ARC Review: Liars, Inc.

 

Title/Author: Liars, Inc. by Paula Stokes

Publication Date/Publisher: March 24, 2015/Harper Teen

Series: No

Source and Format: I received this book for free from the publisher. This in no way affected my opinion of the book, or the content of my review.

Rating: 3 stars

From Goodreads:

Max Cantrell has never been a big fan of the truth, so when the opportunity arises to sell forged permission slips and cover stories to his classmates, it sounds like a good way to make a little money and liven up a boring senior year. With the help of his friends Preston and Parvati, Max starts Liars, Inc. Suddenly everybody needs something and the cash starts pouring in. Who knew lying could be so lucrative?

When Preston wants his own cover story to go visit a girl he met online, Max doesn’t think twice about hooking him up. Until Preston never comes home. Then the evidence starts to pile up—terrifying clues that lead the cops to Preston’s body. Terrifying clues that point to Max as the murderer.

Can Max find the real killer before he goes to prison for a crime he didn’t commit? In a story that Kirkus Reviews called “Captivating to the very end,” Paula Stokes starts with one single white lie and weaves a twisted tale that will have readers guessing until the explosive final chapters.

You could probably hear the exact minute I finished this book. It was the “eeeehhhhhhhhhhh” heard ’round the world.

Liars, Inc. is not without mystery and suspense – it opens with Max making his escape from the FBI – but it just never completely clicked with me. Maybe I thought more of the focus would actually be on Liars, Inc. (the underground high school forgery group Max forms with his best friend and girlfriend) and not the disappearance/murder of Max’s best friend? I’m not sure. I was also able to guess the biggest part of the ending, which I can almost never do, so I was proud but also lost a little of the enjoyment.

I’m not entirely sure why this didn’t quiiiiite work for me. Paula Stokes did a great job with the male POV and kept me guessing for most of the book. I couldn’t connect with Max like I could with Lainey, or it’s possible a suspenseful thriller mystery wasn’t what I was looking for right now.

Gone Girl, I Hunt Killers, How to Get Away with Murder: I’m only familiar with the first two and, okay sure. I mean, there aren’t many popular books most Young Adults will be familiar with I guess so these two are acceptable. At least they didn’t somehow work John Green and Eleanor & Park into it.

ARC Review: The Last Time We Say Goodbye

 

Title/Author: The Last Time We Say Goodbye by Cynthia Hand

Publication Date/Publisher: February 10, 2015/Harper Teen

Series: No

Source and Format: I received this book for free from the publisher via Edelweiss. This in no way affected my opinion of the book, or the content of my review.

Rating: 2 stars

 

From Goodreads:

There’s death all around us.
We just don’t pay attention.
Until we do.

The last time Lex was happy, it was before. When she had a family that was whole. A boyfriend she loved. Friends who didn’t look at her like she might break down at any moment.

Now she’s just the girl whose brother killed himself. And it feels like that’s all she’ll ever be.

As Lex starts to put her life back together, she tries to block out what happened the night Tyler died. But there’s a secret she hasn’t told anyone-a text Tyler sent, that could have changed everything.

Lex’s brother is gone. But Lex is about to discover that a ghost doesn’t have to be real to keep you from moving on.

 

When a book makes me cry, or even just tear up a little like The Last Time We Say Goodbye did, my heart screams FIVE STARS!! So even though I trudged my way through this one, and kind of disliked it the entire 400 pages (WHY IS THIS 400 PAGES) the last 5% made me a little emotional and started confusing me about how I felt. Also, the last 5% thing is right there in the summary which would have made me even more mad the whole time I was reading it if I knew/remembered that.

It wasn’t the teen suicide or aftermath or teen suicide that bothered me. It wasn’t even all the math that bothered me. I think it’s that The Last Time We Say Goodbye feels pointless until practically the last page. There’s a lot happening, but it doesn’t really matter – you could completely get rid of two semi-prominent characters and the book wouldn’t change, except to be blessedly shorter.

There are a lot of religious-y things happening here, and then all of a sudden reversed – a lot of Alexis/Lexie/Lex bemoaning God for doing this to her and her family and why God why – until she announces she doesn’t even believe in God and drops it. It wasn’t like there was a crisis of faith or anything that should have made her switch up like that.

