THIS IS KIND OF AN EPIC LOVE STORY is such a good book and it makes me sad that the average rating for the book is so low on Goodreads because I read it in just over a day and loved it so much, even if I do think I understand why so many people seem to have a hard time loving it (more on that in a minute). In some ways, it kind of reads as the prototype version of FELIX EVER AFTER, only with younger characters, but it's also a really great portrayal of diversity, realistically dramatic and tempestuous teen friendships, and the trials and tribulations of first love, so it does stand on its own.
Nate is an aspiring screenwriter who's painfully single. Ever since his dad died, he's had trouble forming close bonds with others because he's terrified of loving and losing again-- after all, everyone has to go away sometimes, why open yourself to hurt? It causes him to push people away and make bad decisions, even though you can kind of get where he's coming from, and how he's dooming himself with his behavior.
He has a close-knit group of friends, which includes his ex, Flo, who cheated on him with the girl she's now dating. There's also Ashley, an aggressively go-getter Hermione Granger type, Gideon, a jock, and, now, Ollie, the "new kid" in school who was actually Nate's closest friend as a child... until Nate kissed him on the day he moved away, which made everything awkward, and caused them never to speak again.
There really isn't a plot to this book, apart from teen boy is awkward and anxious, teen boy meets teen boy who is also awkward and anxious. Boys fall in love but keep messing up because they are bad at communicating with each other because teen boys are gonna teen. Some people complained about the drama and yes, there is a LOT. Everyone has histories with everyone and there's a lot of cheating. Normally, I hate cheating in romances, but I feel like it works better in stories about high school and college because we all know that most of those relationships DON'T last forever, and sometimes falling out with someone you used to like or even love is part of an adult journey. I've said in other reviews that I don't question teenagers making stupid decisions if they make them for believable reasons. There's a difference between a bad decision on behalf of the character and a bad decision on behalf of the author writing as that character, and here, all of the characters felt very real and believable to me.
I loved the diversity of Nate's friend group. Both heroes seem to be either bi or pan (I couldn't really tell, but it seems like both of them have dated or been interested in girls). Ollie is Latinx and I think the hero is Black. His friend, Flo, is Taiwanese and Black and also bi/pan, and I think Ashley and Gideon are white and straight. Ollie is also HoH (hard of hearing) and even though I don't believe this is ownvoices in that regard, it seemed very respectfully done. I liked the signing on the page, and how communication style between him and the other characters was inclusive and respectful and focused on Ollie's needs. I also liked how grief was approached, and how a big part of the story was about Nate's mom sorting out some of her own unresolved psychological trauma, and how a big part of the narrative arc between Nate and his mom was about communication and her learning to let him go.
THIS IS KIND OF AN EPIC LOVE STORY can be a really frustrating read at times because Nate does not always make the most likable decisions, and sometimes you, the reader, will get really mad at him. But the way he behaves is consistent to his character and it makes watching him learn and grow so much more rewarding as you watch him lower those prickly walls of his and learn to let others in. I think anyone who enjoys YA with topics geared towards older teens (sex, first time, relationships, long-stance relationships, college applications, internships, career decisions, grief, friend drama, etc.) will really enjoy this book, as it ticks a lot of the boxes of what I personally look for and love in YA.
THIS IS KIND OF AN EPIC LOVE STORY is such a good book and it makes me sad that the average rating for the book is so low on Goodreads because I read it in just over a day and loved it so much, even if I do think I understand why so many people seem to have a hard time loving it (more on that in a minute). In some ways, it kind of reads as the prototype version of FELIX EVER AFTER, only with younger characters, but it's also a really great portrayal of diversity, realistically dramatic and tempestuous teen friendships, and the trials and tribulations of first love, so it does stand on its own.
Nate is an aspiring screenwriter who's painfully single. Ever since his dad died, he's had trouble forming close bonds with others because he's terrified of loving and losing again-- after all, everyone has to go away sometimes, why open yourself to hurt? It causes him to push people away and make bad decisions, even though you can kind of get where he's coming from, and how he's dooming himself with his behavior.
He has a close-knit group of friends, which includes his ex, Flo, who cheated on him with the girl she's now dating. There's also Ashley, an aggressively go-getter Hermione Granger type, Gideon, a jock, and, now, Ollie, the "new kid" in school who was actually Nate's closest friend as a child... until Nate kissed him on the day he moved away, which made everything awkward, and caused them never to speak again.
