So I hope that for those that celebrate the holiday season, you have a great holiday. If you don't hear from me until the New Year, I'm just eating too many Christmas cookies and I'm too lazy to blog!
Happy Reads Everyone!
Natasha: I’m a girl who believes in science and facts. Not fate. Not destiny. Or dreams that will never come true. I’m definitely not the kind of girl who meets a cute boy on a crowded New York City street and falls in love with him. Not when my family is twelve hours away from being deported to Jamaica. Falling in love with him won’t be my story.Nicola Yoon is a new up and coming YA author and has found sucess with her first novel Everything, Everyhing; however reading her second novel is my first experience with her.
Daniel: I’ve always been the good son, the good student, living up to my parents’ high expectations. Never the poet. Or the dreamer. But when I see her, I forget about all that. Something about Natasha makes me think that fate has something much more extraordinary in store—for both of us.
The Universe: Every moment in our lives has brought us to this single moment. A million futures lie before us. Which one will come true?
“You’re going to feel uncomfortable in your new world for a bit. But I hope you feel a bit exhilarated too. Live boldly. Push yourself. Don’t settle. Just live well. Just live. Love, Will.”A lot of people have a lot of feelings about Me Before You, and I have talked about how I feel about the book already on this blog. So today I want to talk about the sequel After You. I know that some people really did not like this sequel or think it needed to happened. I'll admit, I don't think a sequel was at all necessary, but I ended up really liking this one. I think mostly it's because there is something about Lou that I can relate to so much.
How do you move on after losing the person you loved? How do you build a life worth living?
Louisa Clark is no longer just an ordinary girl living an ordinary life. After the transformative six months spent with Will Traynor, she is struggling without him. When an extraordinary accident forces Lou to return home to her family, she can’t help but feel she’s right back where she started.
Her body heals, but Lou herself knows that she needs to be kick-started back to life. Which is how she ends up in a church basement with the members of the Moving On support group, who share insights, laughter, frustrations, and terrible cookies. They will also lead her to the strong, capable Sam Fielding—the paramedic, whose business is life and death, and the one man who might be able to understand her. Then a figure from Will’s past appears and hijacks all her plans, propelling her into a very different future...
For Lou Clark, life after Will Traynor means learning to fall in love again, with all the risks that brings. But here Jojo Moyes gives us two families, as real as our own, whose joys and sorrows will touch you deeply, and where both changes and surprises await.
A love out of time. A spaceship built of secrets and murder....One of the things I loved about this novel was the concept of people being frozen on a ship and having to rely on other people living on that ship to take care of them for generations. It seems like such a common Sci-Fi trope, but I think it might actually be the first Sci-Fi book I have read like that. So the concept of this novel was super cool, especially since I knew something was going to go wrong.
Seventeen-year-old Amy joins her parents as frozen cargo aboard the vast spaceship Godspeed and expects to awaken on a new planet, 300 years in the future. Never could she have known that her frozen slumber would come to an end 50 years too soon and that she would be thrust into the brave new world of a spaceship that lives by its own rules.
Amy quickly realizes that her awakening was no mere computer malfunction. Someone - one of the few thousand inhabitants of the spaceship - tried to kill her. And if Amy doesn't do something soon, her parents will be next.
Now Amy must race to unlock Godspeed's hidden secrets. But out of her list of murder suspects, there's only one who matters: Elder, the future leader of the ship and the love she could never have seen coming.
The Keeper: A prequel to the Lunar Chronicles, showing a young Scarlet and how Princess Selene came into the care of Michelle Benoit.Stars Above is a short story collection to go along with Marissa Meyer's Lunar Chronicles. Due to this, I'm going to spend some short paragraphs talking about each story individually. First, I do want to say that I love Rebecca Soler as the narrator for this series. I listened to both Scarlet & Winter on audiobook and I was really glad to hear the same voice in my head. I think she does a good job with this world, and I definitely want to hear more of her in other audiobooks. Fair warning there are some spoilers for the series below. So if you haven't read it yet, maybe skip this review.
Glitches: In this prequel to Cinder, we see the results of the plague play out, and the emotional toll it takes on Cinder. Something that may, or may not, be a glitch….