And the ghost thing…Is he a ghost? Was Alexis/Lexie/Lex just imagining it? I thought this was going to be a ghostier story, but it’s really not. It’s a maybe ghost sometimes showing up (smelling of Brut) saying “hey give this letter to my ex-girlfriend” or “hey give this picture to Dad” and that’s it. And God talks to the mom on the way home from Graceland? Are you confused, and not intrigued, by these elements? Then this might not be the book for you.

ARC Review: Playlist for the Dead

 

Title/Author: Playlist for the Dead by Michelle Falkoff

Publication Date/Publisher: January 27, 2015/Harper Teen

Series: No

Source and Format: I received this book for free from the publisher via Edelweiss. This in no way affected my opinion of the book, or the content of my review.

Rating: 3 Stars

 

From Goodreads:

A teenage boy tries to understand his best friend’s suicide by listening to the playlist of songs he left behind in this smart, voice-driven debut novel.

Here’s what Sam knows: There was a party. There was a fight. The next morning, his best friend, Hayden, was dead. And all he left Sam was a playlist of songs, and a suicide note: For Sam—listen and you’ll understand.

As he listens to song after song, Sam tries to face up to what happened the night Hayden killed himself. But it’s only by taking out his earbuds and opening his eyes to the people around him that he will finally be able to piece together his best friend’s story. And maybe have a chance to change his own.

There’s absent parents, grieving teens, a supernatural tangent, a first love, bullying, pretty good nerdiness, glaring factual errors – everything one might need in YA. And I do mean EVERYTHING. Playlist for the Dead had soooo much crammed into one book that it wound up being only pretty good for me. I mean, you don’t need to have every character go through everything to make them fully formed.

The playlist as a whole is a mess, but some of the music is actually pretty good, or at least interesting. The songs tie in to the story well, but if you don’t look at the song at the start of the chapter the name of it might never be mentioned and that was a little confusing sometimes.

The most important lesson Sam learns is that people aren’t just one thing. It takes him a long time to realize this – that even your best friend (who you know better than anyone) might still not have shown you every side of himself. Sam is quick to judge and make assumptions about people, which is kind of annoying, but also true to the nerdiness of his character – if people only see him as a nerd or whatever, then it doesn’t matter if he makes assumptions about the characters that are gay or weird in different ways than he is.

 

The Perks of Being a Wallflower and The Spectacular Now. I’m way more familiar with Perks, and I think the music and loss is the reason for this comparison. I read The Spectacular Now in 2013 and don’t really remember much about it. Re-reading my review, I can’t draw any comparisons. There is some light teen drinking in Playlist for the Dead, but nothing close to the amount taking place in The Spectacular Now.

ARC Review: Love and Other Theories

Title/Author: Love and Other Theories by Alexis Bass

Publication Date/Publisher: December 31, 2014/Harper Teen

Series: No

Source and Format: I received this book for free from the publisher via Edelwiess. This in no way affected my opinion of the book, or the content of my review.

Rating: 1 stars

From Goodreads:

If you want more, you have to give less.

That’s the secret to dating in high school. By giving as little as they expect to get in return, seventeen-year-old Aubrey Housing and her three best friends have made it to the second semester of their senior year heartbreak-free. And it’s all thanks to a few simple rules: don’t commit, don’t be needy, and don’t give away your heart.

So when smoking-hot Nathan Diggs transfers to Lincoln High, it shouldn’t be a big deal. At least that’s what Aubrey tells herself. But Nathan’s new-boy charm, his kindness, and his disarming honesty throw Aubrey off her game and put her in danger of breaking the most important rule of all: Don’t fall in love.

For me, 1 star is basically a hate read. I guess I run the risk of this publisher giving out my personal information if this author feels like finding me for slandering her book or whatever, but it is what it is. The second I realized what was really going on in Love and Other Theories, I was angry. I can’t believe anyone would think marketing this towards younger girls is in any way a good idea.

Don’t be fooled by the synopsis – this is not a cute high school romance story. This is a group of girls who got together and decided they weren’t going to be in committed relationships, especially with high school boys. That’s fine. But it somehow turns into a book about slut-shaming the girl who used to be in their group until she decided to get a boyfriend…because one of the main girls was into that boy at the time.

