Books and Sensibility

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3.5 Star

ARC Review : Marie Antoinette, Serial Killer by Kate Aleander

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  •  Release Date : September 24th 2013
  •  Publisher : Scholastic Point
  •  Genre : Paranormal Mystery/History
  •  Pages : 304

Synopsis: Paris, France: a city of fashion, chocolate croissants, and cute boys. Colette Iselin is thrilled be there for the first time, on her spring break class trip.

But a series of gruesome murders are taking place around the city, putting everyone on edge. And as she tours the sights, Colette keeps seeing a strange vision: a pale woman in a ball gown and powdered wig, who looks like Marie Antoinette.

Colette knows her status-obsessed friends won’t believe her, so she seeks out the help of a charming French boy. Together, they discover that the murder victims are all descendants of people who ultimately brought about Marie Antoinette’s beheading. The queen’s ghost has been awakened, and now she’s wreaking her bloodthirsty revenge.

…

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Book Review : Coldest Girl In Coldtown

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  • Release Dat : September 13th 2013
  • Pages: 432
  • Genre: Fantasy
  • Publisher : Little Brown For Young Readers

Tana lives in a world where walled cities called Coldtowns exist. In them, quarantined monsters and humans mingle in a decadently bloody mix of predator and prey. The only problem is, once you pass through Coldtown’s gates, you can never leave.
One morning, after a perfectly ordinary party, Tana wakes up surrounded by corpses. The only other survivors of this massacre are her exasperatingly endearing ex-boyfriend, infected and on the edge, and a mysterious boy burdened with a terrible secret. Shaken and determined, Tana enters a race against the clock to save the three of them the only way she knows how: by going straight to the wicked, opulent heart of Coldtown itself.

The Coldest Girl In Coldtown is based on the world created in Holly Black’s short story of the same name. I reviewed this short story a few months ago so I had some insight going into the novel….

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Book Review : All Our Yesterdays by Cristin Terrill

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  • Release Date : September 3 2013
  • Genre : Sci-Fi/Thriller
  • Publisher : Hyperion Teen
  • Pages : 368

Synopsis : Imprisoned in the heart of a secret military base, Em has nothing except the voice of the boy in the cell next door and the list of instructions she finds taped inside the drain.
Only Em can complete the final instruction. She’s tried everything to prevent the creation of a time machine that will tear the world apart. She holds the proof: a list she has never seen before, written in her own hand. Each failed attempt in the past has led her to the same terrible present—imprisoned and tortured by a sadistic man called the doctor while war rages outside . . . All Our Yesterdays is a wrenching, brilliantly plotted story of fierce love, unthinkable sacrifice, and the infinite implications of our every choice.

All Our Yesterdays has been on my radar since I heard it was one of the books on the 2013 Book Expo America YA Editor’s Buzz Panel. It was described as “deceptively simple” and  “more than  a standard girl goes back in time to save the world.”

This is a story that starts at the end. Em is a prisoner in
a secret government facility. Her only company is   Finn, the boy in the cell
next to her. Now I know this might sound like Shatter Me byTahereh Mafi but don’t let these first few pages fool you.  Em and Finn have to escape and go back in time to their yesterdays (wink wink nudge nudge) and kill ‘ the doctor”, the man who changed the world for the worst in order to save the future.…

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The Infinite Moment of Us by Lauren Myracle

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  • Release Date: August 20th 2013
  • Publisher: Amulet Books (Abrams)
  • Pages: 336
  • Genre: Contemporary

Synopsis: For as long as she can remember, Wren Gray’s goal has been to please her parents. But as high school graduation nears, so does an uncomfortable realization: Pleasing her parents once overlapped with pleasing herself, but now . . . not so much. Wren needs to honor her own desires, but how can she if she doesn’t even know what they are?

It’s all ending for Wren Gray…

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Skylark by Meagan Spooner

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  • Release Date: August 1, 2012
  • Genre: Fantasy
  • Pages: 344
  • Publisher: Carolrhoda Labs (Lerner Publishing)

Synopsis: Sixteen-year-old Lark Ainsley has never seen the sky.
Her world ends at the edge of the vast domed barrier of energy enclosing all that’s left of humanity. For two hundred years the city has sustained this barrier by harvesting its children’s innate magical energy when they reach adolescence. When it’s Lark’s turn to be harvested, she finds herself trapped in a nightmarish web of experiments and learns she is something out of legend itself: a Renewable, able to regenerate her own power after it’s been stripped.

Steampunk, fantasy and dystopian collide to create the devastatingly unique setting of Skylark by debut author, Meagan Spooner.

In Lark Ainsley’s community everything is powered by the Resource, a type of magic that originates in all the citizens. At a young age, every citizen has their Resource harvested which strips them of any ability and then fully join society as adults.

Lark is getting older and at 15-years-old is frustrated that she has yet to get harvested. Just when she thinks it will never happen Lark discovers she is different.  In a very bad way. Lark finds herself on the run, escaping the only life and civilization she knows into a great and dangerous unknown….

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Things I Can’t Forget by Miranda Keneally (Thousand Oaks #3 )

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  • Publication Date March 1st 2013
  • Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire
  • Pages: 308
  • Genre: Contemporary

Synopsis: Companion to Catching Jordan and Stealing Parker. Kate has always been the good girl. Too good, according to some people at school—although they have no idea the guilty secret she carries. But this summer, everything is different…This summer she’s a counselor at Cumberland Creek summer camp, and she wants to put the past behind her. This summer Matt is back as a counselor too. He’s the first guy she ever kissed, and he’s gone from a geeky songwriter who loved The Hardy Boys to a buff lifeguard who loves to flirt–with her.Kate used to think the world was black and white, right and wrong. Turns out, life isn’t that easy…

Much like Kenneally’s last book, Stealing Parker this book is about a good Christian girl. But unlike Parker in Stealing Parker, our main character Kate wants nothing more to stay that way. She likes being called a  “a good, good girl.” Which is why every day she wrestles with helping with her estranged best friend’s abortion.…

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