Another Ten Books I Absolutely Can't Wait For

Dear Blog,
I haven't done one of this posts in an insanely long time, it seems. Well, I should.  Because there are a lot of books that I'm looking forward to that are released later on in the year or in 2012.
So. Without further ado.


The Diviners by Libba Bray- Libba Bray= possibly my favourite historical fiction writer.  New York City in the 1920s = possibly one of my favourite eras. The summary on Goodreads tells me it will be "a wild new ride full of dames and dapper dons, jazz babies and Prohibition-defying parties, conspiracy and prophecy—and all manner of things that go bump in the neon-drenched night."  All I can say is oh my God yes.  Bring it on.

Perfect by Ellen Hopkins- companion novel to Impulse, and is released this autumn.  And look at that cover.  It's so delicious, I could eat it. In fact, when I get a copy I may well have to do so.

Smoke by Ellen Hopkins-Another Ellen Hopkins.  This is a sequel/companion novel to Burned, the ending of which was intense  but very vague.  I haven't heard much of a synopsis about Smoke, either, and it doesn't come out for a good while yet, so we'll see.

 A Million Suns by Beth Revis- Goodreads is killing me. Although it shows the cover, which is by the way absolutely gorgeous, all it says as a synopsis is "The plot of this book is a mystery."  Aaaaargh I want to know what happens right now *explodes*. 

The Gathering Storm by Robin Bridges- Russia.  1888.  Teenage debutante and member of the nobility who is also a necromancer. Need I say more?  I must have this book.   

Pandemonium by Lauren Oliver- Although I dislike the cover (maybe it will tie in with a paperback cover of Delirium?) which is nothing like that of its predecessor, I am totally looking forward to reading this. The ending of Delirium was so intense and dramatic. However. If there's a love triangle of sorts in this book, I may well scream and rip my hair out, because honestly I dislike nothing more in books, especially when couples go together as well as Lena and Alex and then some unnecessary other character is thrown into the equation for drama.

Audition by Stasia Ward Kehoe- I've probably said before that although I haven't taken ballet lessons for about seven years, I still absolutely love ballet and I just about died when I went to see Swan Lake in London last year.  So when I heard about this book, I was like, Yes!  Also, apparently it's a novel in verse.   Double yes!  There aren't half as many of these sorts of books as there ought to be.

All These Things I've Done by Gabrielle Zevin- Even though I wasn't too into Elsewhere, this book does sound interesting. Among other things that intrigue me about this book, I cannot imagine a world without chocolate, i.e the one this book is set in, and it would be interesting to see how the human race functions without the food of the Gods.

The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer by Michelle Hodkin- So, so, so much excitement for this book. I don't really know much about it, because the synopses  I've read have been rather mysterious.  Which probably just adds to my anticipation.  

 

 The Carrier of the Mark by Leigh Fallon- I was initially interested in reading this book because it was discovered on Harpercollins' YA writing site Inkpop, which I was a member of until I forgot my password various other commitments lead me to stopping being addicted to so many websites.

 Although it's true I don't tend to enjoy a lot of the paranormal romances I read, there's very little YA set in Ireland so I look forward to reading some that is. 

Also, the cover intrigues me.  The girl on the front looks both like she's being dragged up and pulled downwards at the same time.

So, there you go.  Are you looking forward to any particular releases at some point in the future?  Any of these?

That's all for today.  Over and out.

Five Challenge: Great author moments (also late)

Dear Blog,
late again, I know.  But I've been insanely busy recently with Christmas and everything.
Alas, I couldn't name many YA authors I've met in person.  So like the others who couldn't fulfill a list, I'll have to list the writers that I want to meet.


JOHN GREEN (Looking for Alaska, Paper Towns, etc.)
Enough said, I think. Because, well, who wouldn't want to meet John Green?  Someone who's never read any of his work, I suppose.  I pity them.
Anyway, I seriously doubt that anyone such as John Green would ever come within a hundred miles of my small corner of south-west England, being far too awesome an author, with far too many fans in more populous places to bother with towns like mine. 

MARGARET WILD (Jinx, One Night)
So I can beg her for the secret of writing such powerful verse novels.

LISA SCHROEDER (Far from You, I Heart You, You Haunt Me, etc.)
ditto.

AIDAN CHAMBERS (This is All, Now I Know, etc.)
 Because from what of his works I've read, he seems like a very philosophical sort of person.  The chances are slim but I'd love to talk to him for a very, very long time about the Dance sequence, which I'm in the midst of devouring.

ANNE-LAURE BONDOUX (The Princess and the Captain, Life as it Comes, etc.)
My all-time favourite foreign YA author.  I don't know if she can speak English, and I can't speak French either, but if ever I meet the author of the amazing novel that is The Princess and the Captain then I'd have to try French anyway. 

