We're an Open Book
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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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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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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- Release Date: January 1, 2011
- Pages: 352
- Publisher: Quirk Books
- Genre: Paranormal Historical
Jacob has always felt that his life was just ordinary, especially compared to the stories he heard from his grandfather about the halcyon days and Peculiar children during World War II. But these strange stories are just stories though, right? After the traumatic death of his Grandfather, Jacob begins to see things– things that can’t possibly be real. Soon, Jacob finds himself traveling to the small island of Carinholm, Wales, the place of his Grandfather’s stories, where he discovers the past and present may not be that far apart at all….
- Release Date: September 30th 2014
- Pages: 352
- Genre: Science Fiction
- Publisher: Arthur A. Levine Books (Scholastic)
A few months ago I read Alaya Dawn Johnson’s The Summer Prince as my starting point to support the We Need Diverse Books campaign and to start including more diverse books in our blog. The Summer Prince started out kind of rocky for me but morphed into an intricate, creative poignant dystopian tale. When I saw Johnson’s next book on NetGalley I jumped at the chance to review it.
In the political, power-hungry world of Washington D.C. Our main character 18-year-old Emily Bird occupies a curious space as a black upper-class teen in D.C. society. Bird grits her teeth and bares it as her mother, who raised herself up from the lower-income Northeast DC neighborhood, pushes Bird to join the Ivy league crowd whether she wants to or not. But when Emily loses hours of memories right before a pandemic flu turns D.C into a quarantine zone, she becomes a girl of her own making. With the help of Coffee, the son of a Brazilian diplomat and new friends, they will uncover her memories and who is trying to keep her from remembering….
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(Get it ? Cause her name is America…)
This book seems to be lurking around every corner since we started Book and Sensibility three years ago. I finally grabbed the ebook and when I put it in the running for book club selection, it ultimately got…selected. I couldn’t really get a sense of the story from the first book, so I went to the second and figured what the heck since I’ve been taking a lot of 30-minute bus rides lately. I may as well finish it. …