Grim Lovelies

Fairy tale stories have always intrigued me, so the premise of Megan Shepherd's new book Grim Lovelies hooked me.  The question:  what happens to the animals in fairy tales that get turned into humans?  And how hard would they fight to stay human?

In the story, Anouk is a beastie, meaning she was created from an animal by a witch.  She's spent her year of life cooking and cleaning for Mada Vittora, the witch who created her, but after a tense night meeting, Anouk finds Mada Vittora dead.  In fear, Anouk and the other beasties--Cricket and Beau--flee for their lives and try to find a way to remain human forever before Mada Vittora's spell fades away.

This book is pure fantasy.  Yes, it's set in modern day Paris, but the magic, witches, royals, and goblins dominate the story.  The first half is straightforward--introductions and survival.  However, the second half of the novel gets a little crazy, in my opinion.  There’s an Ocean’s 11-esque heist and a goblin party in the subway tunnels.  There are living topiaries and love interests.  And, of course, there’s deception and trickery while Anouk figures out who she can trust.  

In my opinion, it was laid on a little thick, but it does set up for the next book in the series.

**Thank you, Net Galley, for this free book in exchange for an honest review.**

The Glass Ocean

If you know me, you know I love history, especially the opulent time of the Gilded Age.  Although technically the Gilded Age stopped around 1900, the wealth and extravagance lasted into the 1910s and 1920s.  The Glass Ocean is a historical fiction book chronicling the final passage of the Lusitania, an ocean liner that was sunk by a German U-boat in 1915 during WWI.  

The Glass Ocean is written by three authors—Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig, and Karen White—and the story is told from three women’s perspectives.  Two of the women lived in 1915, Caroline a wealthy socialite and Tess a con woman, who were both on the Lusitania.  The third is Sarah, a historical writer in the modern day who is investigating a mysterious note left by her great-grandfather, a steward who died on the Lusitania.  Her research lead her to England and John Langford, a descendant of another Lusitania passenger who was the supposed sender of the mysterious snippet.  While John and Sarah try to piece together how their ancestors connect and why a coded message was safely sealed in a waterproof bag for a century, the reader is pushed back in time to see the events play out in real time.

If I had to classify this book, it’s historical fiction but also a mystery.  I liked figuring out the new pieces and realizing who people were in relation to the modern day research Sarah was doing, but the beginning and the end of the story was uneventfully slow.  It took me a while to swap to the different character’s perspectives and to be invested in their outcomes.  Once they made it onto the boat, the action and suspicions started picking up and made the book better.  But the ending seemed a little…up in the air?  Anticlimactic?  It was just missing something.

Overall, I’m glad I read it.  I’m also glad that I checked it out from the library instead of buying it.

Love, Life, & the List

Kasie West currently reigns over sappy chick-lit stories in the middle school world.  Others have cycled through, but what I love about West’s writing is that it sets up love triangles and situations that relate to middle and high schoolers without all the unnecessary sex scenes.  My (current) favorite of hers is PS: I Like You, mainly because of the quirky characters and their banter.  Love, Life, & the List was good, just not my favorite.

This story is about Abby and Cooper, two best friends since 8th grade.  It’s their first summer together without their other two friends—Rachel’s touring Europe with her family and Justin’s on a church mission trip all summer—and Abby’s realizing that her unrequited love for Cooper may be one of the things holding her and her art back, along with her fear of change and her agoraphobic mother.  With the help of her mother and her grandfather, Abby makes a list of things to do over the summer—from trying something new to facing a fear to finding out a stranger’s story—to try and help her expand her world for herself and for her art.

Like I said, this book was just okay.  I guess I was frustrated at Abby most of the book because she knew Cooper didn’t like her back the same way, but she still enabled him to have a hold over her.  I know it’s harder to do than to just say “let him go” but her own personal happiness was so caught up in this one person that I just felt it to be unhealthy.  I do like how it shows that having more than one friend group is okay.  Each friend you have can bring something new out of you, and that’s what I feel Abby finally realized.  She’d been a four-some with her friends for so long, she didn’t have any other close friends to confide it.  So when two of the four were away for the summer, it forced her to make some new friends.  I’m not saying you need to be friends with everyone but having diverse friend groups you’re a part of is a good place to be.

Lois Lane: Double Down

We all know who Lois Lane is, but what about her life before meeting the infamous Clark Kent?  That is what this series focuses on.  

