judy Blume's works were missing, too. Notably Deenie and Forever because they both involve sex. Oh. Em. Gee. Teenagers having sex? I never! I've never heard of such an outrageous thing! Bring me my pitchfork, and fire up the oven to Fahrenheit 451: the temperature at which books burn.

Come on, guys! This is Judy Blume. Her books were written in the 1970s. Surely forty years is enough time to get used to a controversial topic. How bad could it be?

"I touched my special place practically every night. It was the only way I could fall asleep and besides, it felt good" (79).

Wait, what? Is she saying what I think she's saying? No, she can't be. I'm imagining things.

"Does anyone here know the word for stimulating our genitals?" (80)

Well, that's certainly taking the subject by the balls. Literally.

"That's right," Mrs. Rappoport told us. "And it's not a word you should be afraid of. Let's all say it."

"Masturbation," we all said together (81).

Okay, so Deenie talks about masturbation, and it's a little silly the way it's written, with Deenie always causing it her "special place" and rubbing at it like a lucky rabbit's foot whenever she's stressed or unhappy, and I found myself thinking, after the fourth time or so, when she's going at it with a rough washcloth (ow!), "You must be chafing 24/7. Leave your poor crotch alone, girl!"

In fact, thinking about that kind of makes me feel a little ill, so let's drop that right now. The main issue in this book is scoliosis, anyway. Deenie has one of those bitchy mothers who needs to live out her ambitions vicariously--through her children. She has two daughters, "the smart one," and "the pretty one," and never lets them out of the Skinner box. Deenie is the pretty one, and her mother has decided she's going to model.

All that changes when Deenie finds out she's going to be wearing a brace for four years. Her mother cries and basically throws a tantrum in the doctor's office, until the doctor is like, "FFS. DON'T YOU THINK YOUR DAUGHTER IS SCARED ENOUGH ALREADY?"

Deenie learning to overcome the stigma about physical imperfections and disabilities, deal with her mother's unrealistic expectations, and her growing awareness of her own sexual awakenings all make up the plot of this interesting and off-color coming-of-age tale. I actually really liked Deenie's friends. They were so sweet and understanding, and there was none of the catty bitchiness that's so prevalent in YA today. Deenie's sister was also really nice. It reminded me of my relationship with my own sister. We have a bit of the notch-holing phenomenon in my family. I'm the "smart" one, and my sister is the "pretty" one, and both those things come with baggage. I'm really interested to see what her take on this will be, actually.

At 135 pages this is a short and sweet read. It's a bit squicky, but it deals with some important issues more teens and preteens should know about. I personally don't see the harm in it.

3 out of 5 stars.

Starseed by Liz Gruder

Oh man. I don't even know where to begin. To be honest, I'm a little freaked out by the doll people on the cover, trying to work their alien mind control on me while I write my review.

*shudder*

This book is pretty much Twilight--with aliens, with a dash of P.C. Cast and a dash of Revealing Eden. Not really my thing.

 Kaila, our repulsive protagonist, is the selfish epitome of teenage dreams. Instalove, instafriendships, the right to be as bitchy as she wants, family members who serve as cardboard cut-outs to provide filler, and dispense money like ATMs when she wants a new phone and new clothes or someone to scream/whine at.

On her first day, everyone Kaila meets adds her as a friend on Facebook. She decides she's in love with Jordyn after one day, and he takes the watching-you-sleep thing to a whole new level of weird by invading her dreams.

Eek.

I don't like writing negative reviews for indie authors, or if I do, I like to provide constructive-criticism, but there was nothing I even remotely liked about this book. Not even the cover. There's something in here guaranteed to offend pretty much everyone. Stereotypical ethnic characters, slut-shaming, blatant sexism (a boy accusing one of the girls of having a boob-job), making fun of people with physical health problems, cavalier treatment of bullying ("retard" being used as an insult without consequence, a nerd being described as someone who might be thrown in the dumpster), offensive religious commentary (one of the characters yelling at someone for saying "Oh my God" and mocking her, saying things like "you're living a lie" and "where is your God now?").

