November Reading – 100 Word Reviews

Ballad by Maggie Stiefvater (Scholastic Children’s Books, 2009) ~ 5/5* (A perfect research read for my NaNo project too!!)

Opening line:

I was used to being the hunter.

~

I launched into Ballad without reading it’s predecessor Lament; I loved the Shiver series though so had high hopes.

I wasn’t disappointed as I found myself in a reality where the Fey are ever-present and not as nice as they sometimes seem.

I loved the main characters and not having read Lament was never an issue. When things were mentioned they were asides and explained just enough that you didn’t feel like you were missing information.

I hated the text speak used for Dee’s character. The clever page layout showed the text format making the infuriating spelling entirely unnecessary.

*

Witch Baby And Me by Debi Gliori (Corgi Books, 2008) ~ 2/5* (Though I never completed it)

Opening line:

Wreathed in clouds in the coldest, wettest and most remote part of Scotland is an impossibly steep mountain called Ben Screeeiiighe.

~

I made it to about page 25 of this book before deciding that life was too short to spend time reading things I didn’t like.

If I were 8 years old, I may well have loved the random words in stupid fonts, the unnecessary repetition of things that weren’t funny and the slightly patronising narrative tone. As it is, I am a 24 year old and it annoyed me intensely in the space of 25 pages.

It reminded me heavily of Mr Gum and the Biscuit Billionaire which I detested so if you like Mr Gum you will love this.

*

A Life Unpredicted and Other Stories by Joanne Phillips (Mirrorball Books, October 2012) ~ 4/5*

Opening Line:

The house where my mother lived her whole life stands proudly to the side of a walled rose garden.

~

I don’t always do well with short story collections – I get irritated with all the switching around and usually want to know more about a story (or am left thinking ‘what exactly was the point of that?’ and want the five minutes I spent reading back).

I quite enjoyed this selection though, laughing out loud on more than one occasion – even shedding a tear at the end of one or two.

Every piece is concise and well written and I found myself struck by certain phrases and ideas that hung around in my head long  after I had finished reading.

*

Blackout (Newsflesh #3) by Mira Grant (Orbit Books 2012) ~ 5/5*

Opening Line:

My story ended where so many stories have ended since the Rising: with a man – in this case, my adoptive brother and best friend, Shaun – holding a gun to the base of my skull as the virus in my blood betrayed me, transforming me from a thinking human being into something better suited to a horror movie.

~

I loved Feed and Deadline, the first two books of the Newsflesh Trilogy. The concluding novel did not let me down.

I laughed out loud, cried buckets, had scary nightmares and adored every page. I remembered how much I loved the characters and the world Grant created – scarily believable, hauntingly accurate.  If there were to be a scientifically caused zombie apocalypse I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised if things went a similar way to in these novels.

I can’t say much else. It’s the big finale.

Things go boom. Things get dead… and then get back up again.

*

Bewitching the Werewolf by Caroline Hanson. (Host of the Hills Publishing at Smashwords, 2011) 2.5/5*

Opening line:

“I don’t get paid enough to deal with a Werewolf that can’t get laid.”

~

From the title of this I assumed it would be some sort of paranormal romance. Turned out to be less of the romance and more of the ‘jump on the hot, lonely werewolf guy and hump him senseless’ variety of book.

There wasn’t all that much of a story – a bit of a hint at a supernatural world where Wiccans get hired for their problem-solving magic – but mostly it was just a case of ‘Let’s have rampant sex. NOW!’

I suppose it wasn’t too offensive aside from missing punctuation and the use of ‘btw’ in the narrative which annoyed me.

*

November Reading

Having just looked up that we are in week 44 of this year and that I have only read 40 books since January 1st, I am starting to fear that I will fail at my target to read 52 books in the 52 weeks of 2012. I need to get a wriggle on!

With that in mind I am going to continue my (seemingly everlasting) struggle with Diary Of An Ordinary Woman in tandem with reading other books instead of ploughing through it alone. I will finish it. One day.

The books I am going to read this month are (hopefully):

Ballad by Maggie Stiefvater

Witch Baby And Me by Debi Gliori

A Perfect Blood by Kim Harrison

and if by some miracle they all vanish before the end of the month I will start Checkmate by Malorie Blackman (again, because I read the first 80 pages then stopped and now have no idea what was happening at all…)

Of course, all of this is on top of me trying to complete NaNoWriMo too. I am doomed.