There really isn't a plot to this book, apart from teen boy is awkward and anxious, teen boy meets teen boy who is also awkward and anxious. Boys fall in love but keep messing up because they are bad at communicating with each other because teen boys are gonna teen. Some people complained about the drama and yes, there is a LOT. Everyone has histories with everyone and there's a lot of cheating. Normally, I hate cheating in romances, but I feel like it works better in stories about high school and college because we all know that most of those relationships DON'T last forever, and sometimes falling out with someone you used to like or even love is part of an adult journey. I've said in other reviews that I don't question teenagers making stupid decisions if they make them for believable reasons. There's a difference between a bad decision on behalf of the character and a bad decision on behalf of the author writing as that character, and here, all of the characters felt very real and believable to me.
I loved the diversity of Nate's friend group. Both heroes seem to be either bi or pan (I couldn't really tell, but it seems like both of them have dated or been interested in girls). Ollie is Latinx and I think the hero is Black. His friend, Flo, is Taiwanese and Black and also bi/pan, and I think Ashley and Gideon are white and straight. Ollie is also HoH (hard of hearing) and even though I don't believe this is ownvoices in that regard, it seemed very respectfully done. I liked the signing on the page, and how communication style between him and the other characters was inclusive and respectful and focused on Ollie's needs. I also liked how grief was approached, and how a big part of the story was about Nate's mom sorting out some of her own unresolved psychological trauma, and how a big part of the narrative arc between Nate and his mom was about communication and her learning to let him go.
THIS IS KIND OF AN EPIC LOVE STORY can be a really frustrating read at times because Nate does not always make the most likable decisions, and sometimes you, the reader, will get really mad at him. But the way he behaves is consistent to his character and it makes watching him learn and grow so much more rewarding as you watch him lower those prickly walls of his and learn to let others in. I think anyone who enjoys YA with topics geared towards older teens (sex, first time, relationships, long-stance relationships, college applications, internships, career decisions, grief, friend drama, etc.) will really enjoy this book, as it ticks a lot of the boxes of what I personally look for and love in YA.
It's 1995. A teenage girl named Kerry goes to the 24 Hour Laundromat to get her younger brother's stuffed koala bear, only to find herself in the middle of a dangerous situation: a group of adults are holding a teenage boy hostage, claiming that he's a vampire. The plan seems to be to kill him-- right in front of her. After she ends up getting held hostage, too, Kerry takes advantage of a moment's lull to free the boy.
She thinks that he's innocent, like her. But she's wrong.
The result is a road trip of the night, where she's forced to play Scheherazade to a vampire's twisted plans for revenge... or die.
COMPANIONS OF THE NIGHT is one of my favorite vampire books of all time. The writing style reminds me of L.J. Smith's, and even though it takes place over only a couple of days and is a very short book (a novella, really), it feels cinematic. You read it, thinking that it would make a great, campy 80s style movie with a rock soundtrack.
I know it's YA but it's good YA, with complex themes about mortality, morality, and some of the best banter I've ever seen. Everyone who loves vampires should read this.
I still remember the first time I read LUCAS, and how fucking betrayed I felt by that ending. When I was a teenager, LUCAS was one of my favorite books of all time, because I related to the heroine so much-- she's passive, bitter, and depressed, dreaming of the future while also fearing it, and I think that chaotic and malleable state is going to resonate with a lot of teens. It certainly did for me. And the writing! The descriptions of small town life and complex interpersonal dynamics! Oh my god!
At its heart, this is a dark small town story about the suspicion and animosity that can bubble up like rot as intolerant people close ranks against people they see as different and a threat to their continued way of life. The eponymous Lucas is a drifter who comes to a British island town, and the heroine, Cait, sort of ends up becoming fascinated with him because of how mature and different he is from other boys.
I don't want to say too much else, but this book is HEAVY. It deals with violence, an attempted SA, xenophobia, suicide, alcoholism, and police corruption. Reading it as an adult in 2024, I also noticed some things that flew over my head when I read it back in 2000-whatever. For example, one of the plotlines involves a girl lying about her rape to punish an innocent boy. The heroine is very much on the innocent boy's side, and says all this stuff about how the girl involved is a slut and should be examined more thoroughly. It just felt very odd, because lying about being raped is so rare and to have this girl just nlog her way through her crush's innocence felt icky.
