Books and Sensibility

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YA Paranormal

The Cost of All Things by Maggie Lehrman

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Release Date: May 12, 2015

Pages: 407

Genre: Magical Realism/ Contemporary

Publisher: Balzer + Bray (Harper Collins)

The Cost Of All Things exists in a world pretty much like our own except spells are real and can be created by women known as hekamists. When a group of high school students in Cape Code start buying spells to  cope with their insecurities…it doesn’t go well. I went into this book excited because it had blurbs from so many award winning YA authors and the premise sounded so fascinating. But overall this book didn’t work for me.

 The magic system never felt fully developed and it’s existence within the world didn’t feel real . One thing that bothered me is that being a hekamist is illegal, but there doesn’t seem to be any illegality with buying a spell–which feels like the opposite of what should be happen.There were also very little stakes, the book sets up the death of one character , Win, as being a main plot point but he has a POV, so it takes some of the mystery out. I think what kept me reading was that I thought there would be a twist ending but there really wasn’t.

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YA Mini Reviews

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The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater ( Audiobook)

When Kat’s review mentioned that this book throws away all of pretense of being anything but fantasy, I braced myself going in because I like the contemporary aspects of this series.  While I was at BEA I talked to a lot of people about my experience listening to this and my verdict was . . . this book got so weird.. . good weird but weird. All the characters you expect and some new ones that will have you changing everything you thought you knew. Patton’s performance was on par, but I can’t unhear some of his cringe worthy singing. Stiefvater is the queen of quirky characters, mysterious settings and bracing readers for the unknown.  ★★★★ 

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Audiobook Review: Glory O’ Brien’s History of The Future by A.S. King

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  • Release Date: October 14th 2014
  • Genre: Magic Realism
  • Audiobook Hours: 7 hours and 15 minutes
  • Publisher: Blackstone Audio

I picked this up from my library’s Overdrive because A.S. King is pretty much an auto-buy for me. Plus Jenn and Preeti at The Bookrageous Podcast gushed about this book in their interview with King.

King’s books tend to be near impossible to describe, so I’ll just give the premise that is in the prologue of the book. After drinking a petrified bat (stick with me here) Glory O’Brien is able to see  people’s infinities–the lives of their ancestors and their descendants. As she starts putting the pieces of these visions together she realizes  the near future isn’t looking so great…especially for women.

King strikes a great balance between the surreal and the real. I like how she gives her characters conflicts with small personal stakes and giant stakes. In this book there is Glory’s fear of committing suicide like her mother and uncertainty about her post high school life paired with visions of a coming war.

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Sisters of Blood and Spirit by Kady Cross

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  • Release Date:March 31st 2015  
  • Pages:288
  • Genre:Paranormal YA
  • Publisher:Harlequin Teen

I picked this book up at the Harlequin Teen signing at BEA and knew nothing about .I knew Cross vaugeley from steampunk series that starts with The Girl in the Steel Corset, but I’d never heard of this series. I think I chose this as my first post-BEA books because this is the first time in a long time I’ve read something with no information about it. It felt like the old days when every book I read was a new discovery.

Sister of Blood and Spiritis a paranormal YA with a bit of a horror twist.Twin sisters Wren and Lark (wink, wink) are near identical with two key differences; 1. Wren’s hair is a bright red and Lark’s is white and 2. Wren was born a ghost and only Lark can see her.

Yeah, this cover is very on the nose.

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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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Book Review: Everyday by David Levithan

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I can view everyone as pieces of a whole, and focus on the whole, not the pieces. I have learned to observe, far better than most people observe. I am not blinded by the past or motivated by the future. I focus on the present because that is where I am destined to live.” 

― David Levithan, Every Day

 

  • Release Date: August 28th 2012
  • Pages: 233
  • Genre: Paranormal Romance ?
  • Publisher: Knopf (Random House)

This novel is fairly different from the previous Levithan novels I’ve read so far. It’s very high concept and cerebral. The story follows A, a who wakes up every day in someone else’s body. A lives their life for one day before falling asleep and waking up in a new body the next day.  A is essentially a soul without a body, A has sentient thoughts and memories,  A has no gender or form. 

When I first heard about this book, I thought it would essentially read like a series of short stories, but there is a continuing plot. When A meets a girl named Rhiannon while in the body of her boyfriend, Justin A falls in love with her. Now, A is will do anything to get back to her and find a way for them to be together…

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