Love & Romance

The Last Present

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by Wendy Mass
First sentence: “When you’ve drawn breath for nearly a hundred years, not much surprises you.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Others in the series: 11 Birthdays, Finally, 13 Gifts
Content: There some kissing (a first kiss) and a bit of fudging the truth, but other than that, nothing objectionable. Sits quite happily with the rest of the series in the middle grade (3-5th grade) section of the bookstore.

Amanda and Leo have gone without talking for a year. Again. This time, though, it wasn’t a fight that did it: Angelina — the mysterious, magical woman in the town of Willow Falls — asked them to. Because when Amanda and Leo don’t talk, they have the power travel through time.

This time, they’re tasked with going back in time to fix their friend’s sister’s birthday party. See, Angelina bestows a “benediction” of protection on all the children of Willow Falls, something that will keep them safe. But she didn’t make it in time to help Grace (that’s the friend’s sister), and every attempt she made in the intermittent 10 years didn’t work either. And she’s tasked Amanda and Leo with going back and making sure that Grace’s benediction happens. Three times.

It sounds simple, and in many ways it is: Amanda and Leo head back to a different year each day over the course of a week, and all they have to do is fix one little thing at each birthday party. But as they find out, it’s not as easy as it sounds. And then there’s the problem that all this might be more about Angelina than it is about Grace.

While it’s nothing earth-shattering or ground-breaking, it’s a very sweet little book. I liked how Mass brought in all the elements of the whole series, and though this is Amanda and Leo’s follow-up story (they were always my favorite, anyway), Rory and Tara do have parts to play. It’s very much one of those “on the cusp of adulthood” books: Amanda and Leo have their first kiss, and they are beginning to make decisions that will effect their future. But even with that, it’s a simple, sweet (I know: I keep saying that. There really is no better word.) story about moving on and making things right.

And a fitting end to this series.

Allegiant

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by Veronica Roth
First sentence: “I pace our cell in Erudite headquarters, her words echoing in my mind: My name is Edith Prior, and there is much I am happy to forget.“
Others in the series: Divergent, Insurgent
Content: There’s violence, some swearing, and a whole lot of kissing. In the first half, anyway. It’s in the Teen (grades 9-12) section of the bookstore, but I wouldn’t have an issue giving it to someone younger.

I’m going to get hate for this.

This is how my opinion on the series has gone (without looking at my reviews): Divergent is a unique dystopian idea, with some cool action scenes. The movie might be good. Insugent I don’t remember a thing about. Not a thing. Except that I don’t remember liking it all that much. And I had no interest in reading Allegiant. I only picked it up because I succumbed to the hype and stuck my name on the hold list at the library.

So, if I gathered right, after the events of Insurgent, Four’s mom has taken over things, deciding that the factions are to be done away with. Except that’s not working. And she’s executing people right and left. So, there’s an underground movement to fight against the Man (still) and to get people out to explore the world outside the fence. Tris and Four are part of that group. And when they get out they discover that 1) their life is an elaborate experiment by a government bureau in order to make people’s genes “normal” again after a gene war (or something like that) and 2) I was so over it.

I was. I didn’t care that Four was angsting about not being a true Divergent. I didn’t care Tris stressing about Who She Was. Their hallway snogging did nothing for me. I found the world to be trite and simplistic. I was over caring about government conspiracies or parental abuse or revolutions.

So I bailed. I admit I’m a little curious to know why the whole fandom was up in arms about the book, but I have so many other books to read, that I honestly don’t care if I don’t finish this one. Ever.

There’s just not enough time to waste it on things that I’m so over.

Audiobook: Longbourn

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by Jo Baker
read by Emma Fielding
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Content: There is some talk of sex, but it’s vague and not at all explicit. And some mild swear words. It’s in the general fiction section at the bookstore, mostly because that’s the way it’s marketed. If a 15 year old were interested, I’d give it to them.

This is, to be frank, Pride and Prejudice fanfiction. All the familiar settings — Longbourn, Pemberly, London — are there, as are the familiar characters — Lizzie, Jane, Mr. and Mrs. Bennett, Bingley and Wickham (Darcy not so much).The difference is that it’s really only the bare bones of the P&P and the story is told from the points of view of three servants: Mrs. Hill, the housekeeper; Sarah, a maid; and James, a footman.

