Fairest (4) Marissa Meyer

This is the fourth published book in the Lunar Chronicles series. The Lunar Chronicles is a delightful Sci Fi/Fantasy series taking beloved fairy tale characters and making them more badass. Cinder, the first book, is Cinderella-esque (ball and all!) but Cinder is a cyborg. I can't explain this series without making it sound ridiculous but I swear everyone I've talked into reading it has loved it. It's for the Once Upon a Time crowd more than the Game of Thrones crowd, it's lighter than Hunger Games and definitely leans on the prince/princess love stories. 

Fairest is the prequel to the existing series, where we see the origin story of the series' spooky villain Queen Levana. Winter, the fourth book in the actual series was supposed to be published in January, and instead we got Fairest. The book that nobody wanted. It's like the forth book of Game of Thrones* when we have to constantly listen to Cercei, and I almost quit the series. And I love this series. It's my new Harry Potter. Well, no, it isn't. But I need something to look forward to in my life, and Winds of Winter isn't going to be published ever.** 

Except it isn't actually. It's so dark and creepy and I couldn't put it down and begged my friend to read it so I could talk to her because I needed to talk about it with somebody. I think I gained a lot of respect for Marissa Meyer. I was worried she was more of a Stephanie Meyer and would name characters Renessme or some crap, but no! She can write a villain's story and you can understand her, and empathize with her, and still think she's scary and awful and hope Cinder and the rest of the original characters can defeat her. But maybe not too mercilessly because now you can see how damaged she is.  

Now I want to go back and re-read the series, but I can't quite bring myself to since I still need to finish The Bone Clocks (Day 77 and counting...). BUT GUESS WHAT?! As of this post, I have caught up! With this post. Which is adorable to look at. Oh, precious, you're 13 books behind? That's cute. Since I posted that I read 20 more books. TWENTY. And that's not even counting the daily doses of children's picture books I read. So what will I finish first? 20 blog posts or The Bone Clocks? Stay tuned...

PS Winter will be out in November and Facebook is already showing me adds for it. Facebook knows me too well. 

*Yes, it's called A Song of Ice and Fire but everyone knows it as Game of Thrones and I try not to sound as pretentious as I actually am. 
** Maybe 2017? GRRM stopped writing the show so he could work on it but I don't trust him. 

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (5)

Junior lives on the Spokane Indian Reservation with his family. He goes to the school on the rez. He's friends with other boys on the rez. Until his teacher tells him he deserves so much more, and he transfers to the all-white farm town high school. Sometimes, when gas money runs out, he walks all the way to school.

from The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Based in part on Sherman Alexie's own experiences, this a funny and beautifully written book boiling with anger at the continued racism and inequality that exists today. It's an honest look at the world without being entirely jaded. 

"But in Reardan, my coach and the other players wanted me to be good. They needed me to be good. And so I became good. I wanted to live up to expectations. I guess that's what it comes down to. The power of expectations." - The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian 

This is my mantra for life, and especially for teaching. Over and over again the books talk about high expectations and part of me is like "well, isn't that obvious?" It's nice when the research backs up what you've always known to be true. If you set the bar low because you think kids are lazy or don't care, they'll meet that expectation. But if you raise that bar and help them climb up your tower of high expectations, giving them the support they need to reach that level, they'll meet those expectations. I hope I always stay this idealistic, and don't let the standardized tests get me down...

The Fault in Our Stars

Oh my god, this book. I mean if you haven't heard of this book, I don't know what rock you've been hiding under because it's definitely a movie. It's not even cool anymore it was so big so long ago. But ok, let's pretend you don't know what this book is about. Hazel was diagnosed  with terminal cancer awhile ago. She's a ticking time bomb and tries to guard those she can from liking her so that they won't be hurt when her inevitable end comes. Her parents can't be helped, but no one else. But Augustus Walters has other plans. They meet at a cancer kid support group, and Augustus breaks through Hazel's shell.

You'd think, given that story, that this would be some sort of whiny YA drivel, but it is so not. This is YA because it's about teenagers but they are real and wonderful and the book is so beautiful. I read this book near the end of summer. I stayed up till some ungodly hour of the morning finishing a big assignment for my correspondence course and then was so hyped up on stress and red bull I couldn't sleep. So I read the second half of this book and cried myself to sleep. This is how I deal with stress.

