Why I YA

Recently I took a break from all my YA reading and read a new Barnes & Noble Recommends selection, The Light Between Oceans by M. L. Steadman.  This was a very good book; beautifully written and intriguing.  However, it reminded of the main reason why I mostly stick to YA these days: because "adult" literature is just so freakin' depressing!  Life is hard enough when you're an adult, so why would you want to spend your few hours of escape submersing yourself in the depressing "adult" problems of others? 

One of the reasons I love YA books is that they're so refreshingly free of adult problems like marital strife, or dealing with the loss of a child, or all the other horrible things that we're forced to cope with when it's time for us to grow up.  I get tired of being a grown-up and having so much responsibility, so it's nice to get away from my life by spending a few hours here and there with characters whose problems range from worrying whether or not a cute guy is checking her out to wondering if that same cute guy is a vampire. 

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to slight teenagers or act like they don't have problems of a different kind that are all their own.  I remember the mean girls from junior high and high school and I wouldn't go back to that time in my own life for anything.

All I'm saying is that YA books don't bum me out the way "adult" fiction does.  If nothing else, you can usually at least count on a neatly-wrapped happily ever after, and lately for me, that makes it worth a read.

My Top 5 Reads Thus Far in 2012

I finished my 100th read of 2012 this morning and as I entered it into my log (yes, I keep a spreadsheet of everything I read, because I'm that nerdy!), I scrolled back through and reminisced about my favorite reads of the year (thus far). 

I recently finished reading Origin by Jessica Khoury, a debut YA book from a new, young author, just released on Sept. 4.  I had heard tons of hype about this book and it sounded really cool but I wasn't sure if it was something I wanted to buy.  I eventually caved and used some Amazon gift card money (thank you, Swagbucks, for keeping me in free Kindle books!) to download it for my Kindle.  (Sadly, this is the book I was 95% of the way through when my Kindle died, but the book was so good I'm not blaming it.  And also, now I have an excuse to preorder a Kindle Paperwhite!)  Anyway, I'm hoping to find the time to write up a full review of Origin but for now let me just say that this book is TOTES AMAZEBALLS!!!  It's not only in my top 5, it's in my top 2 (with Cinder, by Marissa Meyer).  It was one of those books where, after I finish reading it, I immediately want to go right back to the beginning and start reading it again. 

So, Origin.  And Cinder, obvs.  Close behind are Partials by Dan Wells (the hubs even loved this one), Divergent by Veronica Roth (which I actually have read twice this year), and A Million Suns by Beth Revis.  And yes, they are all YA books.  After 3 grueling years of dissecting "literary" tomes like Ulysses in graduate school, I feel I've earned the right to read nothing but YA fluff for the rest of my life if I so choose. 

True story.

Book Review: Angelfall by Susan Ee

To summarize:  This is a post-apocalyptic, dystopian world in which angels have come to earth and basically demolished everything and everyone.  Not a lot of people remain, and those who do are left to scavenge for themselves while steering clear of marauding scary angels.  And the angels are kidnapping children for some secret, sinister purpose.  The main character, Penryn, has a younger sister, Paige, who is disabled and is taken away by the angels.  To try to rescue her sister, Penryn forms an unlikely alliance with an angel who has himself borne the brunt of his fellow angels' cruelty.

And now, my thoughts on this novel.

This book has it all:

• A psychotic mother who stabs gang members in the chest with butter knives and then draws a pentagram on them with pink lipstick?  Check.  And who may or may not have been the cause of her younger daughter’s paralysis?  Check.  (And yikes!)
• Angels, angels, and more angels.  They come in all sizes and colors.  Some are even tiger-striped.  And they carry off children, bringing them home to roost in their…aeries?  Like big, freaky humanoid multi-colored eagles.  Or something.

Stephenie Meyer would be proud:

To Susan Ee’s credit, she did manage to make it ¼ of the way through this book before she started channeling Twilight.  But when she does, she dives right in:

“Then warmth envelopes me.  Firm muscles embrace me from the space where the cushions used to be.  I’m groggily aware of masculine arms wrapping themselves around me, their skin soft as a feather, their muscles steel velvet.”

The word “velvet” cropped up a couple more times, which I thought was unfortunate (Stephenie Meyer has forever ruined that word for me!), but I did appreciate that Ee made the romantic tension a more gradual thing, rather than the “instant connection” that’s so pervasive in YA lit these days.

