My Best and Worst of 2012 and Most Coveted of 2013

Whee, end-of-year recap posts! I've got a second cooked up that's about a hundred times more fun because it recounts how wild this year has been in books and bookish drama, but this is the basic, slightly less offensive one that's about the books I read.

First comes the best books I've read in 2012 (not ranked, just listed):


Stolen by Lucy Christopher

• There's just something so powerful about this book and its portrayal of Stockholm Syndrome. It hit me in so many of the right places that I couldn't not love it. The ending even made me cry!

Graffiti Moon by Cath Crowley

• Like most of my friend insist, there must be something in the Aussie water! The romance and tour of the city Ed and Lucy take, both location-wise and artwork-wise, is one of my favorites. I always said I'd get my own copy after I read an ARC of this fantastic novel and I did a few months ago.

Cracked Up to Be by Courtney Summers

• My introduction to this author and the book that made me fall in love with her. I'm totally going to marry her. Sexual orientations? Relationship statuses? Pfft, who cares about any of that? I hear wedding bells! But yeah, despite Parker being a generally terrible person, she was written so well that I kept reading about her.

This Is Not a Test by Courtney Summers

• Got to read this one as an ARC thanks to the beautiful creature that is Amazon Vine! 
  Couldn't have come at a better time, seeing as I read it maybe a month or two after Cracked Up to Be. I ain't even into zombies, but the characters and how easily Summers tapped into their darker emotions really hit me hard. Why is her next novel so far away?!

Some Girls Are by Courtney Summers

• This was my year of Courtney Summers, in case you didn't know. This Is Not a Test beats this one for best Summers book by a hair, but Regina's story and how she endured the bullying by her former friends hit me as hard as it did everyone else. I can't even with words for the moment. Just check out the review.

What's Left of Me by Kat Zhang

• Dystpian novels rarely strike a chord with me, but Zhang did something right because hers did.

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

• You've probably seen this on many end-of-year lists and it's for a very good reason.

Like Mandarin by Kirsten Hubbard

• Words for this = I can't even. There's something about Hubbard's books that strikes me speechless; I wasn't even able to put together a review for Wanderlove despite how much I loved it, and writing the review for Like Mandarin was a little like pulling out a tooth.

Reality Bites Back by Jennifer L. Pozner

• Yeah, nonfiction. I know. This one gave me a lot to think about concerning both reality television and YA. Most of the points she makes can be applied to YA too, especially books like The Selection by Kiera Cass that have deep roots in reality TV. I thought about reading said novel and writing an article on it, but I lack the time and interest at the moment. Maybe one day.

The Friday Society by Adrienne Kress

• This one was a recent read, but its whimsical feel and the girl power rocketed it up into my top ten for the year. AND THEN THERE WAS AN EXPLOSION.

~

And because I'm honest to a fault and refuse to keep anything bad I have to say to myself, here are the worst books I've read this year, narrowed down from the many stinkers I've read this year (listed, not ranked):

The Raie'Chaelia by Melissa Douthit

• To say nothing of the author (that will come in my drama-recap post), this book was awful. Typos, lots of telling-not-showing, predictable plotting, and too many other issues I don't care to recount.

Beautiful Disaster by Jamie McGuire

• Slut-shaming, glorifying an abusive relationship, inconsistent characterization, and more are why this book is actually an ugly disaster. The only reason I'm not raging harder at this is because of the rainbow of ninety-one sticky notes I put in it. They make me calm.

Heaven by Alexandra Adornetto

• Well, I can't say I expected anything different from her. She still made me mad by proclaiming through Gabriel that marriage is only between a man and a woman. That sentiment can put on some fiery red lipstick and kiss my ass.

Thoughtless by S.C. Stephens

• Couldn't even finish it. Cheating is one of my big no-nos unless there are extenuating circumstances and Kiera does it like it's no big deal. Way too much melodramatic schmoop for me too handle.

Phantom by Laura DeLuca

• A complete and utter desecration of The Phantom of the Opera, one of my favorite works of all time. I keep getting trolled over this book and called a book snob both to my face and behind my back, but screw it, it was bad.

Dinner with a Vampire by Abigail Gibbs

• THE MAIN LOVE INTEREST ATTEMPTS TO RAPE HIS LOVE INTEREST BECAUSE SHE TOOK HIS CONDOMS. Nothing more really needs to be said. And he still gets the girl to fall in love with him. WHAT. THE. FUCK. Also, bundles and bundles of double standards and slut shaming. I am ashamed this was produced by someone my age.

