On My Radar, or Future Reviews

So at my house, Christmas is over for the year and I am the incredibly happy owner of about twenty new books, all of which will eventually get reviewed. It would take me far too much time to dig up covers for all of the books and post quick summaries, so what I will do is leave you with the names of all the books so you will know what you might be seeing in the future:

Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor
Everlasting by Angie Frazier
The Deadly Sister by Eliot Schrefer
Eon by Alison Goodman
Jane Slayre by Charlotte Bronte/Emily Browning Erwin
Moonshine by Alaya Johnson
This Gorgeous Game by Donna Freitas
Flecks of Gold by Alicia Buck
Crazy Beautiful by Lauren Baratz-Logsted
The Sky is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson
Intrinsical by Lani Woodland
Steampunk by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
Stolen by Lucy Christopher
The Grimm Legacy by Polly Schulman
21 Proms by about 21 different authors.
The Boyfriend List by E. Lockhart
The Boy Book by E. Lockhart
The Treasure Map of Boys by E. Lockhart

So what will I be reading first? Hm... I'm not sure. Well, considering that its third sequel will be coming out on December 28th and I am almost positive I will love the series and desire that fourth book for my seventeenth birthday, my first read out of this gigantic new TBR pile will be...

The Boyfriend List by E. Lockhart!

This book is incredibly short and I'm already loving it after just the first chapter, so expect a review within a few days. I'm absolutely sure it will take me no longer than a week to get a review up. Happy holidays everyone, and I hope you all have a wonderful new year!

Crank by Ellen Hopkins

(Yeah, I'm going to normal titles now. The corny ones cause my brain much pain when I try to think them up and they're just plain silly. I'm nearly seventeen now! I suppose it's time to grow up. I apologize if you liked them.)

Title: Crank
Author: Ellen Hopkins
Publisher: Simon Pulse
Release Date: October 5th, 2004
Pages: 537 pages (paperback)
How I Got the Book: Borrowed it from my Newspaper teacher

Kristina Georgia Snow is the perfect daughter: gifted high school junior, quiet, never any trouble. But on a trip to visit her absentee father, Kristina disappears and Bree takes her place. Bree is the exact opposite of Kristina--she's fearless.

Through a boy, Bree meets the monster: crank. And what begins as a wild, ecstatic ride turns into a struggle through hell for her mind, her soul--her life.

Review:

Kristina Snow has only ever been a good girl. Good grades, good behavior, never associated with the wrong crowd--she doesn't take after her drug addict father at all. Or does she? When she goes to visit him due to a court order, her alter ego Bree, a girl who is fearless and her own person, comes out to play and together, they take on the monster: crank, or meth, or any of the million names you can call it. When she returns home to Reno, the addiction she picked up in Albuquerque comes back with her. School, her old friends, and her family suddenly become unimportant to her--all that matters is crank: the connections she must make to get it, the rush she gets from it, and the people she meets because of it.

Before August, I had no idea who Ellen Hopkins was and had not heard of her books. At that time, I heard about the incident where she was uninvited from the Teen Lit Fest in Humble, Texas because a librarian and some parents protested it. I wanted to see what they were fussing about, but it took me until now to get ahold of one of her books because it lingered in the back of my mind. I can now say I have read an Ellen Hopkins book and plan to read many more.

The verse prose of the book could put a reader off at first, but the story takes hold fast and the form it comes to the reader in no longer matters. Personally, I believe that this story has more impact written in the poetic form it appears in than in the conventional form of most novels. The reader is forced to pay attention to exactly what they're reading because the form changes all over the place. This unusual form (which takes up much less page space than the usual novel) and the fast pace make Crank a novel someone can dive right into and not surface from until they read the last page.

Not only is Ellen Hopkins a wonderful writer, but she is also a wonderful storyteller: using experience gained in her own life from when her daughter was addicted to crank, she tells the tragic story of a girl who lost herself to drugs in about six months and makes the reader care. Her descent from good child to drug user to drug dealer is a terrifying one and despite not ever being an addict herself, Hopkins captures Kristina's thoughts perfectly and if I am to believe other reviewers, accurately; I have seen many readers who formerly used crank/meth comment on just how realistic the text is. It appears that Hopkins had many talks with her daughter about what her experience was like.

