Tag Archives: fiction

Teaser Reviews: Glitch and Timepiece

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I recently finished reading the digital review copies of Glitch and Timepiece, and while I won’t be posting full reviews until closer to the release dates, I wanted to give you a taste of my thoughts.

First up, Glitch by Heather Anastasiu (release date: August 7, 2012):

Premise: In a futuristic society, humans have been purged of their emotions via technology implanted into their brain stems. Logic and duty reign supreme. However, when Zoe starts “glitching” — i.e. experiencing emotion — her world begins to fall apart. Does she turn herself into the Regulators to be “fixed?” Or does she attempt to break free of the orderly yet oppressive system, to lead a normal life and fall in love?

Why I liked it: Glitch is full of fun sci-fi action, superpowers, and crazy twists and turns. It’s a fun ride, kind of like an action movie or a roller coaster. You’re not going to come out having lots of Deep Thoughts after this one, but it kept me entertained for a couple nights, most of the characters were enjoyable, and I am always a fan of superpowers and futuristic technology.

Danger, Will Robinson: There is a love triangle in this one, and I hated — hated — one of the participants. So that’s always frustrating. Also, if you like your sci-fi served up with a hefty dose of it-could-kinda-maybe-happen scientific techno-talk, à la Michael Crichton, this is not the book for you. Disbelief must be suspended, and in a big way.

Next, Timepiece by Myra McEntire (release date June 12, 2012):

Premise: Timepiece picks up pretty much where Hourglass left off. (Haven’t read Hourglass yet? Go order it RIGHT NOW. Or pick it up from the library. You’ll be glad you did.) This time, the narrator is Kaleb Ballard, a minor player in Hourglass and Michael’s best friend. Kaleb is a charming but irresponsible womanizing drunk at the start of the book. However, when a new mysterious bad guy comes to demand that the Hourglass hand over the devious Jack Landers — or else — Kaleb finds himself swept up in ancient plots, legendary prizes, and the task of possibly saving the world.

Why I liked LOVED it: I need to be careful, or I will write an essay on how much I loved this book. And this is just supposed to be a teaser. So first off: Kaleb is awesome. He doesn’t start awesome. I wanted to punch him in the face. But he quickly becomes awesome. The secondary characters are fabulous. I was especially pleased that Lily, Emerson’s barista best friend from Hourglass, gets a lot more face time in Timepiece. Jack Landers is a deliciously horrible villain. And the time-slippy action and the twisty-turny plot is just incredible. There were several developments I just did not see coming, and that was a good thing. I can’t wait for the next book. Too bad this one’s not even out yet…

I’ll post full reviews when we’re closer to release, but if either of these pique your interest, go pre-order on Amazon, put them on hold at your library, or (if you’re a reviewer), go try to snatch them from NetGalley!

Review: Hourglass by Myra McEntire (@MyraMcEntire @EgmontUSA)

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I found out this weekend that in about two weeks, a trio of authors will be doing a book signing in Nashville (I live right outside of Nashville), and that a bunch of book bloggers will be attending. I’m really excited to attend. Not only will this be my first signing and therefore my first opportunity to meet some of my fellow bloggers in person (which, I have to admit, kind of terrifies me. I’m only extroverted on the Internet. In real life, I tend to want to hide behind things and be socially awkward), but I actually really enjoy the authors.

The three authors are Amy Plum, Myra McEntire, and C.J. Redwine. So leading up to the event, I will be posting reviews for Hourglass, Timepiece, Die for Me, and (hopefully) Defiance and Until I Die. Still working on getting my hands on those last two, although I have high hopes for Defiance. I’ve been in communication with The C.J. Redwine herself, and awesomeness is in the works. Stay tuned.

I will also post other things in the coming two weeks. No fears. I may also post a review of The Wise Man’s Fear or a really old book that I just feel like reviewing. Maybe a Farseer book, since I keep referencing them as The Awesomest Ever. Maybe The Princess Bride, because it is mortifying to me that so many people don’t realize it’s a book. Maybe something else. I don’t know. I’m flighty. We’ll see. But there will be other stuff.