Ditched by Robin Mellom

• This should have been cute, but wow at all the slut-shaming. I couldn't finish it because it was borderline causing me pain to keep reading.

Eternal Starling by Angela Corbett

• This one makes it because it really could have been good, but it chose to indulge in cliches instead of trying to be original and live up to its potential.

When You Were Mine by Rebecca Serle

• The slut-shaming strikes again! This take on Romeo and Juliet fell flat on its face and demonized Juliet when both in the play and in this book, Romeo/Rob is the real dickbag.

Lipstick Apology by Jennifer Jabaley

• Seriously, slut-shaming is like a one-way ticket onto this list. Six of the books on here are guilty of it. This started out as your standard dead-parents book, but the main character's attitude and all the slut-shaming just about made me toss it out the window.

~

Finally, the books I'll sell Smurfs for: my most coveted of 2013! I already did this list for a Top Ten Tuesday thing, so I'll just link you to that. Sorry to be anticlimactic, ladies and gents. My hands hurt too much to retype it all.

My Most Coveted/Anticipated of 2013

Thoughtless by S.C. Stephens

Title: Thoughtless
Author: S.C. Stephens
Publisher: Gallery Books
Release Date: November 6, 2012
Pages: 544 pages (paperback)
How I Got the Book: ARC from the publisher via Edelweiss
Purchase/Pre-order: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Book Depository
Promotional Materials and More: author website

For almost two years now, Kiera's boyfriend, Denny, has been everything she's ever wanted: loving, tender and endlessly devoted to her. When they head off to a new city to start their lives together, Denny at his dream job and Kiera at a top-notch university, everything seems perfect. Then an unforeseen obligation forces the happy couple apart.

Feeling lonely, confused, and in need of comfort, Kiera turns to an unexpected source – a local rock star named Kellan Kyle. At first, he's purely a friend that she can lean on, but as her loneliness grows, so does their relationship. And then one night everything changes...and none of them will ever be the same.

Review:

The only good I got out of reading Thoughtless is that I now have the ability to horrify people with how a beer bottle was shoved in a woman's vagina before page 30.

"...this girl, damn, she had the best rack I've ever seen." The bassist paused to make a crude gesture with his hands, as if the guys would need that statement clarified. "And the shortest skirt too. Everybody around us was completely wasted, so I ducked under the table and shoved that skirt as high as it would go. Then I grabbed my beer bottle and stuck--" (ARC p. 28)

I think it's clear where he was going. Anyone else want to consider the possibility that he did this without the woman's consent or when she was too drunk to give consent? Hello there, rape. Besides, everyone knows proper etiquette is to wait at least 50 pages before inflicting that kind of mental scarring on a reader. Common courtesy and all that. I thought this was New Adult, not adult erotica!

To sum up Thoughtless in a nutshell: It is 544 pages of lifeless, badly written, plotless schmoop dripping with enough melodrama to kill an elephant. I tried so hard to look at this the way fans of the novel and Simon & Schuster (whose imprint Gallery Books picked up this trilogy after the first two books were self-published) did, but the appeal is not there. This novel should not have seen the light of day, much less been given a publishing deal.

You know that character who is always like, "Oh my gosh, why is this super-hot guy paying attention to me? I'm so plain, even though there are at least four guys with some level of interest in me and people are constantly grabbing my butt!" That's Kiera.

She's also the blushing virgin sans the virginity. I can understand the quoted story above making her blush, but the simple word "penis" after she's been having sex with her boyfriend of two years for a good while? It's ridiculous! Her immaturity, shown by such actions, become more obvious when considering she changed schools solely to move to Seattle with her boyfriend (and has no problem admitting it), being a selfish child by demanding Kellan do this or that even though they're not together and she's cheating on her boyfriend all the time with him, and so much more that I can't recount it all without losing my temper again.

Kellan and Kiera disgust me and I would like to hurt them both. End of story. Infidelity is one of my huge no-nos and that made it impossible to root for them the way I was supposed to. Their scenes, rather than getting me hot or making me like them like they're supposed to, made me reach for my trash can and force me to take a break in order to preserve my sanity. Other people may be able to get around the infidelity, but I can't. I have no interest in reading about these two selfish, childish people and all their drama as they hurt their best friend (Kellan) and boyfriend (Kiera) with their actions. This novel has no plot unless this counts and these two characters are not interesting or tolerable enough to carry the entire book.