People who demand that every little thing is detailed, down to the stains on the carpet and the poster on the wall in a room, might be annoyed by this book. All of the detail is concentrated inwards on Kristina's experience with crank and what it is turning her into. Despite the lack of details in most situations (one of the few settings detailed well is Kristina's room), the scenes are easily pictured within the mind. Kristina spouts just enough about what is around her for the reader to put the picture together and that is it. Little else is said because why would she care about that? She's more concerned with the drugs.

Reading Crank, I wondered what this kind of novel might have done for a former friend of mine named Shelby. We were best friends when we were younger and then she went away to a private school for eight years. The next time I saw her, she was hooked on all sorts of drugs due to her family, all of whom are a special kind of messed up. I heard her talk about doing ecstasy, just as Kristina does in this book, acid, she smoked marijuana at our bus stop (which is pretty much my mailbox) one morning before school... She even overdosed at school once and was in the hospital for a few days. Sixteen years old and a drug addict, just like Kristina. She recently moved away and we haven't kept contact. How many children has this author and this book helped? Who knows. Maybe if she'd had a book like this, it could have helped her too.

Now I'm wondering what took me so long to read an Ellen Hopkins book. I wish I could go pick up the sequels Glass and Fallout right now, but it's Christmas and I don't exactly have the money at the moment. Good thing my birthday is so close! After that, I'll advance onto Ellen's other novels, written in the same prose form and tackling the same issues. Even if books about drugs make you uncomfortable the way they way they do me, get your hands on this book and read it if you haven't already done so. The time you spend reading this book with be nothing but worth it.

5 stars!

What am I reading next?: I have no clue. I have no new books left and I don't plan to start any old ones since I'll be getting more books in two days. My next post will be about what books you can expect me to review in the future.

Delcroix Academy: The Candidates by Inara Scott

Title: Delcroix Academy: The Candidates
Author: Inara Scott
Publisher: Hyperion
Release Date: August 24, 2010
Pages: 293 pages (hardback)
How I Got the Book: On loan from a friend

Dancia Lewis is far from popular. And that's not just because of her average grades or less-than-glamorous wardrobe. in fact, Dancia's mediocrity is a calculated cover for her secret: whenever she sees a person threatening someone she cares about, things just... happen. Cars skid. Structures collapse. Usually someone gets hurt. So Dancia does everything she can to avoid getting close to anyone, believing this way she can suppress her powers and keep them hidden.

But when recruiters from the prestigious Delcroix Academy show up in her living room offering her a full scholarship, Dancia's days of living under the radar may be over. Only, Delcroix is a school for the child geniuses and diplomats' kids--not B students with uncontrollable telekinetic tendencies. So why are they treating Dancia like she's special? Even the hottest guy on campus seems to be going out of his way to make Dancia feel welcome.

And then there's her mysterious new friend, Jack, who can't stay out of trouble. He suspects something dangerous is going on at the Academy and wants Dancia to help him figure out what. But Dancia isn't convinced. She hopes that maybe the recruiters know more about her "gift" than they're letting on. Maybe they can help her understand how to use it... But not even Dancia could have imagined what awaits her behind the gates of Delcroix Academy.

Review:

Since childhood, Dancia has had a strange power. When she gets upset, things happen. Like when a guy threatens her grandmother at the hospital, he gets thrown into a wall and ends up in a coma. She tries to fly under the radar and not make friends so that she wouldn't have anyone to defend. Then comes an invitation to the famous Delcroix Academy, a school that has turned out some pretty well-known people. With insistance from her darling grandmother and a convincing argument from a boy she's developing a serious crush on, Dancia accepts the invitation and starts to make friends, including Jack Landry. Once Jack starts pointing out the strangeness of the academy to her, Dancia wonders if there is more going on at the school than meets the eye.

The cover of this book is striking and the summary is too, in its own special way. I never had the opportunity to read this book until a friend bought it and gave it to me on loan so I could read it. The first four chapters did not capture me, so I put it away for a few months and got back to it only when it was finals week, I needed a book to read, and had nothing left that I hadn't read other than this book. No more books are going to get loaned from that friend for a while because that is now four awful books she has given me in a row.

