Books and Sensibility

We're an Open Book

Book Reviews

Audiobook Review : Cress By Marrisa Meyer

     1 Comment

  • Release Date: February 4th, 2014
  • Genre: Sci-Fi/Adventure
  • Audiobook length: 15 hours 40 minutes
  • Publisher: Macmillan

Cress is the third book in Marrisa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles Series. In this book, we get introduced to Cress who briefly appears at the end of Cinder. Cress is a highly imaginative teenage girl who has spent most of her life in isolation aboard a satellite. When the chance comes for her to embark on a real adventure with the crew from the previous novels; her will, smarts and survival skills are put to the test….

Read this Post

Complicit by Stephanie Khuen

     1 Comment

 

  • Release Date: June 24th, 2014
  • Genre: Thriller
  • Pages: 256
  • Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin (Macmillan)

Kheun’s 2013 debut, Charm and Strange is in the top 5 books I read this year, and when I saw Khuen had a new book coming out this year I had to get my hands on it! …

Read this Post

Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith

     9 Comments

So, by the time I finished Grasshopper Jungle I was like:

Which I believe is the only correct response to this book. How do I know this? Because when I Google Image Searched for this meme I found it on Writer For Wrongs review of the same book.It also shows up in pretty much every review of this book.

 


…

Read this Post

Jennifer Govenrment by Max Barry

     Leave a Comment

When I finished reading Max Barry’s 2013 novelLexicon I went to Barry’s site to learn more about him. From what I can tell Barry seems to have a thing for writing and satirizing the culture of corporate America and marketing. I had mixed feelings about the female characters in Lexicon, so the synopsis and title to Jennifer Government caught my eye….

Read this Post

The Great Greene Heist by Varian Johnson

     2 Comments

 

Publication Date:

Pages: 240

Genre: Contemporary

Publisher: Arthur A. Levine (Scholastic)

 

The Great Greene Heist caught my attention during the #weneeddiversebooks campaign when John Green promised 10 signed copies of TFiOS to any bookstore who hand sold 100 copies of The Great Greene Heist. The synopsis felt Curseworker-ish (sans magic), which was enough for me to delve into reading my first Middle Grade as an adult.

13-year-old con artist Jackson Greene is cleaning up his act. After the Kelsey Job, or the Mid-Day PDA as his friends have dubbed his last con, Jackson is hanging up his cons for good. That is until he gets recruited by his best friend Charlie de la Cruz to rig the school election for his sister Gabby, the girl whose heart Jackson will do anything to fix.

The atmosphere in this novel felt very campy and sort of like a satire. I don’t know if this is a typical of middle grade or if it’s just this novel. The students exist in a school where they are never in class, principals easily accept bribes and all clubs have a budget that the school council president controls. As I read this I imagine it as more as a cartoon or Nickelodeon sitcom than real life.

…

Read this Post

The Golem and The Jinni by Helene Wecker

     4 Comments

  • Release Date: April 23 , 2013
  • Pages: 496
  • Genre: Historical Urban Fantasy
  • Publisher: Harper

Hey, did you read Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus?  Did you fall all over the magical aspects, charming side characters and nonlinear narrative? Well, I did and if you need something to fill that hole I highly suggest TheGolem and The Jinni. I grabbed this off my library’s Overdrive after seeing so many people reading it on vacation and it was just my kind of book.

Drenched in Kabbalah and Arabic folklore Wecker’s debut novel  is the unlikely story of two creatures believed to exist only folklore finding their way in the immigrant neighborhoods of 1890’s  New York. 

The  Golem is a newborn woman made of earth, who is quickly abandoned as soon as she is bought to  life. Hiding out in the Jewish populated Lower East Side, her only solace is trying to meet the wants of others without revealing herself first.

Once free to roam the deserts of Syria, the Jinni is now selfish, arrogant creature made of fire and smoke, who is bound to human flesh, and has inexplicably awoken in New York City’s  Little Syria.

…

Read this Post