Category Archives: Contemporary

Review: Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins (@naturallysteph)

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I’ll be honest. I’ve put off reading this book for a while because, much like the Young Boy in The Princess Bride, I feared it was “a kissing book.” Mostly because of the title. And while I don’t mind some kissing in my books — you know, shoved in between the explosions and the dragons — I didn’t think I was really going to be into a YA contemporary centered around kissing.

But then many, many, many people told me that I needed to read it. And I think the straw that broke the camel’s back was this Twitter conversation where C.J. Redwine bullied me into reading it. (Okay, maybe “bullied” is too harsh, since all she did was use ALL CAPS on Twitter, and I am a pushover).

So I checked it out of the library. And I tried to ignore the cover, because the cover makes me think it’s a kissing book. Also, I don’t like the Eiffel Tower.

I know.  I know.

Anyway. I am happy to report that while there most certainly is kissing in this book, it is not “a kissing book,” and it is indeed quite enjoyable.

ALL THE PEOPLE WERE RIGHT.

The Plot (from Goodreads)

Anna is looking forward to her senior year in Atlanta, where she has a great job, a loyal best friend, and a crush on the verge of becoming more. Which is why she is less than thrilled about being shipped off to boarding school in Paris – until she meets Etienne St. Clair: perfect, Parisian (and English and American, which makes for a swoon-worthy accent), and utterly irresistible. The only problem is that he’s taken, and Anna might be, too, if anything comes of her almost-relationship back home. As winter melts into spring, will a year of romantic near – misses end with the French kiss Anna – and readers – have long awaited?

My Thoughts

Reasons I wasn’t sure if this book would appeal to me:

1) It sounds like a cheating book. I hate cheating books.

2) It takes place in Paris. I don’t like Paris. I know, I’m weird, but when I visited Paris, I just didn’t like it. For whatever reason. I don’t know. I just don’t like it.

3) The summary uses the phrase “swoon-worthy,” which makes me cringe. Seriously. Is this anyone’s honest reaction when they hear a British accent?

I should hope not. It is overly dramatic, and inaccurate. You know what’s swoon-worthy? Finding out you just won the Publisher’s Clearing House. Finding out that a loved one’s cancer is gone. Discovering that a loved one you thought was dead is actually alive.

Not a British accent.

HOWEVER.

None of my problems with this book turned out to actually be problems with this book. Which was a pleasant surprise.

I loved Anna. First off, Anna also kind of hates Paris, and thus I felt a kinship with her. She also is socially awkward and goes to painstaking and impractical lengths to keep from coming in contact with other humans, and I was like, YES. I can relate to this!

And then I also liked her friends. So often in books, I wind up liking the protagonist and then hating their friends, and then wondering why they’re friends in the first place. Not so in this book. They had a natural friend dynamic, where every member of the group had a distinct personality and role to play, and you could see why they would all have gravitated toward each other.

Of course, the majority of the plot circles around her relationship with Etienne St. Clair, and her struggle to determine how she feels when she knows he has a girlfriend and she has a maybe-something-or-other back in Atlanta. I was prepared for this to be extremely irritating, either because their friendship wouldn’t feel like a real friendship, or because one of them was going to cheat. And I just can’t root for cheaters. Period.

But. It wasn’t irritating. Or at least, not irritating in a way that kept me from enjoying the book. I was irritated alongside Anna. She berated herself for looking for hidden meaning in his actions, and I could completely sympathize. And while there were a few times I just wanted to throttle St. Clair (who, while not a cheater, was a monumentally crappy boyfriend on several occasions), he never crossed that point-of-no-return line where I simply would not be able to hold out hope for him and Anna anymore, because I’d be too busy thinking he was scum.

I liked that their friendship was real. They were comfortable, their personalities were complementary, and they just worked well together. One of my favorite chapters was their back-and-forth holiday email exchanges, which is normally one of my least favorite book gimmicks. But their banter seemed natural and easy, and I enjoyed it.

Anyway. I could keep talking about this book and how much fun it was and how I loved Anna’s snarky yet awkwardly endearing inner monologue and how happy it made me to read about friendships that felt real and a friendship-turned-romance that didn’t feel forced. Or I could stop talking and you could just go read it. Which you should.