The first book, Fallout, introduced us to Lois (and her thick permanent record that follows her from school to school) and her first few weeks in Metropolis.  This is the second book in the series and picks up soon after the first book leaves off.  Lois and her friends from the Daily Planet offshoot The Scoop are looking for new investigative stories, not just feature pieces, when one bumps into Lois on the street…literally.  Melody—twin sister to Matty, one of Lois’s friends and Scoop colleagues—is in trouble and reluctantly decides to let Lois help find out what’s causing her dizzy spells.  At the same time, James—another Scoop colleague—asks for Lois’s help to figure out if his political father was falsely charged with embezzlement, causing him to go to jail.  As the two stories unfold, they start to seem like there’s more than coincidental timing linking them together.  During all this, Lois is also still messaging with SmallvilleGuy, a secretive teen she met online who’s quickly becoming one of her best friends and potential crush.

This book, in my opinion, did a lot better job keeping the reader hooked into the story.  I don’t know if the whole “get to know you” part of the first book just seemed forced or if I was really just in the mood to jump in without all the background stories, but this one was fast paced and had just enough quirky to make it a really enthralling read.  Lois and her take charge personality really do come through (and I really like how one promo blurb likened her to Veronica Mars, which is totally true).  You get to see her soften up a little bit, since she’s trying to figure out how to be a good friend while also sticking to the truth of her investigative stories.  Yes, there are some plot points that seem far-fetched, but the story is in the comic book world where there are alien superheroes living normal, teenage lives, so does it really matter?

I’m excited to see what Gwenda Bond’s newest installment, Triple Threat, will bring to the table…

Nyxia

I (obviously) went to ReadUp Greenville this year, a young adult author’s conference where you basically spend the day getting to listen to authors talk about their books, processes, and motivations.  It was (obviously) phenomenal, like I knew it would be.  Usually going in I have read some of the author’s books, so I have my list of ones that I want to buy or are interested in hearing about.  Scott Reintgen’s novel Nyxia wasn’t even on my radar, but after hearing him talk about it, I knew I had to get it.

If I had to describe Nyxia in one phrase, it would be “Hunger Games in space.”  It’s set in the future when a new Earth-like planet has been discovered along with a new element called nyxia.  The problem is the indigenous people of the planet don’t like humans, but they’re peaceful with children.  The solution:  assemble a team of teens, promise them a whole lot of money for participating, train them to be soldiers and miners, and send them to the new planet to mine the nyxia.  Ten kids are chosen to go, but they soon find out that not everything is as it seems and everything is part of the game of survival.

First, I loved the diversity.  Everyone can find someone they relate to.  Elliott, the main character, is a black teen from Detroit.  There are also teens from Pakistan, Japan, China, Switzerland, Nigeria…and the list goes on.  The author also did a good job with making the characters each have their own personalities while making them not seem stale.  Another aspect I liked was the quick action.  The storyline picks up quickly from the start, and the science fiction aspect isn’t completely weird.  Since it’s set in the future (around 2050-ish) the tech they have seems plausible and the element nyxia gives it just enough mystery to make it intriguing.

This is the first in a trilogy, so hold on tight!

The Hollow of Fear: A Lady Sherlock Mystery

I’m a sucker for a good old fashioned “who done it” mystery, and the latest Lady Sherlock book did not disappoint.  It’s written in the same style as a classic Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie, which just makes the language feel so much richer than some modern day books.  I also enjoy how they’ve taken Sherlock Holmes and reimagined “him” as a woman.

You’ll have to start with the first book in the series, A Study in Scarlet Women, to get the full background, but the basic premise is Charlotte Holmes is a beautiful young woman with an even more brilliant mind.  To prevent her parents from marrying her off against her will, she decides to purposefully get caught in a compromising position (to put it lightly) so she will be ineligible for marriage.  Now she must find a way to make money so she can live on her own, hence the creation of the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes.  Along with her sister Olivia, her benefactor Mrs. Watson, and her long-time friend Lord Ingram, she successfully creates and maintains the persona of Sherlock.  But now in the third book, Lord Ingram is under scrutiny for his wife’s murder, and only Charlotte’s quick mind can try to extricate him from blame.

This novel, much like the last, cannot be predicted.  There are too many pieces all floating together and they don’t match up until the last 50 pages.  All the seemingly minor loose ends have a purpose, even though the reader may not be able to see how they all fit together as the story progresses.  That’s what I love about a good mystery.  I’m great at predicting motives and murderers, so it takes a lot to stump me, and when it’s done is such a way that keeps you interested the entire book, well, that’s even better.

If you enjoyed the first two books in this series, then you’ll be just as enthralled with this third installment.