What Are You Reading? – September

Click here to join the linky

I’m off on holiday for a week of this month and I doubt that I will get much reading done then – so don’t hold me to getting all these read. Did well last month though and read the lot! (remember – clicking the cover takes you to the book summary if it takes your fancy)

(I saw the dramatisation of Impossible God, performed by the author himself, back at Easter & am interested to see how the book compares)

Review: Linger by Maggie Stiefvater

Linger by Maggie Stiefvater

Published: Scholastic Ltd, 2010 (Paperback)

Length: 416 pages

Summary: Sam and Grace are finally together but their future is far less certain than they believed in Shiver.

Cole, a new wolf, has a past that puts the entire pack at risk, and, with Beck no longer able to take charge, Sam suddenly finds himself with new responsibilities. Responsibilities he doubts he can cope with, especially whilst worrying about Grace who just doesn’t seem herself…

After Grace’s parents take a dislike to Sam, their future together seems bleak unless Grace can find the courage to take a stand against them. This would be easier were Grace not trying to hide a secret from everyone around her, even Sam. A secret that could change everything, or even end it all.

Shiver was a story about finding love at any cost, Linger is a story about fighting for love through everything life throws at you.

What I Liked: I loved Linger even more than I loved Shiver which is quite impressive. On top of everything I said about Shiver this book had even more to offer.

Firstly it cleared up my complaint about Grace’s parents quite neatly and I can now accept their attitude and absence in the first book as a necessity for the final story. An example of complaining about something before it’s finished there, but I wasn’t to know that at the time.

Secondly the introduction of the new wolf, Cole, and Isabel to the narrative mix added brilliantly to the depth of the writing and characters. The relationship between Isabel and Cole helped to define and show a different side to love than that between Sam and Grace and it also brought out elements of the characters that you had never seen before. Sam through Isabel’s eyes for example, and the whole situation through a newcomer thrown in head-first to the deep end.

I loved Cole’s character. He is horrible and flawed, lost, frightened and obnoxious. Everything you would expect him to be which makes him so brilliantly human despite the fact that sometimes he’s furry and has four legs. I think he is possibly the most human character in the books and keeps the story grounded even when the fantasy romance of Sam and Grace threatens to take over.

Grace’s secret is kept beautifully throughout the story too, even though many parts are from her viewpoint you are never certain what is going on because she is denying it to herself as well as everyone else for a lot of the time. This added an uneasy undercurrent to much of the story and resulted in me crying on more than one occasion as the emotions and tension flew around. (Much crying done on a busy train I might add, so I looked like a right idiot snivelling away behind a book.)

What I Didn’t Like: This is where I have an issue because my only complaint in Shiver was cleared up in Linger so I now can’t actually think of anything I didn’t like. Apart from having to wait until Summer 2011 for the final book that is. I really don’t like that at all.