Anyway. Ahem. For today:

The Story

Hourglass is the story of Emerson Cole, just a typical 17-year-old girl, with the pesky exception that she sees dead people.

 No, not like that.

[Side note: Is the character’s name, Emerson Cole, after Haley Joel Osment’s character of Cole in The Sixth Sense? Questions for Ms. McEntire when I see her!]

Ever since her parents died in a tragic accident, Emerson has been going through life, minding her own business, when all of a sudden someone from the past will show up. A Scarlett O’Hara look-alike. A poodle-skirt-clad group of teenagers from the 1950s. An century-old baseball team. Only Emerson can see them, and if she tries to touch them, they pop like bubbles.

Under the care of her brother Thomas, Emerson has been to every form of therapist, ranging from Freudian men with glasses to bone-shaking witch doctors. No one has been able to help her.

Until one day, Thomas hires Michael, a mysterious young man representing a company called the Hourglass. Michael is certain he can help Emerson; but even more intriguingly, he believes she can help him.

Soon Emerson is introduced to a world she never knew existed. A world where normal people can have extraordinary powers. A world where time travel is possible. And a world where she is more powerful than she ever dreamed.

My Thoughts

I love me a good time travel story, and this had all the trappings of a great one. I liked Emerson. In spite of her 17-year-old-girl-ness (a plague among YA heroines, considering they are inevitably 17-year-old girls), she was likable. She was obviously attractive yet a bit insecure, but not one of those narrators who’s constantly lamenting her ugliness while every guy around her proceeds to walk into telephone poles as they are stunned by her beauty. She had a quick wit and dry sense of humor that I enjoyed. She actually used her brain a good chunk of the time (not all the time, but I dare you to name a main protagonist who always makes well-informed and fully considered decisions).

I also liked the sci-fi elements of the story. I liked the premise and the structure. I liked that a “scientific” explanation was given for how all their crazy abilities worked individually, and how they worked in tandem. And of course, a major sticking point for me is always if the “rules” of the world made sense. In this case, I think they did.

We drifted a bit into X-Men territory for a little while, but I forgive Ms. McEntire for those small similarities. I kind of think X-Men has such a large scope that it’s kind of hard not to call it to mind when writing anything about people with powers. Also, like with almost any time-travel book, there were scenes reminiscent of other time-travel stories (the one that came instantly to my mind was Back to the Future II). But again, it’s hard to have a time-travel story without talk of paradoxes and the space-time continuum. There was no mention of flux capacitors, so I’m good.

The love story between Emerson and Michael was a bit heavy-handed at parts. It was obvious that was where the story was headed from the first moment they laid eyes on each other. But I honestly mean it was only a bit heavy-handed, and only in parts. She talked about his superhuman gorgeousness a little too often for my liking (although it was probably toned down for what an actual teenage girl would have been thinking). Her descriptions of her reactions around him were occasionally a tad over the top. But overall, I enjoyed their chemistry and their interaction.

I will also give Emerson credit for not turning into a complete pile of mush, a la Bella Swan, every time he was around. He may be super-pretty and she may have a tummy full of butterflies, but at least she still spoke her mind and stuck to her guns. She even got annoyed with him on occasion. That was refreshing.

Buffy is hard-wired into my brain. It’s a sickness.

The secondary characters were mostly well-developed. I loved Thomas and his wife Dru, although throughout the entire book, I kept picturing Dru like this:

Emerson’s quintessential gorgeous BFF Lily was also fun. She wasn’t ridiculous and annoying like gorgeous BFFs so often are in YA lit. She was actually loyal and funny and I could understand why she and Emerson were friends. Plus, her character had some intriguing twists that I hope and expect to see developed in the sequel(s).

Michael also had a likable best friend, which is something I find a little rare in these types of books. Normally the male love interest either has no friends or his best friend is a jerk. But I really enjoyed Kaleb. He was charming and interesting, and the more I found out about him, the more intrigued I became.

I guess that’s a good thing, since Timepiece is all about Kaleb.

