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Book Reviews

Cruel Beauty By Rosamund Hodge

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“You’re just as foolish as the others. You think you are clever, strong, special. You think you’re going to win.”

Hodge, Rosamund (2014-01-28). Cruel Beauty

  • Release Date: January 28th 2014
  • Genre: Fantasy/Fairytale
  • Pages : 342
  • Publisher: Balzer & Bray

Cruel Beauty is a fantasy retelling of Beauty and The Best, where beauty is an angry and selfish (read: cruel) young woman named Nyx. Out of desperation Nyx’s father made a bargain that would result in Nyx being married off to the Gentle Lord, a powerful demon who has ruled over Nyx’s people for 900 years. Nyx mission isn’t just to marry the Gentle Lord, but she has been trained to take him down, but could there more inside this beast than darkness ?

 

Cruel Beauty is sold as a Beauty and the Beast retelling
but the story feels more like the tale of Bluebeard. A man whose young innocent wife discovers the benevolent Bluebeard keeps the bodies of his previous wives who disobeyed him. There is this sense of isolation and dread in the original tale that we see a bit of in Cruel Beauty. Nyx is also one of many of wives who have joined the Gentle Lord and, like in the original tale, he allows Nyx to roam the rooms of his magical house—expect for the locked ones. The Gentle Lord also keeps the dead bodies of his previous wives in one of said rooms, so I was really getting Bluebeard vibes

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I’ll Meet You There by Heather Demetrios

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  • Release Date: February 3, 2015
  • Pages: 400
  • Genre: Contemporary
  • Publisher: Henry Holt & Co (Macmillan)

Skylar Evans has one goal; get out of her small backwoods hometown of Creek View, California. With her acceptance letter to San Francisco State in hand the only thing standing between Skylar and the next step in her life is the summer. But when her mom loses her job and sobriety she’s not sure the summer is going to end how she planned.

 Right away this book reminded me of one of my favorite chapters from Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Thingscalled How To Get Unstuckabout Strayed’s time as a counselor to girls whose success was measured by two things; not getting pregnant and getting a job at Taco Bell.  This sort of mentality is evident in Skylar’s story, her best friend is a teen mom and her mom worked at Taco Bell for 18 years. Skylar herself is trying to get “unstuck” from this life cycle. Creek View is a place where future plans are very short sided and people drink and party to forget about their problems.

I feel like the setting of this book is very important to understanding the story. Creek View is this lower income area with a mix of lower income white people and Mexican migrant worker families. Creek View represents a town we don’t see a lot of in contemporary YA; most YAs tend take place in nondescript suburban bubbles.

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Book Swap #1 ! The Golem and The Jinni / Fangirl

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Jess and I did a book swap as a way to force the other to read and review a book. The theme for our first book swap was 5-star reviews; we gave each other a book we’d previously reviewed as five stars. Jess gave me The Golem in The Jinni and I gave her Fangirl.

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Book Review : Suddenly Royal by Nichole Chase

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  • Release Date: April 23rd 2013
  • Genre: New Adult/ Women’s Fiction
  • Pages : 464
  • Publisher: Avon

The story of an American woman who discovers she is a duchess  sounded a lot more interesting when I started this book than when I finished. This concept of normal women finding themselves mixed up with royalty is nothing new with movies like The Princess Diaries and The Prince and Me but I couldn’t find the same  charm in Suddenly Royal.

 

Samantha Rousseau is a graduate student working towards her PhD and taking care of her cancer stricken stepfather. Her life is turned upside down when it’s discovered she is a long lost duchess from the France-expy country Lilaria. Suddenly this American girl is plucked from obscurity and into the world of royalty, paparazzi and fame all while  keeping her eyes out for Prince Alex aka Prince Yummy.

Chase executed the premise well, explaining how the families are being brought together but there wasn’t much of a follow through as far as plot was concerned.

 I don’t know if it was the cookie cutterhero or the low ball conflict but the more I thought about it the more I realized this wasn’t the kind of story I expected. We get a lot of Sam going to Lilaria and about her responsibilities,  but honestly it wasn’t that interesting. . . just a lot of people telling her things.  I wanted something more akin to the  first season of Downton Abbey. I wanted more awkward dinner parties, culture shock,  witty banter and actual tension between the leads.

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Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed

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  • Release Date: July 10th 2012
  • Genre:  Essay Collection / Self Help
  • Hours: 9 hours and 41 minutes
  • Publisher: Random House Vintage
  • Triggers: Child abuse

Cheryl Strayed is probably best known for Wild, the story of her journey hiking the Pacific Crest  Trail, which kicked off Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 and was recently released as a film with Reese Witherspoon. I feel like a couple years ago I heard her name sprinkled through every literary website and podcast I subscribed to, so when I saw this audio on Overdrive I checked it out.

The set up for this book takes some explaining. It’s a collection of advice columns from when Strayed wrote an advice column on the culture website, The Rumpus under the pseudonym Dear Sugar. For each question, he usually picks a story from her past to illuminate her advice. Strayed has had such an interesting and full life and her stories are captivating. She’s brutally honest about herself and doesn’t hold anything back, she shows quite a bit of vulnerability with her readers and I think that’s why the columns were so popular.

I’d heard so much praise for this collection, but I wasn’t sure it would be for me. I didn’t really know what I was getting into when I started, but I really enjoyed this audiobook overall. Strayed’s mix of memoir through advice is fun. Strayed does the audio and I think hearing her voice gets across some of her intention in her responses to advice seekers. Like she calls her readers sweet pea and when you read it it can sound condescending, but the way she reads it it sounds more affectionate.

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Blue Lily, Lily Blue by Maggie Stiefvater (The Raven Cycle #3)

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  • Release Date: November 21st 2014
  • Pages: 400
  • Genre: Fantasy
  • Publisher: Scholastic Press

The dreaded third book in a series review. It can be hard to review books mid-series, so this one is going to be brief and spoiler free for the entire series.

Blue Lily, Lily Blue in a lot of ways is a test to see how closely you’ve been reading the other books. It pulls a lot from a deeply established mythology to keep the plot going which was hard for me because I hadn’t re-read the previous books. I kind of had to catch myself up on what was going on.

My favorite parts of this series, that I noticed more so in the book,  is the dialogue between characters. They just have this great back and forth that is super entertaining. The characters in this series are some of the most solid and well developed characters I’ve read in YA. They all have so much agency that it’s almost like you’re getting four story arcs with each book.

I have started to notice how flowery the writing can be at times, particularly when a scene is from Gansey’s perspective. When Stiefvater is writing from Adam’s POV it tends to be more straightforward and I wish she would stick with it more. Sometimes that kind of writing would take me out of the book.

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