All posts tagged book reviews

Ever the Hunted is Ever Wonderful

By Brookelorren on 4 Comments

Ever the Hunted CoverEver the Hunted was a wonderful book.  I discovered it as I was looking through upcoming titles.  Once a King looked really interesting, but since it was the third in the series, I figured that I better start at book 1.  I was in luck, because Ever the Hunted was available at the library (I’m on the waiting list at the moment for Ever the Brave).

The book grabbed me from the beginning pages.  Our heroine, Britta, is in a tough situation.  Her papa died, and the king is ready to come and take her lands, because she can’t inherit it.  She hasn’t seen her ex-boyfriend Cohen in over a year, but that doesn’t matter anyway, because she could never marry him anyway: he has a noble heritage and can’t marry an outcast like her anyway.

After she gets caught poaching, she is asked to go find the murderer: her ex-boyfriend Cohen.

Dun dun dun!!!

If you want to find out what happens, you’ll have to read the book.  As the story progresses, we find out that things aren’t exactly as they initially appear to be.  Britta finds out that she is not exactly the person she thought she was.  She finds out that there is more that she can do than just finding out who killed her papa — she needs to try to save the kingdom itself.  Even if it costs her her life.

I loved this book from the very beginning.  The characters’ struggles grabbed me from the start, and they were well-written.  There were many supporting characters, many which seemed to have their own personalities and desires.

The world was interesting.  There are two main countries in this story, both of which seem to have their own unique personalities.  The two countries are at the verge of war, and you can feel the tension as a result.

This book is suitable for teens of all ages.

I’m looking forward to getting to the front of the waiting list at the library for Ever the Brave.  I can’t wait to read more of this trilogy!

The Kiss Quotient Adds Up!

By Brookelorren on 10 Comments

I recently saw a review for The Kiss Quotient and saw a review that made it look good.  The main character is an econometrician who has Asperger’s.  You had me at math, LOL!  It certainly looked like a unique kind of love story.  I had recently read a string of dark fics where the guy and the girl aren’t together at the end of the story, so I wanted something different.  We can’t read Holocaust stories and stories with war all the time!

Our protagonists are Stella, the econometrician with Asperger’s, and Michael, who works part time as an escort to help solve his money problems.  Stella has really bad luck with relationships.  She really doesn’t care for them, but her parents are bugging her about grandchildren.  Stella decides to hire Michael to teach her about relationships and sex.

Michael is getting a little tired of his job, but he needs to keep doing it because he needs the money.  When Stella hires him, he’s expecting an old lady, but he’s happily surprised when he finds a lady that he’s quite attracted to.  He doesn’t think that she needs to hire an escort, and initially doesn’t want to work with her (she wants to hire him for more than one Friday, but he has a rule to not work with someone more than once), but he eventually agrees.

I liked the characters.  Even though I don’t have Asperger’s, I can see a lot of myself in Stella.  Like Stella, boys have never asked me out (there’s a reason why I met my husband on the internet).  I rehearse conversations in my head before I have them, and sometimes I almost have a panic attack when I have to call someone on the phone.  So I found myself identifying with her quite a bit.  She is also a person who has interests and dreams, and is not a stereotype.  Michael is a kind person, which is exactly what Stella needs as she gains confidence with relationships.  He has family and friends that make his life fuller.  As you read the story, you discover why he needs all of this money.

The Kiss Quotient is not a young adult book; it has some scenes that are not appropriate for non-adult teens.

If you’re looking for a light book, The Kiss Quotient might be for you.  It’s a cute little read that will keep you entertained.  I would consider reading Hoang’s next book, The Bride Test (which deals with Michael’s cousin Khai, who also has Asperger’s) next year.

Harbor Me is Preachy but Potentially Useful

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Harbor Me coverI recently read Harbor Me by Jacqueline Woodson.  It is a middle grade book that I received through Penguin’s First to Read program.  So far, I’ve had pretty good luck with this program, getting chosen for two books already.  Anyway, Harbor Me is a middle grade book where a bunch of kids talk about contemporary issues that kids face today.  While I thought that it was good, it came across as a little preachy.

