Get Lost in Literature

“And even if I turned out to be entirely sane—well then, great, it meant that an alien advance party was suddenly nosing around my planet. Worse, they were lawyering up.” ― Rob Reid, Year Zero Nick Carter--not that Nick Carter--has 48 hours to save the world. Aliens owe Earth all the money in the universe because they've been stealing our music. And rather than go universally broke on music pirating fines, they want to help us self-destruct. This book was funny, but you probably won't find the meaning to life inside of it, if that's what you're looking for. It does make a few cold jabs at the digital generation; media piracy is at an all-time high because everybody's doing it, simply because everybody else is doing it. And if you like lots of science in your science fiction, this probably isn't the book for you either. There's plenty of gadgets, intergalactic travel, aliens, and fantastic alien planets, but very little logic as to how any of this is possible...

  "This is all you need, isn't it? Just one good friend. Somebody you can be stupid with. Somebody who'll peel you off the ground, prop you against the wall." Ricky, Lewis, Cass, and Gabe have been friends for a long time, but the ten-year anniversary of a hunting trip gone wrong is upon them and no one wants to talk about it. And now an entity is stalking them, like a shotgun blast from the past. This book was okay, but I wasn't wowed. I liked the characters; they were all a little rough around the edges and it gave them an air of realness because they weren't perfect angels. Sometimes it's the imperfections that matter most. The book blurb on GoodReads states, "...a novel that is equal parts psychological horror and cutting social commentary on identity politics and the American Indian experience."  And I know when it came out it was one of the best horror novels of 2020. That's how it got added to my TBR list. Now it's officially been ...

"Earthquakes couldn’t crush us, floods couldn’t drown us, fires were too slow to catch us. Sulfur and brimstone were irrelevant. We were the gods of our own alternate universe. Inside the mortal world but over it, never slaves to its laws, only our own." Few books have incited as much Love and Hate as The Twilight Saga . All I'm going to say, is if you loathed Twilight through Breaking Dawn , you aren't going to like this book much better. It's Twilight , from Edward's POV; it isn't really any darker than Bella's POV, after all it is a vampire novel intended to be palatable for 13-year-old girls. It was never intended to be use as horror or erotica. If you loved Twilight, just the way it was, this book is for you. I feel like Stephenie Meyer has come a long way. She maintains the same level of teenage angst, self-flagellation, desperately sickeningly sweet love affair that we came to know in the first book, but her actual writing technique has improv...

Asher is a closeted trans boy who goes to sleep every night dreaming of a circus, where he is himself for the first time. By day, he lives his worst nightmare: Catholic School. Then one night, he's transported to his fantasy world, where dreams and reality begin to blend. I was skeptical during the prologue. I was promised a story that was similar to The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern , but the prologue wasn't just comparable, it was downright derivative. The circus is even named, "The Midnight Circus." Which, to be fair, it probably is hard to name a circus that comes only at night. But then the story morphs into its own. Asher lives with his mom, a nurse who is almost never home, and cared for by his ridiculously old-fashioned and super controlling grandparents. Grandparents who drag Ash to a church designed to teach him to hate himself and pay to send him to Catholic school after an incident in which he's injured. Grandparents who, after losing their son, dec...

  "This is all you need, isn't it? Just one good friend. Somebody you can be stupid with. Somebody who'll peel you off the ground, prop you against the wall." Ricky, Lewis, Cass, and Gabe have been friends for a long time, but the ten-year anniversary of a hunting trip gone wrong is upon them and no one wants to talk about it. And now an entity is stalking them, like a shotgun blast from the past. This book was okay but I wasn't wowed. I liked the characters; they were all a little rough around the edges and it gave them an air of realness because they weren't perfect angels. Sometimes it's the imperfections that matter most. The book blurb on GoodReads states, "... a novel that is equal parts psychological horror and cutting social commentary on identity politics and the American Indian experience."  And I know when it came out it was one of the best horror novels of 2020. That's how it got added to my TBR list. Now it's officially been...