I disliked Dancia. The people around her care more about her than she cares about them. She decides to hate one girl (Perfect Girl, later given the name Allie) for absolutely no reason and even her friends get no nice treatment. At one point, her friend Esther is described as "clucking" when she is trying to comfort Dancia about something. The connotations of words matter and you do not use the word "clucking" when describing a friend unless you're trying to make the narrator mean. I kept having to tell myself, "She's just fourteen, you were just as bad when you were her age" but I stopped doing that after a while because a reader should not be forced to use an excuse like that for as many times as I had to. Even when I was fourteen and an absolute monster, I wasn't as bad as she gets at points in this novel. Dancia does not think for herself at all and I just could not stand her.

People in the novel kept calling Dancia tough and honest and great, but I never saw what they were talking about. All I found was a girl who was obsessed with a fake boy, decided to hate a girl she didn't know for no good reason, and needed a serious attitude adjustment. I disliked almost every character for one reason for another; even Jack, the character I could stand the most, did a lot of stuff that made me angry.Worse yet was the portrayal of almost any girl who was not Dancia. Catherine? Control freak bully who puts down Dancia for not being from a good family like she is. Anna? Jealous ex-girlfriend who makes it obvious that she doesn't want Dancia and Cam near each other. In this book, if you're female and your name isn't Dancia Lewis, you're either a mean girl or a clucking friend. (Yes, I am sticking with the clucking! That was awful.)

One technique I use when reading to make sure I get as much from it as possible is to stop reading and go over the major events of the novel. This helps me remember what happened for when I review the book later and it makes me remember the book. When I pulled that technique for this book, I could remember very little of what I'd read only an hour before. Writing this review is difficult because it is taking serious effort to remember what I had issues with while reading. Bad sign? Most definitely.

I'm more interested in everything the book didn't say. It's obvious already that the program isn't going to be as clean as it is explained in this book. It will turn out that it is corrupt and instead of sending people around the world to help during disasters, they will be going to the highest bidder and the governments might even be using some of the talented people for not-so-good means. I would rather read about that. If it turns out that the program is that black and white (which I don't imagine it will be due to some hints at the end of the book), then I will be even more disappointed than I already am.

Maybe this story wouldn't have been so bad if I didn't have to read through Dancia's unnecessary explanations (Why do we need to know your grandfather was a logger? Get back to the story because I don't care!) and lovestruck point of view. Since this book is written in first person, the reader is stuck dealing with her obsession with Cam for 293 pages of misery. Words cannot express how many times and how badly I wanted Dancia to shut up about Cam and get back to telling the story. Cam this, Cam that, Cam wouldn't want me to do this, but Cam and I are meant to be (that last part is a direct quote from our fourteen-year-old main character, by the way)--I don't see what the big deal about the guy is about! He felt as fake as counterfeit money.

The only thing about this book that made it worth reading was Jack, and even he hit my pet peeves. Do I need to say this in Caps Lock? I think I do. STALKING IS BAD, PEOPLE! I think I need to make a tag for that and a few other things. Jack lost serious points with me when it was discovered that he'd started following Dancia after she helped him. I don't tolerate that when I read. I'm having one of those moments where I wonder if I missed the point completely or if I'm just being picky. After all, if so many other people have nice things to say, how am I able to find all these negatives? Then I remember that reading is quite subjective and the world needs negative people to make it go around. I don't recommend this book, but I won't tell people not to read it.

1 star!

What am I reading next?: Crank by Ellen Hopkins. It's already turning out much better than the awful book I just reviewed.

Jane Bites Back by Michael Thomas Ford

Title: Jane Bites Back

Author: Michael Thomas Ford

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Release Date: December 29, 2009
Pages: 299 pages (paperback)
How I Got the Book: Bought it online because it sounded like fun

Two hundred years after her death, Jane Austen is still surrounded by the literature she loves--but now it's because she's the owner of Flyleaf Boos in a sleepy college town in Upstate New York. Every day she watches her novels fly off the shelves--along with dozens of unauthorized sequels, spin-offs, and adaptations. Jane may be undead, but her books have taken on a life of their own.

