Review: Rule by Ellen Goodlett

Rule (Rule #1)
By Ellen Goodlett
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Format: eARC
Source: NetGalley

To Sum It Up: Zofi, Akeylah, and Florencia are strangers to each other until King Andros of Kolonya summons them all to court. Upon their arrival, they learn that the ailing king is their father, and they are all potential heirs to his throne. Each sister, however, carries an explosive secret that, if discovered, could result in execution. When the girls start receiving threatening messages, it seems that someone already knows what they’re hiding, and the sisters must band together to find their blackmailer.

Review: It’s been a while since a fantasy blew me away, and unfortunately, Rule left me less than awed. The premise sounds promising: three young women who would otherwise continue leading disparate lives suddenly discover that they’re daughters of the ailing king. Only one of them can inherit his crown, and each sister is hiding a secret that could get her executed. Zofi, Akeylah, and Florencia are all naturally wary of each other since only one of them can rule Kolonya, but the sisters may have no choice but to work together after all three begin receiving messages threatening to expose their secrets.

My biggest issue with the book was how thinly sketched everything was: the plot, the characters, and especially the world building. War figures heavily in Kolonya’s past and present, but the details are sparse and delivered through telling instead of showing. Despite a magic system based on tithing one’s blood to temporarily gain enhanced abilities, there isn’t much of a fantasy feel here. The story focuses more on the girls’ efforts to stop their blackmailer amidst a treacherous court where no one can be trusted.

The book is also repetitive, as we’re constantly reminded that the girls must do whatever it takes to keep their secrets safe, even from each other. A plot point that could have used some hashing out instead of belaboring the secrets thing was the big reveal of the sisters’ paternity. All three accept the news that their father is the king with relative ease. The girls then move swiftly on to resuming their worries over what they’re hiding.

As much as I’d hoped that Rule would be an engrossing fantasy read, it spent too much time on its non-fantasy plot as well as went down the YA trope road with some insta-love and a potential love triangle. I considered DNF-ing this, but there was something about the pacing that still made Rule compulsive to read. As much as I’d also hoped that there would be some resolution to the girls’ blackmail situation, alas the book ended on a giant cliffhanger which I’m not invested enough in to see the outcome of in a sequel.

All in All: Rule has some really good pacing, which spurred me on to read what otherwise would have been a DNF. The other aspects of the book, however, are not as strong. The plot is all about the sisters keeping their misdeeds hidden in a world that isn’t fully fleshed out.

Review: Reign of the Fallen by Sarah Glenn Marsh

Reign of the Fallen (Reign of the Fallen #1)
By Sarah Glenn Marsh
Publisher: Razorbill
Format: Print ARC
Source: YALLFest

To Sum It Up: In the kingdom of Karthia, the ruling nobles have maintained their positions with the help of necromancers who raise them from the dead. The Dead must, however, remain covered by a shroud or else risk becoming lethal monsters known as Shades. Necromancer Odessa’s dedication to her job has been unwavering, until a tragedy shatters her world, and grief envelops her. Meanwhile, Shade attacks are on the rise, and Karthia needs its most skilled necromancer to stop them.

Review: As much as I try not to make any assumptions about a book based on the cover alone, sometimes it’s really hard, especially when a cover is particularly eye-catching. When I first spotted Reign of the Fallen at YALLFest, its cover totally called to me, and after reading the blurb—necromancers, undead creatures called Shades, a kingdom in peril—this book sounded exactly like my thing. Unfortunately, it ended up falling way short of my expectations.

This is one of those cases where I should have DNFed but got too far into the book to put it aside. I was also reluctant to DNF this because I had just DNFed another book. I wasn’t too many pages into Reign of the Fallen when I started feeling iffy about it because the book repeatedly mentioned how special the main character, Odessa, was. Odessa’s awesomeness quickly became tiresome.

Reign of the Fallen employs a lot of telling vs. showing, and this affects so many aspects of the book, from the world-building to the character development. The world is never really fleshed out, and I couldn’t buy into it. The King of Karthia and his fellow royals have ruled for two hundred years because necromancers have raised them from the dead. Those who have been brought back must, however, remain completely covered by a shroud because if any part of them is seen by a living person, the dead individual turns into a zombie-like Shade. There’s no explanation for why this happens; it just does. The book also doesn’t go into any detail about the necromancers’ magic. For a fantasy read, Reign of the Fallen glosses over its fantasy elements.

