Claire Stevens's Blog, page 21

Waiting on Wednesday - Aftercare Instructions by Bonnie Pipkin

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly meme that was created by Jill at Breaking the Spine and it's a chance for us all to highlight the upcoming releases we're eagerly anticipating.  This week, my Waiting on Wednesday pick is Aftercare Instructions by Bonnie Pipkin.  Here's the blurb:

“Troubled.” That’s seventeen-year-old Genesis according to her small New Jersey town. She finds refuge and stability in her relationship with her boyfriend, Peter—until he abandons her at a Planned Parenthood clinic during their appointment to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. The betrayal causes Gen to question everything.

As Gen pushes herself forward to find her new identity without Peter, she must also confront her most painful memories. Through the lens of an ongoing four act play within the novel, the fantasy of their undying love unravels line by line, scene by scene. Digging deeper into her past while exploring the underground theater world of New York City, she rediscovers a long forgotten dream. But it’s when Gen lets go of her history, the one she thinks she knows, that she’s finally able to embrace the complicated, chaotic true story of her life, and take center stage.

Aftercare Instructions, an electric, format-crushing debut, full of heart and hope, follows Gen on a big-hearted journey from dorm rooms to diners to underground theaters—and ultimately, right into readers' hearts.

What about you?  What's your Waiting on Wednesday pick this week?

The Improbable Theory of Ana and Zak by Brian Katcher

It all begins when Ana Watson's little brother, Clayton, secretly ditches the quiz bowl semifinals to go to the Washingcon sci-fi convention on what should have been a normal, résumé-building school trip.

If slacker Zak Duquette hadn't talked up the geek fan fest so much, maybe Clayton wouldn't have broken nearly every school rule or jeopardized Ana’s last shot at freedom from her uptight parents.

Now, teaming up with Duquette is the only way for Ana to chase down Clayton in the sea of orcs, zombies, bikini-clad princesses, Trekkies, and Smurfs. After all, one does not simply walk into Washingcon.

But in spite of Zak's devil-may-care attitude, he has his own reasons for being as lost as Ana-and Ana may have more in common with him than she thinks. Ana and Zak certainly don’t expect the long crazy night, which begins as a nerdfighter manhunt, to transform into so much more…
 
I thought this book was actually pretty good.  To be honest, my thoughts on the book are probably affected by the fact that I’m super chilled out at the moment - I’m on holiday on the Isle of Wight and it’s raining and I’m spending literally every minute of the day tearing through books - but I think even under normal circumstances I’d enjoy it.
 
The two characters, Ana and Zak, attend the same high school, but don’t really have  anything to do with each other.  Ana is a straight-A control freak and Zak is an uber-gaming-geek.  Their worlds collide when Ana’s little brother goes missing when they are on a quiz bowl trip out of town and what ensues is a screwball comedy-adventure which borrows a lot from eighties classics such as Adventures In Babysitting.
 
I liked Ana and Zak - probably Zak more than Ana, if I’m honest as I liked his super-geek tendencies.  They both had problems, and their friendship/romance developed at a good pace.  The plot is all set around WashingCon (Seattle Comic Con) and is high on action and has more geek references than you can shake a quarterstaff at as Ana and Zak try to retrieve her brother without their teacher or her parents finding out where they are and what they’re doing.
 
There were a couple of things that irked me:  like why on earth did Zak copy and paste an entire essay from Wikipedia, complete with hyperlinks?  I mean, I know he had to in order to move the plot along, but still.  What an idiot.  And the whole problem Ana had with her parents just seemed to be completely solved by a quick hug at the end.
 
Despite this, I still enjoyed it.  I think I’m being a tiny bit generous in giving the book 4 stars, but what the hell.  I’m on holiday.

4 stars

Vivian Apple Needs a Miracle by Katie Coyle

The predicted Rapture by Pastor Frick’s Church of America has come and gone, and three thousand Believers are now missing or dead. Seventeen-year-old Vivian Apple and her best friend, Harpreet, are revolutionaries, determined to expose the Church’s diabolical power grab . . . and to locate Viv’s missing heartthrob, Peter Ivey.
 
This was an okay follow-up to the fabulous Vivian Apple at the End of the World.  I guess I was expecting it to have as much of an impact as the first book did, but for me it fell a bit short.
 
