One Day in December

This book gave me some anxiety.  I think part of it was I knew from the back that I was jumping into a ten year love saga that may not have a happy ending.  Part of it dredged up some unpleasant memories from my past.  Regardless, it took me a week to crack the cover, and then another week to read the first 120 pages.  But after breaking through that barrier, I finished the last 275 pages in two days.

Don’t let the “Christmas” sticker fool you in the library…this isn’t really a Christmas book.  It just happens that December marked the first time that Laurie and Jack meet, her on the bus while he was at the bus stop.  It was a movie-cliche love at first sight moment.  But the bus left, hauling Laurie away, embarking her on a year-long quest to find her missing “bus boy” with the help of her vivacious friend Sarah.  A year later, Sarah excitedly introduces Laurie to her new boyfriend…Jack, the mysterious bus boy.  This is where my anxious heart couldn’t take it because Laurie and Sarah are close.  BFFs.  Practically sisters.  But now Laurie has to decide whether to tell Sarah her new boyfriend is in fact the mystery man they’ve been looking for all year.  It’s stressful and tension filled and enough awkwardness to make anyone cringe.

But the story doesn’t end there.  It keeps going…for years!  Skipping every few months, it tells of Laurie and Sarah’s friendship, of Laurie and Jack’s infatuation turned friendship, of Laurie trying to mend her heart without uprooting friendships.  Heartbreak.  Loss.  Love.  Fallouts.  

This book reminded me of the 2014 movie Boyhood because it gives you snippets and pieces of Laurie and Jack’s lives without filling in all the tiny details.  Sometimes it will jump a month, sometimes six months.  Sometimes we’re in Laurie’s point of view, other times we go to Jack.  

I guess part of my reluctance once I started reading was the fact that I identified with Laurie.  Not in the love at first sight part (because if you’ve read any of my romance reviews, you know how I feel about that subject), but the effervescent best friend who always catches the eye of the guys part.  In high school, one of my best friends was that person.  She never stole the guys I liked, but it seemed that I was always the third wheel, the awkward side-kick without a date, the one who was not quite pretty enough.  I shrugged it off, like Laurie, but that nagging voice stays in your head longer than you’d like it to.  Laurie’s shock and pain at realizing her friend (even unknowingly) took the guy she’s been pining for brought back some of those high school feelings, so it was hard to get through the first part of the book.  But that same feeling is what pushed me towards the ending with abandon.  I needed to know that Laurie got her happy ending, just like me.

Overall, a slow start but a good read for any rom-com fans.  

Greetings from Witness Protection!

This middle grades book was a $2 find at our school’s last Scholastic book sale, and I knew I couldn’t pass it up!

Nicolette has been in the foster system since her father was incarcerated and her grammy died.  She’s been through five foster homes but always finds herself back at the Center because she doesn’t “stick.”  Then the US Marshall’s show up with an interesting proposition:  they are looking for kids willing to go into witness protection with a family to change their searchable profile.  Nicolette, now named Charlotte, joins the Trevor family who is on the run from a crime syndicate family.  Now she has to bond with her new parents, find a way to keep her new sullen younger brother from contacting his old friends, and keep her old kleptomaniac habits hidden so she doesn’t get sent away again.

This was a very well done book and has a lot of elements that would make middle grade kids enjoy it.  There’s a spunky lead who seems to outsmart those around her (even the adults).  There’s the suspense and threat of danger without overdoing the violence.  There’s the friend-dynamic of Charlotte trying to make new friends at school while trying to deflect the mean girl comments.  Overall, it was a very relatable book for upper elementary and middle schoolers (which is easy to understand when you read the author’s bio and find out he’s a current 5th grade teacher himself).  And parents will enjoy that the content is clean without any cursing or intimate situations.

The Raven's Tale

This book caught my eye because it’s a fictionalized version of Edgar Allan Poe’s youth.  Add a little mystical fantasy touch and I knew I wanted to read it.

In school, you read Poe at some point, whether it’s The Raven or The Pit and the Pendulum or The Tell-Tale Heart.  He’s seen as one of the great gothic writers of the weird and macabre.  But what if he dreamed of being a romantic?  A satirist?  That’s the question this book revolves around.

We meet a seventeen-year-old Edgar Allan Poe, orphaned when his theatrical mother died of tuberculous when he was three and adopted by the affluent Allan family.  Poe is anxiously wanting to leave Richmond, Virginia, and cannot wait to start university classes at the University of Virginia.  But his adoptive father is threatening to not send him if he doesn’t stop his frivolous writing habit, his adoptive mother is constantly sick and in a fragile state, and the love of his life is being wishy-washy about commitment for fear of her father’s disdain of Poe’s lowly background.  Basically, Poe’s feeling pressure from all around to be successful.  So this is not the most ideal time for his gothic writing muse to spring from his imagination into real flesh and blood.  His muse, named Lenore (obviously), spends a year trying to convince Poe that telling ghastly stories about death is his true path so she can evolve into the raven she’s meant to be.