In fact, on my second readthrough, most of the other girls in this book are portrayed very badly, and kind of obviously inferior to Cait. There aren't really any positively portrayed female characters in this book except for her dad's sort-of girlfriend, who isn't really in the picture much at all. It feels like a spot-on portrait of slut-shaming 2000s party culture, and how that might look in a small town in the UK. Which makes this book feel quite dated, but not in a way that feels comfortably removed from today. I felt a lot of things while reading it, and while I still really liked it, I do wonder how much of that is nostalgia because I don't love it anymore.
Also, the quasi-paranormal stuff is just... bizarre. Why does he need to know the future? WHY?
I think this is the first religious YA book I read where instead of religious trauma, it focuses on people who use religion as a crutch to hide from oI think this is the first religious YA book I read where instead of religious trauma, it focuses on people who use religion as a crutch to hide from other problems
CLEVER CREATURES OF THE NIGHT is such an interesting book, part gothic, part survivalist horror. There's a very isolated and desolate vibe to the book, almost dystopic, and I would describe the vibe as "assemble style gothic": the heroine ends up in a remote area, trapped with a somewhat large cast, all of whom have something to hide, when she goes to first seek out answers about why her friend invited her to a rural Texas house out in the middle of nowhere-- and then, later, why she appears to have gone missing.
The 2.77 rating shocked me because the writing style is fantastic and Mabry did a great job writing an unlikable but relatable heroine. Apart from the somewhat surreal atmosphere and, I guess, slightly anticlimactic ending, the unlikability is the only thing I saw that would even slightly warrant a rating like this. And even so, I feel like I can think of similar titles that didn't elicit a reaction like this.
Personally, I fell in love with this author's writing after reading TIGERS, NOT DAUGHTERS, and knew I would have to read everything else she ever wrote. The MEXICAN GOTHIC comp is honestly fairly on-point, maybe with a dash of SADIE by Courtney Summers. If you're into raw and visceral young adult books, with fierce girls and a hint of tragedy, you'll probably love this book.
CRACKED was published in 2013 and it shows, but not in a bad way. The tough as nails, sentient-Hot-Topic-tee, soul-devouring, ball-busting heroine is perfectly cast in the mold of Anita Blake-inspired, "strong female protagonists" that were popular in the day. She comes across as a little one-dimensional now, but I did enjoy her arrogance and sarcasm, and how she's an obvious reactionary response to the more Bella Swan-y heroines that were also popular at this time. If you enjoy Wednesday Addams-coded heroines, you'll love this.
The book literally opens with the heroine inside a mental asylum, pretending to be an inpatient so she can attack a predatory male nurse who preys on his female patients. His end is gory, and attracts the attention of some demons on the scene, who also planned to take the man's soul. Instead, they try to come for her and Meda, the heroine, is saved by some well-meaning but inept teen demon slayers called "Templars," including a doofy golden boy himbo named Chi.
Meda plays up the damsel in distress act while hiding her half-demon identity, determined to learn more about her heritage and this new, potentially dangerous enemy. The results are honestly pretty funny, and the book is fast-paced and filled with action, in a way that would honestly make it equally appealing to readers of all genders. I would have liked this more if I'd read it when it first came out, because I was in my early twenties then. Now, it's a little too YA for me, and Meda's one note sarcasm shtick got a little old after a while. I appreciate what this book represents, and it's a testament to its quality that it's aged as well as it has, but Harley Laroux has basically spoiled me for all other demon books.
That said, if you love the TV show, Wednesday, and are looking for something with similar vibes for Halloween, this would be a great pick. And the ebooks for the entire series are very affordably priced.
THE SACRIFICE was a total impulse-buy for me, considering I wasn't too fond of the last book I read by this author. But everything about this book sounded so awesome that I wanted to give it a try anyway. A haunted island in the Philippines where a racially insensitive American film crew awakens something terrible while trying to film a ghost hunting show? And a nonbinary lead?
Yeah, there's no way we're saying no to any of that.