Rating: No beating around the bush with this one. 5/5 no question. A brilliant read, so much so that I forgive Liberty for making me cry in public by lending it to me. (Sometimes I’m sure she only lends/recommends books to me because she knows I will cry and she can laugh at me…)

~~~~~~~~~~~~

This is book two of my September Spectacular Reading Challenge. Two down, three to go! (And yes, to those observant people out there, I have changed my list. I lent one of the books on it to my sister so it is now over a hundred miles away from me, thus quite hard to read…)

Review: Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater

Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater

Published By: Scholastic Ltd, 2009 (Paperback)

Length: 434 pages

Summary: When she was eleven years old, Grace was attacked by the wolves that lived in the wood behind her house. Ever since, she has been obsessed, particularly with the wolf with yellow eyes that had protected her from the rest of the pack and has haunted her garden every winter since.

Years later she meets a boy with instantly familiar yellow eyes and knows without a doubt that he is her wolf. But surely that’s impossible.

Sam has led a double life since he was seven. Hot lazy summers spent as a boy, growing up, reading, writing and learning his times tables followed by long, frozen winters running and hunting in the woods with his pack, a wolf.

One day he saved a girl the pack attacked and ever since has watched over her whenever winters grip forced him into his fur.

He’s not supposed to mention the secret of the wolves to anyone but when a local boy is killed by the pack and a wolf hunt begins Sam finds himself face-to-face with his girl and has no choice but to tell her the truth.

What I Liked : Basically everything! I loved Stiefvater’s take on the werewolf legend mostly because, for a pleasant change, the werewolves turned into wolves. Proper wolves that thought wolfy things, acted like wolves and ate wolfy foods with only the faintest memory of the human things that were most important to them in their human lives – people’s faces were familiar but their names forgotten for example. It’s been ages since I read a werewolf book like that, recently they all seem to turn into massive super-wolves, weird human/wolf mixes or have telepathic abilities allowing human speech and communication. I liked that they became truly wolf in Shiver, it made the change somehow more frightening because the human in them was basically lost as soon as they transform.

I also very much enjoyed the world of Shiver. It was a natural, beautiful yet slightly sinister place where wolves and humans naturally came together which was perfect for the story. Having it set in a city with wolves randomly sprouting up would never have worked so well. Also, it was cold. I’m not sure how she did it but as you read the book you felt the same cold that the characters did adding to the tension as you moved through the story.

I found that the shifting viewpoint between Sam and Grace added depth to the story and helped to stop it from becoming one of those romance books where the entire story is just girl meets boy, they randomly fall hopelessly in love, they kiss a lot, fall into bed, have a minor argument, make up, story finished. Instead, the romance between Sam and Grace is just one of they key plot-lines, being carried along by some of the obvious issues you would have if your boyfriend changed species whenever it got cold and a few other, much more sinister ones that came with part of the package of discovering a supernatural world in your back yard.

What I didn’t like: Grace’s semi-permanently absent parents bugged me a little. I could almost buy into the ‘had a child young and then, as soon as it got old enough to take care of itself, went back to their old life and social circle’ story because the rest of the story helped you to just accept it. However, there was always that little bit of me being a bit unconvinced that they would be out quite as much as they were and wouldn’t notice Sam basically living in their house for weeks. For a start, did they not notice that Grace was suddenly using two lots of cutlery and crockery at every meal? As I’m sure she wouldn’t have always managed to do the washing up before they randomly came home.

I have heard a few people saying that it was just a below-par Twilight rip-off, which I think is generally unfair considering it’s much better written and completely different aside from also being a paranormal romance novel for teens and young adults. Plus I think Shiver was actually written before Twilight anyway…ahem…rant over…

Rating: Apart from the above, which is practically nothing, I can’t really think of anything I didn’t like which draws me to the conclusion that this book deserves a rather impressive 5/5 on my brand shiny new rating system that I have decided to use. Can’t wait to get stuck into Linger next!

What I’m Reading Wednesday

I may as well admit defeat now on my Summer Break Reading Challenge. I’m never going to read everything in the 6 days that are left, not being able to read more than a page without being sick seriously set me back! But never mind, I’m sure there’ll be another I can take up now that I can read again.

So, I’ll be honest, there aren’t any ‘What I Finished’ books for this week. But there are two ‘What I’m Reading’ books and they are:

Dark Space by Marianne De Pierres

I will admit that I am struggling with this one, which is a shame because I was really looking forward to it. I’m about 100 pages in and feel worryingly close to giving up unless it picks up soon. I’m confused with the characters, confused with the worlds, utterly baffled by all the different species that are not in the slightest described or explained and I find the written language quite clunky and hard to follow. I’m reading it in small doses (a chapter or two at a time) purely because any more than that hurts my head.

I will persevere as I have heard great things about it and I would hate to miss out just because I couldn’t hack the beginning.

Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater

I’m almost half way through this YA werewolf romance novel and loving every page. It’s fast-paced and a little bit different from most werewolf stories. I think part of the reason I am enjoying it so much is the real ‘wolfy-ness’ of the wolves, which is a bonus for me and my not-so-secret wolf obsession. (Seriously, you should see my house…)

Aside from the furry side of things I love the characterisation and I want to live in Grace’s house, the story moves swiftly but without becoming too predictable or dull.

What I’m Starting

Once I’ve finished Shiver I will read the second instalment Linger and, if I have time, I will start to read Wolfsangel by M.D.Lachlan – another book I have been really looking forward to reading.

Teaser Tuesday

Yes! I am alive!! My extended absence has been due to severe ‘morning’ sickness (that lasts all day…) which rendered me utterly useless and incapable of reading, writing or even looking at my laptop screen for weeks. It’s eased a little now so I should be back in business!!

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers.

This week my Teaser is from Maggie Stiefvater’s Shiver which has been highly recommended (and kindly lent) to me by my friend, Liberty. It is a good old YA werewolf novel and, as she predicted, I am enjoying it immensely. But then, I am a total sucker for anything wolf-shaped, were- or otherwise

Without thinking, I grabbed him under his armpits and dragged him far enough inside that I could shut the door. In the light of the breakfast area, blood smearing a path across the floor, he seemed tremendously real.

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