missskye

I received an arc of this book from Net Galley.

Adorable, clever book. But somewhat inappropriate for children. Maybe it's a cultural thing?

It was hard for me to get past the ridiculous names in this one. A talking snow leopard with magical abilities named... Megan. Really? Megan?

Abby Silva is the typical misfit teen crushing on the hot guy at school who, of course, is dating the mean girl. Oh, and there's a mysterious, gorgeous stranger whom she has a magical connection with. Pretty standard YA fare. The interesting aspect is that Abby is descended from one of the girls accused in the Salem Witch Trials and seems to have inherited her powers. It's a quick, fairly fun read and pretty much a standalone story, which is a nice change from the cliffhanger endings that seem pretty standard these days in this genre.

The book is set in and around Salem, which I personally found fun because I'm from Cape Cod originally myself.

Mattie Lowe can't stand her perfect stepsister Ella,a beautiful, smart, cheerleader who volunteers for charities and is dating Jake Kingston, the boy Mattie has loved all her life. Mattie decides to strike back by opposing Jake in his run for senior class president but she is shocked when Ella pitches in to help run her campaign. Could these step-sisters become friends? Very sweet, fluffy story with likeable characters and good writing. It would make a fun teen movie.

Kaity and her little sister Pippa are faced with the possibility of the worst Christmas ever. Their parents have just had a bitter divorce and the girls miss having their dad at home. Mom and dad are fighting and their kids are often in the middle. And worst of all, Mom's sudden new internet boyfriend Seth has moved in for a few weeks. Not to mention the overnight appearance of a mysterious battalion of identical snowmen who move when no one is watching. Turns out that divorce is the least of Kaity's worries when the Anti-Claus, arch-nemesis of Santa Claus, shows up at the mall where Kaity's dad is head of security. Can Kaity stop him from ruining Christmas, get rid of Seth, and get her parents back together in time to open presents? Well, she'll have some help from the REAL Santa who shows up with his daughter Blizzard to save the day.

Very charming Christmas book for tweens with a nice balance of whimsy and real feelings. Take the "creepy" with a grain of salt, however. It's definitely a read for everyone and not a bit scary.

The premise of this book grabbed me: Teens that were connected by supernatural powers, in this case the ability to control electricity, reading each others thoughts and feelings, telepathy. Sounds cool, huh?

Yeah, not so much. Because only about a tenth of the book dealt with that interesting premise. The rest was eaten up by really immature ramblings of the characters relationships ("I think I like my friend, but no I like my boyfriend, but maybe I like my friend, but wait...") until I wanted to bang my head against the wall.

The author wrote literally pages of descriptions of the teens having a flour fight as they were making pizza, tickle fights, and making out. But when it came to their powers we got a sentence: "We practiced our powers for two hours."

So much fluff, so little plot. I won't be reading the sequel.

Set in a dystopian future where each couple who wants to have a child is paired up with another couple who wants to have a child. Their collective DNA is combined and two identical children (Alts) are conceived. The Alts are raised apart and at some point between their twelfth and eighteenth birthdays they are "activated" which means that each is sent to kill the other. The (somewhat fuzzy) reasoning being that the society wants only the strongest to survive, thus ensuring a population that can withstand threats. They're not entirely clear on what those threats may be. Also, families had four and five kids each. If you knew your child was going to have slaughter or be slaughtered (or be killed in the cross-fire as several of the main character's family are) what would really be your motivation to have a mess of kids? Nagging plot holes like this riddled this story. The basic premise wasn't bad, there just wasn't enough framework. It's like the author wanted too badly to jump into the shooting and never laid a real foundation for anything to make much sense.

I know kids killing kids worked brilliantly in the Hunger Games but it's because the reasoning behind it was so clearly defined. The government was the villain manipulating the people. In "Dualed", we don't get nearly enough "why" behind tons and tons (and tons) of violence. I kept thinking that at some point the whole (vague) system of Alts would be challenged, but no... the kids just keep killing each other.

I love a good dystopian but it has to make sense.

