Claire Stevens's Blog, page 52

Superstition by Lucy Fenton - Book Blitz and Giveaway

Superstition
by Lucy Fenton 
Release Date: 08/03/15

Summary from Goodreads:
What happens when your childhood nightmares of being bitten by strange creatures in a dark wood aren’t just dreams?

Sixteen-year-old Arden St. John’s life takes a strange turn when she finds an unusual animal injured near her new house on the south east coast of Australia. When she takes it to the local vet, a terrible truth is inadvertently exposed to her. 

She discovers a secret underworld, where witches are commonplace and trolls masquerade as queen bees, terrorising the other students with impunity. A world where vampires traffic in the lives of children, draining their bodies once they reach maturity. Where adults auction their own children to extend their lives.

Arden finds out she’s one of those kids, her life traded by the mother she never knew. Now she’s caught up in this ancient and corrupt economy operating just below the surface of modern society. She’s a hot commodity, and it’s only a matter of time before the vampire who bought her comes to claim his prize. 

But Arden’s not going down without a fight.

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Excerpt:
The further into the bush she went, the more anxious Arden felt. If something happened to me, how long would it be before Dad noticed? I could be dead for days before someone found me, Arden thought, unhappily. The compulsion to turn around and seek out others grew stronger and her footsteps slowed.

And then through the trees, she saw something. Curiosity overcoming her disquiet, at first she thought it was a rocky outcrop and moved towards it, trying to see what was veiled by the leaves of the trees. The flash of sunlight whitened out her vision as she stepped out of the shade into the clearing. Blinded, she waited for her eyes to adjust. Squinting, the blurred shapes gradually resolved into the ruins of a stone building. The roof was gone and the walls stuck up like the blunt teeth of a fallen giant. Arden walked around what had once been a large structure that had been left to crumble back into the earth. It was built on a headland, the view of the ocean clear on the far side. A lone gum tree clung to the edge of the cliff, roots visible where the earth had crumbled away. Dead, its bare branches stood out starkly white against the dark clouds forming over the ocean. There was a storm coming in, but it was still a way out to sea. Catching sight of a marking on the stone, she moved towards it to examine it more closely. It was weathered almost flat, but tracing the rough gritty surface with her finger, she made out the distinctive shape of a convict arrow.

Amazed, she walked in through a doorway, trying to work out what type of building it had been. There had been a large central room with many tiny rooms opening from it. They were small, storerooms perhaps? Exploring deeper into the ruins, there was a room that had been more protected at the rear and the purpose became apparent. The stubbed remains of bars were still embedded in the stone in one section and in the corner of the room were cross hatched markings on the walls, counting off the days. She was standing in a convict gaol. 

About the Author

L. C. Fenton lives in Sydney, Australia with her husband and two children. In addition to her cake- making business, she works as a freelance copywriter and pens occasional articles for various online magazines.

Not being one of those people who had a burning desire to be anything in particular, L. C. worked her way alphabetically backwards through the available degrees at Sydney University. Surprisingly, given the amount of fun she had at school, L.C. finally managed to graduate with a completely unemployable degree in Philosophy. A Law degree soon followed, however, simply to make it possible for some organization to hire her.

After ten soul-destroying years wandering aimlessly in the corporate wilderness, L. C. threw it all in and reassessed. Deciding to bring the "one day I will write a book" idea to the present, she started and hasn't stopped. As a huge fan of the romance genre, she writes the kinds of books that she enjoys to read.

In her spare time, L. C. Fenton...actually she has no spare time. She sleeps or reads copious amounts of romance novels instead of sleeping.

Author Links:

Website│Goodreads│Twitter│Facebook

GIVEAWAY:
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July Wrap Up and August TBR

July was a pretty diverse month for reading.  I was lucky enough to receive some great ARCs from publishers and re-discovered the joys of the local library reservation system!

I think my favourite read this month has to be The Art Of Being Normal by Lisa Williamson.  It's the touching story of a transgender boy and manages to combine a really important issue with great writing and characters.

I also received an ARC of Emmy and Oliver by Robin Benway for review.  I can thoroughly recommend it as a perfect summer read.  The story and characters just whisked me away.

Another good read was a short story I got sent by author Talia Haven - Mama Cried is the story of a young girl who is playing in the playground with some friends when her guardian takes her away to make an important decision.