This group of girls considers themselves to be the “evolved” ones…but Chiffon is trashy and a slut for having boyfriends. I was definitely expecting a more enlightened and realistic view of teen sex and relationships, but this is NOT that. And really? Could she have been given a worse name?

Throughout the whole book, the girls keep referring to their “theories”…

Theory is splendid but until put into practice, it is valueless. – James Cash Penney

“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.” – Yogi Berra

These girls are not just formulating theories, they’re actually putting them into practice. So, shouldn’t super-smart Aubrey whose defining characteristic is that she’s GOING TO BARRON (though it’s hard to know how smarty-pants she really is since that’s not a real place)…shouldn’t she know the difference? Shouldn’t she maybe step in and tell her friends what “theory” really means?

Love and Other Theories wants to be about changing, like, the rules of feminism: Don’t get with your friends’ exes. Love and Other Theories says: There’s not a sufficient number of dateable boys in this podunk town, so we’re all free to get with any or all of them, no strings and no hurt feelings. But OF COURSE there will be hurt feelings because PEOPLE HAVE FEELINGS even if you think they’re a slut for having a committed relationship.

ARC Review: Top Ten Clues You’re Clueless

Title/Author: Top Ten Clues You’re Clueless by Liz Czukas

Publication Date/Publisher: December 9, 2014/Harper Teen

Series: No

Source and Format: I received this book for free from the publisher via Edelweiss. This in no way affected my opinion of the book, or the content of my review.

Rating: 2 stars

From Goodreads:

Top Five Things That Are Ruining Chloe’s Day

5) Working the 6:30 a.m. shift at GoodFoods Market

4) Crashing a cart into a customer’s car right in front of her snarky coworker Sammi

3) Trying to rock the “drowned rat” look after being caught in a snowstorm

2) Making zero progress with her crush, Tyson (see #3)

1) Being accused—along with her fellow teenage employees—of stealing upwards of $10,000

Chloe would rather be anywhere than locked in work jail (aka the break room) with five of her coworkers . . . even if one of them is Tyson. But if they can band together to clear their names, what looks like a total disaster might just make Chloe’s list of Top Ten Best Moments.

1. Reads VERY YOUNG – I would guess the characters are 13-14 not 16-18.

2. Very The Breakfast Club-y. Teens are detained (detention) and they are The Brain, The Jock, The Princess, The Weirdo, etc.

3. Predictable – saw it coming from a mile away.

4. Diabetes was an interesting touch, but I thought it went a little overboard. I mean, my cat is diabetic, so I know what I’m talking about.

5. That was a joke, but my cat really is diabetic.

6. This is now a list about cats instead of a book I didn’t really like.

7.

8.

9.

10.

But seriously – at least Top Ten Clues You’re Clueless was a quick read.

ARC Review: A Thousand Pieces of You

Title/Author: A Thousand Pieces of You by Claudia Gray

Publication Date/Publisher: November 4, 2014/Harper Teen

Series: Firebird #1

Source and Format: I received this book for free from the publisher via Edelweiss. This in no way affected my opinion of the book, or the content of my review.

Rating: 4 stars

From Goodreads:

Marguerite Caine’s physicist parents are known for their radical scientific achievements. Their most astonishing invention: the Firebird, which allows users to jump into parallel universes, some vastly altered from our own. But when Marguerite’s father is murdered, the killer—her parent’s handsome and enigmatic assistant Paul—escapes into another dimension before the law can touch him.

Marguerite can’t let the man who destroyed her family go free, and she races after Paul through different universes, where their lives entangle in increasingly familiar ways. With each encounter she begins to question Paul’s guilt—and her own heart. Soon she discovers the truth behind her father’s death is more sinister than she ever could have imagined.

A Thousand Pieces of You explores a reality where we witness the countless other lives we might lead in an amazingly intricate multiverse, and ask whether, amid infinite possibilities, one love can endure.

I wish I was still doing half star ratings because 4 seems like too much and 3 stars seems like not enough. I was really enjoying A Thousand Pieces of You, then it dragged a bit, but the end result is…I wish it was a standalone (I also thought it was a debut).