Add to that lazy writing, metaphors that don't make sense, and teenage characters who do things like talk to their animals, shove chewed gum into other people's mouths, and I can't--

I can't any can'ts because this book can'ted me out of all my can'ts.

DNF.

0 out of 5 stars.

Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters by Ben H. Winters

I'm more in love with the idea behind these monster-mashups than I am with the actual execution. To me, it's kind of like taking an old black and white movie, and adding a soundboard full of farting noises to the track. Funny, but the humor wears off quickly.

Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters is Sense and Sensibility... with sea monsters. You should know what you're in for from the get-go. Just look at that cover. It screams regency tentacle porn.

Part of the problem is that I really didn't like Sense and Sensibility, so if you don't like the classic being lampooned, you're screwed because you miss out on a lot of those winks and nods. I actually really liked Wuthering Bites and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies because I really liked the books they were based off.

Another problem is that this premise has just been so overdone. I adore Quirk Classics, because they happen to be the best at it (in my opinion), but there's only so much you can do with these public-domain works while still preserving the basic text. I honestly think these authors would be better off writing their own retellings from scratch.

I really tried to get through this book, but I'm calling a DNF @ p. 150.

1 out of 5 stars.

The Electric Church by Jeff Somers

In philosophy, there's a thought experiment called "the brain in the vat." It's pretty self-explanatory, and can basically be summed up in conspiracy Keanu terms as, "DUDE. WHAT IF WE'RE IN THE MATRIX, YOU GUYS? HOW WOULD WE KNOW?"

I'm kind of wondering if Somers was a philosophy major.

Or a big Matrix fan.

I wanted to read Electric Church for a long time. One of my friends recommended it to me. She's an unapologetic hipster, and our tastes seem to differ on pretty much everything these days, but I gotta say that I loved the idea of a dystopian future where the cult-like dominant religion turns everyone into robots.

Literally.

By killing them and putting their brains into jars.

I mean, robots.

Is that or is that not the coolest thing you ever heard? I thought so too.

Once I started reading Electric Church, however, I quickly lost some of my initial enthusiasm. The robots do not appear for a while, and when they do, it's almost funny. They're like evil Jehova's witnesses crossed with scary clowns. But the main focus is on Avery Cates, the main character, who is a total Gary Stu, indistinguishable from hundreds of other manly-man-type characters who eat nails and shit bullets and strive to live their lives as a Chuck Norris meme.

None of the characters really stood out. They had potential, but it was never realized--the focus was always on Avery and how awesome he was, how nobody was as bad a dude as he was, how he's lived way past his life expectancy (most men die around their 30s in this world--50 is considered ancient). Everybody has heard of this guy. He's got a reputation. Are we shown this in action?

Nope.

Do we get told about it until we want to punch one of the Jehova's witnesses/clowns/robots in the face?

Yup.

I wanted to think about this book for a night because it really did cover some interesting elements of philosophy and I wanted to make sure my review did it justice. It could have been a better book if it hadn't been so pulp-fiction/80s action movie corny. The world-building was pretty standard dystopian: corrupt cops and government, anarchy running rampant, Ayn Rand was right, Rush Limbaugh was right, corrupt religious groups, distorted socioeconomic scales, etc. etc.

And that ending--what the heck just happened? I became totally lost. I think I understand what the author was trying to do (I think). I think he was trying to go for an Inception-like twist. You know, one of those, YOU THINK THIS, BUT REALLY, THIS-type affairs.

But because there was no foreshadowing, it didn't work.

Electric Church is not terrible; it is merely very, very meh. I gave it to my brother, who loves Pulp Fiction and Bladerunner and all that good stuff. We shall have to see what he thinks. Until then,

2 out of 5 stars.