While I wasn't exactly disappointed with any of the books I read this month, I thought The Miniaturist didn't really live up to the massive amounts of hype it's had heaped on it.  It wasn't dreadful, far from it, but I was underwhelmed.  Still, it was a book club book, and that's the whole point of book clubs, really - to read books you wouldn't ordinarily pick up!

August's TBR pile includes some hopefully-cracking books.  I've just started 10 Things We Shouldn't Have Done by Sarah Mlynowski and it's going great so far!  I also have Stolen by Lucy Christopher and The Summer I Turned Pretty by Jenny Han.  And I just had a message from the library - P.S. I Still Love You, also by Jenny Han, has just come in and is sitting on the reservation shelf for me as we speak!  Woo hoo!  I've been looking forward to this one for ages!

Feature and Follow Friday #13

Feature and Follow Friday is a weekly book blog meme hosted by Alison Can Read and Parajunkee's View.  The idea is to answer the featured question, link back to the hosts and featured bloggers and then hop around the blogs on the Linky thingy making new friends!  

This week's featured question is: If you could get an ARC of any book, already published, or not yet, what would it be? - Suggested byWords I Write Crazy

If I could get an ARC of any book at all at the moment it would have to be Starflight by Melissa Landers.  The author is touting it on Goodreads as Overboard (one of my favourite romantic comedies ever) meets Firefly (an awesome, awesome sci-fi drama that the dastardly Rupert Murdoch cancelled before the first season was even finished). 

It's rare that I'm this interested in seeing what a book is going to be like.  I usually try to rein in my enthusiasm as the pessimist in me reminds me it's the best way to handle disappointment, but yeah, in answer to the featured question, I think I would sell my grandmother to get my hands on an ARC of this one.

Feel free to follow me on Bloglovin', Goodreads or Twitter  and leave me a note so I know to follow you back!

Allison Hewitt is Trapped by Madeleine Roux

Allison Hewitt, along with a few of her colleagues, is trapped in the staff break room at the book shop where she works while the zombie apocalypse takes place outside.  When the first zombies started marching through town, taking a bite out of anything with a pulse, she and her work buddies barricaded themselves in (I don’t think it’s specifically mentioned, but I get the impression that they left the customers to fend for themselves, which shows an admirable level of pragmatism and cold-heartedness) and now leave only to empty the stinking toilet and to forage for food.  Soon they must venture out into the outside world to see what’s left, but do they do it before or after the toilet finally overflows and they run out of teriyaki beef jerky?

I quite liked this book.  It was by no means perfect, but the good definitely outweighed the  not-so-good.

Probably my favourite aspect of the story was Allison herself.  Having an MC who you can really get behind can make up for any number of leaps of logic you might need to make about a plot (and you need to do a few of these in this book).  She is utterly pragmatic and almost sociopathically cold-hearted but I loved that about her.  She has no compunction about killing a zombie, even if it wears the face of a person she used to know.

I enjoy a zombie novel and nothing irritates me more than the female MC going to pieces or getting all sentimental about stuff that doesn’t matter any more.  Sorry love, it’s the end of the world so no, you can’t go back across town to pick up your childhood teddy bear.  If the zombie apocalypse were to really happen, I think a lot of people would react like Allison.  You’d see so much awful stuff that you’d harden up and come to appreciate the benefits of a nice sharp axe.

The plot moves along quite quickly, and although the reader has to make a few leaps of logic here and there and it sticks to the zombie-novel-formula (plenty of encounters with the undead, family members that may or may not be dead, insubstantial rumours of a safe haven, and a road trip across country) the fact that it was written in the style of a blog made it fresh and interesting because you never knew if Allison was going to live or die.

One thing that confused me about this book - and I might be nit-picking here - but at no point in the story do any of the people Allison is knocking around with turn to her and say, ‘Allison, will you put that damn laptop down and give us a hand fighting off the zombie hoards?’  Because over the space of just under two months, she managed to blog an impressive 100k - ish words.  That’s over 1,500 words a day, which would be impressive in normal circumstances, let alone when you’re struggling to find food, when there’s no reliable electricity or internet source and you’re generally dealing with the end of the world.  But yeah, maybe that’s just me being picky.

