Tag: reader

Review: My Life Next Door by Huntley Fitzpatrick

On By Beth JonesIn Book Review3 Comments

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The Garretts are everything the Reeds are not. Loud, messy, affectionate. And every day from her rooftop perch, Samantha Reed wishes she was one of them . . . until one summer evening, Jase Garrett climbs up next to her and changes everything.
As the two fall fiercely for each other, stumbling through the awkwardness and awesomeness of first love, Jase’s family embraces Samantha – even as she keeps him a secret from her own. Then something unthinkable happens, and the bottom drops out of Samantha’s world. She’s suddenly faced with an impossible decision. Which perfect family will save her? Or is it time she saved herself?

Yes. Yes. Yes. This book is such a good debut and such a pleasant surprise! I’ve been a tiny bit peeved recently because I’ve been powering through books on my shelf and I haven’t really been enjoying them as much as I’d like…until this.

Where do I even start? I’m used to contemporaries, and I have a soft spot for them. But this is a contemporary with one hell of a twist. I was enjoying this book, and about halfway through was left wondering what was happening, a little bored perhaps. It was lovely, fluffy…but that was it. I needed more.

Hell, did Fitzpatrick give me more.

““You have to kiss me,” I find myself saying.”

Some people may say the twist was a little too intense for such a fluffy romance, but I am not one of those people. This book really needed the twist to pull it apart from the rest. But it wasn’t just the twist that I loved. For one, this book includes family and friends and such a large cast of characters, but I loved them all and I thought they were all so well built. Everyone played an important role in the story and Fitzpatrick is so good at creating well-rounded characters. I really liked Samantha, and I actually love that she was a rich girl. She challenged the whole rich girl stereotype and proved there is more depth to the spoilt princess we expect.

This book took me through so many emotions. Boredom, slightly, yes. But also love, confusion, tears, happiness, laughter and so much more. I spent some of this book trying not to cry, and other parts bursting out into giggles. It displayed the rollercoaster of Samantha’s life perfectly.

“”Yeah.” He leans closer. “I do.””

So honestly, the best part of this book was definitely the characters, whom I adored. I loved the big Garrett family and the natural way they were represented. I loved George, who came across with traits of aspergers to me, and made him even more lovable. I loved the dynamic between Sam and her mum, because even though it was heart-wrenching, I think it was written beautifully.

My only criticism? The pace. As I briefly mentioned above, I thought halfway through this book that that was it. And later on, I felt the ending was a little rushed. I just think if the twist had happened a little sooner, with the first half of the book being more compressed and the second half having a little more longevity, it would have been absolutely perfect.

★★★★★
4.5 stars

-Beth

May your shelves forever overflow with books! ☽

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Review: The Heir (#4) by Kiera Cass

On By Beth JonesIn Book Review9 Comments

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Princess Eadlyn has grown up hearing endless stories about how her mother and father met. Twenty years ago, America Singer entered the Selection and won the heart of Prince Maxon—and they lived happily ever after. Eadlyn has always found their fairy-tale story romantic, but she has no interest in trying to repeat it. If it were up to her, she’d put off marriage for as long as possible.
But a princess’s life is never entirely her own, and Eadlyn can’t escape her very own Selection—no matter how fervently she protests.
Eadlyn doesn’t expect her story to end in romance. But as the competition begins, one entry may just capture Eadlyn’s heart, showing her all the possibilities that lie in front of her . . . and proving that finding her own happily ever after isn’t as impossible as she’s always thought.

Oh my god. Why oh why did this series carry on? I was so happy with the end of The One. I cried for gods sake! We really didn’t need to see 20 years on with America and Maxon’s bratty daughter. Okay, I’ve always heard people complain about narrators being annoying etc, but Eadlyn was another level. She is SUCH A BRAT. She spends most of her time complaining, getting massages, and sitting at a desk. I say sitting at a desk because although this book repeatedly says she is ‘working’, all I know her to do is sit in her room looking through forms from the Selected. All of these books have been about the Caste system and how important abolishing it was, yet all Eadlyn does is talk about how beneath her everyone else is, and how she is the best person in the whole world.