Another bonus: for once, there was a twist at the end that took me completely by surprise. I am very rarely taken by surprise in a YA book, and when I am, I even more rarely feel that the book really earned the ending. Sometimes I feel like a twist ending is dropped in simply for the sake of a twist, with nothing else in the book backing it up. It feels forced and awkward. This one I totally didn’t see coming, but it also didn’t feel random just for the sake of having a twist.

Anyway, this review has gone on long enough. Bottom line: I really enjoyed this book. It was a fun, exciting read that put its own spin on the special powers/time travel theme.

Content Guide: Contains descriptions of past violence, and teens being amorous.

Review: Frost by Kate Avery Ellison

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Frost is the first novel in yet another new dystopian series. I’d say something sarcastic about the need for new dystopian series right now, given the severe shortage and all, but the truth is I love the current trend. I like reading about the imaginary and plausible-to-varying-degrees worlds that authors can come up with.

It’s the same reason I like reading books about dragons. And aliens.

Still waiting for someone to send me a book about dragons and aliens, BTW. Just a reminder.

Anyway, I like books that spark my imagination. Real life has enough drama to make me not want to spend my precious reading hours delving into fake “real-life” drama. (Yes, I know, there’s always exceptions. But I’m all about broad generalizations right now)

So I picked up Frost based on 4 factors:

1) It was another YA dystopian, and I like those.

2) It had a good rating on Amazon.

3) The cover was pretty.

4) It was short (194 pages), and I wanted something short to balance out the epic fantasy novels I’ve been trudging through lately (I say “trudging” like this is somehow painful for me. It’s not. Just loooooong).

It turns out that reason 3 was a sham, because the cover has absolutely nothing to do with what the book is about.

[One of these days I’m going to learn a valuable about judging books by their covers. But that day is not today.]

What the Book Is About

Frost is the story of Lia, a teenage orphan taking care of her crippled twin brother and younger sister. They live on a farm near a small village in The Frost, a hostile and chilly area located somewhere near mountains and forests. Maybe Canada. I don’t know.

Lia has her share of troubles. First, she has been responsible for providing for her family since her parents were brutally killed by Watchers, mysterious and vicious beasts living in the forests of The Frost.

Second, between the Watchers and the equally mysterious and slightly less vicious Farthers — the people who live outside The Frost — Lia lives in constant fear for her and her family’s safety.

And third, she and her sister just rescued an injured Farther from the Watchers, and are hiding him in their barn.

Lia can’t imagine what possessed her to help a Farther, but she finds herself reluctantly nursing him back to health. And the more she learns about him, the more questions she has about her village, her family, and the people she thought she knew.

What I Thought

Let’s start with the good. Frost has a really interesting story. I like Ms. Ellison’s writing style, Lia’s character, and the world she lived in. I saw some of the twists coming, but some were genuinely surprising. I still have a lot of questions about exactly why the village is located in such a hostile environment as The Frost, but the groundwork was laid to get answers in future books.

And yes, there’s a bit of a love story in Frost. It was sweet and mildly necessary, and pretty much what you’d expect in this genre. I liked both Lia and her guy (I’m not going to say which guy, as the beginning sets up 3 potential candidates. Don’t worry though, it’s definitely not the dreaded love triangle). As with pretty much all YA love stories, I thought their feelings got too deep, too fast, without much foundation. But that’s probably just because I’m too far removed from being a teenager, so I have no real complaints.

The pacing in the first half of the book was great. I felt like the characters were set up well (some were a little under-developed, but then again, I’d have a hard time naming a book that doesn’t rhyme with Barry Trotter where all of the characters are well-developed). The world-building was good. A lot of potentially fascinating elements were introduced to the story: the Watchers, the Farthers, why the village was located in The Frost to begin with, the death of Lia’s parents, and the mysterious boy she blames for their death.

The main problem I had was in the second half. I felt like we kind of skipped most of the plot development and skipped straight to the grand finale. It felt rushed. I know I said I picked up the book because it was short, but a short book should still tell a complete story; it should just be a short story. Frost was an average-to-long story crammed into a short book.