Speaking of which, it's the season where people are announcing that they got into grad school and half of me is like

and half of me is like

"IT'S NOT TOO LATE TO SAY NO! Turn back before it's too late!!!" Winter quarter was really rough and I think I'm still recovering. And now I'm an intern which is it's own special type of stress because I'm never quite sure what my cooperating teacher is thinking or what I'm really supposed to be doing. But I feel like I should.

Eleanor & Park (5), Rainbow Rowell

WARNING: Some swearing. Loads of swearing in the book, so if you're not into that, move along and read Cinder or something. 

Oh my God, you know when you finish a book and then all other books are ruined for you forever and you just have to lay there and wish there was someone else who had just finished being in this world so you could talk to them because why is this book over? Where will you go now? That was Eleanor & Park for me.

Eleanor is a chubby redheaded misfit who has just moved in with her mother, stepfather, and younger siblings after spending some time kicked out by her stepfather and living with her mother’s friends.

Park is a gangly half-Korean kid who manages to fit in with the other kids on the bus because his dad’s a vet and they’ve always been part of the neighborhood.

On Eleanor’s first day, the back of the bus kids immediately smell the scene of fresh meat. She has nowhere to sit on the bus until Park takes pity on her and whispers, “Jesus, fuck, just sit down.” They don’t talk. They never talk. But Park begins to catch her reading his comic books out of the corner of her eye. And then he begins to turn the pages more slowly, to make sure she has a chance to finish the page. And then he’s giving her comic books to read and she’s giving them back and before you know it they can’t stop talking to each other.

love is listening to a mixtape he made

You guys, I tried so hard to pretend this book was overrated. But I was so in love with it by like the third chapter. It dresses up as a love story, but it talks about bullying and abuse and all sorts of real stuff. Even the love story feels so real, you can feel them sneaking up on each other, you can feel them fall in love. And the end? The end is so smart. I tried to write a book once that began on the premise this book ended on and she sums up what I tried to say in 50,000 words in one sentence.

I’m not going to tell you what that sentence is because I don’t believe in spoilers.

So I finished this book at like 11:30 on a Wednesday and had no one to talk to so I went on twitter which was a mistake because all the teenyboppers who read it were like “sigh. SO IN LOVE. SO ROMEO. SO JULIET.” And I was like, “omg. Shut up. You understand nothing,” which is really the sign of a good book that it speaks to everyone on the level they’re on. Me? I’m in grad school and studying middle schoolers. Them? They’re in middle school dreaming about falling in love one day. And yet this book speaks to both of us.

But I have to admit, the love story was so cute.  I think I literally said “aww” out loud. More than once. In that really squeaking "squee" way like I saw a puppy or a unicorn. And now I’m ruined and can’t read anything else. It’s like playing a really pathetic game of Duck, Duck, Goose.

nope

nope

fine, I guess

Stay tuned to see what I actually finish.

I can’t even go back to Hunger Games because I literally just finished rereading the series after I finished Outlander. 

If you like this, read The Perks of Being a Wallflower, more Rainbow Rowell, or something. I need to go read something that is a complete 180 because I can't even.

Up Next:

American Gods

Killing Ruby Rose (3.5) & Books That I Would Rather Die Than Finish

This, like I Am Livia, was a free Amazon Prime book of the month. And like many of the Amazon Prime books, I feel like I give it a giant sigh and a shrug, “eh, at least it was free.” But there are a lot of free books in the world, and there are a lot of books I haven’t finished (more on those later), so why this one? Basically I was on a roll of reading some silly books (I actually finished A Mad, Wicked Folly right before I read this one), and the problem with silly books is I don’t have a whole lot to say about them. This one, for example is: here is the plot. Plot very interesting. Talked much about shoes. Shoes very boring. Why is she wearing yellow leggings as pants? I feel that is wrong on a lot of levels.

ANYWAY the book is about Ruby Rose, and it’s basically Veronica Mars but not really as good….Ruby’s dad was a police officer and he died a few months earlier and Ruby has decided to take out her anger at the world by stalking serial killers who got away with murder. THEN some guy starts stalking RUBY and putting her in the position to kill the bad guys. Is he going to kill HER? Is she going to go to JAIL? Is she going to sleep with the cutest guy in school? Read the book if you care to know. I mostly liked her except the shoe tangents made me yawn. It’s like the show Pretty Little Liars, I liked it when it was about their dead friend texting them. I didn’t like it when it was about pretty clothes and sleeping with teachers.