“You can be brave and still be feminine. You can lead and still love flowers.”

She’s selfish, self-centred and she even tries to get her brother to choose between her and the love of his life because she doesn’t want him to go. And SHE IS OBSESSED WITH TIARAS. She’s a princess, she can have all the tiaras in the world, and yet she throws a stupid baby hissy fit when a little girl in the palace (someone who claims is like a sister to Eadlyn), borrows one. When this book claimed Eadlyn’s obsession is like a hobby, I actually snorted with laughter. It really sounded so bratty.

“Most importantly, you can be queen and still be a bride.”

So Eadlyn was definitely the worst part about this book, on top of the fact it wasn’t needed. But at least she kind of gets better, I guess. I mean I started seeing tiny spurts of her good side towards the end of this book, and I’m just hoping the next one will be better and more hopeful.

★★
2 stars

-Beth

May your shelves forever overflow with books! ☽

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Review: The One (#3) by Kiera Cass

On By Beth JonesIn Book Review7 Comments

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The time has come for one winner to be crowned.
When she was chosen to compete in the Selection, America never dreamed she would find herself anywhere close to the crown—or to Prince Maxon’s heart. But as the end of the competition approaches, and the threats outside the palace walls grow more vicious, America realizes just how much she stands to lose—and how hard she’ll have to fight for the future she wants.

I started this book rolling my eyes, and I ended it with tears slowly leaking out of them. I found the first half of this book completely different to the second half, as knowing there was five books I didn’t know how much more I could take.

All I could think of reading those first pages, was I can’t have this repeated for another 3 books. I can’t keep reading about the bitchiness and the indecisiveness. Whenever Celeste was bitchy or the girls fought I just wanted it to all be over.

“Break my heart. Break it a thousand times if you like.”

But the fact I hated this book at the start made the turn-around even bigger than I thought it would be! And when I did fall in love, I fell hard. It turns out, this book turned out so perfect. It wrapped up all the loose ends, it endlessly surprised me, and it had a great ending overall. This book really sounds like the last one of a series right? More on that in my review of The Heir.

“It was only ever yours to break anyway.”

I can’t help it, this series ended up stealing my heart. Of course it wasn’t without it’s faults, which were many at times, but the faults were outweighed by my love. Yes, these books are predictable in a way, but I did end up surprised. And even though these can be a little trashy, they’re so poetic. And I’m embarrassed to say this, but I actually cried a bit when I finished it.

So that proves that even though I didn’t enjoy all of this book, the hopeless romantic in me can’t help but loving it a hell of a lot

★★★★
4 stars

-Beth

May your shelves forever overflow with books! ☽

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Review: The Upside of Unrequited by Becky Albertalli

On By Beth JonesIn Book Review5 Comments

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Seventeen-year-old Molly Peskin-Suso knows all about unrequited love—she’s lived through it twenty-six times. She crushes hard and crushes often, but always in secret. Because no matter how many times her twin sister, Cassie, tells her to woman up, Molly can’t stomach the idea of rejection. So she’s careful. Fat girls always have to be careful.
Then a cute new girl enters Cassie’s orbit, and for the first time ever, Molly’s cynical twin is a lovesick mess. Meanwhile, Molly’s totally not dying of loneliness—except for the part where she is. Luckily, Cassie’s new girlfriend comes with a cute hipster-boy sidekick. Will is funny and flirtatious and just might be perfect crush material. Maybe more than crush material. And if Molly can win him over, she’ll get her first kiss and she’ll get her twin back.
There’s only one problem: Molly’s coworker Reid. He’s an awkward Tolkien superfan with a season pass to the Ren Faire, and there’s absolutely no way Molly could fall for him. Right?

This book honestly really surprised me! I thought I was over cutesy YA romances like this but it turns out I can’t help but have a soft spot for them. And it also turns out that my friend Amy knows me even better than I know myself, because she sent this to me knowing how much I’d love it!