All of the telling also undermines the emotional punch the novel tries to deliver. Odessa suffers a terrible loss early on, but the depth of her relationship with that character isn’t conveyed effectively. This in turn lessens the emotional impact of a chunk of the book, which follows Odessa’s grief-driven spiral into an addiction to calming potion. Both the book’s title and synopsis focus on the plotline involving an alarming increase in Shade attacks, but it takes a long time for that part of the novel to move to the forefront. Even when the story shifts to the threat posed by the Shades, there’s zero mystery as to who’s behind it. I’d hoped for some kind of twist because the clues were so obvious, but alas, there was none.

In the end, Reign of the Fallen was not at all the book I’d thought it would be. It barely explored any fantasy, which was disappointing because the premise had so much potential. Instead the story veered down a different path, which would have been fine if the book had dug deeper into the weighty subject matter as opposed to just describing it through telling. I’d hoped to like this as much as Garth Nix’s Sabriel, another fantasy with necromancy in it, but sadly, it wasn’t meant to be.

All in All: I should have listened to the part of my brain that said this book was not going to work out and given up after the first few chapters didn’t wow me.

Review: Blood Rose Rebellion by Rosalyn Eves

Blood Rose Rebellion (Blood Rose Rebellion #1)
By Rosalyn Eves
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers
Format: Print ARC
Source: Publisher

To Sum It Up: Anna Arden’s family belongs to the elite Luminate—those who can wield magic. Anna, however, is Barren and unable to use magic, but she seems to possess the ability to break spells. After unintentionally wreaking havoc at her sister’s debut into Luminate society, Anna is sent to her grandmother’s native Hungary. Even there, though, the Luminate’s ruling Circle tracks her because her ability could possibly break even the Binding, the spell that keeps magic in Luminate hands alone.

Review: I’ve been in the reading slump from hell since the beginning of the year, and I really, really, really hoped that Blood Rose Rebellion would prove to be the slump-breaker. Alas, it was not.

I started feeling iffy about this book very early on, and I should’ve just listened to my intuition and called it a DNF. I hate not giving books a fair chance, though, and by the time I realize that a book isn’t for me, I’ve already invested so much time in it that I might as well just finish it. That’s what happened here.

I had some rather big issues with the book’s protagonist, Anna. The novel quickly makes it clear that she’s yet another special heroine. Anna’s family belongs to the elite Luminate class, those who have access to magic. Despite her family’s lineage, Anna is Barren, unable to wield magic. She does, however, exhibit an ability to break spells, and jealousy drives her to inadvertently break her older sister Catherine’s spell demonstration during Catherine’s grand entrée into Luminate society. Anna losing it just because Catherine’s spell reveals they were crushing on the same guy, Freddy, irked me quite a bit, especially since Freddy, who doesn’t even have a large role in the book, proves to deserve neither girl’s heart in his limited page time. Anna then proceeds to continue mentioning Freddy every once in a while when he should have been long forgotten.

Anna also assesses every guy she meets as a potential love interest, including her distant cousin. Even when she finally settles her attention on one of them, it still feels insta-love-y. The romance here was a complete no-go for me. I also found Anna condescending, as well as self-pitying over her lack of magic. Although she sheds some of her superior attitude by the book’s end, it’s not gradual enough to really illustrate any character growth.

In addition to never clicking with Anna, the novel’s pacing made this a long, slow read. After the disastrous debut, Anna is shipped off from England to her grandmother’s native Hungary, where rebellion is stirring. Emphasis on the stirring, because nothing actually materializes for quite some time. The rebellion aspect is one of the book’s highlights; the revolutionaries are fighting for an independent Hungary and to break the Binding, the spell keeping magic in the hands of the upper class Luminate. It’s an interesting mix of history, politics, and fantasy, but it takes some time for the revolution to ignite. In the meantime, Anna waffles over whether or not to use her power to break the Binding, which for me was not compelling reading.

It’s almost always impossible for me to read past a main character I don’t connect with at all, and unfortunately, Anna’s character and narration just didn’t work for me. The magic and the way it was tied to the social order had potential, but the majority of the book focused on Anna’s ultra special special-ness and a romance that was pretty standard YA fare.

All in All: The mid-19th century Hungary setting and the magic are the two highlights here, but everything else, including the protagonist and the insta-love, overshadowed them.

