Source: Purchased

Holiday Review: Let It Snow

Posted December 8, 2014 / Book Reviews / 7 Comments

Let It Snow is a compilation of three interconnected stories. I’ll review them each separately, then include an overall rating and my thoughts! The Jubilee Express by Maureen Johnson I absolutely LOVED the main character of this story, Jubilee. She was funny and adorable. The writing style was very quirky and definitely made me LOL at times. I immediately looked for other books by Maureen Johnson as I was reading this one. The story was certainly very predictable, but I didn’t care. I also LOOOVED Stuart, our main boy. He was adorable, smart, and just seemed like an all-around great guy. I would totally read this as a full-length story just to get more of these characters! The ending was adorable but it definitely left me wanting more. I think it was a good ending , but I would seriously love to see more of these two and what happens next. I can’t think of really anything I disliked about this one. It’s almost hard to review because you would have to read it yourself to really get how fun and interesting Stuart and Jubilee were. A Cheertastic Christmas Miracle by John Green Oh John Green, you never cease to amaze me. A lot of reviewers seemed somewhat disappointed by this story, so I was a little nervous, but I ended up really enjoying it. It’s been a while since I’ve read John Green (I’ve read all of his books, but last read TFIOS the year it came out. Due for […]

Holiday Review: Ex-Mas

Posted December 5, 2014 / Book Reviews / 5 Comments

I’ve had my eye on this book for a long time, considering how much I love Kate Brian. Up until this year, I never really considered reading holiday-themed books and just never picked this one up from the store. I’m glad I finally did! I sat down the day after Thanksgiving and read it in under two hours. Lila is a popular girl, dating her best friend’s older brother, and about to throw the party of the year while her parents are out of town. Her brother and his best friend decide that they need to venture to the North Pole to save Santa in light of global warming, and Lila is forced to travel with her ex-boyfriend (Beau, her brother’s friend’s brother) to get the boys back before her parents come home. I absolutely loved the road trip that they took. It was fun reading about their mini-adventures and mishaps along the way. The book was predictable, but still had some cute, unique parts. Kate Brian is one of my favorite authors, so I wasn’t surprised that she crafted a well-written holiday tale. There is somewhat of a love triangle, but it was well-done in the sense that you know who she’s going to end up with It was a great story of second chances, both romantically and family-wise. Lila was kind of annoying at first because you can tell that she really had to prove herself and change herself to become popular. I didn’t like that about her […]

Holiday Review: Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares

Posted December 1, 2014 / Book Reviews / 12 Comments

Man guys. This book. I have a lot of feelings. I instantly loved it because of the setting – New York City! And more specifically, the Strand!!! This book is a book lover’s dream. It really helped that I finally made a journey to the Strand last month, so I was able to picture it really well. The book follows Dash and Lily as they communicate through a red notebook all around NYC. They inevitably have some interesting in-person meetups towards the end that were kind of funny too. The premise of the book was so, so great. We get to see the two of them travel around the city and come up with clever little scavenger hunts for each other. This book is perfect for people who haven’t been to NYC and want to go, or people who have been plenty of times and love it. I think this book is reminiscent of John Green’s work, in that it tries to ingest a lot of meaning and insightfulness into its pages. It felt like it was trying too hard. This could have been a cute, simple read, but it was a little too heavy in places it didn’t need to be. Some parts actually confused me, which should not happen during a contemporary YA romance. Dash: I think Dash is a really interesting, complex character. I’m honestly still kind of undecided on if I even like him. He was very bitter towards the holiday season, which is fine, […]

Review: White Hot Kiss

Posted November 19, 2014 / Book Reviews / 10 Comments

I have a lot of mixed thoughts on this one. First, I definitely didn’t read the description. I’m not sure why, because that’s normally something I read multiple times before and during my reading. Layla is half-demon, half-gargoyle, but her allegiance has always been towards the gargoyles (Wardens). She helps the Wardens keep demons at bay and lives with them on their compound. Suddenly there’s an uptick in demon activity and Layla is the reason. The biggest thing I liked about this book is that it’s incredibly unique. I’ve read and heard of a lot of paranormal books, but this one is definitely different. Demons and gargoyles? Sounds kind of cool. How the heck did JLA come up with this stuff?? A lot of parts of the book were confusing to me because there were so many types of demons to keep track of. Also, Layla talks about how the Wardens “went public” at one point, so the general public knows they exist but don’t know what exactly they do aside from protect them. The story was unique, which was the biggest selling point for me, but I just could not get into it. I was never in the mood to dive in and sit down to read it. I ended up taking a break in the middle of the book to read something else because I just wasn’t making any progress. Luckily, that worked – I was able to pick up where I left off and was suddenly more […]