Well, that's all. Now I'll post this and have to catch up with FIVE (challenge, that is) posts from the last couple of days that I've missed.

Review: An Abundance of Katherines by John Green

Dear Blog,

Summary (from Goodreads): When it comes to relationships, Colin Singleton's type happens to be girls named Katherine. And when it comes to girls named Katherine, Colin is always getting dumped. Nineteen times, to be exact. He's also a washed up child prodigy with ten thousand dollars in his pocket, a passion for anagrams, and an overweight, Judge Judy-obsessed best friend. Colin's on a mission to prove The Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability, which will predict the future of all relationships, transform him from a fading prodigy into a true genius, and finally win him the girl.

Letting expectations go and allowing love in are at the heart of Colin's hilarious quest to find his missing piece and avenge dumpees everywhere.

Review: You may or may not know if you've been reading my blog for a while that I am a total fangirl of John Green's works after I read Looking for Alaska last summer.    Paper Towns followed quickly after and now, alas, the only of his works I have left to read for time being are his collaborate novel with David Leviathan, Will Grayson, Will Grayson.  Anyway, so no doubt I shall spend a lot of time in this review comparing it to his other works, and I'll probably repeat myself once or twice.

Anyway.  So I had pretty high expectations for An Abundance of Katherines and, most of the time, it didn't disappoint.

Maybe it's just me, but you can't help but speculate slightly at this formula: a protagonist with some strange personality quirk, a highly amusing sidekick, a strong love interest, and a lack of parental authority.  So there wasn't really much new, but it's physically impossible to not enjoy anything by John Green.  He is, along with Sarah Dessen, one of my few favourite contemporary authors.  It doesn't matter, at least to my mind, if you can start to predict what's going to happen.

A lot of An Abundance revolves around mathematics.  I should probably mention that all of this was totally lost on me because my knowledge of maths is totally appalling and I probably have the same mathematical knowledge as an eleven-year-old.  All the discussion and examples of the Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability went over my head.  I did read the appendix at the end, by the way, but I just ended up saying to myself, "So, he's written a formula...which will tell him how long a relationship will last...so this line here is supposed to represent today...eh..." Maybe it was just me being mathematically challenged, maybe not.  Maybe there were just too many numbers.

That said.  Despite all that, like Looking for Alaska and Paper Towns, An Abundance of Katherines is full of small, quirky facts that you wouldn't have known otherwise.  Read John Green books and you'll become one of those interesting intellectuals who can surprise their friends with things that none of them know.  Become cultured and exciting and intriguing and have people look up to you (or else just think that you're slightly bizarre). 

Colin was a nice enough protagonist.  He wasn't quite as humorous as Q and he didn't have so much to learn, I suppose, as Miles.  And his incessant whining did get on my nerves considerably a little at the start.  And for all his three dimensions, he seemed almost overly dependent on having a Katherine constantly at his side- though Lindsey Lee Wells was a welcome surprise, she was still amorous material.  That doesn't mean I disliked her.  Nay, I thought she was actually pretty awesome, and if there's any romantic material in a novel I like it to be sort of like her; Clever. Witty. Sassy.

The writing style is, strangely, told in the third person, which was a nice change.  And I think that's what actually set Colin apart from Q and Miles.  In not narrating the whole story, it made his dialogue and his thoughts seem even more...original, I guess you could put it.  If that makes any sense. 

So.  Hmm. Is it a good book?  Yes, definitely, compared to a lot of the novels in the vast expanse of YA lit.  But is it as great as I was expecting?  Hmm, not sure. When novelists are so fantastic I think it's hard for their second and third novels to live up to expectations. 

In Three Words: not quite Alaska.
Recommended for: John Green fans.  Despite a few flaws it's worth it.
Rating: 4. 

Review: Paper Towns by John Green

Dear Blog,
I finished Paper Towns this afternoon.  I know that the picture is the US edition as opposed to the UK one, but I couldn't find a good-quality image of the right size of the sceptr'd isle edition.  No matter.

Summary (from Goodreads): When Margo Roth Spiegelman beckons Quentin Jacobsen in the middle of the night—dressed like a ninja and plotting an ingenious campaign of revenge—he follows her. Margo’s always planned extravagantly, and, until now, she’s always planned solo. After a lifetime of loving Margo from afar, things are finally looking up for Q . . . until day breaks and she has vanished. Always an enigma, Margo has now become a mystery. But there are clues. And they’re for Q.

Review: I read Looking for Alaska about a  month ago and completely fell in love with it, and a couple of days after finishing it I ordered Paper Towns off Amazon.  I haven't had a chance to read it since then, but decided to read it now so that it didn't just blend into my bookshelf and not read for another two and a half years, à la Artemis Fowl and Many Waters (neither of which I've actually read yet).  Although, John Green's writing is too good to put off from reading for very long.