The kids in Harbor Me are six kids of different races that go to a mostly-minority school in the Bronx.  The narrator is an eleven-year-old mixed race girl whose father is in prison (during the story you discover why).  These six kids are placed in a “special” classroom, and have a caring teacher that they like.  At the beginning of the story, their teacher starts putting them in the ARTT room every Friday for them to talk.  ARTT stands for “A Room to Talk”.

I did enjoy reading about their stories.  Esteban’s father was taken by immigration; Tiago is Puerto Rican and is upset when people tell him to not speak Spanish with his mother.  Another kid was told that he couldn’t play with toy guns any more because his parents were afraid that he’d be shot.  All of the kids have things they have to deal with.

This book addresses a lot of situations that kids might be going through these days.  A middle-grade reader might find this useful if they are going through difficult times as well.  This book is good in that it addresses these topics and might make kids feel a little less alone; it also may help kids feel compassion for other children that they may know that could be going through these things.  A little compassion is always a good thing.

The kids behaved like you would expect 11 year olds to behave.  Since there are six characters in this story and it’s fairly short, it really didn’t get the time to allow the reader to get to know them incredibly well.

That, I think, may be where this story falls a little short.  The book mainly focuses on the issues that these kids are having with the hot-button political issues of our day.  11 year olds might be also having trouble with peer pressure, girls, school work, etc., but these kids are all dealing with race issues and the like; in reality, kids are dealing with everything all at once.  This book feels a little preachy in that almost the entire story is politics-driven

Perhaps it is the setting that these kids are in, but I think that it paints these issues too stereotypically.  My kids are mixed-race.  When the boy came to school one day and talked about how his parents no longer allow him to play with Nerf or water guns because they’re afraid of their child getting accidentally shot by the police, I think of my own boy, who likes to go to the neighbor’s house down the street and have water-gun fights.  Never once in my life have I ever thought to tell him to not play those games because of his brown skin.  Maybe it’s different for us because we live in a nice neighborhood where people aren’t afraid to leave their garage doors open all day, and not the Bronx.  I felt that perhaps people might come away with the wrong impression though, thinking that all parents of brown children are afraid of their kids getting shot by the police if they play with guns.  That is simply not the case.

Overall, while I think that this is a book that definitely points out problematic issues of our day, I think that it focuses a little bit too much on that.  This book would have been better if it would have been a little longer and made these characters more real than just kids with stereotypical problems.

Harbor Me is scheduled to be released on August 28th, but you can pre-order it now.

1,000 Years, 1,000 People, and 18 Years Late

By Brookelorren on 6 Comments

1,000 Years, 1,000 People Cover1,000 Years, 1,000 People is a book that ranks the 1,000 most influential people of the last millennium.  I just finished reading the book this week; you might be thinking “aren’t we 18 years into the new millennium?”  Well, we are, but I finally got around to reading this book.

This isn’t a book that you really sit down and read all in one sitting, like a lot of the books that I’ve reviewed here.  Even though I bought this book years ago, it was misplaced until just recently.  I decided to start reading it earlier this year.  I typically would only read about ten entries a day.

This book ranks the people who had the most lasting influence over the last millennium.  Since it’s hard to judge people’s lasting influence if they’re still alive, there are some people that were really influential in the 1900s that didn’t make the book (still, 136 people did).  There are people represented in this book from every century, although 417 people that lived in the 1800s made the list, so it’s still fairly skewed towards people that lived more recently.

Even though 1,000 Years, 1,000 People does represent worldwide influence, the book is still fairly heavily skewed towards the United States (267 of the people in the book lived there).  Then again, the US has been the most influential country in the world since about World War II.  This book was published in 1998, which was right after the Cold War had seemingly ended and was before 9/11.  It was a time when the United States seemed to have an unprecedented influence over the world.

Each entry has the person’s name, the years they lived, a short caption about them, and an approximately 150 word blurb about what they’ve done.  The only exception is Fernão Lopes, who was ranked 780.  Instead of a caption saying why he was important, there is a footnote notation after his name.  The footnote reads “1. father of the footnote”.  Each entry is fairly witty like this, as well as being informative.