Content Guide: Contains profanity, under-age drinking, implied sexual activity

Review: Pushing the Limits by Katie McGarry (@KatieMcGarry @HarlequinTeen)

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Received an advance digital copy from the publisher via NetGalley

If I’m not careful, I’m going to have to admit I like reading Contemporaries. Which just seems weird. I mean, I’m a fantasy/sci-fi gal. I like when things blow up and shoot lasers and travel through time and battle monsters. What is up with me liking books lately that are all about relatively normal high school students? I’m having a bookish identity crisis, people.

But with Pushing the Limits by Katie McGarry, I found yet another well-written and riveting contemporary that I simply could not put down. Really. I tried.

The Plot (from Goodreads)

“No one knows what happened the night Echo Emerson went from popular girl with jock boyfriend to gossiped-about outsider with “freaky” scars on her arms. Even Echo can’t remember the whole truth of that horrible night. All she knows is that she wants everything to go back to normal.But when Noah Hutchins, the smoking-hot, girl-using loner in the black leather jacket, explodes into her life with his tough attitude and surprising understanding, Echo’s world shifts in ways she could never have imagined. They should have nothing in common. And with the secrets they both keep, being together is pretty much impossible.

Yet the crazy attraction between them refuses to go away. And Echo has to ask herself just how far they can push the limits and what she’ll risk for the one guy who might teach her how to love again.”

My Thoughts

Okay, the synopsis sounds hokey. Maybe you don’t think so, but I do. Bad boy reaches out to the popular girl so that she can learn to love again? Um, no. Truth be told, I’m not exactly sure why I requested this book, because I think the synopsis sounds hokey. But I’m glad I overcame that (for whatever reason), because it is not hokey.

From the first page, a counseling session between Echo, her father and stepmother, and her therapist, Mrs. Collins (who I LOVE, by the way), I was completely engrossed in this story. Echo is a complex and well-developed character, and we find out right from the beginning that she suffers from traumatic memory loss, that she deals with tremendous grief over the death of her brother, that she has all sorts of authority issues and trust issues, and that she’s smart. And unlike a lot of books that claim the main character is smart but the character never actually talks or thinks or acts like a smart person, Echo actually thinks intelligently. She’s logical. She’s quick. She’s witty. She made me like her, despite her myriad of issues and struggles.

Then you meet Noah, another case of Mrs. Collins. Noah has been in the foster system ever since his parents died in a fire after his freshman year of high school. Since then, he’s been labeled a “bad influence” and cut off from his young brothers. And while Noah is also a smart cookie, he reacts understandably — he decides to become the bad influence everyone thinks him to be, without really thinking through the consequences. As a reader, I could see that he wasn’t really doing himself any favors there, but Katie McGarry does a fantastic job getting inside Noah’s head so you can really understand how he became the way he is.

Partially through the interference of Mrs. Collins, Echo and Noah wind up thrown together, and although they aren’t each others’ biggest fans at first, they slowly grow to see all that they have in common, and ultimately get together (which I don’t consider a spoiler, since it’s on the cover).

However, unlike many other contemporary teen romances, the romance in Pushing the Limits is not the central focus of the book (Echo and Noah actually get together around the 50% point). Although my emotions were pulled every which way by the romance, the main focus is trying to get Echo and Noah to both cope with the trauma in their lives and move past it. Echo needs to remember what happened on that night two years ago when her mother senselessly attacked her. Noah has to come to terms with how he fits into the lives of his brothers, who he is only allowed to see rarely, and how to determine what is best for them. Both stories tackle difficult subject matter admirably (Noah’s scenes with his brothers made me cry on more than one occasion), and both resolved in a satisfying and realistic manner.

There’s a lot of secondary characters in the book, and while none are developed as thoroughly as Echo and Noah, they all had their own voices and personalities, and I loved reading about how the different relationships worked. My favorites were Noah’s foster brother Isaiah, and the aforementioned Mrs. Collins, who Katie McGarry somehow made me love even while viewing her through the eyes of Echo and Noah, neither of whom really liked her.

The narrative uses the alternating POVs of both Echo and Noah, and each had their own distinct voice. They thought completely differently, and even if their names were never mentioned in the narrative, I would have been able to follow who was speaking when. I thought it was a great use of dual POV, and I was fully invested in both characters.