Review: Seven Days of You by Cecilia Vinesse

Seven Days of You
By Cecilia Vinesse
Publisher: Poppy
Format: eARC
Source: NetGalley

To Sum It Up: In seven days, Sophia is set to return to the United States, leaving the life she’s led for the past four years in Tokyo behind. Before going, however, Sophia must first face the return of Jamie Foster-Collins, a former member of her group of friends. Sophia still isn’t over the hurt he caused her before being sent to an American boarding school three years ago, but the more time she spends with him, the more she realizes that he’s not the same Jamie she remembers. With the days ticking away until Sophia’s departure, saying goodbye becomes increasingly difficult.

Review: Seven Days of You caught my attention because of comparisons to Stephanie Perkins’s Anna and the French Kiss, which was a lovely surprise way back when I read it about four or five years ago. The latter’s sweet romance made me, a reluctant reader of YA contemporary, more willing to try other books like it. And so I gave Seven Days of You a shot, but unfortunately, it did not work out for me.

I had a really tough time trying to find protagonist Sophia and her friends Mika and David likeable. For friends, they turn on each other quite easily, and there’s a lot of drama between them. David is acknowledged to be an arse, and yet everyone continues to hang out with him and Sophia continues to crush on him. The only OK character for me was Jamie, who was part of the group before his parents sent him to a boarding school back in the United States and whose return to Tokyo at the beginning of the novel sends Sophia into a tizzy. She’s still not over an incident that happened right before he left three years ago, and while I could understand why she was upset with him initially, I didn’t feel the situation warranted the amount of time she spent stewing over it. I actually expected the misdeed to be much worse considering how much Sophia went on about it. On top of that, I couldn’t help thinking that there was some truth in what Jamie had said to set Sophia off.

Sophia was not an easy character for me to scrape together much sympathy for. She’s very woe-is-me, and I’m sorry, but I can’t exactly pity someone who’s lived not once but twice in Japan and has been to Paris. I also found her condescending and judgy; I especially took issue with her rather looking down on Jamie’s geekish tendencies. Sophia totally lost me here because there is nothing wrong with reading Harry Potter twenty times. Not now. Not ever.

While other readers might find the conclusion to Sophia’s character arc satisfying, her character development throughout the novel was too choppy to convince me that she had matured significantly by the end. If Seven Days of You hadn’t been a quick, short read, I’m not sure I would’ve stuck it out until the last page. I just wasn’t into the frequent melodrama between Sophia and her friends, and for me, it overshadowed everything else about the book.

All in All: Sadly, this did not measure up to the delightful Anna and the French Kiss for me, but don’t let me discourage anyone from seeing for themselves how the two books compare.

Review: An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir

An Ember in the Ashes (An Ember in the Ashes #1)
By Sabaa Tahir
Publisher: Razorbill
Format: Hardcover
Source: Library

To Sum It Up: Laia and her family are Scholars, a class brutally oppressed by the ruling Empire. When Laia’s brother is accused of being a rebel and imprisoned, Laia undertakes a dangerous mission to free him. The Resistance movement tentatively agrees to help her, but only if she infiltrates the walls of the infamous Blackcliff Military Academy, which trains the Empire’s future soldiers. Top student Elias Veturius is on the verge of graduating—with his loyalty to the Empire in question. But fate has other plans for Elias, and his service to the Empire may have only just begun.

Review: An Ember in the Ashes was one of the most hyped books of 2015, and for that reason alone, it secured a spot on my TBR. I’d also seen it compared quite a few times to A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones, so I absolutely needed to check it out. I came this close to buying a copy; I actually held the book in my hands at Barnes & Noble but put it back in the end because it just wasn’t in the budget. Well, I’m glad that I opted to borrow this from the library instead because hardly anything about the novel, including the characters, the pacing, the world-building, and the romance, worked for me. Now, this book has received A LOT of love from other readers; I'm sorry to say that I'm not among them.

The comparisons to Game of Thrones led me to expect an epic fantasy here, but the fantasy elements were minimal, in my opinion. Jinn, efrits, and wraiths were occasionally thrown in, but the brutal, oppressive rule of the Empire gave An Ember in the Ashes a very dystopian feel. It reminded me more of Divergent, The Hunger Games, Legend, and Red Rising, the latter especially. As with Red Rising, I considered quitting An Ember in the Ashes after about 100 pages, but I’d already invested so much time in the book that I figured I might as well just tough it out till the end.