This was an extremely simplistic take on the Snow White legend from the point of view of the Queen. There was little character development (neither the Queen nor Snow White's father are even given names) despite the fact that the book is clearly meant to show you the Queen's motivation for everything she did. It was all fairly superficial and I never felt particularly attached to any of the characters.

Brenna Yovanoff has quickly become one of my favorite YA authors.

The Space Between tells the story of Daphne, the demon daughter of Lilith and Lucifer, who lives in Pandemonium, a chrome and steel city in Hell. Her brother Obie, the son of Lilith and Adam the first man, who is dedicated to saving earthly souls from eternal torment in Hell goes missing after falling in love with a human woman. Daphne journeys to Earth to rescue him, guided by Truman, a boy who was saved from death by Obie.

The story is rich with atmosphere and Yovanoff's trademark honesty of writing - she never pulls any punches or rose-colors any difficult situations. The story is dark and twisted, yet at the same time beautiful and compelling, leaving you with the feeling that good and evil are really just a point of view.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

The story begins with a group of college freshmen at Washington D.C.'s University of the Archangels and St. John the Divine where an ancient order called the Benandanti are headquartered. It immediately becomes evident that the mysterious Benandanti maintain a far-reaching control of most of society and that they are recruiting amongst the students. But when a member of the order finds a mysterious archaeological treasure and passes it onto a student, she unleashes the ancient moon goddess onto the world.

The story is complex and spans over twenty years, but it never drags or becomes overwhelming. The writing style is reminiscent of Stephen King at times, delivering some pretty good scares while spinning a web of mystery that ensnares the reader completely. I found the book captivating, exciting, and engrossing.

It's rare for a sequel to surpass the original but I loved Sapphique even more than Incarceron. It is definitely necessary to read Incarceron first, nothing in Sapphique will make sense if you don't.

Sapphique takes us back to the prison where Attia and Keiro are both feeling betrayed at having been left behind in the prison. They struggle to find an alternate way out while wrestling with their opposing feelings about Finn having left them behind.

Outside, the political intrigue in the Realm gets thicker as on the day when Finn is to be recognized as Prince Giles, the true heir of the Realm, another man steps forward to claim the title. There's a delicious back and forth through most of the story as the reader is pulled at once time towards believing Finn is indeed Giles only to be pushed a moment later towards believing he is not.

The storylines collide towards the end of the book as both worlds begin to crumble. The finale comes to a crashing conclusion and while I felt satisfied in the ending, there is some wiggle room for extending the series.

I really wanted to like this book. I thought for sure I would. It had such great reviews. It was a fairy story. It featured the Tam Lin legend, which I love. I was positive I'd adore it. But... I didn't.

As I read it I kept thinking it was just so long-winded. It took forever for anything to happen. And everyone talked so much, usually about nothing. Most of the characters weren't particularly interesting or endearing. The climax was singularly anti-climactic.

It's very rare for me to just want a book to be over, but that's all I could think of as I read it. Not my favorite.

I received a copy of this from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

This is a clever re-working of the Snow White fairy tale that skillfully blends the familiar and the surprising to create a story that truly captivates.

Told from the viewpoint of the Mirror (with a lovely little twist at the end that I didn't see coming), the narrative is a little old-fashioned in a completely charming way. There's no poison apple, but there are seven dwarves - of sorts -, a deliciously wicked Queen, and no shortage of princes.

I love good reworkings of fairy tales and this one is by far one of the better ones.

I received this book from Net Galley in exchange for an honest review. I'm pleased to say I absolutely loved this book!

A. G. Howard took us down the rabbit hole in a decidedly different take on the Wonderland story. While clearly influenced by the original work and the Tim Burton film, Howard's Wonderland story still had enough twists and surprises to make this urban fantasy fresh and captivating.

Alyssa is a descendant of Alice Liddel and has inherited the curse that plagues all female descendants, she can hear the speech of flowered and bugs and has a tendency to run mad. Of course, to break the curse she must travel down the rabbit hole herself and perform certain tasks. We see the Wonderland characters along the way but in unexpected incarnations and there's a wonderful twist at the end that turns everything upside down.

Naturally, Alyssa is torn between two boys - this IS YA fic after all - but there's none of the typical obnoxious angst that clutters most YA fictional love triangles. Everything about this story is a little wiser, a little more clever, a little more gritty than most offerings of its genre.