Review: Scoring Wilder

Posted November 5, 2014 / Book Reviews / 2 Comments

The character development was pretty good. The main character, Kinsley, was honest and funny. I loved that the book started the summer before college when she had just moved into the Rookie soccer house on campus. The reader is able to watch her develop friendships rather than picking up in the middle of a character’s life/high school career. The humor between characters in this book was certainly my style. Like Boomerang, this was a fun and sexy New Adult book that I enjoyed. I don’t like the ones that are too angsty. Kinsley and Becca’s friendship was on point for me. I kept highlighting funny parts because they sounded exactly like my friends in all of their interactions. I loved the three main characters: Kinsley, Becca, and Liam. That dynamic really worked for me and we learned a good amount about each of their lives. There could have been a little more characterization but there was enough to work with and really enjoy the three of them. Yes, this book was sexual as hell. So much swooning over Liam Wilder, holy shit. I don’t normally read New Adult so I’m always surprised about how much sex is actually in the books, but this one wasn’t all about that. There was a good balance. The biggest thing I liked about this book was how readable and entertaining it was. I just smiled a lot and enjoyed myself. Sometimes that’s all you really need from a book! Some of the humor was kind […]

Review: Poisoned Apples

Posted November 3, 2014 / Book Reviews / 2 Comments

So when I was in college, I did a Directed Study course for my minor (Literary and Cultural Studies). It basically meant that I joined up with one of my LCS teachers and wrote out a semester-long research paper about a topic of my choosing. Because this teacher was one of two that taught me everything I needed to know about being a feminist, I knew I needed to work with her. She taught the art history-related courses at my school, which was a big time business university, so she was more than happy to work one-on-one with someone who was actually interested in her expertise and wasn’t just taking her courses because they needed the credit. ANYWAYS this book is pretty much exactly in line with what I wrote my paper on. I wish this was published two years ago. My paper was basically about feminist artists whose work depict and work against gendered stereotypes, fairy tales, and expectations. SOO in summary, you can see why I was super excited about this book. I went out to the store and bought the physical copy because 1) I knew I needed it on my shelf and 2) I heard the illustrations were gorgeous and didn’t think my Kindle screen would do them justice. Overall, this book did not disappoint! It’s difficult for me to rate poetry or say if it was “good” or “bad,” because that’s all up to interpretation. For someone who is way more interested in this subject […]

Review: Catching Jordan

Posted October 27, 2014 / Book Reviews / 4 Comments

HOW have I gone so long without reading a book about football? The only hobby/interest I have outside of reading? JESUS. Catching Jordan was always kind of on my radar but I literally purchased it on a whim when it was on sale for Kindle. I also decided to read it on a whim because my library books didn’t sound appealing at the moment. I absolutely loved Breathe, Annie, Breathe even though I wasn’t expecting to (not sure why, most likely because running = death)… so I knew that reading a book by Miranda Kenneally about FOOTBALL would be even better. I was right. This is a story about a Jordan, a female quarterback for her high school team. She’s the daughter of some football prodigies but doesn’t get as much attention from them as she’d like because, of course, she’s a girl. She has dreams of playing football for Alabama and won’t let anything stop her… not even when a swoon-worthy, incredibly talented QB moves to to town and joins the team. It was so great watching Jordan find herself and learning about her friendships. There were so many instances where I expected her to keep her feelings bottled up but she surprised me every time; this book had so many opportunities to slip into the predictable YA books I’ve become all too familiar with. You know, the MC refuses to share their feelings or lies about them when people close to her try to help. This book was […]

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: 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 […]