I had no problem whatsoever with this turning out to be more of a dystopia than fantasy, but the world-building was just lacking, regardless of the genre. Other than the abundantly clear picture of the Empire’s totalitarianism, this world didn’t make much sense to me. Blackcliff Military Academy, the elite school that churns out the Empire’s finest soldiers, is all-male except for one female student because that’s the policy. A new Emperor must be chosen through a contest to the death because a bunch of seers called Augurs say so. I needed further explanations for a lot of things, but I just didn’t get them.

Alternating POVs from the two main characters, Laia and Elias, are employed in the novel, but there’s little distinction between their narrative voices. Neither was an especially compelling protagonist, although if I had to pick between them, I’d go with Elias, whose arc had slightly better pacing. Laia’s storyline dragged, and I had issues with her character from the start. When Empire troops turn up at the home she shares with her grandparents and brother, Darin, to arrest Darin for rebellious activities, Laia has to choose between helping him and running. Darin tells her to run, and she does, and then she spends the next 400 pages regretting the decision. Okay, Darin did urge his sister to flee, but the way that the scene unfolded didn’t effectively convey the urgency of fight-or-flight to me. I think what gnawed at me was how Laia kept going on and on and on about how much she loved Darin and how she would do anything to bust him out of prison, but she didn’t make a stand when an opportunity literally stood right in front of her.

I also couldn’t suspend enough disbelief over how quickly and easily Laia ran into the rebel group that she hoped would help rescue Darin, the group that her parents used to lead. Laia approaches the Resistance with a rather large sense of entitlement because 1) rebels ratted Darin out to the Empire, so the Resistance now owes her, and 2) her parents were the greatest Resistance leaders ever, without question. But Laia is not quite so cut out for the family business of undermining the Empire, and she gets in way, way over her head when she agrees to spy on Blackcliff’s Commandant in return for the Resistance freeing Darin. Laia’s naïveté, coupled with some poor decision making, made her chapters really tough for me to get through.

I fared a little better with Elias’s POV, primarily because he winds up entangled in a Hunger Games-esque contest that will determine which Blackcliff student becomes the next Emperor. Even with the trope, at least the scenes with the Trials move at a solid pace, unlike the majority of the book. Both Elias and Laia are very, very chatty with their internal thoughts, which adds up to a lot of telling over showing.

The novel’s romance frustrated me most of all. Laia insta-falls for Keenan, a member of the Resistance. Elias sort of has feelings for his best friend, Helene, Blackcliff’s sole female student. But whenever Laia and Elias clap eyes on each other, it’s like, Keenan and Helene who? Put Laia and Elias back with their original love interests, though, and they return to their original feelings for them. Meanwhile, there’s barely any chemistry between any of these characters! I could somewhat buy into Elias and Helene’s friendship; I even thought that Helene might have made a more interesting female protagonist than Laia. As for the other pairings, there was zero build-up to the intense emotions that everyone suddenly felt for each other.

I really, really wanted to love An Ember in the Ashes like just about everyone in the universe did, but sadly, we were not compatible with each other at all. But, just as there’s another book out there that’s perfect for me, this book may perfectly suit another reader.

All in All: Fans of Red Rising may want to check this out. Unfortunately, An Ember in the Ashes came up short for me as both a fantasy and a dystopia, and I’m okay with not knowing what happens in the rest of the series.

ARC Review: The Young World by Chris Weitz

The Young World (The Young World Trilogy #1)
By Chris Weitz
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Format: Print ARC
Source: Goodreads Giveaway
Publication Date: July 29, 2014

To Sum It Up: New York City is a ghost of its former self after an outbreak of a devastating illness wipes out the population of adults and children. Many of the remaining teenagers have joined one of the tribes that now rule the city and battle for scarce resources. These kids have resigned themselves to a very short life expectancy, but there may be a sliver of hope for them yet if one group can somehow escape the city alive and discover a cure.

Review: I will always be a complete, total, and utter sucker for books set in New York City. Of course, it’s a bonus when I end up enjoying the book, but I’m sorry to say that this was not the case with The Young World. In fact, the setting was the novel’s highlight.

The concept of a post-apocalyptic NYC run by teenage survivors of a deadly sickness is what grabbed my attention about The Young World. I was excited to see that the core group of characters were based in Washington Square Park, right in the heart of the campus of mine olde alma mater, New York University. The book even references NYU’s Bobst Library. Just when I started getting all nostalgic about seeing several familiar places mentioned not just around NYU but around the city, I also began to realize that this was a by-the-numbers YA dystopian. Disease. No adults. Societal breakdown. Gang warfare. Quest for disease cure. Aside from my stroll down NYC memory lane, I was hard-pressed to find anything original about this story to make it stand out from other books in its genre. Simply borrowing an element of dystopia here and there and putting them together do not necessarily translate into a dystopian novel. I personally need to feel the urgency of the characters’ situation, and I just couldn’t manage it here. The characters had what I thought was a generally blasé attitude toward their plight; they know there’s no future for them, so caring about anything usually isn’t worth the effort. And if the characters couldn’t really be bothered to care, it wasn’t easy for me to do the caring for all of us.