There is some romance in the book and it’s kind of sweet and doesn’t detract from the main action.  The very, very end of the book explains what happens to humanity after the apocalypse and although the resolution is basically a bottled form of deus ex machine, it’s kind of nice to be able to speculate if not a happily ever after then at least an ever after for the characters who remain.

4 stars

Waiting On Wednesday - The Dead House by Dawn Kurtagich

Waiting On Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Jill over at Breaking The Spine and it highlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

My Waiting On Wednesday pick for this week is:

The Dead House by Dawn Kurtagich.

Here's the Goodreads blurb:

Part-psychological thriller, part-urban legend, this is an unsettling narrative made up of diary entries, interview transcripts, film footage transcripts and medical notes. Twenty-five years ago, Elmbridge High burned down. Three people were killed and one pupil, Carly Johnson, disappeared. Now a diary has been found in the ruins of the school. The diary belongs to Kaitlyn Johnson, Carly’s identical twin sister. But Carly didn’t have a twin . . . 

Re-opened police records, psychiatric reports, transcripts of video footage and fragments of diary reveal a web of deceit and intrigue, violence and murder, raising a whole lot more questions than it answers.

Who was Kaitlyn and why did she only appear at night? Did she really exist or was she a figment of a disturbed mind? What were the illicit rituals taking place at the school? And just what did happen at Elmbridge in the events leading up to ‘the Johnson Incident’?


Sounds spooky and pretty darn interesting to me!  The Dead House is released in the U.K. on the 6th August by Orion Children's Books.


What about you?  What books can't you wait to get your hands on?

Mechanica by Betsy Cornwell

Mechanica tells the story of Nicolette, an orphan who lives with her stepmother and stepsisters and works as their servant.  One day, she discovers her mother’s old workroom which kindles her latent talent for building pretty much all things mechanical.

The premise behind this retelling is fantastic: Nicolette is a super-skilled mechanic and wants to survive by her own efforts, without waiting for a man to rescue her.  There is romance, but it’s not the focal point of the whole book.  I really liked this about Nicolette and it made her a good character to get on board with.


There were some really good ideas as well.  I liked the inclusion of the fey and the steampunk setting was really cool - I love a bit of steampunk and I don’t get to see it nearly often enough in the books I read.

The main problem I had with Mechanica was its pacing.  It moved far too slowly for me and included far too much detail about inconsequential things.  There was very little in the way of tension and I found it quite hard to keep going at some points.  It’s such a shame, because this really could have been a five star book if only it had been pepped up a bit, or made the reader fret and worry about Nicolette’s fate.  The whole fey thing could have been expanded or made more sinister and for all that the Steps were obviously not nice people, I never really hated them or felt anything stronger than mild annoyance.

Some people have complained about the ending, but I actually found it great.  It’s exactly what we need to see more of, especially in YA lit, to counteract the appalling messages that all Disney films prior to Brave fed us - that a girl requires a boy to validate her, save her and supply her self-worth.  Um, no!


I’m not even going to go into the comparisons with Cinder.  They’re different books and neither of them invented (a) the Cinderella myth, or (b) fairytale retellings.


Ultimately, Mechanika moved too slowly for me and there was too little in the way of tension or excitement for me to enjoy it more, but I have to give snaps to the author for writing such a feminist version of a super-unfeminist tale.


I received a copy of Mechanica in exchange for an honest review.  Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley.

Top Ten Tuesday - Fellow Book Nerds

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish and celebrates all things bookish in the form of a top ten list. Because everyone likes a nice list, don't they?

This week the topic is: Top Ten Characters Who Are Also Book Nerds.

Being a book nerd myself, these are the book characters who I identify with most readily - it's going to take some seriously awesome writing to get me identifying with the jocks - and I think authors realise this, because there are plenty of characters to choose from.  Here are my favourites:

10.  Liesel from The Book Thief.  So desperate for reading material that she steals books.
9.  Matilda from Matilda.  As I recall she taught herself to read aged three.  Impressive.
8.  Jo March from Little Women.  Not interested at all in dances or frocks, she much preferred curling up eating apples and reading a good book.
7.  Guy Montag from Farenheit 451.  I didn't think this book was all that great, but you've got to respect a man who saves books from being burned.
6.  Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice.  She gets mockeed by the mean Bingleys for liking books, but I fail to see how it's a bad thing.
5.  Katy Swartz from the Lux series.  She runs a book blog.  Need I say more?
4.  Scout from To Kill A Mockingbird.  'Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read.  One does not love breathing.'
3.  Hazel from The Fault In Our Stars.  She uses her boyfriend's cancer-kid wish to stalk her favourite author in Amsterdam.
2.  Tessa and Will from The Infernal Devices.  Their entire stop-start courtship is based around books.