There were times when some of the dialogue felt a bit forced, or some of the descriptions were a bit unrealistic. For example, according to Noah, Echo smells like hot cinnamon rolls all the time, and tastes like warm sugar. I get that maybe she’s really into the “Warm Vanilla Sugar” scent at Bath & Body Works (because seriously, it smells so good), but unless she’s constantly licking frosting (which she isn’t), I’m not sure how that scent is translating to taste for him.

And then there was Noah constantly referring to Echo as “my siren.” I get that he thought she was irresistible, but I kind of doubt a tattooed, stoner “bad boy” would actually think the words “my siren” every time he sees this girl. They’re minor things, but they took me out of the story just a tad.

That aside, I still really enjoyed this book. I didn’t intend to devour it the way I did, but I couldn’t stop reading. I only got 4 hours of sleep the night I finished it because my bedtime came and went and I couldn’t put the book down. If you’re a fan of contemporary romances that tackle some serious issues, I highly recommend Pushing the Limits.

Content guide: Contains profanity, mentions of child abuse, drug and alcohol use by minors, sexual situations

Review: Perception by Kim Harrington (@Scholastic)

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Received from Scholastic for the purpose of review

Perception, by Kim Harrington, is the sequel to Clarity, which I reviewed (and enjoyed) here. Clarity was a quick, fun read, and I jumped right into Perception the moment I put it down, anxious to hear about more of Clare’s psychic mystery-solving shenanigans.

The Plot

Clarity “Clare” Fern, teen psychic, is adjusting to her newfound social acceptance after using her powers to help solve the murder of a teenage tourist over the summer. Her ex-boyfriend, Justin, has made it clear he’d like to start over, and she’s also being pursued by the dark and smoldering new detective’s son, Gabriel. In addition, the girls who previously shunned her at school are now clamoring to be her friends, with the glaring exception of arch-nemesis mean girl, Tiffany.

But as the school year starts, the air is abuzz with gossip about the recent disappearance of a girl no one really knew. Did she run away? Or was she taken?

Meanwhile, Clare starts receiving notes from a secret admirer, and Justin and Gabriel swear it’s neither of them.

Clare decides to dust off her detective skills again: to discover not only what’s happened to the missing girl, but to unveil the identity of her mysterious suitor.

My Thoughts

Much like Clarity, Perception is an exciting, fast-paced teen mystery channeling the essence of Veronica Mars, but with psychic powers. (P.S. If you’ve never watched Veronica Mars, you really, really should).

The love triangle between Clare, Justin, and Gabriel is still a huge part of the story, even moreso than in Clarity, since the secret admirer plot line obviously places a lot of attention on Clare’s love life. I still see why she’s torn between the two of them and why the choice isn’t obvious, but I am happy to report that she does make a decision by the end of the book, and that it makes sense.

Clare was still smart and sassy, although occasionally painfully oblivious. She suffers from severe tunnel vision in some instances and misses some pretty big clues, but overall she was still an enjoyable character. And after all, she’s not really a trained detective, so it actually makes sense that she wasn’t picking up on everything.

Justin and Gabriel didn’t grow a whole lot from the first book. I still liked them both, but didn’t gain a lot of new insight into either of them. Yes, we learn a couple new things, but my opinion on both of them remained pretty much unchanged. It would have been nice to peel back a few more layers. But since I liked them in Clarity, I still liked them here.

The character who changes the most is Clare’s brother, Perry. The events of Clarity hit him the hardest, and it’s sad to see what has become of his character. While on the one hand, he is no longer the flippant womanizer of the first book (which is a bonus, in my eyes), his new personality isn’t much of an improvement. I still like him, in spite of his flaws, but he wasn’t a “fun” character in this book (and he wasn’t supposed to be). I actually really appreciated that the huge developments in Clarity didn’t just roll off his back, and that he needs to take time to process and overcome them.

As for the mysteries, I was a little less satisfied in this book than in the prior one. I felt like the clues were more obvious, and I’d figured out who the bad guy was really early in the story, despite a red herring that practically jumped up and down and screamed, “LOOK AT ME! I’M A RED HERRING!” It was still engaging and entertaining to solve the mystery alongside Clare, but didn’t have the same impact that the first book did, in my opinion.

