Books and Sensibility

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Archives for 2015

Audiobook Review : Dreams Of Gods and Monsters

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  • Release Date: April 8th 2014
  • Genre: Fantasy
  • Length: 18 hours 11 minutes
  • Publisher: Hachette Audio

IT IS  FINISHED. I started listening to this series 3 years ago  and  have finally finished this sweeping epic fantasy and love story. Taylor’s use of language and creativity have me waiting eagerly to see what she will come up with next.

The Daughter of Smoke and Bone series starts off with a whimsical art student in Prague and free falls into a fantastical epic conclusion. While I enjoyed the world-building and conflict Taylor created, the ending fizzled just a bit for me. It wasn’t that I didn’t like it;  it just came and went just a little to swiftly. But despite this, all these book have me sold. They are all plotted perfectly and follow an even pace.

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So You Want To Review A Galley : The Request E-mail

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We laid out the basics onhow we request ARCs,now here are examples of the successful e-mails we’ve sent to publicist/the publicity department of the publisher. Most of these have been “cold call” e-mails….

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11/22/63 by Stephen King

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  • Release Date: November 8th 2011
  • Genre:  Thriller
  • Pages: 849
  • Publisher: Scribner 

I’ve always been intrigued by the cover of this book; one side shows a newspaper with Kennedy’s assassination as the headline and the other side has the same newspaper with a headline saying the assassination had been avoided. This book has had been sitting on my Kindle since it was on sale for  2.99 and after finishingA Thousand Pieces of You I was looking for a more complex alternate universe story and figured King could deliver.

 Everything you need to know about this book can be summarized from the cover. Basically,  high school teacher, Jake Epping, goes back in time to stop the Kennedy assassination. I think saying anything else would just get… complicated….

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Listen Up (Again) : Podcasts for Readers

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I didn’t think it was possible but since our last posts on podcasts I have become even more obsessed! They are the perfect thing to listen to when doing boring tasks like cleaning the house, washing dishes or long car drives. Here are some of my favorite podcasts that will appeal to the YA reader.…

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Audiobook Review: The Young Elites by Marie Lu

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  • Release Date: October 9, 2014
  • Genre: Historical Fantasy 
  • Narrators: Carla Corvo, Lannon Killea
  • Length: 10 hours 9 minutes
  • Publisher: Putnam (Penguin)

I don’t fangirl for many authors, but if there is one author I will consider flailing over it’s Marie Lu. Her Legend series is one we’ve been talking about on this blog since day one.  The series has great story building, action and interesting female characters. Needless to say when I heard about The Young Elites I was excited to get back into Lu’s head….

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Like No Other by Una LaMarche

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  • Release Date: July 24th 2014
  • Pages: 368
  • Genre: Contemporary 
  • Publisher: Razorbill (Penguin)

Like No Other has an easy pitch; take the star crossed lovers trope and apply it to a  Hasidic Jewish girl  and West Indian boy in 21st century Brooklyn with a meet cute in a broken elevator during a storm.

 I really like  what this book is doing in terms of the current state of YA publishing. It’s like yeah diversity in YA,  yeah diverse cover art and oh look The New York Times is reviewing a diverse book by a female author.  But despite my cheering for its successes I kind of take issue with LaMarche’s portrayal of the male protagonist Jaxon

I didn’t necessarily hate his character. Jaxon is a nerdy first-generation West Indian who represents the average teen boy and I actually like many of his introductory paragraphs.

It’s funny; I forget sometimes how I might look to other people. I could be reading The Great Gatsby on the 3 train, or walking down the street listening to a podcast on my phone, or coming out of the orthodontist’s office with Invisalign braces feeling like the biggest nerd on the planet, but some people don’t notice anything but an almost six-foot-tall black man.

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