Entertainment: 5

Love Story: 4

Do you hope the main character survives the book? probably

Better than Twilight? No

…now I’m reconsidering my life choices.

This book is satisfying to read in the same way it’s fun to read Cosmo magazines are or eat an entire bag of potato chips…it’s fun for a minute, and then you feel kind of gross. 

Charlie is like, SO much smarter than the girls that live above him. He is an unemployed wanna be writer, and they are unemployed, hot, and drink a lot. Charlie eventual gets off the couch and attempts to talk to them. 

I somehow stumbled across the "dear girls above me" twitter feed last year, and thought it was pretty funny. This book is just as quirky, following Charlie's life and interactions with the girls, but….he’s kind of an entitled asshole and feels really sorry for himself that he isn’t getting any blowjobs…and I personally feel grossed out by the idea that some guy thinks he’s entitled to blowjobs from pretty girls. Ugh get over yourself. Thinking you deserve blowjobs just for existing is basically rape culture.

Read Hyperbole and a Half instead. 

I don’t even know how this got onto my to-read radar. I think I was depressed from reading Room or something and just wanted something light and fun. It’s an epistolary novel (which I just had to google because I can’t remember how to spell it. And was only 80% sure it was the right word…it means its written as letters, or emails in this case) about a lawyer doing something. There’s a divorce. I don’t know I got like ten pages in and got confused. I didn’t care about any of the characters because I didn’t know who any of them were. I would rather read Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason and OMG part of that book got spoiled for me and now THERE’S NO WAY I will read that book. And I can’t tell you what it is because I don’t believe in spoiling things*

I am SO disappointed in myself but I cannot bring myself to finish this book. It just goes on FOREVER. It’s supposed to be like, SO GREAT, but, ok, here’s the premise:

This girl can’t die. Every time she makes a decision that makes her die she has to go back and relive her life and make a new choice. And she can kind of remember her past lives and what happened when she made the wrong choice. But after she’s died at the end of every chapter for 200 pages I’m like…just die…just die, die, die…is this book ever going to end. I will try to finish it but I’m not making any promises.

I'm really judging myself that I liked Timebound more than this book.

THERE ARE SPOILERS IF YOU KEEP SCROLLING SO STOP IT

....

....

....

I MEAN IT

....

....

....

YOU’LL NEVER WANT TO READ A BOOK AGAIN

....

....

....

OR AT LEAST NOT THIS ONE

....

....

....

I CAN’T EVEN.

....

....

....

*DARCY IS DEAD. I CAN’T. 

Divergent by Veronica Roth (4)

I was told that this book was “The next Hunger Games!” which immediately made me skeptical. I do not want to read the “new” Hunger Games, I’ll just read THE Hunger Games eight more times thankyouverymuch. AND since I was told it was “the next Hunger Games,” obviously I had to compare it to The Hunger Games every moment I could.

The story starts with sixteen-year-old Beatrice (Tris) Prior who lives with her family in post-apocalyptic Chicago. Their city has been divided into five six factions: Candor (the honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), Erudite (the intelligent), and the Factionless (the outcasts). At sixteen, Beatrice gets to decide what faction to choose to live her life in. Once she has chosen, there is no going back, and if she chooses Not Abnegation, then she will leave her family forever (except for visiting days). So naturally there’s a test where the kid goes on an LSD-trip-spirit-journey to figure out where they are Meant To Be, but Beatrice is Different Than Everyone Else. And thus our story starts.  

Beatrice vs. Katniss: the film actresses

Similarities to The Hunger Games:

-dystopian world where people are sorted

-Book 1 (Divergent) will be consumed in a 24-72 hour period, depending on how much time you have on your hands.

