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4 stars

Audiobook Review: The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness

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  • Release Date: October 6th 2015
  • Length: 6 hours and 23 minutes
  • Genre: Contemporary / Paranormal YA
  • Publisher: HarperTeen

17-year-old Mikey Mitchell just wants to enjoy his last few months of high school with his best friends and hopefully getting his OCD under control.  But he’s also kind of stuck in the middle of your favorite paranormal YA novel, except you know. . . he’s a background character.  Strange blue lights and mysterious deaths  means the indie kids–those high school kids with the capital D destinies and weird names–are up to something. Mikey just hopes the indie kids don’t  blown up up the high school….again.

Patrick Ness is a mix bag of an author, you just never know what you’re going to get. The concept of having a Mikey’s contemporary narrative  adjacent to the indie kid’s paranormal adventure made for an entertaining listen.  The indie kid’s plot is a parody of e those paranormal YA books of the early 2010’s and Ness creates a loving satire of the genre.

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Magonia by Maria Dahvana Headley

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Release Date: April 28th 2015

Pages: 309

Genre: Fantasy

Publisher: HarperCollins

When Aza Ray Boyle dies in the middle of an unusual storm; one life ends and another begins. Because her true destiny lies with the captain of a ship that sails the sky, but not everyone on Earth is ready to let Aza go.

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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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Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

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I don’t usually read buzzy commercially successful  authors–but when I do I read them at least 2-5 years after the buzz has died down and nobody cares. I’m looking at you Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Fifty Shades of Grey and Girl on The Train. I’ll get to you. . . eventually.

Instead of picking up  Gone Girl (Which I have NOT read. No spoilers) I picked up Sharp Objects cause it was on a nifty library display.

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Game by Barry Lyga

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  • Release Date: April 6, 2013
  • Genre: Contemporary
  • Audiobook Hours: 13 hours 28 minutes
  • Publisher: Hachette Audio

From the opening lines–which describe a serial killer’s thoughts as he disembowels his recent victim –this book hit my squick button. Hard. I  can do gritty, but Game had more body mutilation and necrophilia than I like in my….everything. I was prepared to return this audiobook to the library but I was driving so I kept listening. I’m glad I did because once I got past the prologue, I was dipped right back into a story that was like watching my favorite procedural crime shows. From its twisty mystery, acerbic humor and constant supply of WTF-ery….

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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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