Overall, I really enjoyed this follow-up to Clarity, and would be interested to continue reading about the mysteries that Clare solves.

Content guide: Contains violence, profanity.

Review: The Fault in Our Stars by John Green (@realjohngreen @duttonbooks)

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If you follow any book blogs that are not my book blog, you’ve probably heard that John Green is the best thing to happen in the world of books since Gutenberg. At least that’s the way I understood it. And I wasn’t sure what all the fuss was about, since I’d never read a John Green book.

So I decided to remedy this problem by checking out his newest book, The Fault in Our Stars. All I knew was that it was about kids with cancer, and it was supposedly heartbreaking and life-changing.

The Plot

The Fault in Our Stars is the story of Hazel, a 16-year-old 3-year survivor of Stage IV thyroid cancer. Hazel’s diagnosis has never been anything but terminal, but she still tries her best to live a normal life and stay positive for her parents. And one of the things that helps her parents is for her to attend a support group of other kids with cancer.

One day, Hazel arrives at support group to see a new boy in the circle. His name is Augustus “Gus” Waters, and although he has lost a leg to osteosarcoma, he says he’s mostly there as moral support for a friend. Gus takes an immediate interest in Hazel, who is initially reluctant to open up to anyone new. But eventually, Gus and Hazel decide to take the plunge, even though their future is uncertain.

My Thoughts

First of all, this book wrecked me. Wrecked. Me. I was a sniffling, sobbing mess starting about 2/3 of the way through the book. My husband came in and was like, “Hey, got something in your eye?” (Because he is a heckler and has a heart like a STONE), and I choked out between ugly-cries, “It’s about KIDS with CANCER! LEAVE ME ALONE!” And he skedaddled out of there.

So if you want a book to make you cry, I’d suggest this one.

But this book is not all tears and angst. It’s actually full of humor and sweetness. Considering it’s a book about KIDS with CANCER, I was not expecting to laugh so much. But laugh I did.

The highlight of the book for me was the characters of Hazel and Gus. It’s funny, because I was reading along and thinking “Wow, Hazel and Gus remind me of some of my friends from high school. Especially Gus, who is pretty much EXACTLY like this guy I knew, except for the cancer thing.” And then I went online and read some reviews, and the first ones I read were complaining that Hazel and Gus were unrealistic, and no teens act or talk like them. Just goes to show that how we perceive things is heavily dependent on our own life experiences.

So just for the record, yes, some teens act and talk like Hazel and Gus. Some teens have large vocabularies and use SAT words in everyday conversation. If you take out all the cancer references, I swear I had some of the Hazel-Gus conversations when I was in high school.

Yes, I was a nerd. But that’s neither here nor there.

On top of the great characterizations and dialogue, the storytelling was excellent. I was riveted by the first page, and couldn’t find a good place to put the book down, so I wound up reading the whole thing in a day. Which is no small feat when you have to also be parenting and cleaning and cooking and all those other things responsible adults do.  But it was just one of those books that you have to keep reading, even when you realize it’s going to rip out your heart and stomp on your soul.

I loved the friendships in the book; I loved the sweet and sad way that Gus and Hazel’s relationship developed;I loved the glimpses into their friend Isaac, Hazel’s and Gus’ parents, and the members of their support group. I loved how real and raw and honest Hazel and Gus were about what they were going through. Basically, I loved everything about this book, except for the way it utterly ruined me. And I even kind of loved that.

Some people say this book has a twist. I didn’t really think of it as a twist — nothing in the book surprised me — and I think if you go into it expecting it to shock and amaze you, you may come out disappointed.

However, if you read this book for the great characters, fantastic dialogue, and gut-wrenching levels of emotion, you will be satisfied. At least I hope you will be. I was.

Even though it wrecked me.

Content Guide: Contains sex, profanity, and difficult situations dealing with cancer and death.