-you must immediately begin Book 2 (Insurgent/Catching Fire) upon finishing Book 1 (Divergent/The Hunger Games) AND even more pressing is the need to read the third book (Allegiant/Mockingjay)

-The third book is the worst, but you realize that that is the only way to end the series. Mockingjay was a struggle because I read it in one sitting, and the end felt disjointed (you know why if you’ve read it), I had the same problem with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7) because I wanted to know WHAT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN as opposed to what the characters were thinking and feeling. In HP, I felt like they were stuck in that tent in the woods for ETERNITY. On the second read of both Mockingjay and HP7, everything made sense and felt Right. Allegiant took me two weeks to read. There was a lot of things I wanted to happen in Insurgent that then were fixed in Allegiant, but then…I got bored. And the end…

Differences from The Hunger Games:

-In Divergent, the city-state is divided into factions, as opposed to The Hunger Games, where the country of Panem was split into districts. Factions are divided by a personality trait, and jobs are given based on that trait, as opposed to The Hunger Games where the country was divided based on industry

-no love triangle (HOLD THE PHONES, WHAT?! A YA book with no love triangle????). Yes, really.

-By Book 3 Tris actually has a real relationship with a boyfriend where they talk and work through things instead of breaking up at every freakout like teenagers (which I appreciated)

-Tris actually cares about her relationship unlike Katniss who is a badass and is really confused why everyone’s worried about who her boyfriend is when she’s seventeen and the face of a rebellion, which is one of my favorite things about The Hunger Games series, because it’s a discussion with the reader. Why do you care about who your boyfriend is? Does it matter? You could be solving world hunger. I’m not saying its not ok to have a boyfriend, I have a boyfriend. I like my boyfriend. But I don’t like him because he’s my boyfriend, he’s my boyfriend because I like him. In high school (and after…), I feel like there can be pressure on girls to Have A Boyfriend, and that’s not really healthy. I’m totally getting on a tangent but to wrap it up, in the Divergent series Tris actually learns how to communicate within a relationship, and is still a badass, and that is awesome too. Things can be different and still awesome.

-In Divergent, once the rebellion starts, war is happening basically all the time, as opposed to the Boy Troubles/Normal Life à The Games/War conceit that is in a lot of YA (also see Harry Potter: Happy Magic School à oh it’s halfway through the book, time to fight Voldemort!)

THE VERDICT

I read these books in JANUARY and haven’t posted this because I had too many thoughts on the books, and my main problem with them is that they are NOT The Hunger Games, which isn’t REALLY a fair assessment. A friend of mine likes them better because it presents war in a more realistic light. I think the most fair thing to say about the books is that they are clearly a reaction to The Hunger Games, but I wouldn’t say that it talks about as many things as The Hunger Games does. Where Collins is discussing war, the media, and how women are viewed. (You can read a super smart interview with her here.) Roth seems to have a Strong Female Character dealing with war and rebellion. And while I think that Divergent is extremely entertaining, I’m not sure that I would get much more out of it on a second or third read. So I have to say that is DEFINITELY worth reading but NOT as good as The Hunger Games, but I love The Hunger Games too much to give anything but a biased verdict.

POSSIBLY one day I’ll read it again or see the movie and realize how brilliant it is.

If you didn’t like The Hunger Games, DON’T read it. If you loved Divergent, tell me about how wrong I am and what brilliance I’m missing. 

A Mad, Wicked Folly (3.5)

1909, an art class in France, a young, wealthy English finishing student named Vicky decides that to be a real artist, to be taken seriously by her peers, it is absolutely necessary for her to pose nude in front of her classmates. (You can skip the next paragraph if you just want to hear my opinions.)

So she gets kicked out of finishing school and sent home to parents that are way-less-than thrilled and give her two choices: marry a man of their choosing, or go live in a desolate countryside with her Aunt Spinster the Cat Lady. She decides it would be super fun to marry a rich man and then be able to do whatever she wants because she will no longer be under her parents thumb....but THEN she meets a super hot (but poor) cop after she gets kind of arrested while drawing some suffragettes. What follows is a story about love and a young woman learning how to be her own person.

I don't have much to say about this except that it's cute. If you have any passing knowledge about feminism or suffragettes, want to learn more, and are already a feminist this book certainly won't open your eyes to any new information. If you want a love story and a woman who is more feminist-friendly than Bella, you're probably good to go. If this book BLOWS YOUR FREAKING MIND that things used to be that way, you should go read/see A Doll's House IMMEDIATELY.