Paper Towns is similar to Looking for Alaska in many ways.  Margo and Alaska are kind of alike, just because they're clever and worldly and mysterious.  There's one scene on page 77/78 where Q is describing Margo which seems almost identical to the "In the dark beside me, she smelled of sweat and sunshine and vanilla, and on that thin-mooned night I could see little more than her silhouette" scene in Alaska.  But I don't really care because it's so beautiful and well-written (as was the "she was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing.  She was a girl" part in Paper Towns)  And Miles and Quentin had similar characteristics, too, but all these similarities matter not because all these people are awesome-  the sort of people you wish would just jump off the page. I certainly wish that Margot would open my bedroom window one night and take me on awesome all-night escapades.  Too bad that stories are fiction, however realistic the characters may seem.  But that's how you know that characters are truly great, I guess.  Not only do you belive they could be real but you want them to be. 

Paper Towns has that brilliant mix of being funny and making you think.  It's the sort of book where you don't want to just add a couple of your favourite sentences to your Favourite Quote section on Goodreads, but the whole thing.  Indeed, as well as being deep and philosophical in a John Green sort of way, parts of it are hysterically funny.  Parts of it are certainly rude.  Generally it's both at the same time *sigh*. Boy humour...what more can I say?  Anyway, at some parts I was laughing so hard my little sister was giving me weird looks and asking if I was okay.  Which I was.
I don't tend to read mystery novels, but this is more than anything else a mystery and, like any good one, keeps you guessing.  Although I did get a bit annoyed about two thirds of the way into the book when we knew that Margo was in a paper town but not exactly where.  So that sort of got on my nerves because Q didn't actually get on the road until part 3 (to my mind the best part of the book).

I'm not really sure what to make of the ending, which I won't reveal because it will wreck the whole book.  Was it right?  Was it dissapointed?  I can't really tell, and will probably have to think it over for a few days before I come to any conclusions.  

Summary: excellent no matter what you make of the ending. Funny, thoughtful, exciting, rude, and absolutely awesome.  Rating: 4/5.

Review: Looking for Alaska

Dear Blog,

I have returned from Yorkshire, and I bring with me a review of Looking for Alaska by John Green. Seeing as I have blogged little the last two weeks, I have many many books to write a review of.  Sorry.

Anyway.  This will have to be a short review because I stayed up very, very late last night surfing Inkpop.com, aka a teen writing website I am now thoroughly addicted to.  Anyhoo, I'm tired and sleep summons. 

Summary (from Goodreads): Miles Halter is fascinated by famous last words - and tired of his safe life at home. He leaves for boarding school to seek what the dying poet Francois Rabelais called the "Great Perhaps." Much awaits Miles at Culver Creek, including Alaska Young. Clever, funny, screwed-up, and dead sexy, Alaska will pull Miles into her labyrinth and catapult him into the Great Perhaps.

Review: In my time I have heard many many good things about John Green.  In my time as a book blogger I've heard even more good things. So I bought a copy of Paper Towns off Amazon and borrowed Looking for Alaska from the library.  And now I have finally got round to reading his books, how glad I am that I have. 
  This is one of those books that both boys and girls can read, but alas like many similar books the UK cover seems to look like it would appeal more to boys, which is a shame. Note to boys reading my blog: get the US cover instead, perhaps.  I prefer the UK cover.  It's pretty.


The book is split into two parts: "before" and "after".  I won't say what event divides the two, but I had known what it was beforehand because somebody posted it on a review on Goodreads and didn't mark it as a Spoiler post.  Grrr.  Anyway, even though I sort of knew what was coming, the writing was so raw and tragic it didn't stop me feel like crying in an empty, devastated sort of way when The Event happened.  I didn't, but only because my little sister was sat next to me playing  on her Nintendo DS and would have mocked me ceaselessly, even though she weeps buckets at sentences like, "my  brother died when I was two."  before it moves onto another subject.  Anyway, though she herself is a wet blanket, I wouldn't have heard the end of it I had cried.  So, well, I didn't.
That said.  We know something sinister is going on when Alaska says things like, "you all smoke for fun.  I smoke to die." and "I may die young, but at least I'll die smart". And, in truth, I wonder if The Event would have come as such a shock to me even if I hadn't accidentally discovered it on the internet.

Looking for Alaska is one of those books where the characters are absolutely everything. You could keep the story and the writing but have different characters, and I bet it wouldn't be half good at it is with the cast of characters. They're quirky and cool, but with enough flaws and rough edges to keep them interesting. I think this is why sex-drugs-rock&roll Alaska is so compelling and mysterious: not just to Miles, a.k.a Pudge, but to the reader as well. Her mood swings are confusing and strange, her personality equally intriguing: energetic one moment and slightly scary the next. I was sort of surprised at first-having read heaps of reviews, I was sort  startled when the first thing she says as she appears in the book is recount to the Colonel how a boy she was with honked her boob.  I was like, "oh. Um.  Okay then."

