Books and Sensibility

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4 stars

The Dream Theives by Maggie Stiefvater

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  • Release Date: September 17th 2013
  • Pages: 448 Pages
  • Genre: Gothic/Magic Realism/Supernatural/ Paranormal ???
  • Publisher: Scholastic

Synopsis: Now that the ley lines around Cabeswater have been woken, nothing for Ronan, Gansey, Blue, and Adam will be the same. Ronan, for one, is falling more and more deeply into his dreams, and his dreams are intruding more and more into waking life. Meanwhile, some very sinister people are looking for some of the same pieces of the Cabeswater puzzle that Gansey is after...

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The Beginning of Everything (Severed Heads, Broken Hearts in the UK) by Robyn Schneider

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  • Publisher : Katherine Tegen Books
  • Release Date : August 27th 2013
  • Pages : 352

Synopsis: Golden boy Ezra Faulkner believes everyone has a tragedy waiting for them—a single encounter after which everything that really matters will happen. His particular tragedy waited until he was primed to lose it all: in one spectacular night, a reckless driver shatters Ezra’s knee, his athletic career, and his social life.No longer a front-runner for Homecoming King, Ezra finds himself at the table of misfits, where he encounters new girl Cassidy Thorpe. Cassidy is unlike anyone Ezra’s ever met, achingly effortless, fiercely intelligent, and determined to bring Ezra along on her endless adventures.

The Beginning of Everything tells the story of Ezra Faulkner, the popular high school tennis star with the perfect senior year in front of him. But it all falls to pieces in a moment when Ezra is hit by a car and left walking with a cane. Now, his girlfriend has left him, he doesn’t know how to relate to his friends and has resigned to spending his senior year alone. Then he is taken in by his neighbor, Toby, and along with a few quirky debate team members  Ezra grows in ways he never expected….

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Adaptation by Malinda Lo

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  • Publication Date: September 18th 2012
  • Genre: Science Ficton
  • Pages: 386 (hardcover)
  • Publisher: Little Brown For Young Readers

Synopsis: Across North America, flocks of birds hurl themselves into airplanes, causing at least a dozen to crash. Thousands of people die. Fearing terrorism, the United States government grounds all flights, and millions of travelers are stranded.
Among them are Reese and her debate team partner and longtime crush David, who are in Arizona when the disaster occurs. On their drive home to San Francisco, along a stretch of empty highway in the middle of the Nevada night, a bird flies into their headlights. The car flips over. When they wake up in a military hospital, the doctor won’t tell them what happened, where they are–or how they’ve been miraculously healed.
Things become even stranger when Reese returns home. San Francisco feels like a different place with police enforcing curfew, hazmat teams collecting dead birds, and a strange presence that seems to be following her. When Reese unexpectedly collides with the beautiful Amber Gray, her search for the truth is forced in an entirely new direction-and threatens to expose a vast global conspiracy that the government has worked for decades to keep secret.

Sitting in a Phoenix airport, Reese Holloway’s biggest problem is the humiliation of losing a national debate competition and letting down her partner and crush, David Li. And then things start falling out the sky. …

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Days of David Levithan : Boy Meets Boy

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What is Days of David Levithan ?

 

  • Release Date: Sept. 8th 2003
  • Publisher: Knopf 
  • Genre: Contemporary
  • Pages: 185

It’s pretty fitting to start my reading David Levithan with his debut novel Boy Meets Boy. In fact, Boy Meets Boy just released its 10 year anniversary edition which has an excellent Q&A with Levithan in the back and I’ll be referring to a bit.

As I was reading this Q&A I began to think about how this novel is pretty significant to the “YA canon”, if there is one. In a lot of interviews about this book  Levithan talks about how in 2004 there weren’t many books featuring queer teens, and if there were they usually leaned on the Bury Your Gay and the Gayngst tropes–that is a gay teen usually ended up dead or in another equally angsty situation at the end of the day. That’s not to say the intolerance doesn’t exist in the novel, but what Levithan  does is offer a new narrative, a story of hope for those gay  teens who never see positive stories about themselves.

Boy Meets Boy is exactly what it says on the cover. It’s about what happens when boy meets boy, but the plot is about if  boy can keep boy. At the National Book Festival Levithan called this a “dippy happy love story” and I think that is the perfect description.