Jefferson, the leader of the Washington Square tribe, was okay as a narrator and the most developed of the characters. If his narrating duties hadn’t been shared with Donna, another member of the tribe and his friend since childhood and on/off love interest, the novel might have been quite different. Donna’s chapters contain prolific use of “like” as an interjection, and I just found that . . . unnecessary. It made an otherwise smart and pretty funny character rather annoying. Donna would repeatedly say something profound that would then be punctuated with a “like.” This became very distracting at times, and I was frustrated on her behalf because her character could have been so much more than the girl who said “like” all the time.

The details relating to the illness that killed everyone except the adolescent population are sketchy at best, and that is no-no number one for me when it comes to dystopia. There’s plenty of emphasis on everything that was lost when the world went to hell, but there’s not a lot of how and why we arrived at this point. Jefferson, Donna, and the other characters make it abundantly clear that they’re barely existing in a kill-or-be-killed society, but sometimes they get too wrapped up in pondering what life was like before. Overall I felt that there wasn’t enough explanation where more was needed and too much where less would have been fine. I really tried to find some investment in the story and the fates of the characters, but alas, almost every aspect of this book and I were not meant to be.

All in All: Sadly, I could not get into this or shake the feeling that it never really delved into dystopia, despite the ultra bleak descriptions of the world. Donna’s POV was also often challenging to read, and when you find yourself forcing yourself to get through every other chapter, well, you know you won’t be continuing the series.

ARC Review: Second Star by Alyssa B. Sheinmel

Second Star
By Alyssa B. Sheinmel
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers
Format: eBook
Source: NetGalley
Publication Date: May 13, 2014

To Sum It Up: It’s been nine months since Wendy Darling’s younger brothers, John and Michael, disappeared. Her parents are struggling to come to terms with the police’s assumption that the boys drowned while surfing, but Wendy refuses to believe they’re gone. She sets out on her own search to find them, hoping that following the waves will lead her to her brothers.

Review: I’m going to start by saying that I have some very mixed feelings about Second Star, even after taking a few days to mull it over before sitting down to write the review. The novel is a reimagining of Peter Pan, with a protagonist named Wendy Darling who goes searching for her two missing surfer brothers, John and Michael. Wendy believes that her best chance of finding them is wherever the biggest waves are, and her travels bring her to a small group of surfers led by the mysterious Pete. While the surfing spin on the original tale was interesting, Wendy’s actions throughout Second Star posed a huge problem for me. I spent almost the entire book frustrated with her and firmly decided on what I was going to rate the book overall. The ending, however, threw a bit of a wrench in that because, although it stopped well short of justifying Wendy’s behavior, it did cast her character in a slightly different light. Slightly.

Second Star began strongly enough; I quickly became invested in the search for John and Michael, and I gave Wendy credit for striking out on her own to find them. Things started unraveling quickly, though, with Wendy making one head-shaking choice after another. Assist with a burglary? Sure, if it leads to a clue about John and Michael. Take drugs? Sure, if it leads to a clue about John and Michael. I could not wrap my head around Wendy’s logic, or lack thereof, really, no matter how much she tried to rationalize some of her poorer decisions as the means to finding her brothers. That’s another thing—as the tie that’s supposed to bind this whole story together, I never felt depth to Wendy’s relationship with John and Michael. Okay, I realize how coldhearted I sound saying that, but I thought Wendy kept getting sidetracked by her adventures with Pete and Jas, another surfer whom I’ll discuss in a minute. Sometimes John and Michael seemed like an afterthought, referenced whenever Wendy remembered that she was supposed to be looking for them.

The other major issue I had with Second Star was the insta-love. Times two. Wendy finds herself torn between Pete and Jas, both of questionable character and, surprise, not exactly best friends. What I really couldn’t cope with was how Wendy would madly be in love with whomever she happened to be with at the time. If she was in Pete’s company, Pete was her guy; if she was with Jas, Jas was her guy. Personally, I didn’t think either made a particularly good love interest, both in the sense of having chemistry with Wendy and, um, being law-abiding citizens.

