Category: Book Reviews

Review: Yes Please

Posted January 26, 2015 / Book Reviews / 7 Comments

God Amy Poehler is the coolest. I absolutely loved every second of this book. Luckily I had adjusted my expectations a little bit when I saw some reviews that this wasn’t completely a humor book. She mixed in some serious stuff and actual advice too, which I ended up loving just as much. (Well, maybe not just as much. It would be great to have a whole book on the hilarity that is Parks and Rec.) I loved how authentic this book felt. She doesn’t sugar coat anything – her advice or her stories. She gives sex advice and talks about doing drugs; she’s fearless. Even before starting the audiobook portion of my read, I was reading everything in her voice. It felt like she was talking directly with me as if we were friends (like the synopsis says). I really enjoyed the variety of the content, too. Nothing was stiff or formal. It felt more like a scrapbook than a memoir. She had random haikus, handwritten notes, personal photos, chapters from people like Seth Meyers, and lots of lists. I think that was a major reason that this held my attention better than other nonfiction books do; I was anxiously awaiting the next topic because I had NO idea what it could be about. She had a lovely chapter full of her friends and coworkers…followed by a chapter that’s subtitle was “things I learned on mushrooms.” It kept me on my feet and intrigued. I can’t emphasize enough how […]

Review: Princess of Thorns

Posted January 22, 2015 / Book Reviews / 11 Comments

There is no salvation without sacrifice, no light without darkness, no triumph that doesn’t carry the seeds of its own destruction bouncing in its pocket. GUYS holy crap! This story is just beyond words. But I am going to try to use some words anyways. The book started out very complicated and confusing. I was fascinated by the world that was being built, but you are definitely thrown right into the middle of the action. It starts with Aurora and her brother Jor as small children with their mother. It explains some of the curses on their lands and on them. Then it flashes forward 10 years and Aurora (disguised as her brother) is suddenly woken up by a guy named Niklaas and we learn everything else from there. I will admit that the first 100 pages or so were slow. Maybe I just wasn’t in the right mindset at the time. Regardless, I kept feeling like I was going to be the black sheep and not end up liking this one. How could a book that moved so slowly for the first 100 pages ever get better? Well. It did. There was gradual world-building, which is nice, but there just wasn’t much action. I was admittedly kind of bored as the two traveled along and didn’t encounter anyone else. Once a few more characters and some action was introduced, I was hooked. I read 2/3 of the book in one night. I absolutely loved the gender-bending aspect of the book, where […]

Reread Review: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Posted January 21, 2015 / Book Reviews / 2 Comments

Luckily I started reading the Harry Potter series when the first three books had been released already. There wasn’t a lot of wait time in between those ones. I started book one in 1999 over the summer and got the next two books for Christmas that year. I remember actually laying underneath my Christmas tree and starting to read Chamber of Secrets almost instantly. It’s funny because a lot of people generally say that this book is their least favorite of the books. I don’t remember having a least favorite! When Andi was reading the books (for the first time!) recently, I saw quite a few people telling her not to be discouraged by this book because the next one gets much better. It started coming back to me that this book was a little slower than the rest. Of course, it’s still amazing, but it’s definitely not as fast-paced. At times, it’s also less interesting than the rest. I’ve said before how I’m generally not a big rereader of books. (Okay, I just started rereading a few months ago for the first time ever.) This series is the ONE that I said I would reread someday. The Reread Challenge this year is definitely helping motivate me to achieve this goal. I know so many people out there who have read the whole series countless times in their life… I just decided to start now. Oh well. Eeeeek. My instant reaction was being mad that the audio copy of Prisoner of […]