With 1,000 people on the list, there’s bound to be some people that you don’t recognize.  The highest ranked people are bound to be people that you recognize: Johannes Gutenberg, Martin Luther, William Shakespeare, etc.  At the bottom of the list, there were a lot of people that I had never heard of, like Bernard Cornfield and Joseph Bramah.  Even at the bottom of the list, almost everybody did something that you’ll be familiar with, like inventing the stethoscope or disposable diapers.

All sorts of people are represented in this book.  There are artists, inventors, politicians, and even some sports heroes.  It seemed to be a nice balance.

1,000 Years, 1,000 People is a book that you can read and learn something interesting from.  If you’re interested in learning about a wide variety of historical figures, but don’t want to read a ton of biographies or peruse dry entries in Wikipedia, you might find this book worth reading.

Don’t Let Summer Days and Summer Nights Pass You By!

By Brookelorren on 6 Comments

Summer Days and Summer Nights CoverLast week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was on short stories, and I was drawn by Summer Days and Summer Nights.  It was recommended by more than one reader.  Fortunately, they had a copy at the library that I just happened to be going to that evening.  So I picked up the book and decided to read all of the wonderful stories inside.

One of the things that I found interesting about this book is that it had books by authors that I was already familiar with, like Veronica Roth and Cassandra Clare.  The book also has several stories written by authors that I had heard about, but hadn’t had the chance to read before.

I was originally planning on reviewing Throne of Glass today, but since we’re in the middle of summer now and the season is flying by, I postponed that review until September.  Maybe by that time the library will have some of the other books in that series available for me to read.

Summer Days and Summer Nights has a wide variety of genres of stories to choose from, written by authors that tend to write in a variety of different styles.  Some you might like more than others.

In addition to different genres, there are different kinds of relationships represented here.  Some end up happy, some sad; some stories involve same-sex couples, others involve people of color.  Representation seems to be a big deal today in the bookish world; while you can’t represent everybody in twelve stories, it’s not a completely white, straight collection of stories.

Here are some of my favorites:

  • “Inertia” by Veronica Roth:  I don’t think there’s anything that she’s written that I didn’t like, including this short story (okay, I didn’t like chapter 50 of Allegiant, but I try to pretend that never happened).  I was crying at the top of page 202 (I read the 2016 hardback edition).  I actually had to stop reading for a minute to just cry.  It was just so lovely.  And sad.

     

    “It was a good story, right?” he said.  “Our story, I mean.”
    “The best.”

    I’m tearing up just reading and writing those lines.  Oh, and there were a few more pages after this one.  The ending was wonderful too.

  • “A Thousand Ways This Could Go Wrong” by Jennifer E. Smith:  This was a lovely story about a girl who had a crush on a boy with Asperger’s all year at school, and then finally runs into him during the summer and plays basketball with him.  Will things change when she finds out that he has Asperger’s?  You’ll just have to read this story.  It’s really sweet.

  • “The Map of Tiny Perfect Things” by Lev Grossman:  This is another sweet story.  In this story, our POV character is reliving the same day, August 4th, over and over again, like in Groundhog Day.  At the end of the story, we find out why he had been living the same day over and over and over again, and it’s just perfect.

Summer Days and Summer Nights was a wonderful collection of stories, written by a lot of authors that you are probably familiar with.  I hope you get the chance to check this one out before summer slips away.  I enjoyed these stories so much that I already hope to review its companion book, My True Love Gave to Me, on December 6th.

The House of One Thousand Eyes is an Important Book

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The House of One Thousand Eyes coverI was recently given the opportunity to read The House of One Thousand Eyes by Michelle Barker, in exchange for an honest review.  This is an important book to read, especially if you are unfamiliar with the days when the Soviet Union and East Germany existed.

The House of One Thousand Eyes is set in East Germany in the year 1983.  Back in those days, there were informants in East Germany everywhere.  You never knew who you could trust.  The German secret police, or Stasi, could scoop you up and take you to prison, or make you disappear completely.  As an aside, I recently was watching a video on security and privacy where they mentioned that the Stasi would sometimes go into a person’s house and move things around just to mess with them and make them think they were crazy.  This was a place where real repression happened.