I really enjoyed the language in this book, the way Cat Winters weaves her words together using language from the 1800s (I guess it’s the English teacher in me).  The author also spent a quite a bit of time researching Edgar Allan Poe’s life to keep it as accurate as possible. However, the tale was just okay.  It was an interesting concept, but unless the reader is really into Poe, then I don’t see them really connecting with this book.

If writing that springs to life, ghostly specters, and tormented artists don’t catch your reading fancy, then this YA novel won’t hold your attention.

**Thank you, NetGalley and Amulet Books, for this free copy in exchange for an honest review.**

Extracted Trilogy

I have lots of book genres that I enjoy reading, and sci-fi is one of them!  Time travel, fictional technology, mysterious events…what’s not to love?  Sure, sometimes the stories can get a little out there and confusing, but as long as there is a line of plausibility, I’m up for it.

I read the first book in this series about a year ago.  Extracted sets up the main conflict of the series.  In the year 2061, a genius kid built a time machine to save his father’s life, but after jumping into 2111, he finds out the world has been left in utter destruction with no sign of life.  It’s decided that they need to extract people from history with a special set of skills—both military and intelligence—so they can figure out what went wrong in the future and fix it.  The problem is they don’t want to disrupt history’s timeline further, so they need to choose people who died but whose bodies were never recovered.  They decide on three:  “Mad” Harry Madden—a WWII legend who is built like a tank; Ben Ryder—an insurance investigator with a brain to make complex connections; and Safa Patel—an elite police officer with impressive combat skills. 

The first book, Extracted, really lets the reader get to know the characters and understand the conflict of the story while the second book, Executed, picks up where the last on left off.  Now a special force unit—comprised of Alpha, Beta, Charlie, Delta, and Echo—is after the group because they want the time machine.  They report back to their mysterious leader “Mother” and are willing to do whatever it takes to find the group and take the time machine.  Harry, Safa, and Ben also have other changes:  Roland, their previous leader and the person responsible for extracting them, is out and Miri, an old intelligence leader for the military, is now in charge.  With Miri’s help—and a lot of time machine practice—Harry, Safa, and Ben are able to save the time machine inventor and his sister (in a previous timeline—after he built the machine but before people started coming after them) so that they can protect the time travel technology from getting into the wrong hands.  This book, though it gets a little crazy, is still easy to track and understand because only one group is time traveling while the other is fixed in 2061.

The third book is when it starts to get really wibbly-wobbly (and if you make it this far, trust me, you’ll want to finish the series).  In Extinct, Ben, Safa, Harry, and their new recruit Emily have slipped by the special force unit, but Mother is undeterred.  She hijacks the time traveling technology and now has a working time machine of her own.  Now the two groups are fighting against time and each other to figure out how to stop the other…oh, and how to save the world from destroying in 2111.  There’s now three working time machines, lots of jumping here and there in time, and a whole lot of deception.

I really enjoyed the ingenuity of this trilogy (and who doesn’t love a good time traveling book?).  The only fault was the coarse language throughout the entire series (this is definitely an adult book), and some sexual references that weren’t explicit but enough to make me not want to pass this on to a high schooler (again, adult book).

If you enjoy some science fiction hilarity, then you should enjoy this series as much as I did.

The Library Book

I’m not typically a nonfiction reader unless it’s more of a narrative nonfiction.  After seeing some hyped reviews for this book about the Los Angeles fire of 1986, I really wanted to read it.  It seemed right up my alley:  a book about books!  However, it was a little off for me.

On the gorgeous front cover, there’s a review that says it’s a mix of “true crime, history, biography, and immersion journalism.”  This book doesn’t fit into just one nonfiction genre; it’s a mix of many different types which made it feel very disjointed for me.  Part of the story is the history of the Los Angeles public library, from it’s start as a gentlemen’s reading room to its current state as a modern day information center.  Part of the story is the history of libraries themselves, focusing on the history behind book burnings and library fires.  Part of the story is the Los Angeles library fire and the hunt for the arsonist.  Part of the story is Susan Orlean’s research process and interviews with past and current library staff.  

