Books and Sensibility

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Audiobook Review: Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard

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 So, you know how people think most fantasy/dystopian  YA is just a  thinly veiled allegory for high school ?  Well the Red Queen on it’s surface is pretty much that.

We’ve got Mare Barrow another brunette YA heroine who hates her hair and wishes she was more like her sister Gisa who is pretty, talented and basically put up on a pedestal.

In Mare’s world what separates the oppressed Reds from the elite  Silvers. . . is their blood. The Silver’s blood silver blood gives them abilities like controlling elements, strength and mind control.

Mare soon discovers that even though she is Red, she has abilities like a Silver. A threat to the Silver way of life, The Silvers  whisk her away to live among them until they can figure out what she is.

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Audiobook Review: An Ember in The Ashes by Sabaa Tahir

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The popularity of this book seemed to come out of nowhere. I just remember seeing it on an endcap one day in Barnes and Nobles and the next things I knew is was blowing up.

Ember in the Ashes takes place in The Empire,  a vaguely middle ages fictional land with some vaguely Arabic influences. Elias (who by the way is 20 years old….which feels oddly old for YA) is a student at Blackcliff, a ruthless academy that trains Masks, the Empire’s deadliest soldiers. Laia is a Scholar, the conquered class, who  goes undercover as a slave at Blackcliff for the Resistance to help her brother.

I don’t really have much to say about this book, which is weird since the audiobook is over 15 hours long. It wasn’t bad, it just didn’t click with me. I finished this book and I wasn’t amped for the next one. Thinking about the only other YA fantasies I’ve read; Daughter of Smoke and Bone and The Young Elites, I think what this book is missing is characters with skin in the game. Elias and Laia are just kind of going with the flow all the time.

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My Mixed Feelings About Harry Potter #8: Gif Reaction Post

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So this happened 

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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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Listen Up : Podcast Party (Part III)

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This is our third post on bookish podcasts  Here’s another fresh batch of insightful and fun bookish podcasts we’ve been listening to lately.

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Fresh Off The Boat by Eddie Huang

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  • Release Date: January 29, 2013
  • Audiobook Hours: 7 hours and 55 minutes
  • Genre: Memoir
  • Publisher: Speigel & Grau (Random House)

I really wanted to start this review by saying something like ‘move over Anthony Bourdain, there’s a new bad boy chef on the market, but that doesn’t really fit what Huang is trying to do with this book. While Huang’s claim to fame is his restaurant, Baohaus, this book isn’t really a food memoir. It’s about Huang’s fraught relationship with his Asian identity while growing up around what he calls American Whiteness.

As he recounts growing up in suburban Orlando Huang dismantles the idea of the model minority. Fear of assimilation is a point of tension for him. There is a long history of America being the worst to Asian immigrants and then erasing them from history. His story is a story we don’t hear and I think Huang put together a biting and honest memoir that was also entertaining.

Most people are probably familiar with the ABC show based on this book and while I enjoy the show Iknew Huang publicly expresseda lot of dislike for it and after reading his memoir I get it. ABC bowdlerized the crap out of his story, but kept his family’s names are all over it. I think when Huang sold the rights for a show he wanted something like Aziz Ansaris’s show Master of None where they tackle issues of racism with more dark humor and edge that doesn’t care about offending the audience.

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