Our protagonist, Lena, spent some time in a mental hospital prior to the beginning of the book.  Her uncle, Erich, is a well-known writer.  One day, he just disappears.  Throughout the book, Lena tries to find out what happened to him.  We follow her investigation as she works as a cleaning lady at Stasi headquarters.  As we read the book, we find out what she found.

The book was enjoyable, but it wasn’t my favorite.  I’m sure that there are people that will like this book more than I did, but I probably will not reread this book.  This book is a book that is important more than anything else.  I can’t think of any other fiction written during this time period, but I believe that it is more important than ever for people to know what happened there.

What I Liked About the Book

The book was well-written, and the characters were interesting.  From what I know about East Germany at the time, I think that the things that happened (people disappearing, people ordering things and not getting them for eons, etc.) were realistically portrayed.  I liked the use of German, and especially German slang used in the country at the time.  The book had some suspenseful parts where I found myself trying to read as fast as possible because I wanted to find out what happened.

What I Didn’t Like About the Book

I think that I’m the only person that I’ve seen review this book so far that didn’t think that it was the greatest thing since sliced bread.  While I did like it, I didn’t think it was as über-wonderful as some people did.  The main character, Lena, didn’t exactly make the smartest decisions.  I find it difficult to believe that someone growing up in East Germany would be as dense as she was when it came to asking questions about her uncle after he disappeared.  As she was investigating what happened to her uncle, she seemed to be a little more foolhearty than most people in her situation would be.  When she has to make an important decision about her future towards the end of the book, I find it difficult to believe that she makes the decision that she did.

Trigger Warnings

While this book is being marketed as a YA book, I don’t believe that this book is really appropriate for younger YA readers.  Lena is sexually assaulted on multiple occasions, by the same person; the attacks get worse throughout the book.  I didn’t particularly like this part of the book, although I do realize that it is probably a realistic portrayal of the way things could have happened.

Overall…

The House of One Thousand Eyes is a book that you should consider reading, especially if you are unfamiliar with the time before the Berlin Wall fell down.  We are in a time period where our privacy is becoming less and less and the power of the state is increasing.  It’s good to read books like this in order to understand what could happen if a country became this powerful and overbearing.  While it wasn’t the best book I’ve read this month so far, it was good for me to have read it.

Another book about East Germany that you may be interested in is Deep Undercover by Jack Barsky.  That book is nonfiction and deals with an East German spy that went to America, but it’s also a good book to read as he continually had to deal with his handlers back in the Communist world.  That book was one of my favorites from last year.

This book will be released on September 11th, but it is available for pre-order now.

Use of Force Was Not My Favorite

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I recently read Brad Thor’s Use of Force, which is a good book, but was not one of my favorites.  The Kindle version of the book was $1.99, which was a good deal.  I’m not sure if I would have wanted to pay the normal full price for this book, but it did provide a few good hours of entertainment.

The book deals with terrorism, ISIS, and the recent refugee crisis, which makes the story interesting.  I enjoyed the main storyline of Use of Force, where the main character, Scot Harvath, was trying to track down the bad guys.  This part of the story was paced well, and was enjoying.  I also liked how the story took place partly during Burning Man, which made the book even more timely.

I normally enjoy Brad Thor’s books, but this one was not my favorite.  There were several chapters devoted to a battle that Harvath and his team fought against some of the terrorists, which some people might find interesting, but it didn’t really capture my interest.  There was another subplot where a good-guy-turned-bad-guy tried to go after some of Scot Harvath’s coworkers; it didn’t particularly grab my attention.  There was another subplot regarding a medical condition with one of the regular characters; it wasn’t resolved in this book, but if you read the entire series, it might add interest to the series.

Use of Force is an interesting book; however, if I was only going to read one Brad Thor book, it wouldn’t be my first choice.  I tend to enjoy his books, but there are other books that he’s done that I have liked more.

Echoes Worth Reading Reading Reading

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I recently had the opportunity to read Echoes, by Alice Reeds, in exchange for an honest review.  I enjoyed it quite a bit.  It is different than a lot of books out there, but that doesn’t make it any less readable.