So the rapture happened, or didn’t, and now everyone’s waiting for the second boat and society is still pretty much falling to bits and no one save two seventeen year olds is questioning the fact that the Church of America seem to be doing extraordinarily well, financially, out of this whole apocalypse thing.
 
Vivian and Harp, against all odds, find themselves working with a rebellion group who are working against the Church.  There’s still a lot of philosophical debate in this book, but it centres more around the question ‘Is one type of fundamentalism better than another type of fundamentalism?’  And I think we can all agree, without too much debate, that the answer is ‘No’.
 
I think I just prefer my heroes in survival situations, when they are the little guy fighting for their lives against the big bad dictator/dystopian society/evil religion.  Once the baddie gets semi-defeated but before they are ultimately-defeated and the story is all about the hero having to try and forge their way in the rebel alliance and everything’s a bit political - that doesn’t really float my boat so much.
 
To put it this way: I thought Mockingjay was the weakest of the three Hunger Games books.
 
I’m not saying that this book is bad as such.  Katie Coyle is a competent writer and I still liked the characters.  I just didn’t love the plot so much in this one.
 
I still loved Viv - she shows so much growth over the course of the two books, and none of it feels forced.  Harpreet is still basically who I want to be.  She’s amazeballs.
 
This book is totally worth reading if you enjoyed the first in the duology.  I just didn’t love it quite as much.

3 stars

Waiting on Wednesday - Bad Romance by Heather Demetrios

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly meme that was created by Jill at Breaking the Spine and it's a chance for us all to highlight the upcoming releases we're eagerly anticipating.  This week, my Waiting on Wednesday pick is Bad Romance by Heather Demetrios.  Here's the blurb:

Grace wants out. Out of her house, where her stepfather wields fear like a weapon and her mother makes her scrub imaginary dirt off the floors. Out of her California town, too small to contain her big city dreams. Out of her life, and into the role of Parisian artist, New York director—anything but scared and alone.

Enter Gavin: charming, talented, adored. Controlling. Dangerous. When Grace and Gavin fall in love, Grace is sure it's too good to be true. She has no idea their relationship will become a prison she's unable to escape.

Deeply affecting and unflinchingly honest, this is a story about spiraling into darkness—and emerging into the light again.

What about you?  What's your Waiting on Wednesday pick this week?

The Spectacular Now by Tim Tharp

Sutter Keely.  He’s the guy you want at your party. He’ll get everyone dancing. He’ ll get everyone in your parents’ pool. Okay, so he’s not exactly a shining academic star. He has no plans for college and will probably end up folding men’s shirts for a living. But there are plenty of ladies in town, and with the help of Dean Martin and Seagram’s V.O., life’s pretty fabuloso, actually.

Until the morning he wakes up on a random front lawn, and he meets Aimee. Aimee’s clueless. Aimee is a social disaster. Aimee needs help, and it’s up to the Sutterman to show Aimee a splendiferous time and then let her go forth and prosper. But Aimee’s not like other girls, and before long he’s in way over his head. For the first time in his life, he has the power to make a difference in someone else’s life—or ruin it forever.
 
Hrrhhhmmmnnm.
 
I didn’t like this book.
 
Sutter Keely is a character who is primed for development from page one.  He is an alcoholic who continually puts himself and his friends in dangerous situations.  His best friend decides to grow up a bit and do things other than just getting wasted all the time and all Sutter does is whine and complain that his friend is abandoning him. His girlfriend dumps him for being a selfish arsehole and he decides to try and wreck things for her in her new relationship (except he doesn’t even see it as wrecking things - he’s miles too selfish to understand how his action might impact other people).
 
He refers to himself as The Sutterman.
 
So basically, he’s a dick.  And so develop-able.  And yet, the author decides to not develop him one iota throughout the entire course of the book.  The book ends with Sutter being just as much of a loser as he was at the beginning.  In terms of whiny, detestable characters, this book ranks right up there with Catcher in the Rye.
 
The plot charts Sutter’s meandering life as he bumbles from one random situation to another - the only link being that in every single scene Sutter is in various stages of inebriation.  Watching someone literally piss their life up a wall isn’t very interesting or fun, so the plot was a bit of a bust for me too.
 
You’d think that, being as Sutter is so clearly an alcoholic, his friends would have staged an intervention at some point.  Spoiler alert: they don’t.
 