And I was so right, by the way. This was fun. Creepy and a little gory, but not more than I, a wuss, could handle. I forgot to mute my phone and when the notification alarm went off while I was in the middle of one of the scarier scenes, I literally JUMPED (and I was holding a water glass, so guess who got soaked???). The anticolonialist message pours from the pages, couched in rage, which serve as a nice counterpoint to the dry irony of the narrator, Alon, who knows that the interlopers are making a terrible mistake, but also knows that they won't heed their warnings because of their arrogance.
My only qualm is that the pacing felt uneven. There were a lot of slow moments. I get that slower beats are a necessity to allow readers to absorb the horror, which was quite well done, but I did find myself losing interest at some parts in the third act. The villain(s) were also kind of caricatures of evil, but because this feels like an homage to classic horror, I feel like that actually worked here. At many points, this feels like a satire of monster horror movies, and I kind of loved that.
Definitely read this if you like folk horror and East Asian settings!
Black Swan except she makes a deal with the devil to get her talent. Also, there's a hot monster-boy with antlers and the heroine is more than happy to step into the role of the villain while screaming about how everyone is going to pay with her whole chest. Do we stan? We stan.
I FEED HER TO THE BEAST AND THE BEAST IS ME has some pretty ambitious shoes to fill with a blurb that literally compares it to both HOUSE OF HOLLOW and ACE OF SPADES, two of my favorite YA books. But honestly, after reading this book to the end, I'd say that not only is that a pretty apt comp, it's a really solid book.
Laure is a down-on-her-luck ballerina oozing talent who is struggling to keep afloat in her snooty Parisian ballet school. Why? Because racism, classism, nepotism. Anyone would get pissed, but Laure has a take-no-shit personality that makes her even less tolerant to anyone giving her anything less than what she feels she deserves. So when she befriends a girl who takes her down to the catacombs and shows her a whispering river of blood, she doesn't exactly ask too many questions.
It took me a while to get used to this author's unique writing style but once I did, I was hooked. Some reviewers said that this book got a little slow in the last act and I would agree with that, which is why this is a four star review and not a five one, but the ending was AMAZING. Anyone who loves dark fantasy, gothic horror, and morally grey heroines is going to love this one. I will read literally anything else that this author writes, including the sequel. Stan, stan, stan.
I'm kind of sad that this author never wrote any more YA books after this one, because this was fantastic. Despite being published in 2006, it really doesn't feel dated. Reviews for this one are mixed, but weirdly, people seem to be taking issue with the exact things I loved about it. HOW IT'S DONE is one of those cautionary sorts of stories, about a sheltered girl with religious trauma, who escapes from her fundie parents by running right into the arms of a sophisticated older man.
I remember reading this as a teen and thinking Michael, the college professor, seemed hot. Now, reading this as a middle-aged woman, I just thought he was gross. The way he gaslit Grace and was constantly trying to Pygmalion her into being what he wanted was so brilliantly done, but it was also really hard to read. Grace also has a toxic relationship with her friend, Liv, who is poorer and desperate to escape her abusive family situation. They were close when they were younger but their diverging paths have created rifts in their relationship that have led to resentment, jealousy, and even a little cruelty.
HOW IT'S DONE never shies from its difficult subjects, and the writing is spare and beautiful and emotional. I know some people criticized the heroine for being too naive, but a fundie girl in the 2000s with the internet still in its infancy, and her only real knowledge of relationships coming from pilfered bodice-rippers? Yeah, I think her naivete makes sense. Just like how it also made sense that her strict religious upbringing and home environment ended up creating the perfect storm of self-blame and internalized misogyny that unfortunately made her so vulnerable to a predatory older man.
This is not an easy read but it is a good one, and I loved it as a coming of age story as well as a teen girl's ultimate triumph over her own oppression.
I've never read a book about synesthesia before. One of my psychology professors recommended this book in a cognition class a long, long time ago, and the concept sounded so fresh and exciting that the title of the book (which is a great title) stayed in my head rent-free all these years. I thrifted this book, which ended up being an additional joy, because my copy was annotated by the teen who read it before I did, and they were funny AF. I started keeping an eye out for their little notes in the margins because they were always on point. It felt like we were having a buddy-read.
Also, speaking of, I got to buddy-read this book with my friend, Ari!