To make matters worse, the manuscript she finished just before being turned into a vampires has been rejected by publishers--116 times. Jane longs to let the world know who she is, but when a sudden twist of fate thrusts her back into the spotlight, she must hide her read identity--and fend off a dark man from her past while juggling two modern suitors. Will the world's most beloved author be able to keep her cool in this comedy of manners, or will she show everyone what a woman with a sharp wit and an even sharper set of fans can do?

Review:

Two hundred years ago, Jane Austen was turned into a vampire and ever since, she has been hiding among humans under many names, her current one being Jane Fairfax as she lives in New York and owns an independent bookstore called Flyleaf Books. She has spent the time since her "death" to try and get her final novel Constance published, only for it to be rejected every time until one house in the present time finally accepts it. Just when that happens, the vampire that turned Jane arrives in town to see her and she starts to develop some boy problems. Walter, the guy who fixes up homes for a living, wouldn't mind fixing her heart and she's got maybe just a teeny tiny crush on her new editor, the unfortunately-named Kelly. Accusations come forth that she plagiarised someone in her novel and sooner or later, all this pressure just might make poor Jane's head explode.

The premise was one of the most grabbing I've seen in recent months. A satire on the industry of Austen with a vampire Jane Austen that is trying to get a book published and defend it when a blogger calls it plagiarized? Sign me up! Unfortunately, there was a large gap between what I was expecting to read and the actual content of the novel. My imagination gave this book too much hype and it was an underwhelming read, though it would not have been a great novel for me even without the hype.

I should have suspected this would be the case from the mention of the dark guy from her past and two modern suitors, but I didn't realize how much of the book would be concentrated on Jane's romantic dilemmas. What did I expect? A satire of the Austen industry where a vampire Jane Austen is trying to get her book published, has to fight back when someone accuses her of plagiarism, and oh yeah, has some guy problems. It was more along the lines of Jane has guy problems and oh yeah, is trying to get a novel published and gets accused of plagiarism on it.The satire part is mostly confined to the first few pages and less than five one or two line reappearances in the rest of the novel. I kind of wanted a break from so much romance after reading a little too much bad or bland romance, but it turned out that I read more of it with this novel.

Almost every time something comes along that might distract from Jane's guy problems, something else comes along to get rid of it or the problems come to her. The blogger that accuses Jane of plagiarism? Yeah, that problem is eliminated shortly after it arrives. No more plagiarism claims. Traveling away from the boys? One of them comes to her! The romance overtakes the plot and makes what could have been a fantastic book if there had been less lovey-dovey nonsense a so-so read.

There isn't much else to say about this novel. It was not particularly good, but there was nothing that annoyed me other than the lack of a few things I would have liked to have seen in the story that the back cover made me think might be there. There were a few things I enjoyed, like how the novel took the war between Austen and the Brontes to a whole new level and Jane's wit, but otherwise, there was little that stood out to me. I wanted to put the novel down at one point because of Byron's monstrously creepy behavior (any pun that might be there may or may not be intended) but then I realized that for once, it was not being romanticized and it became a little more bearable.

Maybe I'm the problem for once. After reading this, I suppose that a read of at least one of Austen's novels and some knowledge of her would be required to fully enjoy the novel. I know very little about Jane Austen and I have never read any of her books (even though I plan to within the next year; it's on my list). Reading without that knowledge behind me could have made me miss the fun of the novel and may do the same to other readers.

Ultimately, this novel was underwhelming for me in some unexplainable way. Considering how interested I was in the premise, this is sad. Perhaps I should have known due to the genre of this book that Jane would be too busy trying to fix her Leaky Faucet of Boy Problems to unfreeze the pipeline above her that the plot was coming from. This is more about Jane Austen's boy troubles as a vampire than anything else. Anyone looking for more may get little doses of it, but it doesn't get enough focus to matter. Will I pick up the sequel Jane Goes Batty when it comes out in February 2011? No.

3 stars!

What am I reading next?: Delcroix Academy: The Candidates by Inara Scott

Wildthorn by Jane Eagland

Title: Wildthorn
Author: Jane Eagland
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Release Date: February 9th, 2009
Pages: 350 pages (hardback)
How I Got the Book: Bought it in a bookstore

Louisa Cosgrove is Louisa Cosgrove--not Lucy Childs. Or is she?

A horse-drawn carriage takes her to the wrong place: Wildthorn Hall, an asylum for the insane.