It basically follows the plot arc of P&P, though the concerns are not the concerns of Lizzie and Jane. And, honestly, I was expecting to love visiting that story from the perspective of the downstairs help. However, I was in for a surprise: unlike Austen’s witty observations on human character, Longbourn is a very pedantic book: every day is get up, do the work, collapse in bed. It’s also a dirty book — literally, there’s dirt, blood, pig slop, mud, you name it; Baker doesn’t whitewash the 19th-century.

There’s a slight love triangle between Sarah, James and Mr. Bingley’s footman, and while it goes somewhere, it feels kind of superfluous. I never really connected with the help; Baker didn’t make me care about all the work they were doing, or how annoying Mrs. Bennett was, or what a creeper Wickham was. And so, when at the beginning of volume 4 (I think; listening to it kind of throws off those things), I got backstory on Mrs. Hill and James, I was more than annoyed. First, at the timing — why wait until most of the way through the book? — but secondly because Mrs. Hill and James were not who I cared about or was interested in.

And then it just kind of petered out at the end. Baker kept the story going past the end of P&P, through the marriage of Lizzie and Darcy and even later until everyone is Old. I didn’t care. I wanted to care, but I was just Tired of the story.

I finished it. But I’m thinking that I shouldn’t have. Which is too bad.

(A note on the reader: she was fine. She was interesting. But it wasn’t enough to make me really like the book.)

Just One Year

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by Gayle Forman
First sentence: “It’s the dream I always have: I’m on a plane, high above the clouds.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Content: There are a half-dozen f-bombs in addition to a handful of other milder swear words. Also there’s off-screen sex and some drug use. For these reasons, the book is in the Teen (ages 14+) section of the bookstore.
Others in the series: Just One Day

The book opens with Willem de Reuter, Dutch actor and playboy, waking from a coma. For those who have read Just One Day, you know exactly what point in the overarching story of Willem and Allyson that this picks up. The question is: where does Willem go from here?

While I’ve known that this book was coming out since reading Just One Day, I have to admit that I’m not sure it needed a companion book, or that Willem’s side of  the story needed to be told. That said, I was curious about Willem as a character, and the path that he took over the year that Allyson was trying to figure herself out. It turns out that while Willem’s path was more adventurous than Allyson’s, it essentially was the same: he needed to figure himself out.

However, it was Willem’s adventurous lifestyle that made the book for me. He couldn’t shake the memory of Allyson — or Lulu as he called her — and the searching for her (and, inadvertently, the healing from the grief of his father’s death three years before) took him to Mexico and India as well as through rural Netherlands and Amsterdam. I’m a sucker for books like these, ones where the main character gets to travel the world, giving himself over to the experience of seeing things.

And even though Willem is uncertain about his direction and, admittedly, a bit angsty (or in a funk a we’d call it around our house), he’s a pretty amiable character to be traveling the world with. I love how he picks up friends as he wanders from place to place. And how he just falls into experiences. It seems so… effortless.

I do understand that in many ways this is a fantasy. Not only the love-at-first-sight thing, but also the Fate/Kismet/Karma thing. No one’s life is that effortless, that charmed, that fate-driven. But, it was a nice fantasy to immerse oneself in for a while to get away from the drugery of “real” life.

Untold

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by Sarah Rees Brennan
ages: 12+
First sentence: “Welcome to Sorry-in-the-Vale.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Others in the series: Unspoken
Review copy greedily stolen from the package the publisher sent to the bookstore, then hoarded on my shelves until I finally devoured it.

To catch up (spoilers for Unspoken, obviously.):
1. Kami’s imaginary friend, Jared, is real.
2. He’s part of an old sorcerer family.
3. Who used to rule Sorry-in-the-Vale
4. His uncle, Rob, is more than slightly batty, and is killing people because blood gives him power.
5. Kami wants to stop him.

In many ways, this is very much a second book in a trilogy. The first was a brilliant set up. This one, while still interesting and laugh-out-loud funny at times,  had the feel that everything is building toward some grand conclusion. Though we never quite get to it in this book.

That’s not to say that it’s a bad book. On the contrary, it’s actually quite good. Even though I felt like I was spinning my wheels — will Kami and Jared get together? Will Lillian ever stop being a Royal Snob?  Will Angela and Holly work out their differences? Will Ash ever grow a backbone? — it was done in a way that I didn’t mind the spinning. At all. It was also because I adore Kami. I hate to call her plucky, but she really is. She’s smart, and determined, and bossy, and willing to do ANYTHING for her family, friends, and town. I love her.

And the ending? Oh. My. Gosh.  If I wasn’t already convinced that endings can make or break a book, I would be now. The ending is brilliant. And painful. Because now I have to WAIT for the next book.