It’s hard to say what I didn’t like about A Thousand Pieces of You, except the title should probably be ONE Thousand Pieces of You, right? Anyway. I thought the ability to jump to different dimensions – but not through time – was very well done. We saw enough different things, and enough of the same things, to really get a feel for what it was like. The sciencey stuff made my eyes glaze over a bit like it always does, and the love triangle, YES LOVE TRIANGLE, wasn’t even horrible, but I didn’t really feel the connection with one side of it.

The bits of it that are going to carry on into the next book (the unresolved parts) were my least favorite and most draggiest parts. I thought the writing, with the asides and little jokes and everything felt very normal for how Marguerite would talk and express herself, but anytime I would put the book down for a while and come back to it, it took a bit to get used to again.

I write my reviews immediately after finishing a book so I can start a new book and not get my thoughts jumbled. I expect, like some others, the more time I spend thinking about it, the more I’ll find at fault, but as it is, I quite enjoyed A Thousand Pieces of You – though I’m not sure I’m on board for a series.

Cloud Atlas meets Every Day – I buy it. I read Every Day and I even read about half of Cloud Atlas (I’d still like to read it or at least watch the movie) and I guess these two were picked because of the body switching part of one and the still kind of being the same person part of the other (that I didn’t finish reading so maybe that’s not what was happening).

Take These Broken Wings and Learn to Fly

Title/Author: Blackbird by Anna Carey

Publication Date/Publisher: September 16, 2014/Harper Teen

Series: Yes, Blackbird Duology #1

Source and Format: I received this book for free from the publisher via Edelweiss. This in no way affected my opinion of the book, or the content of my review.

Rating: 2 stars

From Goodreads:

A girl wakes up on the train tracks, a subway car barreling down on her. With only minutes to react, she hunches down and the train speeds over her. She doesn’t remember her name, where she is, or how she got there. She has a tattoo on the inside of her right wrist of a blackbird inside a box, letters and numbers printed just below: FNV02198. There is only one thing she knows for sure: people are trying to kill her.

On the run for her life, she tries to untangle who she is and what happened to the girl she used to be. Nothing and no one are what they appear to be. But the truth is more disturbing than she ever imagined.

What a disappointing run of books I’ve been reading. Blackbird is technically interesting, but I’m surprised the second person narration didn’t make me DNF. Each time I picked the book up it took a little while to get re-acclimated to it though, so I recommend reading it all in one sitting, if possible. Actually, I recommend watching The Pest instead of reading Blackbird.

The second person narration puts YOU as the main character of the story. This should make things feel more immediate and thrilling, but it didn’t really work that way for me. Even when people are being murdered right in front of YOU, there is no emotional connection to them, because YOU have no memories.And because YOU don’t seem to actually feel any emotions.

YOU keep making terrible decisions. Like, I would totally completely trust the first hot guy I saw, and go live with him even though I plan to steal from him again and again. There are some fade-to-black(bird) sexy times and every teen character in this book is super unsupervised (minus the tracking/surveillance), so this makes me think that these characters should have been written as older than 17/18. Not because of the implied sex parts, but because if you’re going to make your characters operate as grown-ups, then what is the point of being a teenager? All the teenage obstacles are irrelevant in Blackbird due to lack of parental/authority figures – even the cops are failures – so they are basically all 25 years old.

YOU are obviously on the run and have no memories of family, Ben (drug dealing heartthrob/savior) has an dead father and an institutionalized mother, Izzie (Ben’s neighbor’s granddaughter who YOU befriend and also try to steal from again and again) keeps turning up and YOU keep putting her in danger. Why do these people keep helping YOU?!

Blackbird is being pushed as The Maze Runner meets Code Name Verity, and I’m sorry, but WHAT?! I guess it’s like The Maze Runner because there is running and I didn’t like it? But Code Name Verity is a literary masterpiece and I’m extremely offended by this comparison. Is it because…the main character is a girl? I still say to just watch The Pest instead. Proof (I know this is not from The Pest because it’s from my second favorite movie ever okay):

 

ARC Review: Rites of Passage

Title/Author: Rites of Passage by Joy N. Hensley

Publication Date/Publisher: September 9, 2014/Harper Teen

Series: Not currently

Source and Format: I received this book for free from the publisher via Edelweiss. This in no way affected my opinion of the book, or the content of my review.