Now that I've finished the book, I'm a little disappointed. I can tell the book did a lot of research into synesthesia, but I'm not sure how much of it is still true or relevant. For example, in this book, the heroine, Mia, can "see" other people's emotions and sense their pheromones as a color trail (why does that give me the ick). When I Googled this, the first thing that came up was the author's website, and the second was some kind of new age-looking website. I was immediately leery of this, because I feel like a lot of pseudoscience hypes up pheromones, and while it's been a while since my introductory neuroscience class, I remember my professor telling us that in most animals, chemoreception is done through the vomeronasal organ, which is considered a "vestigial" organ in humans (I seem to remember most people don't even have one).
Synesthesia in this book is also treated like a disability, with Mia's parents asking about cures and how it will affect her study. She gets bullied for it at at school and talks a lot about how it makes it difficult to function in certain situations from sensory overstimulation. I was looking through the reviews and it seems like synesthetes and neurodivergents took issue with this representation. (So did the little annotator of my book). This book came out in the aughts and a lot of these "single issue" YA and MG books were written like afterschool specials, not written so much for representation so much as to inform a normative audience (sometimes with unfortunate and now-dated stereotyping) that this reputation exists. When I think about some of the aughts era books with trans rep that I read, for example, it was always clear that the audience wasn't trans kids so much as cisgendered kids, because usually these stories were written from the perspective of a cisgendered kid who needed to learn that "trans kids, they're just like us." Synesthetes: when they're not stabbing themselves with acupuncture needles to experience a color high, they're just like us (oh yeah, THAT happened).
Also, this book is really sad. All the adults are mean helicopter parents who are like BUT SEEING COLORS WILL KEEP MY KID FROM GETTING INTO YALE, Mia's friends are pretty unsupportive, the cute boy with synesthesia that she meets only wants her for bad reasons (and she's THIRTEEN, ugh), and both animals in this book die in pretty traumatically descriptive scenes. I cried both times, for the dog and the cat. Two animal deaths feels excessive for a middle grade book that was supposed to be a fun journey about a kid who sees colors with words, numbers, and sounds.
WHEN WE WERE MAGIC is kind of like The Craft meets Lisa Frankenstein, but delightfully queer and strangely surreal. The book literally opens with the heroine, Alexis, accidentally murdering a guy during a hookup by making his dick explode with magic. Desperate, she calls in her squad of five friends to help her. They're all kinda sorta witches, and their original plan is to bring him back to life with magic. Instead, they separate his body into pieces, including his heart.
There's a little bit of The Telltale Heart with this book, too, as the pieces of the boy haunt each girl as they're forced to dispose of the body, while also reckoning with how his disappearance/murder impacts the community, their relationships, and their magic. I think the beginning was stronger than the middle and the end, which felt a little unsatisfying to me. Especially since I know Gailey can do better. I'm reading one of their adult novels right now, JUST LIKE HOME, and it positively drips atmosphere and character development.
One of my friends said that this would make a better movie than it would a book and I see what she means. It would be a good visually arresting artsy horror movie, like Lisa Frankenstein or Velvet Buzzsaw. Not bad, though.
I have historically had very mixed thoughts about Green's work, most of it not favorable, but I'd heard the anxiety rep in TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN was fantastic and that made me really want to read it... and it did not disappoint! Honestly, this is the first time that I have ever felt so seen with my crazy. The invasive thoughts, people thinking you're unlikable because you bring down the vibe, the spirals and the obsession and the despair. It was brilliantly done, I loved it. He either has firsthand experience with anxiety disorders or he did a fuckton of research. It was so validating. Also we love a book that shows the benefits of therapy to teens.
***MILD SPOILERS TO FOLLOW***
The premise of this story is pretty bonkers, though. Aza, still mourning the death of her dad, and dealing with her intense anxiety, finds out that her childhood billionaire friend, Davis, has a missing dad. He skipped town after doing bad stuff and there's a $100,000 reward for information that leads to his arrest. Aza's friend, Daisy, wants that money, and tells Aza that she should rekindle her friendship with Davis to get closer to him to see if they can get any information that might help them tip off the police (Daisy is kind of gross).
As the story goes on, and Aza starts talking to Davis, we learn that his billionaire dad is a huge asshole. He's a crazy biohacker who has left all of his money to his possibly illicitly-obtained pet tuatara, convinced that the long-lifed living fossil will be the ticket to his immortal life. SO Davis actually isn't all that keen on his dad and would probably be first in line to tip off the police... if he knew anything. But to Aza's pleasant surprise, Davis is actually a super chill softboi and she and him start hanging out.
