Books and Sensibility

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Young Adult Fiction

Heartless by Marissa Meyer

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  • Release Date: 11/08/16
  • Audiobook Length :  14 Hours 34 Minutes
  • Genre: Fairytale
  • Publisher:Macmillan Audio / Feiwel & Friends

Katherine Pinkerton knows better than dream of owning her own bakery baker, she knows her destiny lies in becoming the queen of a wacky, quirky, surreal little Kingdom of Hearts. On the night she is to be betrothed she sets eyes on the handsome court joker, who has more than cards up his sleeves.

Unlike the Lunar Chronicles where the fairytale aspects are subtext and set in a modern world, Heartless is an overt-played-straight prequel to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Meyer digs into the Kingdom of Hearts and all its little oddities. It’s a place where animals talk, playing cards are courtier and if one bring something back from a dream. . . well then so be it. 

What we don’t really get to dig into in this novel is the plot. Plot points in the novel are hung like painting with no nails, there are a lot of them, you want to see them. . . but they have a tendency to fall off. One of the many plot in this book is about a forbidden romance that never really started for me. There is also a beta romance, a monster, intrigue,  war and magic. . . but we never get fully invested in any of it.

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The Sun is Also A Star by Nicola Yoon

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  • Release Date: November 1, 2016
  • Pages: 384
  • Genre: Contemporary
  • Publisher: Crown (Random House)

Tasha Kingston’s family is 24 hours away from being deported to Jamaica after her father drunkenly tells a police officer they’ve been in the country for over a decade on expired travel visas. Tasha isn’t ready to leave America, she has a fake social security number and was prepared to go to college and become a data scientist. She resolves to spend her last day doing everything she can to find a way to delay the deportation. What she doesn’t plan on is meeting Daniel Bae, the idealistic aspiring poet  who believes their meeting was an act of faith. Tasha is pragmatic and doesn’t believe in fate or soul mates but as they spend the day together Daniel starts to change her mind and get inside her heart. But what does any of it mean when in 24 hours she won’t be allowed back in the United States ?

Honestly, I was kind of lukewarm on the romance, I just have a hard time investing in romances in such a condensed timeline. To me the most interesting thing about this book is how the story is structured. Not only do we get Daniel and Tasha’s POVs we also get these mini sections called “brief histories” that give you a minor characters past and future or give you a history on a certain subject. I liked the way these sections broadened the 24 hour timeline a little bit.

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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 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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