Rating: 4 stars

From Goodreads:

Sam McKenna’s never turned down a dare. And she’s not going to start with the last one her brother gave her before he died.

So Sam joins the first-ever class of girls at the prestigious Denmark Military Academy. She’s expecting push-ups and long runs, rope climbing and mud-crawling. As a military brat, she can handle an obstacle course just as well as the boys. She’s even expecting the hostility she gets from some of the cadets who don’t think girls belong there. What she’s not expecting is her fiery attraction to her drill sergeant. But dating is strictly forbidden and Sam won’t risk her future, or the dare, on something so petty…no matter how much she wants him.

As Sam struggles to prove herself, she discovers that some of the boys don’t just want her gone—they will stop at nothing to drive her out. When their petty threats turn to brutal hazing, bleeding into every corner of her life, she realizes they are not acting alone. A decades-old secret society is alive and active… and determined to force her out.
At any cost.

Now time’s running short. Sam must decide who she can trust…and choosing the wrong person could have deadly consequences.

Rites of Passage is super hard for me to review and super hard to pinpoint why I liked it so much – especially since all my thought about it are kind of complain-y. Like…everything I like about it also has a negative.

Some examples:

 

FINALLY a girl that is strong for real and actually does some weight lifting (although extremely briefly)…and she does it all wrong. Like, I’m so glad you impressed the guys with your knowledge of the jargon (“working in”), but you wouldn’t start with a weight you’ve never attempted before for 8 reps without warming up at all.

 

Secret societies! This is so unexpected and interesting because I didn’t read that far into the description! Set in a military school and Sam is from a military family JUST LIKE ME! Oh, yeah, that’s not how my family is and this secret society stuff is going on a little too long. This book could be 100 pages shorter and I would be fine with it.

 

What I really like about Rites of Passage is not the will-it-or-won’t-it-be-a-sequel ending, but that it’s so unlike other books right now. I like what I like and I want to read what I like, and I was worried that Rites of Passage was going to be a bit of a clunker for me because military school is not boarding school, but it was so interesting (I want to say “refreshing” but I feel like a book with this much violence towards women can not be deemed refreshing because that is not like a strawberry lemonade AT ALL) to read a book that goes so many different places than most YA.

Part of me is even hoping for this to be a secret series, despite how much I hate a secret series. I wouldn’t mind spending some more time with Mac and the rest of the Alphas.

ARC Review: Don’t Touch

Title/Author: Don’t Touch by Rachel M. Wilson

Publication Date/Publisher: September 2, 2014/Harper Teen

Series: No

Source and Format: I received this book for free from the publisher via Edelweiss. This in no way affected my opinion of the book, or the content of my review.

Rating: 2 stars

From Goodreads:

Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. Touch another person’s skin, and Dad’s gone for good.

Caddie can’t stop thinking that if she keeps from touching another person’s skin, her parents might get back together… which is why she wears full-length gloves to school and covers every inch of her skin.

It seems harmless at first, but Caddie’s obsession soon threatens her ambitions as an actress. She desperately wants to play Ophelia in her school’s production of Hamlet. But that would mean touching Peter, who’s auditioning for the title role—and kissing him. Part of Caddie would love nothing more than to kiss Peter—but the other part isn’t sure she’s brave enough to let herself fall.

WHY ARE YOU AT ACTING SCHOOL is the thing I thought most while reading Don’t Touch. I didn’t feel Caddie’s connection to acting or performing at all. It seems like the author just wanted Don’t Touch to take place in a setting where it was believable that the MC would be spending a lot of time as Ophelia for all the literary allusions and SHAKESPEARE! Metaphors! ACTING! For someone who is so afraid of everything, it seems like ACTING! would not be something Caddie is comfortable with.

I like books I can connect with, or books that give me something to relate to. I’ve had the odd panic attack, but don’t suffer from anxiety disorder or OCD. So, the actual “no touching” and the rules and everything was a little strange for me to believe – especially when Caddie really wants Peter to touch her. The whole thing of stemming from her parents separating was also weird for me – my parents divorced before I was old enough to make memories and subsequent divorces were not especially hard on me, so this isn’t something I can sympathize with either.