Before I start, this book isn’t perfect. I’d rather finish on the good, so I’m going to start with the little bad there is. Even though I enjoyed it, it is predictable and all of the characters have their…problems. For example, there was a few places that made me cringeeee. Basically, Molly (the main character), talks to her cousin Abby and the conversation almost suggests Abby is a slut because she slept with her serious boyfriend of 4 months. Why is that even a consideration? It’s up to Abby whether she sleeps with her boyfriend or not. If they were ready at 4 months, great. If they were ready sooner, great.

“You would matter. That’s the thing. I get into this weird place sometimes where I worry about that.”

But apart from a few little things, I did love this book. I had to put myself into my mind a year or two ago, but I couldn’t help but really enjoy this. It is exactly how I felt when I was Molly’s age and crushing. She felt so real to me. I love how much I could relate to her and her situation. Molly wasn’t perfect but who is? And this book was so diverse, with so many LGBT and POC characters! Sometimes I struggled to remember Molly was still growing up (I was a little more mature than her at the same age), but that was just her as a person, and I could sympathise with that.

“I’ve never told anyone this – not my moms, not Cassie – but that’s the thing I’m most afraid of. Not mattering. Existing in a world that doesn’t care who I am.”

Maybe this book says something about me, because I feel like I’m one of the only readers who didn’t find Molly a little annoying because I found her so relatable. I loved that Molly suffered with anxiety and that was part of her character. I loved that she was fat and that was discussed in relation to how she was feeling. I loved her addiction to Pinterest.

So overall, this book feels like a guilty pleasure to me. I just couldn’t help but fall completely in love with it. Molly is the perfect representation of a 17 year old girl with low self-confidence. Her story, and the stories of the people around her, brought tears to my eyes even though I kind of knew what was about to happen. If you love romance and have a secret obsession with contemporaries, please go and read this. It’s beautiful and perfect and includes many, many Mini Eggs. It’s the definition of cute and fluffy, but it warmed my heart so much.

★★★★
4 stars

-Beth

May your shelves forever overflow with books! ☽

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Review: Legendary by Stephanie Garber

On By Beth JonesIn Book Review2 Comments

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A heart to protect. A debt to repay. A game to win.
After being swept up in the magical world of Caraval, Donatella Dragna has finally escaped her father and saved her sister Scarlett from a disastrous arranged marriage. The girls should be celebrating, but Tella isn’t yet free. She made a desperate bargain with a mysterious criminal, and what Tella owes him no one has ever been able to deliver: Caraval Master Legend’s true name.
The only chance of uncovering Legend’s identity is to win Caraval, so Tella throws herself into the legendary competition once more—and into the path of the murderous heir to the throne, a doomed love story, and a web of secrets…including her sister’s. Caraval has always demanded bravery, cunning, and sacrifice. But now the game is asking for more. If Tella can’t fulfill her bargain and deliver Legend’s name, she’ll lose everything she cares about—maybe even her life. But if she wins, Legend and Caraval will be destroyed forever.
Welcome, welcome to Caraval…the games have only just begun.

I loved this book. But did it capture my heart? Not exactly, and that little fact makes me want to cry. You see, Legendary, for me, had a hell of a lot to live up to. Caraval was something extremely special, and it absolutely captured my heart. When I finished that book, I made mood boards and playlists. It made me feel like magic was really woven between the beautiful paper pages.

And although I still really loved and admired this gorgeous book, I don’t feel as though my heart has been captured right now. It’s really hard to describe what was wrong here, but I’m going to try. For a start, it took me a week to read. And yes, that’s a personal thing, and I have a lot on my mind at the moment, but I just didn’t feel as though I needed to be inside the pages of this book all the time. Trust me, there were parts when I couldn’t stop reading, but it wasn’t so constant.

