Genre: Young Adult

Review: Famous in Love

Posted October 22, 2014 / Book Reviews / 3 Comments

EDIT: Well I’m a big butthead and didn’t realize this book was a FREAKIN SERIES. I thought it was a standalone and let myself get so pissed off about the ending that it affected my entire review. Here’s my review with some edits and changes. Same overall score (because I somehow rated it much higher than my review made it seem.. just a nicer review) The first half of the book was good. It really worked for me. I was interested to see what happened to Paige, how her life changed, and what it was like on a movie set. I think the premise was really spot on with the kind of books I enjoy. The main character had some realistic emotions and actions. When she learned what was going on with her friends from home, she reacted selfishly… but I think most people (including myself) would have that same reaction. It kept me interested. Despite the flaws I talk about below, I enjoyed getting lost in a fluffy story about a girl becoming a movie star and dealing with her first real acting gig. I liked some parts near the middle/end of the book. I thought the real reason Jordan and Rainer were enemies was interesting and understandable. I was happy to see Jordan get explained out a little better and see that his “bad boy” persona wasn’t exactly true. I think, honestly, he was the most characterized person in the book somehow. There’s a really cool book-in-a-book concept going […]

Review: The Perfectionists

Posted October 20, 2014 / Book Reviews / 3 Comments

Yessss Sara Shepard you can do wrong for me. So many people complain that all of her books are the same and she makes series drag on forever… I have no issues with this. Regardless of how similar the stories may seem, they’re always easy to differentiate in my mind. Her writing makes everything suspenseful, quick, and interesting. I was certainly intrigued by the prologue and beginning of the book, but thought the huge amount of characters would get confusing. After a while it wasn’t difficult to keep them separate. The book follows five girls who bond over hating Nolan, the popular asshole guy at their school. They jokingly plot to kill him during their class but end up deciding to mess with him at his party that weekend. By morning, Nolan is dead – and it wasn’t their fault. Their activities that night make them look suspicious and the girls try to figure out who killed him that night in order to clear their own names. The girls are keeping secrets of their own, and in the super-competitive world of Beacon Heights, everyone who knows them is willing to spill them. As I said, the story itself and the setup of the book is fairly similar, but Shepard touches on a lot of different secrets and keeps things interesting. I’m a HUGE fan of her style. She slowly releases information (like why they all hate him, what actually happened that night, etc.) throughout the book until everything comes crashing […]

Review: Dissonance

Posted October 13, 2014 / Book Reviews / 15 Comments

Have you ever read the description of a book that felt like the most YOU book of all time? Like the author literally jumped into your brain and wrote it just for you? Yeah, Dissonance is one of those books for me. I’m sorry if this review is just me fangirling like a wild woman, but I’m just too excited. When I first saw this book pop up, right before my blogging days got started, my jaw dropped at the plot summary. This concept of creating new universes based on every decision you make was something I thought about ALL of the time. Anyone remember that episode of the old Disney show So Weird? The girl makes a decision to pick orange juice instead of grapefruit juice, which splits into two different universes.. In one she ends up late to school, gets detention, and falls into a bad crowd. The other world has her day going normally. The two versions of herself somehow squeeze into one world and she has to work to get the other one out. Yeah, well, ever since that episode I’ve been obsessed with that concept. Talk about taking “everything happens for a reason” literally! WELL I DIGRESS A LOT but this book was perfect for me. I talked about it for MONTHS, built it up in my head to be the best book I would read this year, and guess what? It delivered. As far as the actual story goes, we learn about Del and […]