Our main characters, Fiona and Miles, are going on an internship in Berlin.  They never have liked each other, and Fiona, at least, is not very excited at the prospect of working with him.  That’s where everything goes awry.  They find themselves stranded on a desert island with each other.  Alone.  Or do they?

The story goes back and forth between two timelines.  In one, Fiona and Miles are stranded on the deserted island.  In the other, the two are running for their lives in Berlin.  While I was reading it, I started to ask myself, how do these two timelines intersect?  After reading this book, I actually still don’t know.  The answer is still mysterious.

Over the course of the story (in both timelines) Fiona and Miles start to actually *gasp* like each other.  As they get to know each other, they discover that they’re both not quite what the other person expected.  I found that Miles was the more reasonable person here, although I can see where Fiona was coming from.  I won’t go over the details of why they originally developed an animosity towards each other in the first place, as that is explained in the book.

The world that Fiona and Miles are visiting is well set up.  During the Berlin scenes, I can tell that Ms. Reeds has actually been to Berlin, or at least went through the city virtually using google street view.  I have recently been working on a story where the characters are going through locations that I am familiar with, and the details that Ms. Reeds gives in her Berlin scenes are just as knowledgeable as the ones that I am writing about places that I am familiar with.

There is also some German in this book.  I happen to speak German, so I really like that aspect of the story, but if you don’t speak German, the surrounding context explains what it means.  Fiona doesn’t speak German either.  There is also one line of Russian in this story (I also speak some Russian).  Again, Fiona doesn’t speak Russian, and the story explains what it means.

Despite this being a really strange story, I liked it a lot.  I couldn’t put it down.  The book went with me everywhere, all day long, and only put it down when I had to do those pesky life things.  I read the first chapter before I went to bed one night, and finished it the next evening.

The ending makes me think that there should be another story in this series, although it doesn’t look like there is one planned, at least according to Goodreads.  It ends in something of  cliffhanger.  If it does end in a small cliffhanger, then it seems fairly appropriate for this book.  As you read Echoes, you discover that almost nothing is as it appears (except for, probably, Fiona and Miles).

If you enjoy interesting books with puzzles to solve, you will probably like Echoes.  It would be nice if there ends up being a sequel, as the book is well set up for one, but if there is not, it fits into the style of the rest of the book.

I Love The Young Elites

By Brookelorren on 2 Comments

Young Elites coverToday I will be reviewing the Young Elites trilogy, so it looks like I will be reviewing all nine of Marie Lu’s books this year.  My review for Wildcard will come out September 18th or 19th, and I’ll probably end up reviewing her Batman: Nightwalker book in September as well.  Like my review of the Legend trilogy last month, I will review all three books at once.

The Young Elites trilogy is comprised of three books:  The Young Elites, The Rose Society, and The Midnight Star.  I like the second two books better than the first book of the trilogy; in fact, I currently have two Young Elites related fanfics in progress, and they are more influenced by the second two books.

The three books follow the story of Adelina Amouteru.  As a child, she caught the blood fever and one of her eyes become infected and had to be burned out, leaving a scar.  She also was marked with silver hair.  Although she was still pretty, her scar left her marked: she was a malfetto.

Many people who caught the blood fever as children survived with marks of various types and lived as malfettos.  People hated and feared them.  Adults who caught the blood fever died.

Some children who got the blood fever eventually discovered that they had supernatural powers.  These people became known as The Young Elites.

The blood fever also infected her sister Violetta, who survived and remained unmarked.  Violetta remained pretty, and was the favorite of their father.  Over time, Adelina became resentful and bitter towards her sister.

Until one night, her father decided to sell her to a wealthy merchant… as a mistress.

Adelina wasn’t having that.  She decided to escape instead.  In the process of escaping, she accidentally killed her father — and discovered that she had the power to conjure up illusions.  She was an Elite.

She is taken in by a group of Elites known as The Dagger Society.  They taught her how to use her powers.  She falls in love with the leader of The Dagger Society.  While all this was happening, she discovers that she is trapped into making impossible choices.  She doesn’t know who to trust, and we are led along through all three books.