I've read some bad reviews from adults who are all, "this book is BAD. They drink.  They smoke.  they drink drive. They have sex.  Bad, bad BAD. Bleeeeeurgh." All I can say is, I don't care.   It's not like they're the only teens in the world to do this things, so, well, get over it please.

 Miles was a likeable protagonist.  As I've said before, I read few books with male protagonists because I feel slightly alienated from them.  But Miles seems real, like he was an animate object instead of words in a book.  I loved that his main talent was memorising last words-how original is that?! 
While their were moments of such fleeting weirdness and teenagedom, it's a very deep and philosophical book. It's full of the sort of  sayings you might want to add to your favourite quotes if you have a Goodreads account (as every bookworm ought to).  Actually, having read the book I proceeded to add about a squillion quotes from the book onto my page.

Random extra paragraph: While in Yorkshire over the weekend, my father and sister were in a labyrinth and I, having completed it, was stood outside talking to the man who had designed it, having a slightly intellectual debate about the philosophies behind mazes (yes this is going somewhere).  I mentioned the last words that are at the centre of Looking for Alaska:  "How will I ever get out of this labyrinth?"  The designer of the maze asked about it and then we had a long conversation about mazes and what they really mean.

Summary: emotionally draining whether you saw The Event coming or not, and an absolute must read for every teenager and adult.  Rating: 4.5.

In My Mailbox 9

Dear Blog,
IMM returns, hosted infinitely by Kristi of The Story Siren.
I got some cool books this week, mostly from the library.  I live in a smallish village but we're about five miles from a town with a massive library.  It's like nirvana.  So many books *is happy just thinking about it*.  Anyway, about once a month I go into town and come back with armfuls of books (excuse the "Headspace", a.k.a teen section stickers on the side of the library books)

IN MY MAILBOX/IN THE POST
I ordered these off Amazon last week and they turned up on Tuesday:
Postcards from No Man's Land by Aidan Chambers
Paper Towns by John Green

BORROWED
Looking for Alaska by John Green
Pita Ten volumes 1 and 2 by Koge Donbo
Powers by Ursula Le Guin
Hold Still by Nina Lacour (I've wanted to read this for ages)

Well, that was my week.  What about yours?

In My Mailbox 8

Dear Blog,

IMM returns,  hosted eternally by Kristi of The Story Siren fame. 
As I write, my hands are covered in paint (I'm helping my little sister whitewash her bedroom).  I've stopped to take a break and hopefully all the paint has dried, otherwise my father won't be pleased

Even though I have far too many books that I need to read, I got some books anyway, all bought.  

ON POINTE by Lorie Ann Grover

(FINALLY arrived from America. Yay!  Review coming soon)

Summary (from Goodreads): For as long as she can remember, Clare and her family have had a dream: Someday Clare will be a dancer in City Ballet Company. For ten long years Clare has been taking ballet lessons, watching what she eats, giving up friends and a social life, and practicing until her feet bleed -- all for the sake of that dream. And now, with the audition for City Ballet Company right around the corner, the dream feels so close.
But what if the dream doesn't come true? The competition for the sixteen spots in the company is fierce, and many won't make it. Talent, dedication, body shape, size -- everything will influence the outcome. Clare's grandfather says she is already a great dancer, but does she really have what it takes to make it into the company? And if not, then what?

PAPER TOWNS by John Green

(I bought this from Amazon, and it hasn't arrived yet):

Summary (from Goodreads:) When Margo Roth Spiegelman beckons Quentin Jacobsen in the middle of the night—dressed like a ninja and plotting an ingenious campaign of revenge—he follows her. Margo’s always planned extravagantly, and, until now, she’s always planned solo. After a lifetime of loving Margo from afar, things are finally looking up for Q . . . until day breaks and she has vanished. Always an enigma, Margo has now become a mystery. But there are clues. And they’re for Q.

POSTCARDS FROM NO MAN'S LAND by Aidan Chambers

(also from Amazon, not arrived yet).

Summary (from Goodreads): Jacob Todd is abroad on his own, visiting his grandfather’s grave at the commemoration of the Battle of Arnhem in Amsterdam. There, he meets elderly Geertrui, who tells an extraordinary story of love and betrayal, which completely overturns Jacob’s view of himself and his country, and leads him to question his place in the world. Jacob’s story is paralleled in time by the events of the dramatic day in World War II when retreating troops were sheltered by Geertrui’s family. [close]

So, well, though I didn't get much (controlling inner self and book-buying splurges) it was a good week.  What about yours?