And my favourite book nerd of all is...

1.  Hermione Grainger from the Harry Potter series.  Unashamedly book-nerdish, can always be found doing research in the library and has very little time at all for things that cannot be found between the covers of a book.  Hermione's my girl.

What about you?  Who are your favourite book nerds?

Another Day by David Levithan

This book has been on my radar since I found out about it months and months ago.  I adored Every Day.  I read it when I’d only just ‘discovered’ David Levithan and it completely knocked me for six, so the prospect of a companion novel had me very excited indeed.

Another Day is the same story but told from Rhiannon’s POV.  We get to see her home life and more of her relationships with her friends and Justin.  We also see the internal struggle she has when she tries to reconcile her rubbish relationship with Justin, who is the same person every day, with her potential relationship with A, who has the amazing personality but is never the same physical person twice.

There is a lot of discourse about the nature of attraction - how and why we are attracted to people, why we automatically discount other people purely based on their looks.  As a narrator, Rhiannon is refreshingly honest: she openly admits that she isn’t attracted to A when A is in a girl’s body.

The plot follows the same path as Every Day and there were overlaps, which is par for the course in a companion novel.  There was still enough in Rhiannon’s non-A life to make it interesting and there was an interesting plot twist literally in the last sentence that has made me hopeful for a third instalment!

One of the things I love about David Levithan is that he can write secondary characters that have depth but don’t take the whole story over.  He is sparing but meaningful with his descriptions and interactions and I ended up really caring about Rhiannon’s friends.  I was ridiculously pleased that Preston got an HEA!

I found it harder to connect with Rhiannon than I anticipated, but I think most of that stemmed from the fact that Rhiannon doesn’t really connect with anyone.  She’s kind of drifting through her life and her only anchor seems to be her mean boyfriend.  She has low self-esteem, which is so sad because reading between the lines (and you do really have to read between the lines - David Levithan doesn’t really go in for the whole Special-Snowflake ‘I think I’m ugly but boys just keep asking me out!’) she is moderately intelligent and attractive.  I spent a lot of the book wanting to bang my head against the table because she was just putting up with Justin the Knob and making excuses for his sullen, passive-aggressive behaviour.

She goes through the entire book (and about a year of her life before the story starts) in this going-nowhere relationship with an emotionally vacuous boy who doesn’t really see her, or care if she’s there or not.  Their perfunctory sex is the only time he shows her a modicum of emotion and she’s constantly fretting in case he tells her off for being clingy.  Her friends spend a good proportion of their time trying to get her to take her blinkers off, but she brushes their concerns away with a ‘You just don’t understand our relationship’ and by explaining that Justin really isn’t that bad because at least he doesn’t abuse her.  Well, to paraphrase the excellent Chris Rock, he’s not SUPPOSED to abuse you, you low-expectation-having motherfucker!

Despite these frustrations with Rhiannon, I did still really enjoy Another Day.  At the end of the day, it’s written by David Levithan so it’s never going to be a bad book - the man could write a shopping list and still manage to include at least seven astute observations about the state of the human race.

Obviously there are going to be comparisons between Another Day and Every Day and people will ask whether Another Day is ‘as good’.  Well, it’s different.  It’s definitely good.  Did I enjoy it as much as I enjoyed Every Day?  It was close, but I preferred A’s viewpoint and the extra helping of fantasy that the first book included.  Is Another Day worth reading anyway?  Absolutely. 

4 stars


I received a copy of Another Day in exchange for an honest review.  Many thanks to Egmont and Netgalley.

Thirty Seconds From Now by John Chu

Thirty seconds from now is a short story about a guy called Scott who has the ability to see into the future.  Scott’s version of precognition involves seeing multiple versions of the future, depending on people’s actions.  He tries really hard to stay in the present and juggles a beanbag to help him retain his focus.  When he’s in his dorm room one day, he sees a guy outside his door who looks ‘clearer’ to him than anyone else ever has.