Review: Ask Again Later

Posted October 8, 2014 / Book Reviews / 3 Comments

Okay this book was really funny. A bit of the humor was a little too predictable or childish for my tastes, but I really enjoyed that aspect overall. (Obviously this book was set in high school, so I can’t be too surprised). This book is about Heart, who of course has no interest in finding love. That aspect was cheesy to me but I let it slide. She is invited to prom by two very different guys under very different circumstances. Instead of just doing the logical thing and saying no to both, so she can go to prom with her big group of friends like she planned, she flips a coin. Heads: she goes to prom with her brother’s friend, Troy, who is most likely going to get drunk and obsess over his ex-girlfriend. Tails: she goes with Ryan, the theater boy with a secret. I LOVE this premise; I will read any book with the alternate timelines like this one. This book was so cute and light that I finished it in about 3 sittings over the course of 2 days. I liked the characters a lot (more below), but felt like overall they could have been fleshed out a bit more. All of her friends in the No Drama Prom-a crew weren’t given much explanation and I constantly had no idea who was who. It wasn’t that big of a deal, because giving them much more personality probably would have detracted from the actual story, but I got enough […]

Blog Tour Review: Damsel Distressed

Posted October 6, 2014 / Book Reviews / 12 Comments

Enhance the experience with the companion soundtrack, Imogen Unlocked, by the author’s band, Wedding Day Rain. Tracklist: Heavy No Goodbye Something About Sinking Don’t Wake Me Up Let Me Go My Strength Unseen Always Speak Too Late The End is Just the Beginning Breathe Easy Edge of the Fall CD Info: Damsel Distressed is the story of Imogen, a girl who’s survived the years after her mother’s death by focusing squarely on her best friend, Grant, musical theatre, and lots of cheese. The book is full of humor and heart, and also contains a few surprises. Full page sketches are scattered throughout the novel, and each one contains a QR code that corresponds to a song from the book’s soundtrack. Imogen Unlocked is a 12-song album of original music written by the author and her husband Daron as their indie-pop band, Wedding Day Rain. Together, the book Damsel Distressed and the soundtrack Imogen Unlocked work together to tell the story of a girl who might just make her own Happily Ever After, if she can just hold herself together. This book was a lot darker than I thought it would be, but it really worked! Wow. It’s actually hard to put my thoughts together. The book is about Imogen, who lost her mother years ago and is still coping with his father’s new marriage and evil stepsister…and seriously, the stepsister is EVIL. This book is supposed to be a play on Cinderella, except focuses on the “stepsister’s side.” Honestly, I […]

ARC Review: Trial By Fire

Posted October 3, 2014 / Book Reviews / 5 Comments

Oh god oh god this book!! Wow. Within the first chapter, I already knew I was going to love it. I was a bit nervous heading into it because I had just finished about two or three months of reading pretty much only contemporary romance. (A lot of lighter reads for the summer, ya know?) I was itching to get my hands on something a little heavier and paranormal, so this surprise book mail was delivered at exactly the right time. Lily, a girl who (in our world) is extremely sick and allergic to everything, has a seizure at a party one Friday night. She ends up being transported to a very different world that is also located in Salem, Mass. The alternate universe piece was REALLY freaking cool. Lily’s other self, Lillian, is an evil witch who has been killing her own people for some unknown reason that is supposed to help their world. The world-building in this book was just amazing. Realistically, this book was definitely an introduction to the rest of the series in terms of setting up this alternate universe. The reader slowly learned about witches, crucibles, the Woven, the Outlanders… it was so detailed and complex! Because of all of this world-building and setting the stage for the next books in the series, there was a little less action than I expected. They spent a lot of time laying low and figuring out what to do next while Lily uncovered her abilities. It was interesting, […]

