Author: Lauren Oliver

Review Round Up | Ringer, The Broken World, and Turtles All the Way Down

Posted October 19, 2017 / Book Reviews, Review Roundup / 8 Comments
Review Round Up | Ringer, The Broken World, and Turtles All the Way Down

In an effort to cut down on posts and burnout, my Review Roundups will feature 2-4 books I’ve read or listened to recently. Sometimes they’re newer releases and sometimes they’re all backlist titles. My ARC reviews usually get the solo treatment. Enjoy the mini reviews! The cool thing about this series is that there are multiple ways you could read it. You can read one girl’s story all the way through and then read the second girl’s, or you could alternate back and forth to create a dual POV. I can’t help but compare this experience to REPLICA. In that book, I was equally interested in both Gemma and Lyra’s stories as I was reading them. I liked reading Gemma’s all the way through and then learning Lyra’s after to see how they connected. I could see how reading the book that way OR alternating back and forth would both work. I wish I could say the same about RINGER. I wasn’t a huge fan of this one. Gemma’s story, which I read first, was somewhat boring and not as shocking as I thought it would be. I wish I read Lyra’s chapters in between because I think that method actually would be better for RINGER. Lyra’s story was generally more interesting than Gemma’s and would have provided some extra context in between, plus balance out the boring parts. SO if you’re curious about what it would be like with both reading experiences for this series, I recommend trying REPLICA with all […]

ARC Review: Replica

Posted December 7, 2016 / Book Reviews / 12 Comments
ARC Review: Replica

I usually break these reviews out into my typical categories below, but I decided to divide my review into the two “books” within one book. You can read this book in multiple ways. You can read Lyra’s story then flip the book around to read Gemma’s, or you could alternate chapters between the two books (as if it were one book with two alternating points of view). I decided to read all of Lyra’s story then all of Gemma’s because it was frankly easier than flipping between the two sides each chapter. TL;DR? I’m happy with how I chose to read this book. It was really interesting as certain events happened and I thought about what happened on the *other* side of the book during that time, and it did make me wonder how it would have been reading the other way. I wish it were easier to do; maybe I’ll reread it someday. I knew that Gemma and Lyra met up for a portion of the book, but they weren’t always with each other. This was helpful because otherwise it would have been really repetitive to essentially read the same story twice! I liked getting inside both of their heads – in the order I read them – to piece it all together. There wasn’t too much overlap between each point of view. So many big reveals and connections came together at each story’s end! I loved seeing how all of their research would crash together. When I read Lyra’s ending, […]

Review: Before I Fall

Posted July 18, 2014 / Book Reviews / 16 Comments
Review: Before I Fall

Review: I haven’t had as many “holy shit that was an amazing book” books in a while. This book had me staying up late reading (which is something I haven’t been compelled to do in a long time either). And even after I decided to go to sleep, I couldn’t stop thinking about the book. It was truly the definition of a pageturner. I wanted to get all of that out of the way first. The plot of this book is that a popular teenager, Samantha, is killed in a car accident while driving with her friends. She wasn’t a nice girl to others in high school, which is pretty standard of “popular” girls nowadays. The book starts with her last day of life and outlines everything that happened leading up to the accident. When she inevitably dies, she wakes up in the next chapter and thinks the whole thing was a bad dream. Of course it wasn’t…she is actually dead and reliving the day over and over again, like Groundhog Day. She goes through the typical stages: disbelief, frustration, sadness, etc. Oliver does not try to make Sam a likeable character (at first). She’s a mean girl. Her friends are mean girls. As the book goes on, she tries to make amends for everything and live each day the best she can. She realizes what she needs to do in order to pass on to the afterlife. I don’t want to give too much away, but this book really had me […]