Themes

Trust and rejection are a huge part of this story.  Adelina feels like she is rejected by everybody in her life.  Society rejects her for being a malfetto.  She’s rejected by her father.  She feels like she is rejected by her sister.  Then, she is rejected some more.  The more she faces rejection, the more bitter and dark her soul becomes.  When she achieves power over others, she takes it out on them.  She becomes one of those wicked people that you read about as the villains in many other stories.  Yet… you don’t wish ill for her.

Another theme in this story seems to be about mental illness.  As Adelina becomes more powerful, she starts seeing hallucinations and has nightmares.  If she existed in the 21st century and not in a fantasy novel, we would say that she had a mental illness.  Her hallucinations only contribute to the darkness in her heart, until it almost seems impossible for her to crawl out of this dark hole that she’s dug for herself.  My theory on this trilogy is… that she would never have been able to crawl out of this hole on her own.

But, never fear, that is not the end of her story.  A third theme of this story is unconditional love.  There are people that love Adelina for who she is and not what she can do for them.  These are the people that finally help her redeem herself in the bittersweet end.

Setting

I love the setting for this book.  The world is a fantasy, medieval-type world (quite unlike Legend, which is a future dystopian setting).  Each part of the world has a different flavor to it.  The world that Adelina is born into seems to have the flavor of Italy, and in particular, Venice.  The northern part of the world reminds me of the Celts.  In the South, where Adelina’s ancestors hail from, the world seems like medieval Persia.

I felt that this was a really clever way to set up the world.  In my Young Elites WIP, Saving Adelinetta, I’ll be extending on the theme of her settings; but I still have about 1/3 of the first draft to do, and it’s going to need a lot of editing, so who knows when I will finish it.

Overall

This is one of my favorite stories.  In order to write fanfiction, I have to spend a lot of time reading the original books, getting into the character’s heads, and studying what the story is trying to say.  I’ve only written for four fandoms, and this is one of them.  The Young Elites trilogy is good enough for me to want to live in these character’s heads and reread the books enough to write fanfics based on it.  I think that’s enough of an endorsement to say that I really like it.

My Real Name is Hanna is Really Good

By Brookelorren on 2 Comments

My Real Name is Hanna is a really good book.  Last year I read quite a lot of 20th century books, including Defying Hitler; I also regularly attend a Russian meetup group.  When I had the opportunity to read a book about a Jewish Ukrainian girl during World War II in exchange for an honest review, I figured that I had to read it.  I was not disappointed.

At the beginning of the book, we meet Hanna and her family.  They are a observant Jewish family who won’t even light a fire on the Sabbath: they pay for their neighbor to light the fire for them.  She has a normal family, attends school with her best friend Leon, and lives a typical Ukrainian life.  Even through they sometimes have to pledge their loyalty to one government or another (first Stalin and the Soviet Union, then Germany), they still live decently.

Hanna and her family begin to hear rumors about things happening to other Jews in faraway places.  At first, they are insulated from these problems because they live in a rural area.  Eventually, Hanna’s family is affected by Hitler’s rules for Jews.  First, her family is asked to wear armbands marking them as Jews (her family rebels against this order).  Then, they are given fewer food rations than their non-Jewish neighbors.  They start hiding fleeing Jews in their barn.  Eventually, things get so bad that Hanna’s family, as well as Leon’s family, have to flee their homes and hide.

Throughout the remainder of this book, they struggle to survive while in hiding.  Their circumstances get progressively worse, and when it looks like the family won’t be able to make it, the Russians finally take over their town and they are able to return to society.

My Real Name is Hanna is a book that you won’t want to put down.  I wanted to know what would happen to their family next.  How would they find food?  Will Hanna and Leon become more than friends?  You grow to care about Hanna and her family as they go through these struggles.  Hanna is a likeable girl, and even though you know she is going to survive (Hanna is telling this story as an adult), you still want to root for her.

With everything that is going on in the world, books like My Real Name is Hanna are more important than ever.  If you read the news, there is a growing hatred for “otherness” in both the United States and in Europe.  This is not only a good book; it is also a reminder that tragedies like this could happen again if we don’t remain vigilant.

This book will be available on September 15th, but you can pre-order it now.