  "There was something about the release of breath as you pulled the trigger, the stillness, the quiet before the almost-welcome recoil, that soothed and comforted her." Maya Burkett's husband is murdered and a few days after his funeral he appears on her new nanny cam. Now she must solve the mystery of what happened to her husband, who killed him and why or is he even really dead? The first sentence of the book was artfully designed to pull the reader in, and you can tell right away that when it comes to writing, Harlan Coben really knows his stuff. He created a collection of characters designed to evoke an emotional response, from our heroine newly widowed and tortured by PTSD to her deeply unlikeable babysitter. But after the plot and characters are introduced, the book slows down quite a bit. It's described as a 'thriller' but honestly, I think that word gets thrown around a little too much and sets expectation too high. For me, a thriller should be on-the...

  "The mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience." Frank Herbert, Dune Please forgive my lackluster review, this one is not current, written in 2020. As you know, 2020 was a trying year, Covid-19 sucking the life out of most people, myself included. I can see why this book touched so many and I enjoyed reading it for the most part. I think some of the plot devices were a tad bit lazy: every oh-so-convenient moment that fell in line with The Prophecy, for example. But the characters were delightful in their schemes. The setting was great. Plot would probably have been better for me if I wasn't overthinking on overdrive, stress makes me cynical. I maybe think the world building and vocabulary could have been improved upon, just a bit, but I might also be reading this at the wrong age. I liked the touches on environmental and ecological issues. I liked that he addressed political and theological conflicts, and the void between the ruling class...

  "As I feel my way through the kitchen to the stairs... I realize there's one good thing about the dark. In the dark I can't see myself." Kasey LeBlanc, Flyboy Asher is a closeted trans boy who goes to sleep every night dreaming of a circus, where he is himself for the first time. By day, he lives his worst nightmare: Catholic School. Then one night, he's transported to his fantasy world, where dreams and reality begin to blend. I was skeptical during the prologue. I was promised a story that was similar to  The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern , but the prologue wasn't just comparable, it was downright derivative. The circus is even named, " The Midnight Circus. " Which, to be fair, it probably is hard to name a circus that comes only at night... But then the story morphs into its own. Asher lives with his mom, a nurse who is almost never home, and cared for by his ridiculously old-fashioned and super controlling grandparents. Grandparents who drag...

  I traditionally open each review with a quote from the book, but I regifted the book and couldn't look one up for you. I apologize for the quality of this, my last review of A-Z Challenge, but I suppose it's on par with the quality of the book. Upon reading the last few sentences of the story, I shouted aloud, "Oh, c'mon!" (I actually think I swore in my exclamation, but I try to keep this blog safe for kiddos.) The book starts great, just so you know. Pretty much as good as a murder mystery at an isolated research station could be. Paranoia, espionage, sabotage, set on the backdrop of the vicious polar landscape... Then towards the end, it's like the writer decided he doesn't really do murder mysteries anymore so here's an ending for sci-fi nerds instead... And I am a sci-fi nerd, but, c'mon.  I loved the ending in a way. I loved it in the way that I'd really love to read the beginning half of that story because, realistically, the ending ...

“Perhaps the logical conclusion of everyone looking the same is everyone thinking the same.” ― Scott Westerfeld, Uglies In this futuristic world, there are Uglies and there are Pretties. Main character, Tally is an Ugly, who can't wait for her sixteenth birthday, that magical birthday when all newly 16-year-olds get to undergo plastic surgery to become a Pretty. Once Pretty, she gets to go to New Prettytown, where a Pretty's only job is to have fun. Everything looks like it's going to go according to Tally's plan, until her friend Shay, decides to run away rather than become pretty...And Tally is given the task of tracking her down and bringing her back to civilization. I didn't love this book from start to finish, but some parts were definitely more lovable than others. At first, the story was hard to get into: Even though the story is told by Tally, who is almost sixteen, her voice seemed to belong to someone much younger than a teenager approaching adulthood. In ...