This must be a great misunderstanding. They strip her naked, of everything--undo her whalebone corset hook by hook. They take her identity. But she is still seventeen--still Louisa Cosgrove--isn't she?

To untangle the mysterious, wretched present, she remembers the past.

I wished I were a boy.

Locked away in the dingy bowels of the hall, she feels a fire burn inside her. She remembers her cousin. She remembers Papa.

I want to be a doctor.

She is determined to escape--and only love will set her free.

Review:

Louisa Cosgrove wants nothing more than to become a doctor like her father. Being that she lives in 1800s England, this is difficult because women still have their entire lives decided by the men in their lives and no medical school will take in women because they should be learning the womanly arts instead. She is on her way to the house of someone she will be acting as a companion and she is instead taken to Wildthorn Hall, an insane asylum. Treated as just another lunatic, Louisa struggles to keep sane and make someone believe that this is all a mistake and that she does not belong here while with the way she is acting, it only seems more and more like she does need a place among the residents and hellish halls of Wildthorn Hall.

I bought this book because someone I practically worship because of her literary critic skills and our similar reading tastes was gushing over this book. When I got it, I had no idea of the adult content in this novel except for one detail about Louisa that later emerges as a plot twist (and that was only because someone spoiled it for me a day after I bought the book). This novel is outside of my reading tastes in multiple ways and if I had not bought it blind, I would have passed this over for another novel. Thank God for going in blind because this novel was worth it!

I loved Louisa as a character. She was layered, had her flaws (impulsive to the extreme), and had her screwups. I felt for her when she tried to convince her doctor and the attendants that she wasn't crazy, she didn't belong there, and that her name was Louisa, not Lucy, but each time she did so, it made her seem more and more like a lunatic. That was quite the trap she was caught in and quite realistic. I can't begin to imagine how many other women were caught in the same hellish trap back then. Her plights were entirely sympathetic because none of them were truly her fault. She wanted to be who she wanted to be, not who everyone else wanted her to be.

What makes this story so terrifying is the reality of it. Men could easily have the women in their life locked up in the insane asylum for reasons such as not wanting them around the house or because the woman wants to become studious when women are not supposed to do that. Women had very little control over their lives and if a man decided to send a sane woman to an asylum for whatever reason, the woman was trapped. They had little to no hope of being freed. This was not just a fictional, dramatized account of a rare case; this was a fictional account of something completely nonfictional and even halfway normal.

A lot of adult subject matter gets brought into this novel that is a dark shadow in society that everyone knows about now, but was practically taboo to even think about back then. For example? Homosexuality, child pornography, rape, and teenage pregnancy. And that is only the beginning of it. I'm not sure why this is categorized as a young adult book because such subject matter exactly the things popular young adult lit is made of (at least within one novel). I'm fine with that because we need something different in the young adult world every now and then, but yeah. Not your average young adult novel. I wouldn't hand this to a fourteen-year-old kid or anyone younger than that. I might not even give it to a fifteen-year-old unless I felt they were mature enough!

I thought of this novel as predictable when I got to the three-hundredth page and in the course of those next fifty pages, what I thought I knew got revealed as being something completely unexpected. Isn't it wonderful when books do that and make sense while doing so? I do, and that is just what Wildthorn did.
I found it a bit sad that the thought was never explored that maybe Louisa actually was Lucy Childs and was ill enough to think she was someone else. The reader and Louisa are always certain that she is Louisa and not someone else. Even if it was just a quick bout of such an identity crisis, that little touch would have made a great book even greater.

Normally I wouldn't notice this, but it happened so many times throughout the novel that it stuck out like a sore thumb: if someone wronged Louisa at some point, they are screwed at a later point, like her older brother Tom and the attendant Weeks. This made me giggle because I remember seeing an item on a Mary Sue litmus test one that went just like that. Louisa certainly isn't a Sue, but the thought of that item came to mind and refused to leave. it didn't count against the book either; it was just fun to keep count of how many times it happened.

5 stars!

What am I reading next?: Spirit Bound by Richelle Mead (but if I cannot finish the novel by the afternoon of December 7th, the next book I review will be Last Sacrifice by the same author because that is the day I get it and when it comes out. I fangirl Richelle's books like you have no idea.)