Miss. Peregine review (3.5) & Cress is coming!

“I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was.” - Miss. Peregine's Home for Peculiar Children, Ransom Riggs 

Jacob, 16, is a quiet loner who has one best friend, a misfit like himself, and is closest to his grandfather. As a child, his grandfather told him many stories about a magical house he lived in as a child during World War II, the kindly matron who protected them from the monsters, and the peculiar children he lived with. As Jacob grew older, he came to realize that the monsters were really the Nazis, and the pictures of magic merely illusions. But after he finds his grandfather half-dead in the woods, torn apart by an animal who he glimpses, Jacob begins to wonder if the stories were real after all. He ends up travelling with his father to the island his grandfather had spoken of, to find the house where it all began. 

This book started out really strong, but the more fantastic it got, the less connected to the characters I felt. I thought it was going to be a great, creepy, Halloween read but it turned into a less interesting X-Men meets Harry Potter and ended on such a blatant to be continued, I felt a little cheated. Maybe if I had known that it was the first book of a series, I would have accepted this more, but I thought it'd been out for awhile (only 2011) and was just a book all on it's own. 

Now, in the book's defense, I did read it immediately after finishing The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which became more beautiful as it got more fantastical, so it did have a lot to live up to. And the author's note that all the creepy pictures of fantastic children were actually real pictures he found in thrift shops was pretty cool. And the next book comes out January 14th, so you don't have long to wait if you want to know what happens. 

I, personally, am feeling a little overwhelmed by the authors/series I'm following, and If you're into YA, I am in love with the Cinder series, and the third book is coming out in exactly two months!! If you missed my earlier post about Cinder (which was really short), it's another one of those fairytales re-told, which I have a soft spot for. I am especially obsessed with retellings of Cinderella, so I probably like this series more then I should. I may have already read it twice this year. I tried really hard to say it was just ok, but it's the perfect fast read if you're into that prince falls in love with ordinary girl and you can see it all but she doesn't because she's just so ordinary except she really is special if only she could just see it. SPOILERS, sorry, but it's based off Cinderella, so you  have to see that part coming. Cinder's a cyborg, it's the year 3000-something, there are cyborgs.

Rehearsing has taken over my life

Acting is my addiction. That is my only excuse for not having updated in the past six weeks. Between filming a short film, rehearsing for Jesus Christ Superstar and getting ready for TPS auditions, I haven't sat down and thought through a blog post. I I also haven't had time to go to the library, and was trying not to go on too much of a book buying spree...so I steadily attempted to plod through "A Prayer for Owen Meany."

I don't know why I keep quitting that book. It's rich and compelling, while I'm reading it, but then after a few weeks I wander into the abyss of Facebook and can't force myself to pick it back up. Perhaps one day I can admit to myself that I love love stories, and Johnny's lack of a romantic interest makes me lose interest. Maybe it's because my brain is tired, and all I can handle is some good old junk food reading, the kind where you can sit on the couch and devour the book in one sitting instead of, you know, actually thinking.

Judas give us your info

These are the books that made the ADD cut:

Cinder: a scifi YA Cinderella novel set in the future. Cinderella's a cyborg, the prince likes her but politics and all that...definitely an entertaining, fast read but the plot is a bit obvious.
Scarlet: the sequel. Adds a little red riding hood and big bad wolf character. I found this plot less predictable, but I also felt that it was very much a second-book-in-the-series, where characters are added wit their own plot and histories are revealed, but the plot itself has merely inched along.
I read them both in the span of...four? Maybe five? days in the midst of tech for JCS. The next book doesn't come out until 2014, I think I'm going to jump off a bridge. Lol

Night Circus: awesome. Love it. Want to play Celia in the movie version desperately. I'm not joking, I seriously started reading up on moving to LA in time to get discovered. It had everything you need: romance, magic, threat of death hanging over your favorite characters' heads. The book's about a circus which is only open at night which becomes the arena for two young illusionists to compete.
That being said: if a character dies in a book I want to cry my eyes out. This book did not make me cry, but maybe I've just become heartless in my old age. You be the judge.

The Thirteenth Tale: at first I kind of hated the main character, Margaret Lea, because she was quiet and mousy and just sat around and read books, but I think you're supposed to. Margaret gets chosen by the reclusive, best selling author Vida Winters to pen the authors biography.
The real story is, of course, the biography, which at times becomes so fantastical you wonder if its fiction after all. What begins as a slow, quiet novel about a shy, quiet girl morphs into an enticing mystery.