ARC Review: All Fall Down

Posted January 19, 2015 / Book Reviews / 8 Comments

AHH THIS WAS SO GOOD GUYSSSS. Throughout the whole book, I kept wondering when I would find a flaw. I really couldn’t, for the most part, until the very end of the book. My first impression was that this book had a more mature feel to it than the Gallagher Girls, which was nice. The one thing that’s recently bugged me during my GG reread was that Cammie felt too immature to me. I was really looking forward to seeing what Ally Carter could do with an older character. Of course, Grace has her own problems that did at times make her seem younger than her age. There were times when she got angry and pouty that were reminiscent of a bratty teenager… but when you think about everything she’s been through, you kind of understand why. She seemed overdramatic at times, but she always said what was on her mind and wasn’t afraid of the backlash. She was kind of a badass, while also being funny and very sarcastic. This book is about Grace trying to prove that her mother was murdered and not killed in the fire. She has very foggy memories of that night, but does vividly remember seeing the bullet holes in her mother’s chest. She tries to find the Scarred Man that she remembers from that night, as she believes he’s the one who killed her mother. I loved that Grace developed as an unreliable narrator in some ways; you start to doubt her memories […]

Review: The Secrets of Lily Graves

Posted January 14, 2015 / Book Reviews / 0 Comments

I had pretty low expectations when starting this book because I had seen a lot of pretty negative reviews. Most people said that it was glaringly predictable, but I am SO BAD at predicting things in books. Mysteries and thrillers always catch me off guard because I kind of try not to make theories about what’s going to happen because I would rather be surprised…. but even when I do make predictions, they’re wrong. I was thinking that I would be the black sheep and actually end up liking this one, but I was nervous about the ending. (I had a feeling this was going to a book that’s success hinged on the ending, and I was right.) I think the overall concept and setting was really cool. It was the epitome of a story that sounds GREAT in theory but was poorly executed. What Worked The fact that the main character, Lily, was in a family that ran a funeral home was pretty sweet. I thought that would be a good setup for an interesting story that obviously involved death. It was able to give Lily some insider information to help her solve the mystery. That whole aspect was interesting and kept me reading. In general I think Lily was veryyy generally characterized, which is obviously not a good thing, but there were a few instances where humor and feminism shown through. I liked that she stayed true to herself no matter what. The pacing was pretty good. It […]

Review: All Lined Up

Posted January 12, 2015 / Book Reviews / 7 Comments

Review Honestly this one wasn’t what I expected. I should have known it wasn’t going to be the LOL-funny New Adult books I’ve recently come to know and love. It was a bit more angsty than that. There were definitely some funny moments that I enjoyed, and definitely a bit of steaminess, but a lot of the “emotional” parts had me rolling my eyes like nobody’s business. Dallas was a bit melodramatic a lot of the time. I get where she’s coming from: her dad doesn’t pay her a lot of attention, her mom isn’t around, and she doesn’t know who she is (apparently). I do enjoy some flawed characters – but only to a certain extent. They have to realize when they’re being weird and insecure in order for me to be semi-okay with it. Luckily Dallas does seem to realize it a few times… “I recognize the self-loathing because I’m a master at it.” – yeah, no kidding girl. A lot of the drama in this book was built on misunderstandings, which always annoys me. Dallas hung around being a whiny baby all the time and Carson remained perfect. (I love him, by the way.) The CHEMISTRY between those two… JESUS. Besides all of that self-pity, a lot of the dialogue (both inside her head and with her friends) just bugged me. People complain that The Fault in Our Stars has two teenagers with vocabularies that are “unrealistic” or too fancy for their ages? Well, I thought that the dialogue in this […]

Blog Tour Review & Favorite Quotes: Perfect Couple

Posted January 11, 2015 / Book Reviews / 3 Comments

Review This was a cute read that I finished in a day – not too bad for kick-starting my year of reading! It was an “opposites attract” story, much like what I’m assuming the next book in the series will be, which is always kind of fun. Harper is a unique main character that dresses in homemade retro clothes, who is (at the time) dating Kennedy. I really hated him throughout the book and never understood why she stuck with him for so long. He was obviously the wrong person for her; it was frustrating to see that play out longer than made sense. The premise of the Superlatives series is that when the senior class votes on their superlatives, a ripple effect occurs among the winners. In this case, Harper and the popular football player, Brody, are somehow voted Perfect Couple That Never Was. They find themselves kind of drawn together after the vote and things kind of heat up. I loved watching the two of them develop a relationship and have Harper see that there’s much more to Brody than she thinks. The story definitely got steamy, much like the first book in the series. I absolutely love that Echols writes sex-positive characters and isn’t afraid to show that part of high school. Harper had some great lines (you’ll see below in my favorite quotes!) that supported the feminist aspects of the book. Going against that though, Harper decided to change her retro style and get contacts because […]