I was a little torn on how to rate this because I loved the rep, and excuse me, a SHOUT-OUT for Jupiter Ascending, one of my favorite and much-maligned movies? HELL YES I WOULD. But this book also had some of the things that put me off Green's books sometimes, too, like unrealistically pretentious beleaguered-academic-style dialogue between the teens (why do all his characters sound like grumpy old European men arguing in a coffee shop?) and a romance that lacked chemistry. I also thought Daisy was a TERRIBLE friend. When I found out that she turned Aza into a character in her fanfic exaggerating her mental illness for rage bait and comedy, which she and her thousands of fans then basically made fun of together, I felt sick. It was believable mean girl behavior, but honestly, what wasn't believable was that they stayed friends. After all that? I mean, REALLY. That's yeet-to-the-moon behavior, right there. Daisy was also pretty terrible for using Aza to exploit Davis for one hundred grand, and it really bothered me that Aza was basically forced to apologize for not paying enough attention to Daisy and her problems while she is literally drinking hand sanitizer until she gets physically ill because she thinks that she needs to kill the bacteria mutating in her stomach.
After reading out all my thoughts, and being like, "Well, the rep and the fangirl culture and the lizard inheritance were great, but the romance and ultimate resolution of the mental health stuff were eh," I'm going with a three-star rating. I did like this book, and I didn't hate anything about it, but for a book where romance was so integral to the core story, I wanted more emotional connection. I also wanted more Daisy punishments. It is definitely very true that mental illness can make people self-centered in their pain, so that is a valid call out, but some things are definitely unforgivable.
I found this while cleaning and must have bought it ages ago when I was still in my YA phase because I don't remember getting it at all. A BRIEF CHAPTER IN MY IMPOSSIBLE LIFE is a 2000s-era YA about a girl whose parents are both very into politics: her mother is a lawyer for the ACLU and her father is a political cartoonist. One day, they drop a huge bombshell: Simone's parents aren't her biological parents at all. She's the adopted daughter of a Hasidic Jewish woman who gave her up for adoption at sixteen.
For the time this was written, this tackles a lot of interesting subjects. The heroine and her family are non-religious (agnostics, I believe). Her biological mother is dying from terminal ovarian cancer. It talks about the realities of what it means to be pro-choice, and how the decisions to give up a child you can't take care of are never easy. It also discusses sex in a fairly non-judgmental way for the time. Simone's best friend Cleo is very sexually active and more developed, and Simone is jealous but not super shamey, which I liked.
There wasn't a lot of interesting conflict in this book and it was pretty sad, even though I would say the ending is more life-affirming than tragic. It also captures the way people talked in the 2000s pretty well, which means that sometimes the language is un-PC, like Simone jokingly calls her gay best friend a "h*mo." I probably wouldn't recommend this to most people, unless they were looking for a YA that does a really good job with current issues, but man, what a brave and daring debut.
DEEP AND DARK AND DANGEROUS is a fantastic middle grade gothic ghost story about a girl who goes to the lake for the summer, only to find out that her mother and her aunt are harboring a dark and terrible secret. It all starts when Ali finds a picture in one of her mother's old books of three girls: her mother, her aunt, and a mysterious girl whose face has mostly been torn away.
When she asks her mother about it, she shuts down. So she wants until her aunt comes to visit and her aunt acts just as strange. With the persistence only a kid can summon, she manages to convince her aunt to take her to the lake for the summer along with her small young cousin, Emma. And at first, it's beautiful and picturesque, but the lake creates its own foggy weather and all of the locals have warnings about how dark and deep it is. A body could get lost down there.
Maybe a body already has.
If you like the vibe of those old 70s gothics, you'll love Hahn's work. She basically writes the kid versions of them, and she does a great job. Some middle grade feels like you're being sat down and taught a lesson, but Hahn writes her kids in all of their bratty precocious glory, and I love that about her work. I honestly think the kids reading this will, too. Kids are a lot smarter than adults give them credit for. They know when they're being patronized.
This haunting, beautiful, creepy story is going to be living rent-free in my head for a while. Thank goodness I don't have any creepy lakes or creepy little girls in my backyard.