It was like we jumped straight from the set-up to the conclusion, with no development. The characters of Ann, Cole and Adam all had significant contributions to the plot without much leading up to it, making their actions seem kind of out-of-the-blue.

In the first half of the book, Ms. Ellison does a great job with the “show, don’t tell” mantra that always gets thrown around writing circles. But in the second half, everything is “tell.” The big showdown at the end has absolutely nothing leading up to it, and the entire thing is explained by The Bad Guy doing some extensive monologuing, with no prompting whatsoever.

Also the ending has three — count ’em, three — dei ex machina (Yes, that is the plural for deus ex machina. Yes, I looked it up), back-to-back. I will name list them vaguely to avoid spoilers:

1) Extremely specific overheard conversation that prompts the events leading to the ending.

2) Reveal of the Bad Guy.

3) What happens to the Bad Guy.

It just seemed like there should be a better way to get to the ending without forcing it. I’m not a fan of unnecessary exposition and buildup, but this story needed more of both to really feel satisfying.

There had to be a more organic way for the same events to have taken place, but with Lia & Co. actually figuring things out on their own through subtle clues rather than having their next actions spelled out clearly by external forces. There had to be a better way to reveal who the bad guy was and what exactly he did, without just dropping him in for a point of a final confrontation. And there had to be something better to do with the character than what happened after the extensive monologuing.

It’s just too fast. Too much happens in too little time. Especially when the beginning seemed like it was really going to take the time to build up some steam. Instead it barely started simmering, then it exploded.

Frost is a good story. I’ll be interested in the next book in the series to see where things go. Ms. Ellison has a natural, engaging writing style that I like. I just hope that with the next book, she slows down her pacing a bit. I’d like to spend more time with these characters. Let them develop, grow, and learn. I think it would be neat.

Content guide: Contains some mild violence.

Review: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs (@RansomRiggs @QuirkBooks)

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So in all my blog hopping madness today [which has been SO much fun — I’m probably following a couple dozen new blogs now, and gained a nice handful of followers myself! Thanks, Parajunkee and Alison Can Read!] I came across a review for Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children over on Movies In My Head. And that reminded me that I, too, read this book recently, and it is so good. And kind of creepy. And decidedly unique. And now I want to talk about it too.

What It’s About

Miss Peregrine’s is the story of Jacob, a teenage boy living a normal life, until the mysterious and horrific death of his grandfather sends him across the ocean, to a tiny island off the coast of Wales, to discover the truth of his grandfather’s past.

What he finds on the island only seeks to arouse his curiosity further: An orphanage secluded from the rest of the world. A tragic bombing that wiped it off the face of the earth. A town that refuses to talk about it.

As Jacob digs deeper into the tragic past of Miss Peregrine’s orphanage, more and more questions arise, until finally he makes a shocking discovery. Soon Jacob is caught up in an incredible — and peculiar — adventure he never even dreamed of.

Here, before I get to my thoughts, watch the book trailer. It’s probably the best book trailer I’ve seen. Period.:

What I Thought

[I am going to have to get into mild spoiler territory here. I’ve been pondering how to avoid it, and I just can’t. It’s alluded to very early in the book though, and I don’t think your enjoyment will be lessened knowing this in advance. Even so, my apologies.]

First off, this book is nothing like what I expected (I should mention that I checked it out from the library as an e-book, so I didn’t know that it’s typically classified — mis-classified, in my humble opinion — in the horror genre). I thought it was going to be a bittersweet story of a young boy digging into his grandfather’s tragic past, and learning a valuable lesson. I knew creepy vintage photos were incorporated, but I figured they’d be like a metaphor for the way his grandfather had tried to dress up what had happened to him, to make it all seem magical and mysterious instead of just sad and depressing.

Because I was thinking that “tragic past” meant something like “Holocaust survivor.” I was pretty sure monsters = Nazis.

But no. Monsters = freakin’ monsters.

This story is full of fantasy, magic, and unexpected twists and turns that totally blew my mind. I had no idea where it was going, and when I turned the last page, I found myself dumbly attempting to flip another non-existent page, and yelling, “that’s it?!”