“Her heart was still a little heavy,”

Let’s talk about the things I love. Well, I love Tella. I felt as though there has been enough space between the first book so I wasn’t too sad about missing Scarlett as a narrator, and I really liked Tella’s character. She just felt real – she had her own difficult decisions and confusion and she didn’t always know where her life was heading. I loved her struggles and her torture, because it made her the relatable and lovable girl she is.

I also really enjoyed the story and other characters. I liked the way Legendary explores Tella’s relationships and friendships with not just her mother but with many other characters. They provided a really interesting development for me, and I did want to read on to find out which paths Tella was about to choose. Can I just also mention something? THE LOVE. AHHH. Okay. So Garber still leaves me shipping couples, and the romance was definitely the best part of this book for me. God, Garber knows how to write romance and kisses.

“but she’d decided carrying it around would only maker her stronger.”

So thinking about all this, compared to other books, this one could easily be 5 stars. However, I can’t help but compare this to Caraval. And that makes me feel as though this series has just lost it’s vibrancy. I really wanted more vivid descriptions of the world and game itself, as I remember Caraval being very setting heavy. And that’s the reason why, I’m sorry to say, I’m going to give this one…

★★★★
4 stars

-Beth

May your shelves forever overflow with books! ☽

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Review: Obsidio by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

On By Beth JonesIn Book Review3 Comments

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Kady, Ezra, Hanna, and Nik narrowly escaped with their lives from the attacks on Heimdall station and now find themselves crammed with 2,000 refugees on the container ship, Mao. With the jump station destroyed and their resources scarce, the only option is to return to Kerenza—but who knows what they’ll find seven months after the invasion? 
Meanwhile, Kady’s cousin, Asha, survived the initial BeiTech assault and has joined Kerenza’s ragtag underground resistance. When Rhys—an old flame from Asha’s past—reappears on Kerenza, the two find themselves on opposite sides of the conflict. 
With time running out, a final battle will be waged on land and in space, heroes will fall, and hearts will be broken.

Wow, unpopular opinion much. I know there is much love around this series and I’m sorry, but my opinion seems to be the complete opposite of what everyone else thinks. Oops.

Oh my god. I didn’t think it could get any worse, but reading my review of Gemina, I think I actually liked this one even less. The bottom line is, I was just even more confused because there are way too many characters in these books! Let’s just have a quick throwback to me a couple of years ago when Illuminae came out. I was where everyone else was, fangirling over this new book with a completely new style of reading. I honestly think it was just so refreshing to read something so different, but since then, both books that followed just seem like retellings of the same world. I can’t help but feel that success, rather than love made the authors release the other two.

“May we meet again on distant shores.”

And another thing I hate about not only having so many characters, but also the camera surveillance way this story is told? I felt so damn detached. Yeah, this book is emotional and yeah, I loved the poetic parts. But I still don’t give a damn what happened. Sorry for my cold heart and black soul.

Like 80% (at least) of this book was just boring and I couldn’t focus. Only a small number of pages actually made me feel like I was invested or involved in the book at all. But on the other hand, this really small amount of pages…were awesome. I loved them, I felt completely in the world and I felt the emotion. And I guess I do have one popular opinion, because I LOVE AIDAN. Like, I flicked through the whole book looking for those black pages. I loved his parts, and I wanted so much more. If only the book was just AIDAN…

“Some place fine and far from here.”

But that’s where the good stuff ends, and other than that, I was so disappointed. I wanted it to all end so I could read better things. I’m glad I managed to finish this series, but that’s about it.

Well don’t let the fact that I disliked this one put you off – it’s such an unpopular opinion after all!

★★
2 stars

-Beth

May your shelves forever overflow with books! ☽

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Review: The Last Place on Earth by Carol Snow

On By Beth JonesIn Book Review4 Comments

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Daisy and Henry are best friends, and they know all each other’s secrets.  Or, so Daisy thinks, until she wakes up one morning to find that Henry and his family have disappeared without a trace. Daisy suspects Henry’s disappearance is connected to their seriously awkward meeting the night before, but then she finds a note from Henry, containing just the words “SAVE ME.”  Deeply worried, Daisy convinces her unemployed brother to take her on a rescue mission into the California mountains. As they begin to home in on Henry’s exact location, they also start to find some disturbing clues… clues that call into question everything Daisy believes she knows about her friend.  Why is he so hard to find? What kind of trouble is he in, exactly? And most importantly, who is actually saving who?