Reread Review: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

Posted January 8, 2015 / Book Reviews / 7 Comments

Let’s see. I started reading the series when book three was released, so that was back in 1999. I was eight years old. One summer, my friend was reading this book on our summer vacation (we were family friends that went to Cape Cod each summer together), and she started reading it out loud to us before bed. I remember being so fascinated by the series that I asked my mom for the books. I got this first book almost immediately after arriving home that summer. I only remember which year I started because I remember getting books two and three for Christmas that year, and book three had just been released. I remember being in love with it all. The whole world was just so amazing to me. When the movie came out a couple years later, it refreshed my memory on the whole plot of the book. I am really bad at remembering things that happen in books – hence the fact that I have to write all of my reviews within a few hours of finishing the books. I’ve pretty much always known I’ve wanted to reread this series at least a few times in my life. I am normally someone who does NOT reread books because there are so many out there I haven’t read before that I still want to read. I’ve always thought, why bother? BUT, Harry Potter was definitely a series that I wanted to reread. I knew it for a fact. The books […]

Book Jar Review: Pivot Point

Posted January 7, 2015 / Book Reviews / 15 Comments

Twice a month, I’ll pick a slip of paper from my book jar and read a book that has been sitting around for a while. I don’t buy as many physical copies as I do e-books, but my bookshelves are still overflowing with far more unread books than ones I’ve read. A lot of these book jar picks will help with the TBR Challenge I joined for 2015, but some books I own are newer books that won’t qualify. Without further ado, here’s my review for the first book I drew from my book jar! This definitely qualifies as one of those books where I find myself asking WHY didn’t I read this sooner?? I absolutely loved The Distance Between Us by Kasie West and heard nothing but great things about this duology, too. I got it in my Uppercase box a few months ago and was really happy to finally own it… and even happier it was one of my first Book Jar picks! Anyways this book was AWESOME. Totally not what I was expecting – in a great way. I assumed it would be really similar to Just Like Fate, which I also liked, but this was definitely higher-stakes. It was a bit of a mystery and I absolutely could not put it down. First, I thought that Addie was a random girl with abilities. I didn’t realize she lived on a Compound full of people with abilities. That was SO cool and really made it much more […]

Blog Tour Review & Favorite Quotes: Gone Too Far

Posted January 4, 2015 / Book Reviews / 1 Comment

Review This is definitely a book that got stronger as it progressed. The first person perspective threw me off a little because I feel like most of the books I’ve read lately haven’t been. It’s a completely different reading experience, in my opinion. Some of the writing felt awkward at first because of that, but then I definitely got used to it. A lot of character names were introduced right away and I felt like they all blended together, but again I slowly got used to it and they all started to differentiate. Our main character, Piper, was definitely a character that developed over time. It was reminiscent of the character development in Dangerous Boys by Abigail Haas. The character starts out with pretty general characterizations, (she’s interested in photography and just your average high schooler) and then becomes more involved with some darker stuff. She isn’t a villain or anything that serious, but she gets mixed up in some bad things for a little while. It’s very cool to see a character develop and change in a non-traditional way. Also, there were some majorly swoony scenes with a cute boy… which is always a plus. I like when there’s a realistic romantic relationship included in mystery/thriller books. It adds a little something else to the plot. I like books where I’m suspicious of every character because it makes things more interesting. I’m normally very bad at solving the mystery before the end of the book. I had a lot […]