Incarceron by Carrie Fisher

Have you ever read a book with an idea so simplistic, and yet so fundamentally awesome, that you marvel at the fact that nobody came up with it before? That is exactly how I feel about Incarceron.

I mean, come on! It is about a prison that is self-aware and constantly changing: an ouroboros with a wicked sense of humor and an even wickeder sense of self-preservation. Escape is not on its agenda for its prisoners. Ever. Why? Because it eats them, and then recycles them into new prisoners for its own perverse enjoyment. So what happens when a break is in progress?

Bad things, that's what.

I desperately wanted to be in love with Incarceron just because of the premise. The idea is just so intriguing and unique; it's a breath of fresh air from all the reconstituted ideas that, much like the creatures in the prison of Incarceron, are dissembled and then put back together haphazardly in ways the writer hopes we won't notice.

Incarceron was meant to be Paradise, but is in actuality an experiment-gone-wrong that the Outside world tries to hide from its people as a place of myth. Kind of like Heaven, except less religious. Ironically, the people in Incarceron believe the same thing about the Outside, but that's not true, either. Outside, technology has been mostly destroyed and everyone has reverted to a bizarre regency/medieval sort of setting, with lots of emphasis on courtly manners. It's bizarre.

I loved it.

The problem with Incarceron is that the characters were flat. We would have lovely descriptions of metal forests, abyssal bridges, giant walls of gold, and ever-seeing red eyes (creepy), and then we have these lackluster characters that have about as much personality as a pre-programmed RPG character. They are basically templates. Finn, Keiro, Attia, Jared, none of them spoke to me as people. Aside from the occasional spark of annoyance, I didn't feel much for them at all.

I think this is one of those books that might be a better movie. Good acting can compensate for poor characterization, and make up for a lot of nuance that fell flat in the book. Also, can you imagine what top-notch film directors could do with Incarceron? Peter Jackson should totally get on that.

3 out of 5 stars.

Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver

I am in bed right now sobbing the way I did when I read The Fault in Our Stars, or when the wife in Up died, or when my sweet little kitty had to be put down, and I'm not even ashamed.

Before I Fall is one of the most beautiful stories I've read in a while. Everything about it, from concept to characterization, is perfect. It's hard to write a flawed protagonist and still make her likable, but Oliver does, and I found myself wanting to like Sam in spite of knowing I really shouldn't. It's got a great supporting cast, and she really captures how it feels to be a teenager.

 Because even though Before I Fall is about death, it's also a celebration about life. About the choices we make. And how those choices effect us--and those around us--and shape and transform our lives' trajectories...for better, or for worse.

If you took Groundhog Day, Mean Girls, Speechless, and Donnie Darko and threw them all in a blender, you'd have an idea about what Before I Fall is like. Beautiful, cinematic, existential. Before I Fall captures a piece of what it truly means to be human, and in spite of all its flaws, still manages to turn it into something worth salvaging, just like the MC, Sam.

A lot of reviewers talked about how they were Sams in high school, and how reading this was painful because it made them remember what it was like thinking you were untouchable, and subsequently blameless. Sometimes the greatest cruelties are the ones performed in ignorance.

Before I Fall was a painful read for me, too, but not because I was a Sam. I was a Juliet, and I remember coming home after being bullied and feeling as if I had a crack running down straight through the middle of my soul, with everything bleeding together until I no longer knew who I was anymore. The people who bullied me did it, I think, because they were also unhappy, and because it united them as a group, cementing their friendship by excluding all outsiders.

A few years later, one of the bullies apologized. I forgave them. A few years after that, the same bully tried to add me as a friend on a site we both used. All those memories came flooding back. I never forgot. I can forgive, but I never forgot, and I don't think I ever will because it destroyed the part of me that could. Even after nine years. It still hurts. Can you imagine how fresh the pain would feel after only one? Two? Even four? That's one of the things I loved about Before I Fall. Oliver gets this, the finicky nature of time, and how years might go by in a snap for one person but linger for another.