I'm going through all of my books and trying to decide what to keep and what to get rid of. SO FAR FROM HOME was an old fave when I was a kid. My mom had gotten it for me because it's about an Irish girl who leaves Cork County for America because of the potato famine, and she ends up working as a mill girl in Massachusetts. Now that I've read it, I have a lot of big feelings, and those feelings involve spoilers, so BE FOREWARNED.
***WARNING: SPOILERS TO COME***
This book lingered on in my consciousness for a while because I was traumatized by the scene in this book where one of the other girls is fatally scalped when her hair gets caught in the machine. And then they just drag her dead body out and start everything up again, whaaaaat. Also a little boy loses a finger.
Mills were no joke.
Apart from the fatal-to-children accidents, the book also touches upon the discrimination that the Irish faced in the 1800s, with "you're not like other Irish" remarks, people getting hated on for being Irish, the NINA (no Irish need apply) signs, and various other forms of anti-Irish sentiment. Which makes it sound like this book is super crazy, but it's actually pretty boring. Also, the author works double-time trying to make everything sound super Irish by injecting a 'twill, 'twould, or 'tis literally at least once per page. This was almost as traumatic as the mill scalping.
But the WORST thing about this book is the epilogue when the author is like "lolz, guess what bitches? two years later, that heroine you were rooting for dies of cholera." I'm getting flashbacks to the fucking Divergent series all over again lol. When I read this book as a kid, I remember thinking, WTF. On the one hand, I admire the ballsiness. But on the other, wow, what a bummer for the readers.
Some of the books in the Diaries series still hold up, but this isn't one of them imo.
This book made me miss the dystopian boom. I liked the creativeness of the story. It kind of reminds me of both HOLES and the Alex Rider series, but way grungier and creepier. Escape from Furnace is a series about a dystopian society where boys are slapped into a maximum security prison for even the smallest of crimes. But it seems like maybe there aren't enough criminals to fill quota because boys like our main character, Alex, are being framed.
If you like modern-day steampunk horror, like the Bioshock franchise, you'll love this. It definitely feels like a book that's marketed to teen boys first and foremost but I think that there's a lot in here that would appeal to adult readers of horror, too. I know it's the first book in the series but I had SO MANY QUESTIONS that weren't answered, and that was frustrating. Like, I know, I know, first in a series. But give me something! And it ends on a wicked cliffhanger, too. I can't imagine being a teen reading this in 2009 and being like where's the rest
I loved the idea behind this: a girl leveraging social media to find the serial killer who murdered her mother? I'm happy to report that the execution was good, too.
Jess's mother was murdered by the Magpie Man when she was just seven years old, creating a wound that never healed. When the opportunity to be on a reality TV show with vlogs shows up, she thinks it might be a way to provoke the killer into doing something stupid and outing himself once and for all. Or, at the very least, a way to reach someone who knows something.
I liked this book a lot. It was fast-paced and tightly plotted. There wasn't a ton of substance to it but I was engaged the whole time. If they played up the romance a little more this would make a great CW TV show lol. There's even a bit of "is he the bad guy or just a hot man who's into me?" which is always my favorite trope.
This was a buddy-read with my friend Corvina. WALK OF THE SPIRITS has been on my TBR for a while because Richie Tankersley Cusick is one of my favorite horror/thriller books of all time. Most of her books are YA but she has two adult titles. Her adult titles are among her best work, I think because she had to dial stuff way down for her YA publishers. Even so, her older stuff tends to be wilder than her newer books. WALK OF THE SPIRITS is so mild that it could probably be on the Disney channel.
There's a lot about this book I did like, though. Nobody does atmosphere like this author. I also thought the heroine was bland but fine (surprised by how many people were calling her obnoxious in the reviews; she's almost ridiculously inoffensive). Also, one of the other girls talks about how she's had casual sex and the heroine is super unjudgemental about it, which is a rarity for the 00s. I also liked the Louisiana ghost culture elements and the fact that one of the love interests was a hot, dangerous Cajun guy.
Where this book fell apart was that it foreshadowed creepy stuff but then it didn't pay off. I had an idea of how this book would end and when I wasn't even close, I was mad, because I liked my idea better. The ending was ridiculous. Apparently, there's a sequel, so some of the open-endedness made sense, but my issues with the main storyline remain.
I still love this author but I won't be recommending WALK OF THE SPIRITS to anyone.
Nenia ✨ I yeet my books back and forth ✨
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