Review: Pretty Little Liars series

Posted October 2, 2014 / Book Reviews / 11 Comments

Like I recently did for the Private series, I’m posting another brief review for an entire series. The FINAL book in the Pretty Little Liars series is coming out in December. In honor of the end of an important era in my reading life, I’ll debrief everyone on the series if they SOMEHOW haven’t heard of it. And no, the books are nothing like the TV show. The first few episodes were similar, but that’s where it ended. The characters’ names are the same and some of their personalities; the show’s general plotline is not the same as the books. I’m going to review all 15 books in one brief post. Well clearly something’s working for me if I’ve been religiously reading the series since I was 15 years old. This is the one series I will read the book for IMMEDIATELY when it was released…even during my “reading dark ages” in college. Luckily they always came out in June and December, so I was able to read them over school breaks. BUT I digress. This series is great. Lots of people complain that they wish it would just end already, but I’ve been eagerly awaiting each new book just as much as the previous. It’s full of twists and turns. Just when the girls think they’ve figured something out, they are surprised by something else. It’s funny reading the description for the first book with all of the knowledge I have now, because things have changed so much since that […]

200 Word Review: Private series

Posted September 29, 2014 / Book Reviews / 5 Comments

In honor of my intentions to finally finish the Private series by Kate Brian, I’m going to post a brief review here for the first 12 books of the season. Yes, somehow I’ll review all twelve books in less than 200 words. I want to play catch up a little bit because I know once I read the final books, I’ll want to post those reviews. It’ll feel too weird posting them without having some other semblance of a review for the rest of the series. Without further ado, here are my thoughts on the entire Private series so far… The series is about one of my favorite topics: boarding schools. Reed heads off to Easton Academy, where she falls in with a group of rich girls in a sorority-esque “club” called Billings House. LONG, LONG story short – a lot of crazy shit happens with her and her friends over the course of their school years, like people getting murdered or going missing, vacations, fires, friend drama, administration trying to shut them down, breakups and makeups, etc. I won’t get too spoilery, but there was a major TWIST at the end of the last book I read (#12 – Vanished). It didn’t really make a lot of sense and I wasn’t overly eager to get into the following books. Regardless, I have to finish the series off since it’s been an important part of my reading life since middle school. If you like books about boarding schools and “mean girls,” this […]

Review: Just Like Fate

Posted September 26, 2014 / Book Reviews / 4 Comments

Wow, this book left me sitting there with a dumbfounded look on my face. The story is about Caroline, who is faced with a tough decision in the wake of grandmother’s impending death. Should she escape her family for the night to attend a party with her friend Simone? Or should she stay with them by her grandmother’s side? This decision splits her world in two: she lives out both of the timelines for the reader to enjoy. The book alternated chapters between STAY and GO, which was surprisingly not too confusing. Sometimes I had to peek down at the bottom corner of the page and remind myself of which one I was reading, but otherwise it was not hard to follow. What a freaking cool concept. I’ve been obsessed with the parallel life theme for as long as I can remember. Going into this book, I assumed the GO timeline would piss me off because I couldn’t imagine leaving my family in a time like that, especially for a party. Somehow I actually much preferred the GO timeline to the STAY one. I don’t know why; I think the STAY decision led to more boring consequences for me. One of my favorite things about the book was the “glimpes” into the other timeline from the one we were reading. For example, she would say “I could never imagine a world where ___ happened” …. while that exact thing was happening in the other timeline! It was really, really cool. […]

200 Word Review: That Summer

Posted September 24, 2014 / Book Reviews / 6 Comments

I don’t want to say I was disappointed, because that seems a bit harsh, but it definitely didn’t exceed my expectations. Why? The characters – ALL of them – were so selfish. I get that there was (kind of?) a reason for it in terms of the book’s moral, but I just found myself SO sick of their shit. Nothing. Happened. At. All. The book took place over the course of a month or two and literally Haven worked, ran into her sister’s ex, complained about her life, and spent time with her friend. Oh, and there was a random supermodel show that pretty much added nothing to the plot. I’m okay with the fact that this book was only about family issues, but it was just missing the spark of something else. ANYTHING to get some more action. The moral/message of the book was pretty clear and I liked the way it ended. The narrator had the most childish voice. I get that the MC was 15, but holy shit it felt like a 12 year old. Overall, I did like the book. It didn’t blow me away and it certainly isn’t one of Dessen’s best, but I can’t say I regret listening to it.