The ending to Before I Fall is devastating. It isn't fair, as one reviewer said. The sheer injustice of that ending, it just makes you want to weep, and wonder if all things in life are that transient. The answer is, yes. But part of Sam's journey is learning that the most evanescent qualities of life--a burst of laughter with friends, the love of your parents, the taste of your favorite ice cream, a kiss--are the most important, and that, precisely because life is so short, we have to live each day as if it were the last, so we aren't ashamed to look down over our shoulder and see the effects of our decisions at the end of the road.

5 out of 5 stars.

Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World by Vicki Myron

Let's get something straight. If you promise me a book about cats, it better be about some motherf**king cats, preferably with scream-worthy cute pictures thereof, and not about some podunk town in the Midwest that nobody but you cares about.

I loved Dewey. The poor little sweetums. Anyone who puts a baby kitten in a library drop-box in below-freezing weather has a special ring of hell reserved for them in the afterlife.

And what a beautiful cat. I giggled at his antics, I fawned over his cuteness. I acted, in short, like a crazy cat ladee.

And then, Myron starts talking about her life and her divorce and her alcoholic husband and how her daughter won't let her baby her anymore and how that hurt her feelings. Um, okay. I'm sorry. But can we get back to the cat?

We do get back to the cat. But Myron, never one to be left out of the center of things, starts creepily narrating the cat's thoughts in italics. It's like, R U SERIOUS?

And then, she goes back to herself, and her life, and the history of the all important town smack-dab in the middle of Who Cares?, Iowa. I swear, there are only so many times I can hear someone call themselves "simple folk" who don't care for pretensions before I want to scream. You just wrote a motherf**king book about you and your whole town and how great you are.

I loved the kitty, but the woman who wrote this book annoyed me to no end. You'd be better off looking up cute marmalade tabby memes on icanhascheezburger than reading this drivel.

1.5 out of 5 stars (rounded up because of the sweet little kittyface on the cover).

The Diviners by Libba Bray

The Diviners is a like-it-or-leave-it kind of book. It's different from Bray's wackier recent works and more of a throwback to the Great and Terrible Beauty series. Creepy historical fiction and dashingly dangerous rogues and all that good stuff.

Diviners is a loooooooong book. Almost 600 pages of commitment. I'm a  literary commitment phobe--I tend to run away from books that are super long unless I either a) know I'm going to love it, b) am utterly beguiled by the cracktastic summary, or c) have been otherwise coerced or compelled. There were several moments where I considered accidentally "losing" Diviners in my Goodwill box, but by that point I was already three hundred pages in and like, I WILL GO DOWN WITH THIS SHIP DAMMIT.

Because it isn't bad. It is just too ambitious.

Bray clearly did her research, the book is chockful of slang. Which is not a good thing. All the -ski suffixes and everything being "jake" and "copacetic," really started to irritate me. After the umpteenth reference to Evie as a Sheba or a sister, I was getting some majorly un-copacetic eye-twitches.

Another problem? There are too many POVs and even more characters. I got a bit cross-eyed trying to keep everyone separate. Isaiah annoyed me, with his whiny attitude and the way he was always trying to brag about his powers in public. Little bitch. Evie spent the first half of the novel being a selfish brat. She changes abruptly, and for some reason she and Mabel make up for no reason after their big fight, which made me blink and go, "I thought you two were mad at each other...?" Sam was just...ew. A total skeaze. I was mostly indifferent to Theta, though I ship Theta/Memphis.

My favorite characters were probably Jericho, Will, and Henry. They were awesome. Memphis was a cool dude, too, and as I already said, I ship Theta/Memphis. Also I feel bad for him for his douchey little brother.