Review: One Moment by Kristina McBride (@EgmontUSA)

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I received this book as an advance digital review copy from NetGalley

Here’s a confession: I don’t read a lot of contemporary. Shocking, I know. I like most of my entertainment to be a sort of escapism, and I gravitate towards stories that have an element of the fantastic. I love stories that inspire my imagination with things like magic and space and superpowers and monsters. But, on occasion, when the mood strikes, a contemporary will spark my interest.

This was one of those occasions. I was intrigued by the summary for this book — a mysterious death and a case of amnesia? What’s going on? — and thought it may actually be kind of refreshing to read a story based in the “real” world after all the crazy fantasy and sci fi I read. And it was.

The Plot

Maggie’s group of 6 friends has been together since elementary school. They’ve grown up together and shared in all their activities. Cliff jumping is no exception, and the book opens as Maggie tries to gather up the courage to participate in a jump over Memorial Day weekend. Encouraged by her friends, especially Joey, who she has been dating for the past 2 years, Maggie finally summons up enough courage to jump off the cliff with Joey into the water far below.

But one minute Maggie and Joey are holding hands, running for the edge of the cliff; the next, Maggie is disoriented at the top and Joey is on the ground below — dead.

What follows is the aftermath of the accident, as Maggie struggles to remember what happened up on that cliff top, and attempts to recreate the last few week’s of Joey’s life. The five survivors are left with lots of questions and few answers as they all try to make sense of what happened. And their frustrations are exacerbated by the fact that one of them, Adam, has started avoiding them.

My Thoughts

One Moment is actually fairly simple, and although the revelations throughout are shocking to Maggie, they were pretty predictable for me. But that didn’t keep me from enjoying the book.

The story is told from Maggie’s perspective, which means we are treated to the story of her friendships with the others and especially her romance with Joey in brief flashbacks, as Maggie tries to make sense of everything that’s happened to her. The flashbacks help to develop the characters and convey the depth of Maggie’s grief and confusion, and I thought they fit in well with the flow of the story.

Maggie herself is relatable and likable, although occasionally frustratingly naive. It got a little tiring to see all the clues laid out so obviously, but for her to still have no idea what was going on. I could excuse her partly because she’s young, and partially because she’s struggling to get past a major shock, but her continued ignorance (especially when she was offered answers and refused to listen) got a bit grating.

The other friends are developed to varying degrees. Joey is the most developed, through Maggie’s memories, and maybe it’s because I never really went for the mega-popular partying guys in high school, but I just failed to see his appeal. He and Maggie never seemed all that well matched to me, even in her memories. So while I appreciated what Maggie was going through, I didn’t find this book as sad as I was expecting, because I didn’t really mourn Joey along with her.

Her friend Adam was by far the most likable to me, and although I figured out really quickly what was going on with him, I still enjoyed reading about him. Shannon was the epitome of every girl I’ve ever had nothing in common with, and although she was far from one-dimensional, I couldn’t really understand what Adam and Shannon were doing in the same group of friends.

The least developed were Tanna and Pete, who don’t really add much to the character development of the other four, or do much to propel the story forward. It seems like they were mostly there to just establish that this is a group of friends, and not a teen soap on the CW. But I wish we’d have seen a bit more from them, Pete especially, whose main contribution to the story was playing semi-recent pop songs on his guitar (and Nickelback. Huh.)

The pacing was good, and I had absolutely no trouble finishing this book in just a few hours. I was never bored, I didn’t have any trouble keeping up with what was going on (which was impressive considering the frequent flashbacks), and I liked the simplicity of it.

There was an element of the story that I wish hadn’t been there, and I think the story would have been more poignant and bittersweet if the focus had simply been Maggie coming to terms with learning the truth about her dead boyfriend.

Highlight if you want to be spoiled: The love triangle between Joey, Maggie and Adam. I wish Adam could have just been her friend, helping her through her grief, instead of the patient guy waiting in the wings. A story about grief and PTSD doesn’t really need a love triangle to work, and having it resolve at the end almost cheapens everything that Maggie goes through in dealing with Joey’s death. He may not have been a saint, but watching her reactions as she learned more about him was definitely interesting enough. Additional romance was unnecessary.

Ultimately, I thought this was a well-written, interesting, simple story. While it didn’t pack quite the emotional punch I was hoping for, I still enjoyed it.

Content Guide: A disturbing death, some sexual content, profanity