It was worth it, though.

Just One Day

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by Gayle Forman
ages: 14+
First sentence: “What if Shakespeare had it wrong?
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Review copy provided by my place of employment.

Allyson and her best friend Melanie have just recently graduated high school, and are off on a tour of Europe. You know the type: scheduled, regimented, seeing all the highlights tour. If it’s Wednesday, we must be in Rome type of thing. Allyson, being the structured-type girl herself, is enjoying it okay, in spite of Melanie’s attempts at a re-do. She keeps saying that in college they can reinvent themselves, but at the same time, loves that Allyson is so reliably… Allyson.

Then, they meet Willem. It was a fluke: when they were in Stratford-upon-Avon, they passed up the chance to see the Royal Shakespeare Company do Hamlet in favor of seeing a company called Guerrilla Will do Twelfth Night. And it was… something. Willem, 20 and Dutch, was charming, and Allyson fell, well, in like. And the next day when they met again on the train, she decided it was kismet, and decided on a whim to go to Paris with him. For the day.

Forman really works this implausibility. (Especially for me, as a mother of four girls, I was conflicted. Part of me was: YES, PARIS!! How romantic! And it was, really. The other part of me was screaming: NOOOOOOOO!!!!) It makes sense for Allyson in that moment to make that choice, to experiment with living a life that was something other than her same structured existence. And what better place to do it than Paris? She has a marvelous day, and then… Willem’s gone. She’s alone. “It” didn’t work.

So she packs off home and heads up to college, where she tries to move on with her life. Or rather, move on with the life that her mother has assigned to her. I realized while reading this one that a lot of my ideas on parenting teens have come from reading teen novels because I could totally see where things were going to go. Helicopter mom = disastrous first semester. It wasn’t until her second semester that Allyson began to figure out how to stand up for what she wanted, how to make friends, how to find her own path instead of the one her parents made for her.

And the end? Well, let’s just say it’s a hopeful one. I’m not sure how plausible it is, but by that point, I didn’t care. I was fully invested in Allyson’s story, in her trials and her hopes and dreams. Which Foreman made come alive for me.

Besides, it’s Paris. You can’t get any better than that.

Unspoken

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by Sarah Rees Brennan
ages: 12+
First sentence: “Every town in England has a story.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!

Kami has an imaginary friend.  She has had him in her head, talking to her, keeping her company for as long as she can remember. She’s learned not to talk about him, because people in her small English Village, Sorry-in-the-Vale, tend to think she’s a bit crazy, but he’s there and she’s learned to live with it.

Not for one moment did she ever think that 1) he was really real and 2) he’d show up in her village.

Kami is also an aspiring investigative reporter, something which won me over immediately. I loved her spunk and her gumption, and her Nancy Drew/Veronica Mars/His Girl Friday determination to get to the bottom of the story. Because in Sorry-in-the-Vale there are a LOT of secrets that no one is willing to tell.

To be honest, that kind of bugged me for a lot of the book: the fact that Brennan hinted at secrets, and hinted at secrets, and hinted at secrets, but the reader was as CLUELESS to understanding them as Kami was. I wanted more information, but it wasn’t enough of an annoyance to make me throw the book across the room. No, what kept me reading was the witty writing — the balance between humor, romance, and suspense — and the characters. I adored the girls: Kami, of course, but also her friends Holly and Angela. And the guys weren’t that bad either.

And when the secrets were finally revealed, I understood why Brennan approached it the way she did. She has a way of keeping me engaged, turning pages, until her satisfying-yet-frustratingly-open conclusion.

I can’t wait for the next one!

Anna and the French Kiss

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by Stephanie Perkins
ages: 14+
First sentence: “Here is everything I know about France: Madeline and Amélie and Moulin Rouge.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Copy given to me by the lovely Vasilly

So, this one has been getting a lot of hype, all of it saying how wonderful, how great, how supremely perfect this was.

M, when she finished it said, “Well, that was cheesetastic. Good cheese, but so cheesy.”

The basic story: Anna Oliphant is the daughter of a Nicholas Sparks-type author, who, not wanting to be outdone by all his Posh Hollywood Friends, ships Anna off to a Posh boarding school in Paris. (Oh noes.) She doesn’t know a lick of French, doesn’t want to leave her comfortable life in Atlanta, doesn’t want to leave her blossoming almost-relationship with Toph. But, to Paris she goes.

Where she bumps into — literally — Étienne St. Clair.