The weird thing is, the summary of this book led me to believe this was going to be a campy romp through the Gilded Age, with that "durned" Prohibition, underground clubs, flappers, and lounge crooners. But Diviners is actually reallllly creepy. For starters, it's about a creepy serial killer who kills his victims in cruel and unusual ways pertaining to an equally religious text.

All the characters in this story have really effed-up histories, too. Murders. Rape. Twisted science experiments. Abuse. Dead parents. Dead siblings. Dead friends. Poverty. Hunger. Starvation.

...Eep?

I guess my point is that when it comes to horror and comedy, it's hard to have your cake and eat it, too. You either gotta be camp or you gotta be gallows, otherwise things just ain't jake.

3 out of 5 stars.

Model Spy by Shannon Greenland

Okay, let's play a game, shall we?

THE YOUNG ADULT TROPES DRINKING GAME.

Take a swig if:
✓ your main character considers klutziness a character flaw
✓ your love interest is a total manipulative asshole
✓ the main character remains oblivious to his assholiness for at least 99.9% of the novel
✓ personality traits are "told" rather than "shown," and in many cases, what we are told conflicts with what we are shown
✓ stupid, stupid names everywhere
✓ all the adults in the novel are complete morons
✓ your main character is beautiful/she is told she should model/gorgeous, and yet thinks she is ugly because men don't make passes at girls who wear glasses--and she's KLUMSY D:

I started out really liking The Specialists. It kind of reminded me of the Violet series by Melissa C. Walker. However, when I realized that my initial reservations about the plot (it is meant for teenagers/it shows that it is meant for teenagers/zero characterization/shitty love interests/unresolved sexual tension/incredible amounts of poor judgment/superficiality/etc. etc.) were not going to go away, I decided to call DNF.

This could have been really good. Dumbing it down, I think, was a mistake. Teenagers are a lot smarter than people give them credit for, and if more characterization and research was put into Model Spy, and if the main character had a backbone, it would have been accessible to more people.

DNF.

1.5 out of 5 stars.

Husbands by Jane Espenson

Hubands is...bizarre.

So basically, it is about two newlyweds--who also happen to both be men--and they are on their honeymoon looking at their presents and being almost revoltingly adorable. Their best friend is lurking there, too, raiding their liquor, admiring the gifts, and creeping on the hot man on man action. One of the presents is magical and teleports them into various genre-bending adventures.

Each "adventure" is basically a little vignette that parodies a famous book and movie. There's one that makes fun of superheroes (Batman, in particular), one that makes fun of pretty much every single fairytale ever, Archie comics, Sherlock Holmes, The Avengers (the campy spy series) and Get Smart, and Star Trek. Pretty much every nerdy LGBT's dream, right?

Husbands was a bit too fluffy for me to really enjoy. I loved the illustrations and really liked the idea, but M/M has just never really been a favorite of mine. For those who are a fan of slash, however, I think you will find Husbands a cute addition to the genre.

2.5 to 3 out of 5 stars.

Two and Twenty Dark Tales: Dark Retellings of Mother Goose Rhymes by Various

Hey there readerinos! Sorry for the lull. I suck, I know. In addition to getting through a massive queue of ARCs, I'm also trying to get through my book-hoard. So far, results are mixed--

Just like the contents of this anthology! (Like my segue?)

Two and Twenty Dark Tales is a really interesting idea. Fairytale retellings are canon in the fantasy genre, obviously, but you don't often see nursery rhyme retellings. So that was really cool.

The problem--and this is not unique to Two and Twenty; it is a problem that plagues all compendiums--is that the quality of the stories themselves are entirely dependent upon the skills of the writers themselves. Some of these stories were great, some were good, some were okay, some were meh, and some got skimmed.

Also, the issue with nursery rhymes, I think, is that you don't have much material to work with. Maybe a paragraph or two if you're lucky. Some of the adaptions were a bit of a stretch--like the one about Little Boy Blue. The Nancy Holder story annoyed me, too, but for a different reason. It looked like she posted the first chapter of a new story she'd adapted to fit the premise. It ends on a cliffhanger. Where is part two? Not cool, bro. I liked the retellings of Babylon, Ring Around the Rosey, and Four and Twenty Blackbirds the best. The story about the crow was also quite good.