  “That version, as with so many of the stories we tell about our history, erased a woman- a plain, bad heroine- in favor of a less messy and more palatable yarn about two feuding brothers from New England.” ― Emily M. Danforth, Plain Bad Heroines Plain Bad Heroines is a book with two settings; the story begins in 1902 Rhode Island, at Brookhants School for Girls. The girls at the school become infatuated with each other, and obsessed with a memoir by teen author, Mary MacLane. They start a society that worships the book and, eventually, die tragically with the book in their company. Libbie Brookhants and her long time girlfriend, Alexandra Trills are trying to unravel the mystery before they themselves become unraveled. The second setting is in modern day Hollywood, where actresses Harper Harper and Audrey Wells have been cast to play leading roles in an upcoming horror movie titled: Happenings at Brookhants , based on the novel written by teen writer Merritt Emmons who will be c...

"They would use your life as if it were oil for a proper lamp. You must defy them, but you must defy them with purity and confidence." Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice This is the story of Louis, a vampire from New Orleans -- which is the perfect place for a vampire to come from IMHO. It’s of his maker, Lestat, and his companions Claudia and Armand. I find there are two types of vampires in pop culture. The first type is the ruthless killer who embraces its vampire nature, like in classic story Dracula or newer NOS4A2 . You also have the brooding vampire, overly emotional, like in Twilight or Vampire Diaries . Lestat is the former, Louis the latter. Lestat is greedy, flamboyant, reveling in his own nature; coldly and sometimes erratically trying to teach Louis what it means to be a vampire. “Let the flesh instruct the mind.” Louis is aghast at what he’s become and hesitant to start killing humans because he’s retained more of his human nature… I say hesitant because...

“It was not that he was feckless, more that he had simply not been around the day they handed out feck.”― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys Charles Nancy is an unlucky sort of fellow; he prefers to be called Charles or Charlie but everyone calls him Fat Charlie, whether he likes it or not because that was the name his father gave him. With a wedding on the horizon, Rosie thinks it's time for Fat Charlie to start mending those old embarrassing bridges and invite his family to the wedding. Unable to say no, Charlie reaches out to Mrs. Higgler, a family friend who might know how to contact his old man... But he's too late. Mr. Nancy is dead and Mrs. Higgler's got news for Charlie. His father wasn't just a trickster, he was trickster God and Charlie has a long-lost brother who communicates through spiders... This book started out laugh out loud funny. I loved the glimpse into what an ancient God's idea of parenting would be, and those parenting skills then topped by the peculiar...

  "The world changes, Glokta, the world changes. The old order crumbles. Loyalty, duty, pride, honour. Notions that have fallen far from fashion. What has replaced them?" He glanced over his shoulder for a moment, and his lip curled. "Greed..."  This book was a collection of fascinating characters. There's Logan the Bloody Nine, a barbarian warrior who has lost everything. Bayez, First of the Magi, wise and powerful. There's Jezal, spoiled rich boy who's in love with Ardee, a woman who hides her feelings behind alcohol and cruelty. There's Glokta the torturer and Ferro the escaped slave, and Ferro's rescuer Yulwei who may or may not also be magi.  With characters such as these you'd think the plot would be outrageous, and in a way, it is...As far as I could tell, there is no plot. Bayez calls upon Logan for help but doesn't explain with what and Logan never asks. Yulwei saves Ferro in return for a favor, but we aren't told what the f...

"Right now we were hunting the wights, but if they ever realized it, they'd start hunting us right back." The Conference of the Birds by Ransom Riggs The plot of this story isn't that spectacular. Jacob rescues Noor and helps her look for the mysterious V, with the usual fights with hollows and wights mixed in. Oh yeah, let's not forget the love at first sight teen romance that's about to unfold. That's pretty much it. I'm not sure that this plot offered enough, I certainly expected more from it. The previous stories have been so successful with Jacob and his friends, I didn't understand the sudden teen romance that pushed all these other great characters into the background.  With every book the photos are fewer and fewer, so if pictures are what you're after, don't depend on it. That's fine by me, because with every book the author is pulling more and more from imagination, and I'll give credit where it's due: he's got ple...