To start, can we just take a look at this cover? I picked this up for myself as a little present for being accepted into university, and it was definitely a cover buy. But it actually didn’t disappoint – at least not completely!

This book is definitely a page-turner. It’s so quick and easy, I read it in a matter of hours and I never really read that quickly! It’s quite enthralling and entertaining, and I did really want to know what was going to happen in the rambling plot. Talking of the plot, it started really well. The first 50-100 pages completely captured my attention, and then things get strange. In fact, this book turns weirdddd. And I’m a little weird, but it might even be weirder than me. It just turned into something I wasn’t ready for, or expecting at all.

So this book ends up being just completely absurd. Without giving away a lot of spoilers, it felt incredibly strange and random and I was left almost laughing with the pure anti-realism of it all. It’s cool that Snow wanted to explore something unique and not really covered in YA, and in some ways I think it’s done really well, but also what what what.

Talking of weirdness, this book also includes a family called the Dunkles. This family has 7 children with names all beginning with K and they were, of course, home schooled. Can I just confirm, as someone who was home schooled for 6 years, WE ARE NOT THE DUNKLES. Some of us are actually pretty normal, and live in normal houses with normal, conventional families. And personally, I don’t want my home schooling years to be represented by the Dunkles.

After all that negativity, I still can’t say this book was bad. If you take it at face value and don’t expect a great work of literature or a masterpiece, it’s really entertaining. Sure, there are mistakes and plot holes and it’s certainly not perfect, but it’s a fun adventure all the same.

★★★★
3.5 stars

-Beth

May your shelves forever overflow with books! ☽

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Review: The Smell of Other People’s Houses by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock

On By Beth JonesIn Book Review4 Comments

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In Alaska, 1970, being a teenager here isn’t like being a teenager anywhere else. Ruth has a secret that she can’t hide forever. Dora wonders if she can ever truly escape where she comes from, even when good luck strikes. Alyce is trying to reconcile her desire to dance, with the life she’s always known on her family’s fishing boat. Hank and his brothers decide it’s safer to run away than to stay home—until one of them ends up in terrible danger.
Four very different lives are about to become entangled.

The last time I saw my friend and co-blogger Pete, he gave me a book! It’s also one I’ve wanted to read for a long time – especially since his great review back in September.

I adore how unique this book is, and I felt it’s honesty. I felt the genuine, heartfelt location of 1970s Alaska so insightful and interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book quite the same, involving such a different set of characters and locations. Much like other books with more than one POV, I did find it hard to get into each character and their individual stories, but I ended up liking the differences.

“I’ll never understand how certain things that happen to us can climb under our skin and make us someone new. Big things can do it — like Sam going missing.”

This book strikes me as important. It tackles subjects I’ve never read about before in such detail, such as the statehood and problems Alaska and it’s people faced. It talks about growing up with abusive parents and not knowing your own family. It faces teenage pregnancy and the struggles of growing up.

I love how each character meant a lot, even the families and parents. Too many YA books focus entirely on romance, but this book felt like so much more. It talked about the relationships we have with our families and friends, and how we as people help and support those we love. It wasn’t just relationships or friendships, it was about everyone.

“Small things can do it, too, like having a stranger fall to pieces in front of you. I’m beginning to think that everything changes us to some extent.”

The focus of this book is how our lives intertwine and combine, no matter what. It talks about how we all work together, even though we have different backgrounds and interests. It talks about togetherness and the respect we should have for one another. I felt this book is so important, and definitely one that will stay with me for a long time to come.

★★★★★
4.5 stars

-Beth

May your shelves forever overflow with books! ☽

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