Overall, this was a fun, pleasurable read, but a little slow-going.

3 out of 5 stars.

Dwarf: A Memoir of How One Woman Fought for a Body--and a Life--She Was Never Supposed to Have by Tiffanie DiDonato

Dwarf was an interesting read. It's the memoir of a woman with a rare variant of dwarfism--one that causes serious problems in the limbs with age. Her arms were so short that she couldn't even reach up to touch her ears or brush her hair! So she got a controversial, highly experimental surgery to lengthen her limbs.

DiDonato does an excellent job conveying the pain of her surgery. To lengthen her bones, they had to be broken, and then she had pins stuck in them which she had to disinfect twice a day. There was a point in her surgery where the pain was so agonizing that she couldn't make it to the bathroom and actually peed herself.

I admire her for being willing to put such details into her memoir. Not only to show how far she came in her surgery and what she was willing to risk, but also because I feel that this memoir will be a valuable tool for people--especially teenagers--undergoing similarly agonizing procedures.

It's nice to know that you aren't alone.

Towards the end, I feel that the memoir started to get a little scattered as she searched for a way to wrap it up. The idealization of the Marine Corps (I'm not a huge fan of military stuff, though I respect what their soldiers do for our country), the fairytale wedding--this was all a bit much. I think my issue with it was precisely because it was so fairytale-like. As if her dwarfism was a curse brought upon her by a wicked witch, and only magic-like surgery and a kiss from a prince broke the spell.

Reading other reviews for Dwarf, I noticed that a lot of people took issue with the Mrs. Hart issue. Mrs. Hart was a teacher who was very cruel to Tiffie in school and Tiffie's mom tried (unsuccessfully) to get her fired. Later on, Tiffie also tried (unsuccessfully) to give her computer a virus and humiliate her. Yes, that wasn't good. And yes, she didn't show regret. But can you blame her?

To me, Mrs. Hart seemed like she became the physical manifestation of all those people who had ever stared at her, insulted her, or made her feel small for being small. It seemed like she had depersonalized Mrs. Hart, turning her into a symbol. And I think that's why she returned to hating Mrs. Hart when her life became difficult again, because she was an easy target already established.

It can be very frustrating trying to convey your problems to people who aren't emotionally equipped to "get it."

Overall, I enjoyed reading Dwarf. It provided insight into a group that is frequently made light of.

3.5 to 4 out of 5 stars.

H20 by Austin Boyd & Brannon Hollingsworth

I'm not a Christian. I don't normally like to discuss my beliefs because I believe those are personal, but in this case, my beliefs--or lack thereof--are relevant, because this book is Christian fiction. Which I did not know when I applied for it.

Oops.

And I'm noticing that one of the problems with Christian fiction is that they come off like a bunch of gossipy girls trading in-jokes about secrets I know absolutely nothing about.

Some Christian fiction in the past has been a match for me, because of the brilliant synthesis of belief, observation, plot, and characterization, but this wasn't any of that, unfortunately. I was disengaged from the beginning and found the main character whiny and obnoxious and boring.

Too bad. The cover is so pretty. :(

DNF.

0 out of 5 stars.

Hiroaki Samura's Emerald and Other Stories by Hiroaki Samura

This cover is sooo misleading. I was under the impression that Emerald was going to be a wild, wild west adventure and instead--

You know what? I don't even know what I just read. It was kind of like going to a manga store, crashing into a shelf, and having all the books of different genres come tumbling down on your head.

The funny thing is, while I was reading this collection--it is a collection, by the way, and not one single, cohesive storyline--I kept looking at the art and thinking, "This looks so old-fashioned. Is this really a new publication?"