Caddie is short for Cadence, and whenever I remembered that I completely could not figure out how Caddie should be pronounced. At one point a golf joke is made, but I don’t understand how that is a shortened version of Cadence – which is apparently a family name? Her brother, Jordan, really got lucky in the naming department.

Other stray observations:

So, so, so repetitive. “No, I know” is used in what feels like every conversation.

“Peter has biceps” cool so does EVERYONE

For a second, I think she means, “pick sides,” like we’re going to have to battle one another to make it to the stage, but no, by “sides,” she means copies of the scenes we’ll be reading: WHY ARE YOU AT ACTING SCHOOL

ARC Review: Strange and Ever After

Title/Author: Strange and Ever After by Susan Dennard

Publication Date/Publisher: July 22, 2014/Harper Teen

Series: Something Strange and Deadly #3

Source and Format: Received advanced copy from publisher via Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review

Rating: 2.5 stars

From Goodreads:

He took her brother, he took her mother, and now, Marcus has taken her good friend Jie. With more determination than ever to bring this sinister man to justice, Eleanor heads to the hot desert streets of nineteenth-century Egypt in hopes of ending this nightmare. But in addition to her increasingly tense relationships with Daniel, Joseph, and her demon, Oliver, Eleanor must also deal with her former friend, Allison, who has curiously entangled herself in Eleanor’s mission.

With the rising dead chomping at her every move and Jie’s life hanging in the balance, Eleanor is convinced that her black magic will see her through to the bitter end. But there will be a price. Though she and the Spirit Hunters have weathered every battle thus far, there will be consequences to suffer this time—the effects of which will be irreversible. And when it’s over, only some will be able to live a strange and ever after.

Yet another time I’ve let a well-loved series get the best of me and requested the last book in a series I hadn’t started yet. This is also an example of how binge reading can lessen your enjoyment of a series. To read all three books in less than 5 days…it really started to drain me. I enjoyed each book less than the one before it.

I’m interested in Egyptian mythology as much as the next person, but it was strange (and deadly and lovely and ever after) to me that so much of the riddle of the story relied on it. The story was interesting to me as a hunt for artifacts and solving the letters Elijah left, but almost everything other than that was dull. To go from Philadelphia (zombie) to Paris (demon) to Egypt (all that other stuff plus like 8 Egyptian gods with lore and ~things going on) seems inconsistent. Go big or go home, right? OH WAIT THESE PEOPLE DON’T HAVE HOMES.

Eleanor is awful. She is most awful in this book, but witnessing the entire progression in such a short amount of time makes it worse. She does whatever she wants in the name of “love” or “revenge”. I’m sorry, but if my brother started raising the dead and tried to kill me and my friends I would write him off completely. If my mother was horrible to me (I know it was the times, but still) and then told me TO MY FACE that I was dead to her, fine, she’d be dead to me, too. Eleanor continues to let guilt for her brother’s actions drive her, and her sense of purpose seems more misguided than ever.

Daniel is…annoying. Like, obviously magic is super cool, bro, and you need to come to terms with it. He almost made me wish for the oft-hinted at love triangle to come to fruition. Anything to spice things up a little.

I really hate when the lore is changed in the last book. Like, oh hey – forget all that other junk, THIS is what’s happening now. More than that, is that I’m expected to believe Eleanor could even do any of these things. Absolutely no hints at magic her whole life, and then suddenly it’s there, and she has TONS of power, SO MUCH power that she literally can’t contain it sometimes…but never knew it was there.

Secondly, and this is probably because of the magic but it still bothered me in Strange and Ever After since I was so bored I started nitpicking everything: I don’t believe Eleanor has the level of fitness required to do the things she’s doing. Running all over the place? It’s unladylike to run and Eleanor is carrying around a few extra pounds, so I don’t for one second believe she has the cardio or stamina to do it. Swinging huge old swords around? Eleanor’s only strength training has been holding her parasol above her head, so I really don’t think that she is strong enough to wield such a weapon, and definitely don’t think that she has had any training using it and would therefore not be much help in a fight, even when brandishing a sword.

Additional thoughts: if I ever have to read “shut pan” again it will be too soon and the only redeeming factor of Strange and Ever After was that it cut down on the Shakespeare quotes by about 80%.