Seriously though, jokes aside, this was actually a really good book.  Because it’s gotten so much hype on Amazon, and because it comes from an independent publisher (although I publish through Create Space myself), I was a bit skeptical.  Other independent books I’ve downloaded from Amazon have been poorly written and serious need of editing.  I was pleasantly surprised by how well-written this book was.

The story was very engaging.  It got a little slow at parts, but at the end things got REALLY crazy. 

One thing I really liked about this book is the way Ee portrays good and evil.  Unlike a lot of books, the lines are very blurry here—the characters predominantly fall in that gray area between, which is how it is in real life.  Good people do bad things and bad people do good things.  And a lot of the characters themselves are hybrids.  I love how Ee subtly uses this to question not only the definitions of “good” vs. “evil,” but also to show how you can’t put people (or angels) in a specific box. 

This book has so many layers.  Ee even manages to weave in a satirical indictment of how reliant our current society is technology.

Ee does a good job with character development, especially Penryn.  As the story unravels, you can really see Penryn having to adapt to her surroundings, open her mind, and grow as a character. 

So why are the angels here, suddenly wreaking mass destruction on earth?

This is the big question.  As it turns out, the angels themselves don’t have a clue and would like an answer as well.

If you liked this book, you might also enjoy reading:  Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor, The Mortal Instruments by Cassandra Clare, Blue Bloods by Melissa DeLaCruz

Casting Call (just because):
As I read this, I tried to picture who I could see playing these roles if this book were made into a movie.  Here's what I came up with:

Ian Smolderhotter, I mean Somerhalder, as Raffe…for obvious reasons.

 

I’m kind of liking Troian Bellisario for Penryn.  I don’t know.  She’s got that scrawny underfed look but she’s also really spunky.  I’d love to see her doing something action-y instead of just being uptight and paranoid and well, a liar.

And wouldn't the two of them be fun together?  I think so.

Book Review: Bones Are Forever by Kathy Reichs

I'd planned to cover Angelfall by Susan Ee as my first book review on this newly revamped blog.  And while I still promise to do that, I have to say a few words about Kathy Reichs' latest monstrosity, er, novel because I feel morally obligated to spare other readers the pain of experiencing this book.

Normally, I’m a fan of Kathy Reichs.  I’ve read all of her other books and really enjoyed most of them.  Until now.

The thing I like most about the Temperance Brennan novels is the amount of time spent detailing Brennan’s work as a forensic anthropologist.  The information she learns from the bones is what makes her unique and interesting, and consequently, is what really makes or breaks these books.  I think that was the main problem with this one: very little time was devoted to Brennan spending time with the bones.  Instead, she spends most of her time chasing a quarry all over Canada (a quarry who turns out to be mentally challenged, yet manages to outsmart Brennan, Ryan, and their Royal Mountie friend for quite some time).

Another problem I had with this book was the love triangle.  The on-again, off-again relationship between Brennan and Ryan has gotten tedious at this point, so Reichs decided to spice it up a bit by throwing in a second guy.  Great, just what this series needed.  Not.  And as usual, at the end of the book, Brennan had still made zilch progress romantically, despite the fact that she’s apparently the type of gal no guy will ever get over.

Which bring me to my next point.  I’m by no means a feminist, yet by the time I finished reading this book, I was somewhat offended by Reichs’ portrayal of female characters.  (Her heroine excepted, of course, who is such hot stuff that guys are always fighting over her!)  Brennan ragged on the physical appearance of practically every other woman she met in this book.  Most of the women she encountered were prostitutes, some of them mentally challenged, forced into a horrible lifestyle because they felt they had no other options.  They're deserving of pity, and instead of being sympathetic, Brennan's looking at them thinking about how very white-trash they are, or how fat they are (because apparently anyone who weighs more than 100 lbs. is basically obese), or how leathery their skin is, or how skanky their clothes are.  Really nice, Brennan. 

 

And since I get the vibe that Brennan is basically just Reichs herself with a fake name, I'm kind of disgusted with this woman's inflated opinion of herself.

But I think the biggest problem for me was the sheer implausibility of the plot.  It began with the discovery of several sets of bones, which turned out just to be a side-plot in the tale of a much bigger conspiracy that eventually got so convoluted and honestly, uninteresting, that I ended up not really caring at all.  I didn’t care about diamonds or drug dealers!  I wanted to know the story behind those bones, which Reichs finally wrapped up for me as an aside in the space of about a paragraph tacked on at the end. 