My shiny new rating system:

Entertainment value: 5

Love Story: 4

Value as Feminist Literature: 2

More Feminist than Cosmo? probably

Better than Twilight? yes

More aww-inspiring than the end of Pride and Prejudice? nope

The Perks of Being a Wallflower (5), Stephen Chbosky

Charlie is a freshman. A geek. The kind of guy that doesn't really fit in and mostly just talks to his English teacher and reads books. That is, until seniors Patrick and Sam begin to hang out with him and introduce him to the world of smoking, drinking, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

This book was beautiful. I'd heard for years that I should read it and it just stayed packed away on my list of books, getting skipped over for non-YA while I was being a pretentious snob. Then I realized that there are earth-moving YA books and you are still allowed to read them when you become an adult, crazy right?

Anyway, this book is beautiful. It reminds you of the messiness of life and doesn't try and wrap it up in shiny paper and make it all ok, but let's you wallow in the shared misery of being a human. It gives you hope that it's all wonderfully worth it.

The other thing I love about it is that Charlie reads a whole bunch of really good books, which makes me want to go out and read a bunch of really good books.

Charlie's Reading List

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger

The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald

On the Road, Jack Kerouac

A Separate Peace, John Knowles

Walden, Henry David Thoreau

Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs

Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie

Hamlet, William Shakespeare

L'Etranger, Albert Camus

The Mayor of Castro Street, Randy Shilts

Selected poems, E. E. Cummings

Timebound (4)

I got this book for free from Amazon First Reads, and I was super pleasantly surprised by how much I liked it. It's young adult Sci-fi/Fantasy blend, so if that is not your cup of tea, you're not going to like it. That's fine. If you want to point and laugh at me for my soft spot for the genre, that's also totally understandable.

Sixteen-year-old Kate Pierce-Keller's life is turned upside down when her estranged grandmother decides to move to town to get to know her only granddaughter. There's more to Kate's grandmother tenements the eye, as Kate learns when she comes into contact with a strange blue medallion keychain.

And that's when she finds out she's a time traveller. Her grandmother was a historian in 2200 or something and did a lot of field work, often travelling with her husband Saul. But Saul had greater plans then to idly watch history unfold. He wanted to change it. To control it. And now Kate is the only one with the power to stop him.

DUN DUN DUN!! For a YA book about time travel, I thought this book was incredibly well thought out. Often things get sloppy as soon as time travel is introduced, but Rysa must have really laid out the timelines for herself because it is really well explained.

The love interest falls for Kate instantly in love with her and basically doesn't have a personality besides thinking she's the best thing ever. That's pretty normal for books trying to capitalize on the popularity of Twilight, and Kate is a much stronger character than Bella, so it's not obnoxious, just more of the same old thing.

It's the first book of a series, so jump on the bandwagon early! If you're in the market for a fun quick read, I'd totally recommend this book.

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.

The Age of Miracles (4)

I’ve been writing a lot about abandoning books. I kept getting bored in the middle and wanting to put it down and move on to something else. This book was different. I found myself constantly wanting to read it but having no real clue as to why. It was cute and interesting but there was no real reason to call it spellbinding. Except one: it was pretty. There were so moments so beautiful that you wanted to live inside the book.

Except you really didn’t. The Age of Miracles premise is that, for reasons unknown, the rotation of the earth slowed. We didn’t gain minutes to the 24-hour day, we gained a whole half-hour. And then an hour, and after a few months the days were 50-hours long. That in itself is a reason to say “Why would I read this book? That makes no sense,” scientifically, no. What it does do is create a world in which 11-year-old Julia grows up.

It’s a quiet apocalypse, (unlike World War Z, which I’ve been listening to on runs and in the car) the world slowly gaining days. At first it seems as though everything can go on as it always did, except that sometimes it’s light when you should be sleeping and sometime’s it’s light during the daytime. Some people yell to the world that the end is near, but others just accept the new normal and continue with their lives: going to school or work, gardening, arguing amongst themselves. But as the daylight hours stretch, the earth begins to change, the days grow hotter and the nights grow colder. Can humanity survive? But more importantly, can Julia navigate puberty amidst this changing world, and will she ever get to go on a date with her neighbor?

If you like young adult novels, read it. If you like somber pretty tales, read it. If you want action, plot, fierce characters or hard sci-fi than this book is not for you.

Happy reading, friends.