The Queen’s Army: In this prequel to Scarlet, we’re introduced to the army Queen Levana is building, and one soldier in particular who will do anything to keep from becoming the monster they want him to be.
Carswell’s Guide to Being Lucky: Thirteen-year-old Carswell Thorne has big plans involving a Rampion spaceship and a no-return trip out of Los Angeles.
After Sunshine Passes By: In this prequel to Cress, we see how a nine-year-old Cress ended up alone on a satellite, spying on Earth for Luna.
The Princess and the Guard: In this prequel to Winter, we see a young Winter and Jacin playing a game called the Princess and the Guard…
The Little Android: A retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid,” set in the world of The Lunar Chronicles.
The Mechanic: In this prequel to Cinder, we see Kai and Cinder’s first meeting from Kai’s perspective.
Something Old, Something New: In this epilogue to Winter, friends gather for the wedding of the century…
Marcus, a.k.a w1n5t0n, is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works - and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school's intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.I was totally ready to not enjoy this book, because I wasn't really into the last Cory Doctorow book I read. Little Brother; however, made me feel a lot of things. Mostly anger...which I think was the point.
But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they're mercilessly interrogated for days.
When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.
Cassia has always trusted the Society to make the right choices for her: what to read, what to watch, what to believe. So when Xander's face appears on-screen at her Matching ceremony, Cassia knows with complete certainty that he is her ideal mate ... until she sees Ky Markham's face flash for an instant before the screen fades to black.I actually have paperback copies of this entire trilogy, but I was afraid I wasn't going to like this one so I decided to try the first book on audio. I wasn't completely wrong, because this book just didn't blow me away.
The Society tells her it's a glitch, a rare malfunction, and that she should focus on the happy life she's destined to lead with Xander. But Cassia can't stop thinking about Ky, and as they slowly fall in love, Cassia begins to doubt the Society's infallibility and is faced with an impossible choice: between Xander and Ky, between the only life she's known and a path that no one else has dared to follow.
When the Rebellion defeated the Empire in the skies above Endor, Leia Organa believed it was the beginning to a lasting peace. But after decades of vicious infighting and partisan gridlock in the New Republic Senate, that hope seems like a distant memory.I'm a huge fan of the old Star Wars Expanded Universe books, and since LucasFilms decided to create a new continuity I've been having trouble with the new canon. I feel like some of the books have been hit or miss, however, Claudia Gray's books thus far have definitely been a hit. She wrote Lost Stars, which I adored so I was super excited to see that she was writing a SW book about Princess Leia. For me I think the problem with the new canon is that some of the authors just don't get the essence of what a Star Wars book should be like, but I think Gray does it pretty well. She could write all of the other books and I think I would be happy.
Now a respected senator, Leia must grapple with the dangers that threaten to cripple the fledgling democracy — from both within and without. Underworld kingpins, treacherous politicians, and Imperial loyalists are sowing chaos in the galaxy. Desperate to take action, senators are calling for the election of a First Senator. It is their hope that this influential post will bring strong leadership to a divided galaxy.
As the daughter of Darth Vader, Leia faces with distrust the prospect of any one person holding such a powerful position — even when supporters suggest Leia herself for the job. But a new enemy may make this path Leia’s only option. For at the edges of the galaxy, a mysterious threat is growing.
Joey Harker isn't a hero. In fact, he's the kind of guy who gets lost in his own house. But then one day, Joey gets really lost. He walks straight out of his world and into another dimension. Joey's walk between the worlds makes him prey to two terrible forces—armies of magic and science who will do anything to harness his power to travel between dimensions. When he sees the evil those forces are capable of, Joey makes the only possible choice: to join an army of his own, an army of versions of himself from different dimensions who all share his amazing power and who are all determined to fight to save the worlds.So Interworld was super weird, and I'm not even sure where to start with this one. I added this book on my "Wishlist" on the Overdrive app through my library just because Neil Gaiman's name was attached to it. I don't think I even read the summary, it was just one of those books I went into blindly.
Master storyteller Neil Gaiman and Emmy Award-winning science-fiction writer Michael Reaves team up to create a dazzling tale of magic, science, honor, and the destiny of one very special boy—and all the others like him.'