All in all, Splintered is by far the best Wonderland inspired story I've read.

I was offered the chance to read this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. So I read the whole thing and here's what I thought:

As I read the first few pages of this book I really thought I was going to love it.

The initial set up created a future world that fascinated me. People were all plugged into the "World-Band," a cross between a virtual reality version of the internet and Big Brother. The World Net constantly speaks in your head ("Your heartbeat is elevated. Experience something nice.") and allows you to make holographic images appear in front of you as you wish (imagine jogging in place but in your mind you're running through a beautiful lush forest). Such a cool concept!

But in every utopia there's an underlying conflict, and this book's seemed to be equally compelling. Apparently mankind's abuse of the environment had reached the critical stage. The leading source of death was skin cancer, known as "The Heat," and because of this people whose skin contained high levels of melatonin were now the ruling class, while those with pale skin were made to be subservient or suffer being cast out into the sunlight to die. A really potentially interesting twist on racial injustice that had so many amazing plot possibilities.

Sounds like it couldn't miss, right? Well...

After the great setup is where it almost seemed like another writer hijacked the story. The main character is Eden, a Caucasian girl (called "Pearls" in this world) whose main aim in life is to Mate with (marry) a dark-skinned ("Coal" - wow, that's pretty offensive considering they're supposed to be the ruling class... Coal? Really? Not Obsidian? Onyx? Something precious? You go with "Pearl" for the lowest class and name the upper class after a dirty rock? You're getting your anti-racism point across... NOT) man and have lots of cute dark babies. (I'm not even going to get into the fact that this author seems to know little to nothing about bi-racial children and how they look) Literally, that's pretty much her goal... for the whole book.

Her father is a brilliant scientist who plans on saving the human race from melanoma by merging their DNA with jaguar, anaconda, and eagle DNA. (No, you read that right, that's the plot. Just go with it.) But Eden screws it all up by telling her Coal boyfriend Jamal about her dad's work in the hopes it will get him to Mate with her. Of course Jamal's a member of some very vague militant group who wants to use the DNA splicing experiment for their own ends (not 100% sure what that is but I'm just going with it.) and he captures the test subjects, so Eden's mean, arrogant, Coal boss Bramford elects to have the experiment performed on him instead. And he then becomes Jaguar Man (don't even laugh, I did not make up this nickname, it's what he's constantly referred to in the story.

At this point Bramford takes Eden and her father to some Mayan jungle camp where Eden spends the entire rest of the book identifying each and every creature that passes along by their full Latin name. (It gets annoying.)

I know we are supposed to love Eden but honestly she is the most useless, clueless, whiny, helpless heroine I've ever encountered. She falls off a cliff, she is attacked by howler monkeys, she wrecks her father's equipment, she is nearly swallowed whole by an anaconda and then gets flung around by its tail... all the while being rescued each time by Jaguar Man, whom she is ridiculously attracted to (she's constantly thinking how much she hates him and yet how deliciously attractive she is... and moans "escape her lips" a LOT.) She begins to refer to herself as a "She-cat" (not making this up). There's lots more but the bottom line is that she wants to be DNA spliced too so she, Bramford, and his little son (yeah, he has a mysterious child whom he wants to Cat-ify, too) can all be a Jaguar family in the jungle.

I'm going to assume they all live happily ever after because I can't bring myself to read the sequel.

I find it hard to believe that the first couple of chapters, with their interesting, innovative, creative future world were just chucked out the window for a very juvenile bad romance plot. The whole Pearl/Coal social dynamic was turned into a reason for Eden to whine about why Jaguar Man wouldn't want her (hello, he has FUR on his face now, are you serious?). It took something that could have been profound and turned it into something profoundly silly. What a wasted opportunity.

I DEVOURED this book! Right from the start this story grabbed me and held on tight to the end. Rae Carson has an intelligent, compelling writing style with characters that ring so true you'll swear they're about to walk into the room. The title character Elisa, in particular, alternately made me ache with empathy at her struggles and exult with her triumphs. I'm so very eager to pounce on the next book in the series!