(cue dreamboat music)

What ensues is a lot of romantic push-and-pull. Anna obviously St. Clair, but she has a double problem to deal with: he’s got a girlfriend though she’s kind of out of the picture, and Anna’s friend Mer likes him as well. Then there’s the question of whether or not St. Clair likes her? Sure, they’re friends, and they hang out all the time. But does he like her?

(Because, you know, we ALL want to know that.)

That’s not to say this is a bad book: it’s predictable, sure. But I did enjoy the relationship between Anna and St. Clair, it’s heights and valleys, and it’s inevitable, swoon-worthy resolution. It’s not a simple book, and much like Maureen Johnson’s work, Perkins knows how to write a romance that deals with more even while putting the relationship front-and-center.

Update, 2018: I can see how I thought it was cheesy, but for whatever reason (time, place, etc.), I found it to have a lot more depth this time. There were themes about communication and assumptions that touched me, and a reminder that while my children are my responsibility, they are also their own people with their own dreams, and it’s not up to me to control their lives. Also: I missed the subtext that Americans really can be awful (en masse) the first time around. Still a very good book.

Not perfect, b I ut delightful.

The Demon’s Covenant

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by Sarah Rees Brennan
ages: 14+
First sentence: “”Any minute now,’ Rache said, ‘something terrible is going to happen to us.'”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!

First step: read The Demon’s Lexicon. Second step: come back and read this. Because there isn’t any way I can write this part without spoiling the first book.

Picking up a month where we left off… Alan and Nick are back in Mae and Jamie’s life, primarily because Gerald — new leader of the magician’s Obsidian Circle — is trying to recruit Jamie to be part of the circle. This, for many reasons, completely freaks Mae out, and so she calls the Ryves brothers back to help keep Jamie safe. Except, Nick isn’t exactly the safest person in the world, being a freed demon. That creates its own problems: Alan is making bargains with magicians and demons, Mae is finding she’s falling in love with both the brothers, Jamie is actually becoming friends with Nick. And there’s a whole lot else going on that’s completely impossible to sum up.

It’s slow getting started, but picks up about a third of the way into it. At one point I was flabbergasted, wondering where on earth Brennan was going with the storyline, how it all would work out. It’s one of those instances where the right narrator makes the book; it’s from Mae’s point of view this time, and that makes all the difference. Especially when the book all comes together in the end.

Also, as Charlotte pointed out, Brennan does write some very swoon-inducing prose. Very much so. Very, very much so. But she’s not just skilled in writing swoon; the book is SO much better than that. There’s angst and surliness, yes; but, there’s also mystery, and adventure, and magic, and surprise zombies (it’s not a party until someone brings the surprise zombies), and an ending that will — I promise — leave you begging for the next installment.

Which begs the question: how long do we have to wait, and what can we do to make Sarah Rees Brennan write faster?

The Demon’s Lexicon

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by Sarah Rees Brennan
ages: 14+
First sentence: “The pipe under the sink was leaking again.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!

Brothers Nick and Alan are on the run from magicians who are hunting them. Have been for most of their lives. That, and taking care of their mother (who was driven mad by magic) takes up most of their time. That is until Mae and her brother Jamie come into their lives. Jamie, it seems, has a third level demon mark, which essentially means he’s ripe for possession.

Perhaps we should take a break here and explain that in this world, demons are spirits who long to possess human bodies and experience human lives. In exchange for this, they grant magicians unlimited power. The magicians don’t really see anything wrong with this, but for Nick, Alan, and their “side”, it’s kind of evil to give away human bodies to demons in exchange for power. I can see their point.

As a result of Mae and Jamie (among other things), Alan gets a demon mark, and so the four of them (unfortunately, in Nick’s opinion) set about trying to remove the marks. This involves hunting down a Circle of magicians and killing a couple, since only a magician’s blood will remove the marks. Thus begins an interesting adventure, full of suspense and intrigue, a bit of romance (and Brennan knows how to write romance), and a spectacular twist at the end, one that, in retrospect I should have seen coming yet it completely blew me away.

The only really drawback is that one of the main characters, Nick, is so very unlikable. It’s a turn off at the beginning of the book; you just want to smack the kid upside the head. But, give it time: he will grow on you, he does have a few redeeming qualities. And then there’s Alan, who’s an enigma: he keeps secrets from Nick, he’s up to something, but you never quite know what. They’re an interesting and appealing pair, these brothers. Mae isn’t too bad herself, either: with her fiery temper and determination (not to mention pink hair).

All of which makes for a very compelling book.