  "He left Della sitting in the darkness, a little drunk, with nothing else for company but the picture of the dead daughter she had never seen." It was tough to decide where to rate this because parts of this book were incredibly enjoyable and others not so much. Parts I enjoyed: THE WRITING. The writing is impeccable. Any English teacher would wish they wrote so well. The words are a doorway to another world and within minutes I felt like I was off on an adventure in the UK and not sitting home in my rocking chair. THE CRIMES. A crazy man is looking for justice for a child he'd seen murdered. A politician is being blackmailed by a protester, and in response he's looking for dirt on political rivals. Mysterious trespassers are on an estate in the country, but eyewitnesses are unreliable... And let's not forget a murder that looks like a suicide. CHARACTERS. There's plenty of them and they merge seamlessly into this plot. Each one a little nuttier than the las...

  "They would use your life as if it were oil for a proper lamp. You must defy them, but you must defy them with purity and confidence."  Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice This is the story of Louis, a vampire from New Orleans, which is the perfect place for a vampire to come from IMHO. It’s of his maker, Lestat, and his companions Claudia and Armand. I find there are two types of vampires in pop culture. The first type is the ruthless killer who embraces its vampire nature, like in classic story Dracula or newer NOS4A2. You also have the brooding vampire, overly emotional, like in Twilight or Vampire Diaries . Lestat is the former, Louis the latter. Lestat is greedy, flamboyant, reveling in his own nature; coldly and sometimes erratically trying to teach Louis what it means to be a vampire. “Let the flesh instruct the mind.” Louis is aghast at what he’s become and hesitant to start killing humans because he’s retained his human nature…I say hesitant because he does...

  "No one has tried to kill me, but this feels like an ambush all the same."  A Vow So Bold & Deadly by Brigid Kemmerer A Curse So Dark & Lonely , covers the story of Harper, a heroine with cerebral palsy and an attitude problem, saving Rhen, a prince struggling under the weight of a cruel enchantress's curse.  A Heart So Fierce & Broken , covers the story of ex-Royal Guard Commander Grey, searching for sanctuary and finding it with Lia Mara, the extra heir of an enemy kingdom.  So we've got our characters a set up for the exciting conclusion,  A Vow So Bold and Deadly .  The Kingdom of Emberfall is split between loyalties; those who would be loyal to the True Heir, and those who remain loyal to Prince Rhen. It appears hopeless... how can they repel an invasion, if Rhen can't unify his own people.   Lia Mara, the new Queen of Syhl Shallow, is facing much the same problem. There are those who would have preferred the rule of her sister...

  The main characters of this story aren't particularly likable. Which perhaps is motivation to keep reading, that the main characters are realistically human. Tom is a bit of a narcissistic dick and his wife Abby comes off as cold and oblivious. Both parents were left broken when their daughter was kidnapped. Abby turned to the church in her time of need and Tom obsessively continued investigation into his daughter's disappearance. Overall, there was an easy flow to the writing style even as the subject matter was grim. At times I wondered if Uncle Buster was really necessary to the story, mostly he just seemed a little cliché and some of his conversations felt like a waste of time. I kept turning the page, wanting to know answers to questions like "what happens next?" and "how does it end?" so it absolutely hit its suspense quota. After four years apart, Tom finally gets what he wants: Caitlyn comes home. It's not enough. She's not the same, how co...

  "Hygge is humble and slow. It is choosing rustic over new, simple over posh and ambience over excitement." Denmark has been voted one of the happiest nations in the world, and that's largely attributed to their concept of Hygge. Hygge is all about creating a quiet and warm atmosphere and taking time to enjoy the simple things in life. I feel like the book spoke to me on a personal level, as the secret to Denmark's happiness includes a lot of things I already enjoy doing. I'm no stranger to curling up with a hot cocoa and a good book or a night out by a campfire. It's always been important to me to make time to connect with nature, and it seems strange to me that others refuse to leave their houses... Now I find there's an entire country who believes this is the correct way to live. It seems Denmark took, what I always considered to be the introvert's way, and made it into a social event. In this I missed the mark, as I struggle to find connections in...