It was interesting, but all of the differing stories seemed to make it feel disjointed, in my opinion.  You’d be skipping from the background story of the main arson suspect to the modern day librarian interviews to World War II book burnings to the eccentric library director in 1905 who hiked from Chicago to Los Angeles.  I had a hard time staying engaged with the book because it seemed so scattered.  I’d get really into one chapter then find myself skimming the next to get through it.  

For anyone who loves libraries, history, and books, this will be a great book for you.  If you need linear, chronological order when reading a book, then you may just want to skip this one.

The Incredible True Story of the Making of the Eve of Destruction

I'm completely mixed about this book.  The first half of the book drew me in:  the 1980s culture, the elements of a blended family during a time when it wasn’t as common, the threat of nuclear destruction and Laura’s nervousness about it.  However, the second half of the book was a let down.  It was very over dramatic and just skimmed over events so it didn’t have the same connected feeling.

Laura wins a guest role in a movie that's being filmed in her town.  It's the 1980s and people are still anxious about Russia and impending nuclear attacks, which makes people a little edgy about the 1950s style movie about an accidental nuclear war.  Laura is especially anxious about mutually assured destruction because her dad works in one of the nuclear silos located near her town, however, the rest of the town can only talk about Laura’s mother new marriage to a black man.  I enjoyed hearing Laura's backstory about her family and new stepbrother Terrance, however, the second half of the book just made me say, "What?"  Some of the side stories got lost somewhere, and the details just got confusing. 

I was really hoping for a little more cohesive storyline, so it was a little bit of a let down for me.

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

Pride: a Pride and Prejudice Remix

I have a soft spot for Pride and Prejudice (as you know from this post and this post), so when my husband got me this book for my stocking this year, I was over the moon!

This YA book modernizes the classic story while also having its own heart and soul.  Set in modern day Bushwick, Brooklyn, Zuri and her loud Haitian-Dominican family love where they live.  Zuri loves the block parties, the old men who sit outside the corner bodega all day, her fortune telling landlady in the basement, and the sense of togetherness.  However, she has noticed changes coming to her neighborhood, the biggest of which is the rich family who bought the old dilapidated house across the street and restored it.  Zuri is worried that the Darcy family moving in is the beginning of the end of her close-knit neighborhood, since they obviously don’t belong with their wealth and uppity son, Darius.  The summer before her senior year should have been filled with college essay writing and sister-bonding, but Zuri finds she now must worry about her sweet older sister Janae falling for Ansley (the other Darcy brother), her two younger sisters emerging into the world of puberty and boys, and the sincerity of her her love interest Warren.

This was a great start to my New Year’s reading!  The characters were well-developed (or at least Zuri, Janae, and the Darcy boys are…no one ever really thinks about her poor middle sister Mary), and I think many teens will resonate with this story. 

You don’t have to have read the original to appreciate this one, however, it does add to the layers of the story to know the original.

New Year's Resolutions and Reading Challenges

I admit, I’ve never been one to pick a resolution for the new year (except that one year I tried to give up chocolate in college and it ended flopping like a professional basketball player).

So this year I’m doing something different:  I’m committing to a reading challenge.  

There are tons of reading challenges out there:  post a picture every day on a specific theme, read through the genres, read lesser known books with fewer review hits…but the one I’ve decided to do is the Unread Shelf Project for 2019.

My current unread stack of books

The rules are simple, read books you already own (or in my case, books that I’ve wanted to read but haven’t found the time).  I currently have a stack of 23 books next to my nightstand waiting to be read, another 18 books on my Kindle, and 71 books on my Goodreads “Want to Read” list.  And in all sincere honesty, I blame all of you for this.  You give me really good book recommendations.  My husband passes on great library finds to me.  Instagram is inundated with books, books, and more books.  I also blame myself.  I’m a mood reader, so if I’m reminded of a favorite book, I really want to go back to reread it (for example, I read Fangirl FOUR TIMES in 2018 because it’s my go-to book to destress my anxious mind).

So what are the specifics, you may ask?

• January:  read any unread book
• February: read a book gifted to you
• March:  read the book that’s been on your self the longest
• April: read the book you most recently acquired
• May: read a book you bought because of the movie/TV/theater adaptation
• June: read a book about travel or set in a country you’ve never been to
• July: read a book from a series on your shelf or one you already started
• August: read a book recommended for you by a friend
• September:  read a book you can buddy read with someone else
• October: read a book that scares you (can be its length, content, or genre that’s out of your comfort zone)
• November: read a book from your favorite genre
• December: read the shortest book on your shelf

Usually I read multiple books a month, so this will be one of my monthly picks to give me some emotional freedom to still moody read.

Want to join me?  I’d love the company and the accountability.

Happy reading in 2019!