Towards the end, the author shoehorns in a sudden and entirely unbelievable meeting between Sutter and his absentee father in order to show the reader why Sutter is like he is.  It was clumsy and forced and guess what?  Not everyone who doesn’t have a dad acts like a complete arsehole.
 
And yet through all of this, I kept rooting for Sutter.  I kept hoping he’d change, see the error of his ways.  See that the way he was treating Aimee was utterly deplorable.  Do something other than just drink and sing Dean Martin songs (I can’t stand Dean Martin, by the way).  I kept hoping, even as I saw the page count on my Kindle increase and increase, slimming the chances of any character development down to zero.
 
Such a shame.  This book could have been great, but it was just annoying.
 
2 stars (and that’s being generous)

Vivian Apple at the End of the World by Katie Coyle

"They had to have loved you. You're Vivian fucking Apple."
 
This is a book I’d been wanting to read for ages.  Usually this is the absolute death-knell of me actually liking said book, but in this case expectation actually matched outcome. 
 
So, the premise is that America has totally embraced a fundamentalist belief system led by a dodgy old corporate businessman where the rights of women and the LGBT community have been all but wiped out.
 
Good job it’s fiction, eh?  Imagine if that happened in real life.
 
Anyway, the Church of America (TM) basically runs the whole country and their leader, Beaton Frick, has predicted a rapture, where the souls of the faithful will be taken up to heaven.  Despite her abundant cynicism, Vivian discovers that her parents may actually have been raptured and sets off with her best friend Harp to discover the truth.
 
What ensues is basically a post-apocalyptic road trip, which is, if not a cliché, then definitely a trope, but it’s actually a lot more clever than other post-apocalyptics.  Sure there are looters and plenty of people wishing to do our heroes harm, but there’s a lot of discussion about belief; not so much about what we believe, but why.  There’s criticism, not of religion per se, but of fundamentalism.  What makes a cult like this suddenly go crazy?  Are humans inherently sheep when it comes to thinking for themselves?  Or do you need a perfect storm of social and financial deprivation combined with a super charismatic leader to pull something like this off, a la Nazi Germany?
 
(Incidentally, was I the only one who was wondering what was happening in Canada while all this craziness went down in the US?  I mean, the whole world looks at Canada and the US as basically the Straight Guy and the Crazy Liability Dude, manacled together by forces beyond their control, forced into an uneasy alliance and with their fates inexorably linked, like Bruce Willis and Kim Basinger in Blind Date, Steve Martin and John Candy in Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Spencer Tracey and Katherine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby.  No?  Just me?)
 
I really liked Vivian - she showed enormous development over the course of the book, and her budding romance with Peter was super cute.  But for me, the real star of the show was Harp, a girl so cool I want to be her in my next life.
 
Definitely recommend this book - it really lived up to my hopes.
 
4 stars

Waiting on Wednesday - Words in Deep Blue by Cath Crowley

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly meme that was created by Jill at Breaking the Spine and it's a chance for us all to highlight the upcoming releases we're eagerly anticipating.  This week, my Waiting on Wednesday pick is Words in Deep Blue by Cath Crowley.  Here's the blurb:

A beautiful love story for fans of Jandy Nelson and Nicola Yoon: two teens find their way back to each other in a bookstore full of secrets and crushes, grief and hope—and letters hidden between the pages.
 
Years ago, Rachel had a crush on Henry Jones. The day before she moved away, she tucked a love letter into his favorite book in his family’s bookshop. She waited. But Henry never came.
 
Now Rachel has returned to the city—and to the bookshop—to work alongside the boy she’d rather not see, if at all possible, for the rest of her life. But Rachel needs the distraction. Her brother drowned months ago, and she can’t feel anything anymore.
 
As Henry and Rachel work side by side—surrounded by books, watching love stories unfold, exchanging letters between the pages—they find hope in each other. Because life may be uncontrollable, even unbearable sometimes. But it’s possible that words, and love, and second chances are enough.

What about you?  What's your Waiting on Wednesday pick this week?

If You Could Be Mine by Sara Farizan

 The book revolves around what it’s like to be gay in Iran.  Spoiler Alert: it’s not great.  Nasrin and Sahar are in love - their relationship consists of stolen kisses and declarations of love, but if the authorities found out about them they would face imprisonment, rape and execution if the authorities found out about their relationship.  Then Nasrin’s parents announce that they have arranged her marriage.  Nasrin believes that they can still be together - secretly - but Sahar wants to be open about her love for Nasrin and for them to be together without fear of reprisal.
 