Nope! It's the artist's older work, previously published or serialized in magazines in Japan, now gathered into a compendium for fans.

Also, it turns out this dude is the mangaka of another manga series I read once upon a time called Blade of the Immortal. Which was also a total mindfuck. Kind of like Claymore meets Inuyasha with lots more violence. Which I only just now realized after finishing this book.

I didn't dislike Emerald, but I also didn't like it. Mostly because every time I started to get into a storyline, the story ended and I was punched into the next realm of Samura's Insanityland.

2 to 2.5 out of 5 stars.

Dash & Lily's Book of Dares by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan

One thing I credit this book with is giving me the perfect word to describe unfriendly hipsters: snarly.

Apart from that, though, it was a bust.

The title is great, and the premise is, too. I love the idea of two teenagers meeting in a bookstore through a notebook, and going on adventures that bring them closer and closer together. It's like a scavenger hunt, and the prize is your soulmate.

I think my problem with Dash & Lily is, eponymously enough, Dash and Lily. they did not strike me as realistic characters and really grated my cheese.

Dash, because he's just so cynical and grouchy and annoying. And pretentious. STOP NAME-DROPPING BOOKS AND QUOTING THE THESAURUS. This is a guy who asks for the complete unabridged thousand-dollar Oxford Dictionary as a Christmas president. Lolwut. He's sixteen.

Lily, because, well, she's the complete opposite. We're set up so hard to like her that I didn't like her because apart from her likable traits--loving kittens, rainbows, sunshine, Christmas--she didn't really have any traits. This is a girl who uses the word "Yay!" to excess in her narrative. Eep.

Plus, this book has something that the reviewer Lucy, from GR, has dubbed missing parents syndrome. Where the heck are these kids' parents? And why are they letting them run around NYC unsupervised to be molested by well-meaning Santa Clauses, and stuff things behind cardboard cut-outs of black comedians' oversized butts? I don't get it.

1.5 out of 5 stars.

Speechless by Hannah Harrington

Allow me to list my feels.

Speechless is an incredibly emotional read. If you threw Saved!, Speak, and Mean Girls in a blender, and served it up with a side-order of anti-bullying and LGBT acceptance, you'd come up with something realllllly close to Speechless.

Chelsea Knot is the school gossip. She's best friends with the most popular girl in school, Miss "It Girl", Kristen Courteau.

One day, at a party, Chelsea catches two boys fooling around at a party. Naturally, she tells all her friends expecting that they'll all think it's a total laff-riot and pat her on the back for finding out--

But they get angry--and mean. And then... somebody gets hurt.

Chelsea is devastated, and after giving her police report she decides to take a vow of silence in repentance for her actions. The impacts of this, and the people around her, really are amazing.

I love it when authors experiment with new ideas in YA. Thirteen Reasons Why, Going Bovine, Beauty Queens, The Fault in Our Stars, and Speak, all cover similarly revolutionary topics and concepts, and the fact that they were done well makes them sparkle all the more.

Speechless is a bit lighter in tone, but no less meaningful--and, in fact, quite a bit more fun!

I want to see this as a movie.

4.5 out of 5 stars!

The Fetish Box, Part One: Open All Night by Nicole Camden

Ordinarily I wouldn't read something that so blatantly advertises itself as porn, but in this case I accidentally applied for the sequel because I liked the cover, and when I saw book one was in here as well, I figured, "What the heck, maybe I'll be surprised."

Nope.

This is 79 pages, and that isn't enough to have a plot. It's just porn. The main character is a virgin who inherits a sex shop, and her new coworkers jump her bones instead of a handshake, pretty much.

Fetish Box is just another erotica novel hoping to capitalize on the success of Fifty, only without the BDSM to make it stand apart.

Meh.

I'll read the sequel eventually because fair is fair, but it's definitely not going up high on my priority list.

DNF.

0 out of 5 stars.