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Audiobook Review : Burn For Burn by Jenny Han and Siobhan Vivian

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  • Publisher : Simon & Schuster
  • Audio Book Length : 7 hours 1 min
  • Release Date : September 18th 2012

 Synopsis : Postcard-perfect Jar Island is home to charming tourist shops, pristine beaches, amazing oceanfront homes—and three girls secretly plotting revenge. KAT is sick and tired of being bullied by her former best friend. LILLIA has always looked out for her little sister, so when she discovers that one of her guy friends has been secretly hooking up with her, she’s going to put a stop to it.MARY is perpetually haunted by a traumatic event from years past, and the boy who’s responsible has yet to get what’s coming to him.None of the girls can act on their revenge fantasies alone without being suspected. But together…anything is possible.With an unlikely alliance in place, there will be no more “I wish I’d said…” or “If I could go back and do things differently…” These girls will show Jar Island that revenge is a dish best enjoyed together

The Gist : On the small New England island of Jar Island, secrets, drama and betrayal are running rampant and at its center are three girls; Kat, Lillia and Mary. These unlikely friends are out for revenge, but what starts out as a way to get even soon becomes more than they can handle. All is not what it seems on Jar Island.

Jess’ Takeaway

“Well that took a turn.” is the one way I would describe this book, and I don’t just mean the plot twists. Nothing is ever what it seems in this book. Han and Vivian ever so slightly take tropes associated with high school  and turning them around.

What really makes this book stand out for me is that this story isn’t overtly focused on a romance. Finally a YA novel where the girls characters work together and take center stage over a typical boy meets girl romance.

As for the writing there wasn’t a large attempt at trying to “sound like teenagers”, instead it felt  nostalgic. They captured the everyday down and lows of being a teenager (picking prom dresses, winning high school football games, the over dramatics of being in a teen etc.)

What makes this novel a must read is  pitch perfect setting of Jar Island The mix of local color and lifestyle of the residents down to the local coffee shops and tourism made it seem so real. I literally Googled Jar Island just to see if it was a real place. (BTW it’s not). I’m not a big contemporary (or is this comtep . . . ?)  reader but this book was exciting and devious. I couldn’t wait to see what kind of trouble these girls were going to cause next.

Unfortunately the audiobook was kind of hit or miss. I loved how they used 3 different voices over but the recording sounded off. Mary’s voice actor’s recording sounded faraway and Kat’s voice took a little getting used to.

Kat’s Takeaway

Reminiscent of Pretty Little Liars and Mean Girls,  Burn for Burn is what happens when girls stop playing victim and start getting even. This is a different type of story.  As someone who reads a lot of contemporary and for me Burn for Burn was just okay. So much of the book was fueled on getting to the end, that there was no real sense of complete story. Like certain plot points were brought up, but never really resolved or discussed through the book.

I liked listening to this in audiobook form, and unlike Jess I actually like the narrator of Kat the best. I thought from the very beginning her voice had the perfect mix of attitude and snark with a dash of vulnerability

 All three narrators also did a great job of mimicking the other narrator’s voices. One of my pet peeves is when a characters tone is so vastly different when a different narrator is speaking as them, so I think they handled this well. I’m  not sure why the audiobook sounded so strange at times, like Mary’s narrator was far away or something, but now I’m beginning to think this was on purpose.

Overall, I thought the writing was good and Han and Vivian created a great sense of place in their writing. You can really feel the claustrophobia of having to live on a small island town and the kind of social issues it creates.

Audible|  Barnes and Nobles |Amazon

Book Review : Ink by Amanda Sun

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“When the ink stopped being ink and started being. . . well, something else.”

– Ink, Amanda Sun

 

  • Release Date : June 25th 2013
  • Genre : Urban Fanstasy
  • Page Number : 377
  • Publisher : Harlequin Teen

. . . And then the girl in the drawing turned her head, and her inky eyes glared straight into mine. 
 Stuck with her aunt in Shizuoka, Japan, Katie feels lost. Alone. She doesn’t know the language, she can barely hold a pair of chopsticks, and she can’t seem to get the hang of taking her shoes off whenever she enters a building.
Then there’s gorgeous but aloof Tomohiro, star of the school’s kendo team. How did he really get the scar on his arm? Katie isn’t prepared for the answer. But when she sees the things he draws start moving, there’s no denying the truth: Tomo has a connection to the ancient gods of Japan, and being near Katie is causing his abilities to spiral out of control. . .Katie never wanted to move to Japan—now she may not make it out of the country alive

At first glance Ink is your basic YA formula; teen girl in a new environment and a chance encounter finds her inexplicably drawn to the jerk whose personality changes could give you whiplash.

However, Sun freshens up the usual YA status quo by setting the story in Japan, giving the story a nice bout of culture and diversity. The setting gives readers a glimpse into how other people live without being “showcase-y” about it. There isn’t an attempt to spoon-feed the reader, meaning Sun doesn’t attempt to explain every nuance about Japanese life to the readers.

The first chapter of this novel will without a doubt pull you in. American Katie Green is an outsider living in Shizuoka, Japan with her aunt after the death of her mother. All she has to do is keep her head down until she can move in with her grandparents in Canada. 

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