Books and Sensibility

We're an Open Book

Kat C

The Serpent King by Jeff Zetner

     Leave a Comment

  • Release Date: March 8, 2016
  • Pages: 384
  • Genre: Contemporary
  •  
  • Publisher: Crown (Random House)

Apparently my new jam is contemporary told from the POV of a trio of friends because in a lot of ways this book is like Fans of The Impossible Life by Kate Scelsa which I read last year around this time and enjoyed.

Our unlikely friend group in The Serpent King consists of; Travis who lives in a fantasy world to escape his abusive home life; Dill, the son of the Pentecostal signs preacher who handles snakes and is currently in prison for possession of child porn and then there is Lydia. Lydia should be the popular girl, her parents are upper middle class, she runs a successful fashion blog and is internet friends with the daughters of New York elite.  But all of that makes her a misfit in Forrestville, a small Tennessee town named after the founder of the Ku Klux Klan.

The dynamics of the characters and sense of place are just perfect. There was an interesting tension between Lydia and the boys because she is from a richer, more liberal family while they  are from poorer and more religious conservative upbringings. I happened to hear Gwen Glazer on The Librarian Is In podcast describe this book as evocative and that is just the perfect way to describe it. I actually read the first 50% of this in May and then forgot about it until August, but I was thrown right back into the story and characters, three months later.

…

Read this Post

It’s Our 5 Year Blogaversary + Giveaway !

     Leave a Comment

September is our 5 month blogaversary !

In the summer of 2011 the last Harry Potter movie came out,  some show called Games of Thrones premiered on HBO,  Where She Went by Gayle Foreman won the 2011 Goodreads Choice Award for Best YA and a little blog called Books and Sensibility was created. At the time  Jess and I were recent college grads looking for jobs and thought it might be fun to create a Cleolinda-esque blog about The Mortal Instruments. Instead, we ended up stumbling into the community of YA book bloggers and never turned back.

Over the last few years blogging for me has become less about being a blogger and more about connecting with other readers and making myself read. I think if I didn’t have a blog I’d probably never read.

…

Read this Post

Spontaneous by Aaron Starmer

     Leave a Comment

  • Release Date: August 23, 2016
  • Pages:368
  • Genre: Contemporary-ish
  • Publisher: Dutton Books for Young Readers (Penguin)

This book probably had the easiest elevator pitch ever; students at a New Jersey high school start spontaneously combusting. The entire town, and eventually the entire world starts looking for answers including senior class member Mara Carlyle, the snarky, foul-mouthed, irreverent narrator who takes us through this story.

I have read a lot of weird YA. I’m talking giant man-eating grasshopper YAand girls-drink-bat-and-sees-future-anti-feminist hellscape weird. But this book takes the Kafkaesque cake.

I was so morbidly curious about this book after hearing about it a BEA because I wanted to see how they handled the combustion. Do the students go poof gone or it is something more gruesome? Well, let me put it this way, when it first happens people assume it was a suicide bomb. So, it mentions blood but it never gets too gross. Starmer focuses more on how students react to what is…leftover.

…

Read this Post

Waiting on Wednesday Vol. 18

     Leave a Comment

Well, it’s been a while since I did one of these!

I was talking to Jess about how much I devoured Meg Cabot’s chick-lit in high school and then literally the next day I saw a Penguin newsletter advertising the newest book in Cabot’s chick-lit series.  I’ve already got this one on hold at the library!

Publication Date: October 18th 2016

In this brand-new novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Meg Cabot, a scandal brings a young man back home to the small town, crazy family, and first love he left behind.Reed Stewart thought he’d left all his small town troubles—including a broken heart—behind when he ditched tiny Bloomville, Indiana, ten years ago to become rich and famous on the professional golf circuit.  Then one tiny post on the Internet causes all of those troubles to return . . . with a vengeance.
Becky Flowers has worked hard to build her successful senior relocation business, but she’s worked even harder to forget Reed Stewart ever existed. She has absolutely no intention of seeing him when he returns—until his family hires her to save his parents.
Now Reed and Becky can’t avoid one another—or the memories of that one fateful night.  And soon everything they thought they knew about themselves (and each other) has been turned upside down, and they—and the entire town of Bloomville—might never be the same, all because The Boy Is Back.

 

Keep Me in Mind by Jamie Reed

     Leave a Comment

  • Release Date: April 26, 2016
  • Pages: 336 pages
  • Genre: Contemporary YA
  • Publisher: Point (Scholastic)

When  Ellia Dawson wakes up in the hospital with a head injury the first person she sees is Liam McPherson, her boyfriend of two years. The only problem ? She doesn’t remember him. In fact, she doesn’t remember anything about the last two years of her life. Now it’s up to Liam to help her remember her past and Ellia to discover if they still fit together. But that gets pretty complicated because it seems like everyone is hiding something from Ellia.

I wanted to like this book. I really did. But I was just so annoyed by parts it, specifically by Liam who was just  so freaking righteous. I’m going to rant a little here. From the beginning we know he was with Ellia when she was injured and she has some questions, but instead of just telling her what she wants to know she has to wait for him to finish the book he is writing about their relationship because he is such a special snowflake or something.

And then the worst is this scene when Liam sees Ellia walking out of her therapy session with another guy and he just walks up and makes out with her. I was shouting at the page: SHE DOESN’T REMEMBER YOU, BRO GET OVER IT !

That said I liked the character of Ellia, she’s an extreme extrovert which is nice change up for a YA female protagonist. Ellia’s journey is all about reconciling the person she was with the person she is now. The last thing she remembers is being excited about going to high school and the next thing she knows she’s a junior in high school. This honestly could have been a story on its own without Liam.

One of my favorite podcasts is Read it and Weep and they have this game called No Retreat, No Surrender where they discuss side characters in films they wish they could follow instead of the main character. I wanted to follow Cody, the boy Ellia meets a therapy who  lost his short term memory in a surfing accident. Cody is only in a few scenes but all I could think about what how interesting it would be to have a relationship with where one character can’t remember the past and the other can’t remember the present. I also liked seeing how Cody used technology and other strategies to get through life with no short term memory. I was really hoping he’d take over the plot, but he doesn’t.

Keep Me in Mind had an interesting set up, but a romance I couldn’t invest in. However it did remind me of how much YA contemporary is my jam and I want to get back into reading more of it.

 

Wink Poppy Midnight by April Genevieve Tucholke

     Leave a Comment

Um… So….This Book….Yeah, I think it’s time to borrow this meme from my Grasshopper Jungle review:

I got this audiobook from my library because I got it confused with some other book and thought it was about Victorian-era spies. But, since the audio was only 5 hours I figured I could knock it out in a week.

…

Read this Post