And of course, as in every Temperance Brennan novel, Good Ole Tempe manages to get herself kidnapped at the end.  You would think one of these days she would wise up and learn to recognize a trap when she sees one, or at least develop the good sense to call and give Ryan a head's-up before she willingly walks into said trap.  But alas, some people never learn.

And having said all that, I may have had my fill of Temperance Brennan.  The TV show got so implausible I quit watching midway through last season, and we'll see if I even crack open the next book.  Doubtful.

September 2012 TBR Pile

What books am I currently crushing on?  Here are the titles I'm most wanting to read right now:

Isolation: A Lost Tale of the Partials Sequence by Dan Wells - LOVED Partials and can't wait to read this short back story.  Cy has already read it (before me!  def. a first!) and liked it.

Origin by Jessica Khoury - A lot of hype about this book.  Trying to wait it out and get it for free from paperbackswap.com, but I'll probably give in and get it for my Kindle before then.

The Lost Code by Kevin Emerson

Outpost by Ann Aguirre - REALLY hoping this is as good as Enclave was!

Lucid by P. T. Michelle - second in a series by a self-published author.  I enjoyed the first book so I'd love to give this one a try too.

Arena One - another from an independent publisher.  Heard a lot of hype about this - it's been compared to The Hunger Games.  I bought it along with Angelfall, which I just finished reading, and which turned out to be a surprisingly good read, so now I'm wanting to give Arena One a try as well.

And, since I just realized the above are ALL YA reads, an "adult" book I'm wanting to check out (literally - I'm on the waiting list at the library) is The Light Between Oceans by ML Stedman.  It's a B&N Recommends book right now, and their selections are generally pretty good.

Back on the Grid

It's been a long, long while since I've updated this blog.

As I am now employed full-time as the stay-at-home mom of a two-year-old and an almost-five-month-old, I haven't been able to find much time for writing lately.  But I've read some good books over the past couple of weeks, and they've inspired me to get back to doing what I love, even if it's only for a stolen hour or two, snatched during the kids' naps or after they are in bed for the night.

So what am I currently working on?  Well, lately, I've been sticking to the genres I love best (and consequently, write best): young adult and sci-fi.  I'm about to start tackling my 3rd pass of the novel I completely for NaNoWriMo last year, entitled Alternation.  (Although I'm not sold on that title.)  I was very pleased with how this novel turned out and thought it was one of my better efforts.  However, I just can't seem to get the voice exactly right.  It's told from the first-person point-of-view of a teenaged boy named Asher, and since I obviously have no idea what it's like actually to be a teenaged boy, I feel like the voice isn't coming across legit.  For my second draft, I experimented with writing in present tense, a technique I've noticed is very popular in YA these days.  But ultimately I decided my narrator's still just not convincing, so I'm about to tackle another rewrite, this time in third-person.  Hopefully I'll be able to engage the reader just as well but I'll be free to tell the story without having to worry about making sure I'm sounding enough like a dude.

I'm working on another YA sci-fi novel that I just started - randomly came up with the idea late one night.  I don't want to give away too much just yet and I'm still barely into the outlining/jotting-down-random-scenes phase, but it's of course going to be futuristic and techy and probably some flavor of dystopian.  All the usual YA suspects.

In the meantime, just to get myself writing more, I'm going to start using this blog to review some of the books I read.  I read a ton of books (heavy on the YA) and I always think to myself, I should really review this book, but then I never do.  But since reading is such a huge part of writing, I think it would be a good exercise for me to start doing some reviews.  And I'll probably start by reviewing Angelfall by Susan Ee.  I've heard a lot of hype about this book, and had snagged it for my Kindle once upon a time when it was $0.99.  I finally gave in and started reading it (I've found that I can read on my Kindle while feeding Ethan a bottle, so I've been read snippets of Angelfall whenever E. gets hungry) and so far I've been pleasantly surprised.

I'm also thinking about writing a memoir of sorts.  Not because I'm egotistical, but because I think it might be a nice thing to leave behind for my kids and their kids after I'm gone, so that if they're interested, they can learn about where they came from.  I'm thinking of a sort of combo memoir/genealogy with info about grandparents, great-grandparents, basically any info I can round up that I think might be interesting to preserve for posterity.  I even thought I could do some cool things with pictures (for example, my Granny who passed away a little over a year ago, was a painter.  I have one of her paintings, my sister has another one, and my dad has several.  I thought it might be nice to photograph some of her paintings and include that with a portion about her).  I am actually very excited about this project because it will be a completely different type of writing than I've tried before, and I think it will be very cool to learn more about my own family background and my husband's as well.