Now to address that ending. It’s a departure from the rest of the novel, which reads like a contemporary up until that point. But—the ending actually makes sense for a Peter Pan retelling, if that makes sense. It was a fitting touch, but unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to alter my feelings toward the other aspects of the book that bothered me.

All in All: This was not the Peter Pan retelling I’d hoped for.

Review: Thrall by Jennifer Quintez

Thrall (Daughters of Lilith #1)
By Jennifer Quintez
Publisher: Secret Tree Press
Format: eBook
Source: Author

To Sum It Up: Braedyn Murphy has never thought of herself as anything but ordinary. As her sixteenth birthday approaches, however, everything Braedyn has ever believed about her life is going to be turned upside down. Demons are real and closer than she could have imagined possible, and they have a particular interest in Braedyn. A war is building, and she’s caught right in the middle of it.

Lee's Review: I seem to be stuck in a bit of an odd reading cycle lately, where I either absolutely love a book or have to push through to finish it. Unfortunately, Thrall falls into the latter category, another case of a solid premise that pulls up short in the execution. Although I really liked how the story of Lilith, Adam’s first wife according to some legends, was worked into the novel, that alone wasn’t enough to wholly invest my interest in the book.

I’d read some books featuring demons before, but none that focused on the succubus in particular. They’re called Lilitu here, and despite their breathtakingly beautiful appearance, underneath that surface lurks a potential destroyer of souls. There’s a Guard that fights to combat the havoc that the Lilitu wreak, and as far as good vs. evil battles go, I thought this one had a nice little twist to it. This book had some strong framework on which to build a rich story, but the slow pacing worked against it.

I often found it difficult to settle into long reading sessions with Thrall because it felt too drawn out. The exposition could have used some trimming, as could have the character descriptions. Whenever a new one is introduced, you’re given a mini biography of his/her life that starts sounding like a block of telling and which breaks up the flow of the narrative. I would have liked to have seen more showing, to have become acquainted with the characters through their dialogue and actions as opposed to what was said about them.

I had a few quibbles with the main character, Braedyn, mostly her lengthy reflections at the beginning of the novel on how unexceptional she was. Braedyn believes that she’s plainer than plain and then some, and the reiteration of this idea touched a nerve more than once. I could see how her self-perceived ordinariness figured into the part of the story where her Lilitu powers begin emerging and suddenly every guy at school now notices her. I suppose I just wasn’t keen on the transformation-into-a-swan angle. I also found Braedyn a little lacking in development as a heroine. Even in the later chapters, she’s still unsure of herself and looking to the Guard to save the day. Believing in Braedyn as a heroine proved challenging when she didn’t believe in herself.

Though they were up to no good, the Lilitu were interesting to read about and lent the novel some welcome edge. That’s what I think Braedyn needed—a touch of fire to her character to make her less of a cookie-cutter protagonist. Thrall delivered well on the paranormal side of things, but I can’t quite say the same about some of its other aspects.

All in All: While I liked the book’s take on demons, I wasn’t as enthused about Braedyn as a narrator/main character.

Ally's Review: Thrall sounded like a story I would really enjoy. Demons, angels, and demon hunters—what's not to like? What I wasn't expecting was all the stereotypical teenage angst and high school drama that took up most of the book.

Oh, the drama. I was slightly offended reading about Braedyn's high school life. Being in high school myself, I found the whole interpretation comical and highly inaccurate. You had the mean jocks, the bitchy cheerleaders, and the self-righteous outcasts. Braedyn and her friends obviously fall into the last category. The whole high school scene was very distracting. I felt like it tried so hard to be a part of the plot that it ended up taking over the whole book. Instead of reading about demons and hunters, I was reading about high school dances and bullies.

Braedyn, herself, wasn't a bad character. I actually though she was kind of all right. All the other characters were bringing her down. Her token best friends, who are terribly stereotypical, have so much book time but have nothing to contribute. Seriously, they are wasted. They pretty much do nothing to help Braedyn in her transition from teenage girl to demon. All they do is drive her to and from school. The man of the hour, Lucas, is the absolute worst. Of course it is love at first sight for Lucas and Braedyn. And of course their love is forbidden because Braedyn is a Lilitu—a soul sucking demon, and Lucas is a member of the Guard—a team of Lilitu hunters. But despite all of Lucas's training, he fails to see that his girlfriend isn't necessarily human. Lucas was so clueless that he quickly became my least favorite character. Braedyn is no better. She is told, time and time again, that she needs to stay away from Lucas for his safety. But does she care? No, she loves him but she'd rather be selfish and endanger him with her presence instead of keeping her distance. The whole romance is a mess from the start.

