Books and Sensibility

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Book Reviews

Vivian Apple At The End Of The Word By Katie Coyle

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The only reason this book is on my radar is because it was a part of theTumblr’s Reblog Book Club. Vivian Apple is set in a modern day America where a corporate leaning evangelistic church, The Church Of America, has taken over the country.

 One morning dutiful daughter and all around good girl Vivian Apple wakes up to find her Church Of America believing parents missing and two holes in their bedroom ceiling. The rapture has happened and Vivian is all alone. But is it all real ?

Now Vivian Apple is breaking all the rules to find the truth,  She’s not the old Vivian Apple anymore; shes’ Vivian Apple at the end of the world.

With her best friend and the knowledge that there has to be something more, Apple embarks on a cross country road tip to figure of what she believes.  This book has an odd tone about religion that both questions and accepts the idea of belief,

This is my first Julia Whelan audiobook, Whelan has a broad range and a knack for teenage voices. I can’t wait to check out her other YA audiobooks.

Vivian Apple At The End of The World is one of the weird YAs where your not sure what’s going to happen next and like the characters you will question what’s is and isn’t real and what it means to believe.

The Husband’s Secret and Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty

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Only Daughter by Anna Snoekstra

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  • Release Date: September 20th 2016
  • Pages: 288
  • Genre: Psychological Thriller/Grip-lit
  • Publisher: Mira (Harlequin)

After going missing for 12 years the Winters’ family only daughter, Rebecca, is back. Rebecca doesn’t remember where she’s been and her memories are fleeting mostly because the girl who returned isn’t Rebecca Winters. She’s an impostor simply looking to hide out. But somebody from the shadows is on to the deception and before this impostor is found out she will discover that Rebecca’s perfect suburban life was lie.

This  Aussie thriller moves between time, following the exploits of the impostor in 2014 and the uneasy life of the real teenage Rebecca Winters a decade previous. Snoekstra sets the scene of an idyllic life with a disturbing underbelly and while the novel doesn’t have the same eerie pathos of a Gillian Flynn novel, you will find yourself flipping the pages to find out how this ends.

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The Wrath And The Dawn by Renee Adieh

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May 12th 2015 | Pages: 388  | Genre: Historical/Fantasy | Publisher : Penguin Random house

I’m going to go ahead and reuse a .gif from my Red Queen Review

I mean we have the cold boy king Khalid, his protective cousin Jalal, the boyfriend Tariq  and then his best friend Rahim.

Let me back up here. This YA novel is an adaption of  the Arabian story of Scheherazade, a woman who tells the king a captivating story  for 1001 nights to keep him from killing her and they eventually fall in love. You know kind of a Netflix and chill situation.

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Dreams of Gods and Monsters Gif Review

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Imma let you finish Twilight, but The Daughter of Smoke and Bone series is the best YA paranormal romance about a teenager and male-paranormal-who-is-super-old-but-looks-super-hot-and super young-so-we-swear-it’s-not-creepy of all time. Of all time.

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The Serpent King by Jeff Zetner

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  • Release Date: March 8, 2016
  • Pages: 384
  • Genre: Contemporary
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  • 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.

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