Honestly, they are so bad that I could not finish reading this novel. I read over 300 pages of the disgusting schmoop, flipped to the last chapter, and promptly felt nauseated again as a happily-ever-after was confirmed. My two reasons for giving it a rating and not just calling it a DNF:

1) I've read over half the novel and that is my cut-off for ratings. I don't rate if I read less than half, but I do if I read more than half.

2) I missed absolutely nothing by skipping 200 or so pages to get to the end. To me, that's the equivalent of reading the entire book in misery.

If a girl is interested in Kellan, she is written as an insipid (Kiera's word from page 10 of the ARC, not mine) mess who can't stop herself from drooling over him. Some of them are drunken and.or ugly too, just to add to it. The only females in the story who aren't badly portrayed are Kiera's sister (who starts out as the same drooling-over-Kellan mess and stays that way for a while) and women who are uninterested in Kellan, such as Kiera's co-worker Jenny.

I saw recently where an author turned in a 24k novella and the 55 ellipses she used total were considered too many. In a single fifteen-page chapter, Thoughtless used 74 ellipses, only 11 of which were used to transition flashbacks. This novel doubtlessly has nothing on Fifty Shades of Gray, the ultimate ellipses abuser, but this novel used them far too often. That one chapter was the only one in which I had the patience to count, but they are everywhere in this novel. Don't abuse the ellipses, people! Just don't!

That's just one example of lazy writing, and there are many more, but a worse crime with the writing: a lack of passion. Ben Stein's monotone voice narrated this in my head because there is absolutely no passion in Kiera's voice. Even when she's getting it on with Kellan or her boyfriend, it seems like she's just going through the motions while she narrates. That does not make for good, interesting reading. There are highlights everywhere in my e-galley of passages that were especially badly written, horrifying, or tasteless.

In addition to badly written, it's badly researched. When Denny has to fly to Tuscon for his job early in the novel, Kiera and Kellan somehow stay with him right up until he boards the flight. Uh, no. That's not how it works. It's well-known now that in major airports across the United States, no civilians are allowed to go any further than the entrance to security without a plane ticket. When people without tickets make it past security, it makes the national news and the TSA gets ripped a new one.

The stated target range of New Adult novels is ages 14-35. Are you kidding me? No fourteen-year-old should be reading this book! The descriptions of sex in this novel are on the same level as the kind I've seen in urban fantasy novels aimed at adults. I'm starting to wonder if this genre is by and large and excuse for people to aim sex at teenagers without someone getting up in arms about it. Sex in a YA novel? Oh my gosh, ban that book! The children must not see it! Sex in New Adult? No one cares. -rolls eyes-

I'm the ideal target audience for this book and I've got an iron stomach for all things terrible and bookish, but even I can't deal with Thoughtless. If it turns out Easy was an exception and the average New Adult novel is like Thoughtless, I'm jumping ship.

0 stars!

 

What am I reading next?: Rockoholic by C.J. Skuse

Incarnation by Emma Cornwall

Title: Incarnation
Author: Emma Cornwall
Publisher: Gallery Books
Release Date: September 18, 2012
Pages: 352 pages (paperback)
How I Got the Book: ARC from the publisher via Edelweiss
Purchase/Pre-order: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Book Depository

Lucy Weston tracks down the novelist Bram Stroker in her search to reveal the dark force who made her a vampire—and regain her humanity in the process.

In the steampunk world of Victorian London, Lucy Weston, a character in Dracula, seeks out Bram Stoker to discover why he deliberately lied about her in his popular novel. With Stoker’s reluctant help, she tracks the creature who transformed her from the sensual underworld where humans vie to become vampires to a hidden cell beneath a temple to madness and finally into the glittering Crystal Palace where death reigns supreme.

Haunted by fragmentary memories of her lost life and love, Lucy battles her thirst for blood as she struggles to stop a catastrophic war that will doom vampires and humans alike. Ultimately, she makes a choice that illuminates for her—and for us—the true nature of what it means to be human. 

Review:

Though I primarily read young adult novels, I'm no stranger to adult novels and enjoy them just as much. It's nice to have an occasional break from the teenage dramatics inherent to many YA novels, you know? As big a Dracula/vampire fan as I am (but I was not a fan of the cover the edition of Dracula I had as a child possessed; I wish I had a picture of it to show off, but I don't), I expected Incarnation and its highly original idea to draw me in and never let go, but there was something off about everything.