The coolest part of the book should have been the Guard. Somehow, the demon hunters turned out to be super lame, though. They are such a hindrance and spend almost the entire book running around like headless chickens. They have no idea what they're doing. The Guard is really judgy, too. Braedyn is treated like crap, although she's the one doing all the work.

The most redeeming aspect of the book is the bad guys. The Lilitu are cool. Not only are they practically all women, but they're also pretty powerful. I really enjoyed learning about the back history of Lilith and her daughters. I also liked how there was a dream realm involved. The demons were so interesting, and I wished they would have been focused on more.

The book was easy enough for me to get through because I found it somewhat entertaining. That being said, I didn't particularly look forward to sitting down and reading it. I have no attachment to the characters and I have nothing that motivates me to be intrigued to find out what's going to happen.

All in All: Thrall was disappointing in some ways and interesting in others. What I expected to like, I hated, and what I expected to dislike, I enjoyed. It's safe to say I have mixed feelings.

Review: Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell

Eleanor & Park
By Rainbow Rowell
Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin

To Sum It Up:

In 1986 Omaha, Nebraska, Eleanor Douglas has just returned to living with her family. Her home life is still miserable because of her abusive stepfather, and, as the new girl at school, Eleanor is almost instantly subjected to ridicule. Park Sheridan begrudgingly offers her the seat next to him on the school bus, a moment that proves to be significant for both of them. Soon Eleanor is secretly reading Park’s comic books over his shoulder; this then leads the two to talking about comics and music, conversations that become essential parts of their daily lives.

Review:

I feel like this review needs some kind of disclaimer (yep, it’s going to be that kind of review), so here goes. This is the toughest review I’ve had to write so far. It’s going to be rambling, for which I apologize in advance; I’ve been trying to organize my thoughts for over a week, and it’s just not happening. Normally when I finish a book, I have a rough idea of the points I want to cover in the review, but with Eleanor & Park, I don’t know where to start.

Before I attempt to articulate why this book didn’t work for me, I also feel the need to disclose that realistic fiction is the genre that I read the least often. I usually read for escapism, and though realistic fiction is still fiction, most of the time I prefer to read about a world that’s far removed from this one. So why do I still bother with the genre, then? I have had the occasional success with it, and I worry that cutting it off completely would mean missing out on some great books. It’s just a matter of finding the ones that are right for me. Sadly, Eleanor & Park was not one of them.

I first became interested in the book after it seemed like everyone was reading it, and if you look at the reviews, a slew of them are five star. I took a particular interest in this book when I found out that Park was half-Korean, the son of a Korean mother and a Caucasian father. While our situations aren’t quite the same (I was born in Seoul and adopted when I was four months old; my mom was of Irish descent, my dad of Irish and German descent), I was still very curious to read about Park’s experiences growing up in an interracial family. I don’t know if I went into the book with subconscious expectations of how Park’s heritage would be explored, but to me, it was a subject that wasn’t probed nearly deeply enough. In fact, the portrayal of his whole family was one of the stumbling blocks that I encountered while reading this.

Park senses a distance between him and his father, and he wonders if it’s because he inherited more of his features from his mother than his brother, Josh, did. Now, Park also says that his parents are madly in love with each other. If Park’s dad is madly in love with his Korean wife, why would it matter if his son takes after her in appearance? I’m missing something here. There’s also zero backstory about how Park’s parents met other than that his father was in the military and stationed in Korea, and Park’s mother conveniently doesn’t talk about her life there. It’s as if she had no life until she married Park’s dad, came to America, had two kids, and started doing hair and nails out of her garage. I found this image one-dimensional and unsettling.

As a character, Park didn’t strike me as one of substance. Aside from his occasional identity issues, there wasn’t much else to him. He alternates between pondering his looks and mooning over Eleanor. I did want to scream at him when he asked Eleanor, this girl whom he’s supposed to be absolutely, completely in love with, if she was the one scrawling lewd graffiti on her own textbooks. What?! When she suggests that it might be Tina, one of the girls at school who’s been bullying her, Park sticks up for Tina. He was so clueless at times about how hellish Eleanor’s life was, especially at home.