I had really mixed feelings about this book.  On the one hand, it’s really unique - what it’s like to be homosexual and/or a woman when living under a repressive religious regime.  Like, a truly repressive regime, with state-sanctioned murder and everything. That Sahar and Nasrin have to go to such lengths to hide their relationship is heartbreaking and the descriptions of the repression in Iran is pretty horrific.
 
The main problem I had with this book is that it was far too short.  At 247 pages, it just didn’t have the space to deal with Sahar and Nasrin’s relationship in any great depth, or to give much of an impression of Iran, other than ‘It’s pretty oppressive’.
 
Sahar was a heartbreaking MC.  She was so desperately in love with Nasrin and tried so hard to find a way of stopping the wedding. I felt that her decision to go for gender reassignment surgery was somewhat hurried and not terribly well thought through, especially as she didn’t actually identify as a man, but I could see why she felt it was her only option.  When she found out what the operation would actually involve she seemed so surprised, and I guess it just seemed a bit weird that she hadn’t even Googled what the information involved.
 
The ending to the book was very emotional and ultimately I felt it was quite believable.  This was a pretty good book and I think the author is talented, but it could have done with being a bit longer to actually explore some of the themes of the book in greater detail.
 
3 stars

Waiting on Wednesday - Follow Me Back by A V Geiger

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly meme that was created by Jill at Breaking the Spine and it's a chance for us all to highlight the upcoming releases we're eagerly anticipating.  This week, my Waiting on Wednesday pick is Follow Me Back by A V Geiger.  Here's the blurb:

Told through tweets, direct messages, and police transcripts Follow Me Back is the  first book of a new duology. Written for the online generation this thriller  will keep you guessing right up to the shocking end.

Tessa Hart’s world feels very small. Confined to her bedroom with agoraphobia, her one escape is the online fandom for pop sensation Eric Thorn. When he tweets to his fans, it’s like his speaking directly to her…

Eric Thorn is frightened by his obsessive fans. They take their devotion way too far. It doesn’t help that his PR team keeps posting to encourage their fantasies.

When a fellow pop star is murder at the hands of a fan, Eric knows he has to do something to shatter his online image fast—like take down one of his top Twitter followers. But Eric’s plan to troll @TessaHeartsEric unexpectedly evolves into an online relationship deeper than either could have imagined. And when the two arrange to meet IRL, what should have made for the world’s best episode of Catfish takes a deadly turn…

What about you?  What's your Waiting on Wednesday pick this week?

A Court of Wings and Ruin by Sarah J Maas

Perfection.  I'm still trying to catch my breath because.  That.  Ending.

So I don't even.  I can't even.  I don't know where to begin.  I'm completely incoherent and I'm still a shaky, slightly teary mess.

This trilogy (and I don't care if there are more books coming out - that ending as far as I'm concerned, is it) is the best I've ever read.  And I read a LOT of YA, so it naturally goes that I've read a lot of trilogies.

I was part-excited, part-terrified to pick this book up because ACOMAF almost killed me, but there was no way I couldn't find out what havoc the High Lady of the Night Court would wreak when she got dragged back to the Spring Court.  Spoiler Alert: it didn't disappoint.  She goes ice-queen beserk.

So it's not really giving anything away when I say that the plot revolves around the Night Court inner circle trying to stop the King of Hybern from invading Prythian and smashing the wall.  The plot is chocker with twists and reveals and it never, ever lets up.  Lots of storylines get tied up, but it's also left open for more books.

Feyre and Rhys are perfect.  Just perfect.  And that's all I have to say.

But it's not just Feyre and Rhys - the whole inner circle are amazing.  Such well-fleshed-out characters with heartbreaking back stories and histories and beautiful connections with each other.

I re-read ACOMAF in preparation for this book coming out.  It was my forth re-read and I came to the realisation that it's probably my favourite book of all time.  Actual all time.  This book is right up there with ACOMAF - the only thing it doesn't have is ACOMAF's Chapters 54 and 55 (you know the ones), but it's still amazing.

I am utterly ruined for all other series.

That is all.

5 stars