Needless to say, I sincerely hope Mr. Riggs goes forward with the sequel(s).

What makes Miss Peregrine’s even more interesting is the vintage photography that is incorporated into the story. Authentic (yes, they’re real!) and decidedly creepy photos are woven seamlessly into the narrative, adding a level of realism and creepiness that both grounds the story and enhances its impact.

It’s not without its flaws. It is a little slow to get moving. Jacob spends a good chunk of time on the island before anything really happens. But once it took off, I couldn’t put it down.

Keep in mind, I definitely think it’s mis-classified as horror. It’s much closer to YA/mid-grade fantasy. I think the cover misleads people (bad font choice, publisher). I don’t think the intent of the book is to scare the reader; I think it’s to enthrall and amaze. So there are a lot of people out there who are kind of peeved that this book “wasn’t scary enough.” I’m obviously not one of them. No, it’s not scary. It’s creepy (which can be attributed largely to the photos), but mostly it’s just a fantastical adventure story.

Content guide: Contains violence and some scenes of overall creepiness. Plus creepy photos.

Review: The Host by Stephenie Meyer (@littlebrown)

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I know, I know. I just reviewed Twilight, so why the heck am I reviewing another Stephenie Meyer book so soon? Well, two reasons:

1. The Host is nothing like Twilight.

2. The trailer for the movie was recently released, and it is weird and kind of confusing. So if you are one of those people who saw The Hunger Games recently and wondered what that weird trailer with all the eyeballs was about, I am here to enlighten you.

The Plot

The Host is the story of two characters: A human, Melanie Stryder; and an alien, Wanderer. The kicker is that they’re both inhabiting the same body.

Melanie was one of the leaders in the human resistance, fighting to keep Wanderer’s alien race from taking over their bodies and consciousness, even after the aliens — or “souls,” as they refer to themselves — have already conquered Earth.

Obviously, she fails.

Wanderer is surgically inserted into Melanie’s body, reboots the hardware, takes a look around…and discovers Melanie’s still in there. Her consciousness, which is supposed to be snuffed out when a “soul” sets up shop, is very much present. And cranky.

What follows is an internal struggle between Melanie and Wanderer, as both fight to take control of the host body. And things only get more complicated when Melanie convinces Wanderer to seek out her allies in the resistance, bringing them both face-to-face with Melanie’s brother and boyfriend.

My Thoughts

First off, yes. This basic plot device has been used before: aliens who come to Earth and take control of our bodies. But really, most interesting plot devices have been used before. As long as it’s interesting and the author’s spin is unique and fun, I don’t care.

As for the book itself, I really enjoyed The Host. Ms. Meyer has come a long way from Twilight. Gone were most of the endless, repetitive descriptors; the grammatical errors; the absurdly cheesy metaphors. No, her writing is still not the gold standard against which all others can be measured, but then again, neither is the writing in most of the books I enjoy. But I can honestly say that if I didn’t know, going in, that this was the same woman who wrote Twilight, I would never have guessed it.

That’s a good thing.

Technicality aside, it was a good read. The pace was a little slower than that of your average YA novel; but then again, this technically isn’t a YA novel (although it’s perfectly appropriate for a teen audience). It’s definitely more character-driven than action-driven. There were parts that dragged, but I never got bored. And I have a bone to pick with part of the ending (Meyer left it open for a sequel, which is fine, but how she did it I found a bit creepy).

I don’t want you to think The Host is all plodding inner monologues, though. There’s definitely some good action and suspense in it, as well as a hefty helping of romance. Twilight it is not, but don’t be fooled: Meyer is a sucker for love triangles. Although, to be fair, The Host has more of a love square.

Bottom line: I enjoyed The Host. It’s not “great literature.” It’s not going to change the way you think about anything (unless you have very strong views about alien colonization. No judging here). But it’s interesting, it’s exciting, and it made my heart race and my tummy flutter at all the right times.

I found myself thinking about it after I finished (always a good sign). I’m looking forward to the sequel (The Soul, which Meyer may write someday if she feels like it) and for the film adaptation. Even if the trailer is weird.

Content Guide: contains mild violence