I found the idea behind Scott’s ability really interesting and I was surprised he’d managed to make it as far as university without it sending him completely mad!  It’s kind of like chaos theory (I think) in that he sees the many possible outcomes of seemingly random actions.

The plot was really interesting and I liked the way we saw his and Tony’s relationship play out.  Although it wasn’t exactly an HEA, I liked the decision Scott made at the end of the story.  There is some good characterisation, which can be difficult in such a short story and I think it helps that the author focuses on just two characters.

All in all, this is worth a read.

You can find this story at http://www.bostonreview.net/john-chu-...


4 stars

The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton

The Miniaturist was a book club pick and probably not something I would have picked up ordinarily.  I enjoyed this book.  Like I said, it isn’t something I usually would have picked, but I guess that’s the point of being in a book club.  It didn’t blow me away, but I think that if historical literary fiction is your bag, then this would be a top pick for you.

Nella is an eighteen-year-old girl whose family have fallen on difficult financial times since the death of her father and a few months earlier she was married to a merchant, Johannes.  It is set in the late seventeenth century and as the book opens she is moving to join his household in Amsterdam.

The house is currently being run by Johannes’ sister, Marin, who doesn’t welcome the intrusion by her brother’s new wife and Nella finds herself the owner of an empty dolls’ house and some money with which to furnish it as a means of filling her time.

The Miniaturist is incredibly well researched.  The author has obviously gone to great lengths to drop in little details about life in seventeenth century Amsterdam and her care and attention really show.  There are some scenes that are so detailed and evocative that you really feel as though you were there.

The writing is also very good.  It is incredibly detailed and descriptive and it’s easy to lose yourself in it.  It manages to be wordy and interesting whilst remaining accessible and not at all up-its-own-bum.  Which is always a good thing.

The plot, for me, felt a little slow.  There were a couple of really exciting bits, but the remainder of the book dragged somewhat.  There were a lot of domestic scenes, as well as scenes that probably could have been shortened and had the same impact.  I could have done with less of Nella wandering about the house and more of her actually doing something a bit more interesting instead.  I get that women didn’t have many chances or opportunities in those days, but I think the author was trying to portray Nella as ahead of her time (going by her attitudes to certain things - see below) so it would have been good to see her doing something, anything, with her time.

I was also very frustrated that the mystery surrounding the miniaturist was never resolved.  Who was she?  Was she psychic?  Or was she just a snoop?  In some respects this felt like two separate stories - a narrative on minority groups in seventeenth century Amsterdam on one hand, and a psychic/fantasy mystery on the other.  Both were interesting enough, but I wished the mystery part had been wrapped up.

While I liked the characters well enough, and some of the descriptions were very detailed, I didn’t find them entirely believable.  I thought that Nella was awfully self-assured in some respects but painfully doormat-ish in others.  She seems able to stand up for herself in some ways, but sometimes she seems to, I don’t know, just not bother?

***Spoiler Alert!***  I also found it fairly unbelievable how quickly she accepted Johannes’  homosexuality and Marin’s mixed-race, out-of-wedlock baby.  In these more enlightened times these things aren’t even things, and this is good and progress, but in the time the book was set, homosexuality was a sin punishable by death and mixed race relationships were incredibly taboo.  I could have accepted Nella’s attitude if perhaps she was an old lady, who had been around the block a few times, lived all over the world and seen a lot of things.  But Nella was a naive young girl from the countryside.  To me, her attitude just didn’t ring true. 

Marin was a mixed bag.  I got a good sense of who she was and I loved her hypocrisy, but I couldn’t work out whether she liked or loathed Nella.  She really seemed to blow unpredictably hot and cold.  Otto’s position both in the household and in society was really interesting, but I don’t think enough was made of it.  He just seemed to hover in the background.

It felt like the author was trying to introduce too many issues: racism, homosexuality, women’s rights, but none of them are fully explored or satisfyingly concluded.  I would have been happier if the author had just stuck to one issue and written about it in a lot of detail.

My star rating isn’t based on how good or worthy this book is, or how much I think other people will enjoy it, but purely on how much I enjoyed it.  Three stars is not a bad score and I can totally see how other people would think this book is amazing, but personally I prefer books that move faster and tie off all their loose ends.


3 stars