Cornwall's idea is fantastic and I love everything about it. The idea of Dracula being a piece of propaganda twisting and concealing the truth of vampires and the fate of Lucy Westenra (her real name being Lucy Weston) was what grabbed my attention in the first place and the way the author expanded on it kept me reading. The expansions made throughout the novel to include the Protectors, who safeguard humans from vampires, Slayers born every thousand years to cull the vampire population, and the precarious balance humans and vampires have in Victorian England aren't necessarily new, but the way in which Cornwall employs and describes them makes them feel like something of their own. Moderately fine pacing kept the story moving and unraveled the plots each side was planning in order to defeat the other.

What feels so off about the novel is that I didn't have any emotional investment and there doesn't seem to be much passion in the novel. I respond to a passionately written novel by diving headfirst into it and caring about what happens to each and every character like they're my family, but there was no such connection to Incarnation. Lucy is sympathetic as she struggles with her nature and the differences that set her apart from other vampires, but she didn't truly earn sympathy from me; I just knew that was how I was supposed to feel. The steampunk element seems like more of an afterthought than anything--which I didn't mind, as someone who doesn't care much for it, but readers coming in expecting more steampunk will be disappointed.

The way the novel leaves off, there is easily room for a sequel, though I don't know if there will be one. My Googling skills haven't turned up anything yet, and if there were a sequel, I'm not sure whether I'd read it or not. Fellow Dracula and vampire fans looking for a new twist on a familiar story will enjoy Incarnation and perhaps they will respond to it better than I did.

3 stars!

What am I reading next?: Fall for Anything by Courtney Summers

Obernewtyn by Isobelle Carmody

200 followers! Thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou! All of you are awesome and perfect and-- -devolves into screaming/jumping up and down- It's taken me almost two years to get to this point, but I don't care because I'm just glad you're here and care what I have to say. Thank you!

Title: Obernewtyn
Author: Isobelle Carmody
Publisher: Random House Children's Book
Release Date: December 9, 2008
Pages: 244 pages (paperback)
How I Got the Book: Bought it.
Purchase/Pre-order: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Book Depository
Promotional Materials and More: book trailer | author website

In a world struggling back from the brink of apocalypse, life is harsh. And for Elspeth Gordie, it is also dangerous. That's because Elspeth has a secret: she is a Misfit, born with mysterious mental abilities that she must keep hidden under threat of death. And her worries only multiply when she is exiled to the mountain compound known as Obernewtyn, where—for all her talents—Elspeth may finally and truly be out of her depth. Then she learns she’s not the only one concealing secrets at Obernewtyn.

Review:

Isobelle Carmody's standalone novel Alyzon Whitestarr was one of the first books I reviewed when I started this blog nearly two years ago (almost two years now!) and since then, I've been interested in the series that made her so famous in Australia: the Obernewtyn Chronicles. This post-apocalyptic fantasy novel is a serious departure from what I'm used to and I enjoyed it, though the novel has its share of problems. It's difficult to put my problems into words for this one, but I'll try.

The novel's vivid worldbuilding kept me reading when I needed to pack and do other things, though I admittedly started skimming at the boring points. Elspeth came across as a relatable character to me and what she went through in various orphanages a a child believably shaped who she is in this novel. I got quite a bit of heart from the supporting characters as well, but I did expect a little more from them. It's understandable we didn't get to know them better, in a way; the iron fist of Obernewtyn's Master(s) kept them from being more open and letting both Elspeth and readers in. They're likely to get more characterization in future books.

Carmody began the novel when she was fourteen and it was first published in 1987, when she was in her late twenties, but there are places where stilted writing/dialogue and rough pacing give away how young she was when she began. As I said previously, I started skimming when things got boring and during some of the descriptions. Obernewtyn is short and that's exactly why I read this next over something else, but that also gives it two choices: cram a lot into a little book or allow a proportionately small amount of material into said little book. It went with the latter.

I have a feeling Carmody's Obernewtyn Chronicles is a series that is better when considered as a whole rather than as individual books, much like LJ Smith's books. I think I'll continue on with this series to see how the author improves and how the more subtle elements and forgotten plot threads of Obernewtyn will come back later (research on this series has taught me that everything is important and can come back books later to save the day), but I can't do it right now. Maybe one day.

3 stars!

What am I reading next?: Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins