| Along for the Ride by Sarah Dessen |
[27 Apr 2012|02:03pm] |
Second verse, remarkably similar to the first. Different details for the story, but I'm sure a wider sampling of Dessen would reveal that they're all pretty formulaic in construction.
Still, they're pretty good if straight ya (no fairies, vampires, werewolves or aliens) is what you're looking for.
- Merrin
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| The Truth About Forever by Sarah Dessen |
[27 Apr 2012|01:58pm] |
Filed under: you're too old for these, Merrin.
I went to a friend for book recs from her shelf, and she thrust two Sarah Dessen books in my hand before I could kindly explain that while I do read ya, there better be something paranormal in their to hold my interest. Call me crazy, but I'm thirty, and teen angst doesn't appeal to me the way it used to. (but teens that are fairies? or vampires? you guys, I really don't pretend to understand myself. ever.)
This was good. Really. Fifteen year old me would probably have eaten it up with a spoon. It's relatively harmless, just some underage drinking and teenage rebellion (of the breaking curfew kind, and not the "oh look, I just got this tattoo" kind) so it's already completely foreign to my adolescent experience. Thirty year old me was happy for the distraction, and the company during tonight's round of insomnia.
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| Covet by JR Ward |
[27 Apr 2012|01:50pm] |
This is the first book in her new series, The Fallen Angels.
Look, if you know me at all you know how much I hate this new fallen angel line of romance novels/ya fiction/what have you. City of Angels was bad enough, but now they're in my paranormal romance, and it's just getting weird. This must be what vampires feel like when they read paranormal romance. "We don't do that! AND WE DON'T SPARKLE." Except that I am obviously not an angel, fallen or otherwise. Just, I really hate it when people mess with my belief system.
THAT ASIDE, because I really tried to put it aside for this book, this book ended up suffering from the same problems the later book in the BDB series suffer from: all plot and no action. SO MANY THINGS HAPPENING, even though, in the end, THREE DAYS elapse from the beginning of the book to the end, and NOTHING HAPPENS, except EVERYTHING HAPPENS, and the romance again felt forced and contrived, because JR Ward didn't take the time to develop it.
I finished it, and I was actually moving on to the second in the series, when I got to a description of the bad girl demon and her feelings on virgins. She's an evil demon, right? She sacrifices virgins to guard her mirror gate to the underworld, but she'll only sacrifice them if they're over the age of 18, because killing children, that's just wrong. And she goes on this self-righteous rant about that for two paragraphs, all the while I'm screaming (in my mind) BUT YOU'RE A FLIPPING DEMON. Go big or just go home, I don't even understand trying to find the softer side of evil, y'all.
So, skip them. Stick with BDB, because that's bad enough in the last couple of books.
- Merrin
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| Graveminder by Melissa Marr |
[08 Apr 2012|03:17pm] |
This one was strange. The story is about a tiny town that made a pact long ago with the dead. There must always be a Graveminder to keep people in their graves, and an Undertaker to help the Graveminder travel into the land of the dead and come back out.
What I was expecting? Floaty, ethereal, ghostly dead. Spirits, if you like. What I got? Zombies that ate people. And look, I'm obviously not opposed to zombies, but the florid prose made me expect ethereal spirits, and instead I got dead people eating flesh.
Idk. That's all I've got, actually. It was weird. I don't regret reading it, but that's about all I can say.
- Merrin
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| The Shape of Desire by Sharon Shinn |
[08 Apr 2012|03:14pm] |
Okay, if you've read this at all, you know ShaShi is one of my absolute favorites. She has a great deal of hits and only a very few misses for me. This one isn't a hit? But it isn't really a miss for me either. It was . . . I don't know.
The book is about a woman named Maria who is in love with a shapeshifter named Dante. He can't control the time or the shape he shifts in to, and it's been getting harder and harder for him to stay human for more than a few days at a time anymore. But the time he has he spends with Maria, who he is in love with as well. Then a series of animal attacks on humans leads Maria to question whether or not Dante might be the culprit.
Things I was unsure of in this book? This book is entirely told in first person, so we only hear Maria's side of things. Her devotion to Dante takes it to weird Edward&Bella levels of obsession sometimes. In a world before Twilight, that might not have freaked me out as much, but sadly, that series has completely turned me off the whole "I will die without you" mind set. Also, she tells us this story about Dante meeting her at college and finding out she'd hidden a friend who'd killed someone for days from the police. This is what makes Dante believe she'd hide his secret about shapeshifting, and ultimately what makes him ask her out. Whiiiiiich is great, I guess, but makes you question whether he's with her because she's loyal to the point of stupidity, or because he actually loves her.
That said, this book was lyrical and beautiful, and if you trust ShaShi the way I've come to over the years, you can believe that Dante is just as devoted as she is, and that makes everything a lot better, actually.
- Merrin
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