I wasn’t fond of Eleanor, either. Personality-wise, she wasn’t the type of character I could connect with, but I also really didn’t like the way she saw Park sometimes—as Asian first, as Park second. Before she knew his name, he was “that Asian kid.” Even after these two are supposed to be madly in love with each other (which I didn’t buy, and the romance in general was too sappy for my liking), she still makes the offhand remark about his appearance, not in a mocking way, but it’s like this is the first thing she notices about him. If this was meant to reinforce how lacking in ethnic diversity Eleanor and Park’s neighborhood was, I don’t think this was necessarily the best way to go about doing so. There was a lot of potential here to examine why Eleanor thinks and says some of the things she does, but there’s hardly any follow-through.

I get all nostalgic over the 80’s, and the geek in me appreciated the X-Men and Star Wars references. And I was ecstatic to see Elvis Costello and “Alison” name checked. All of this was not, however, sufficient to overcome the issues I had with the book, which also asked me to believe that these two characters were the 1986 equivalent of Romeo and Juliet. I’ve never considered the latter couple to be the paragon of adolescent love, so perhaps that was another reason why I had trouble with Eleanor & Park. Of course, there are many readers who loved this book, and I encourage you not to let my sole experience with it dissuade you from checking it out.

All in All:

If ever there was a book that I’d describe as a “try it for yourself and see how like it” read, it’s this one. To me, liking a book is always a matter of personal preference, and in this instance, the book and I ended up being wholly mismatched.

Review: The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan

The Forest of Hands and Teeth (The Forest of Hands and Teeth #1)
By Carrie Ryan
Publisher: Delacorte Press

To Sum It Up:

Mary dreams of seeing the ocean one day, but her reality makes that almost impossible. Her village is surrounded by the Forest of Hands and Teeth and the Unconsecrated, the dead who’ve come back to life. When the Unconsecrated breach the village, Mary is part of a small group that manages to flee. There appears to be nowhere for them to go, but Mary has recently made a discovery that gives her hope of finding life beyond the Forest.

Review:

Judging by the title, I was prepared to be thoroughly scared while reading The Forest of Hands and Teeth. Out of all the paranormal creatures, zombies give me the worst fright. They’re usually so disgusting in appearance, and then there’s the whole living dead concept. The zombies in The Forest of Hands and Teeth are described in some grotesque terms, yet this novel didn’t scare me at all.

I had a really tough time mustering investment in the story because I found the prose flat. Mary was not a compelling narrator at all. I never felt like she was actively involved in anything that happened around her; she just droned on about it in a detached voice. The only times when her narration showed some signs of life were when speaking about Travis, the love of her life, and seeing the ocean, which she was obsessed with. And when I say “obsessed,” I’m not kidding. That’s practically all Mary thinks about; that is, when she’s not professing how much she loves Travis. I quickly lost interest in both topics, which only made the book harder for me to get through.

As for the romance, that, too, was lackluster. For all of Mary's “I love Travis” and “I want to be with Travis” declarations, I didn’t find any chemistry between them. I think it had a lot to do with how monotone the prose was because my pulse didn’t speed up whenever anyone was being chased by the Unconsecrated, either. Travis was okay, but like the other characters (except Mary, who just annoyed me), that was about all I could say about him. No single personality stood out to me, so even when misfortune befell someone, it didn’t really matter to me.

One of my biggest pet peeves with post-apocalyptic/disaster type scenarios is when there’s no explanation of how the world arrived at this point. That’s the case with The Forest of Hands and Teeth. The Unconsecrated surround the village, constantly on patrol for their next meal, but what’s the story behind their origin? Don’t know. People only known as “They” built the fences that stand between the village and the Unconsecrated. Who are They? Don’t know that, either. Personally, if I’m going to read a novel about the undead, I’d like to know how they got reanimated in the first place. I’d also like to know how a line of fences manages to keep them out. Most of the zombies I’ve seen in movies and on TV plow through any obstacles barring their way from chowing down.

I’d actually been looking forward to being petrified by this book, but I could never sense any terror from the characters or urgency to their plight. I pushed myself to finish this, even though it’s not a lengthy novel, and despite the twist toward the end, I’m not intrigued enough to see if it turns into something bigger in the sequel.

All in All:

I read this mostly with disinterest. I thought the world needed to be explained in much more depth because one of the first questions that pops into my mind whenever zombies are involved is: where did they come from? I was disappointed not to find out and disappointed with this book all-around; here’s hoping that I have better luck with my next zombie read.