Tag Archives: 3 stars

Minis: YA Contemporaries

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Time to catch up on some reviews! I’ve read some of these books months ago, but I never got around to reviewing them around that time. Here we go! :D

Amelia O'Donohue is So Not a VirginAmelia O’Donohue is So Not a Virgin by Helen Fitzgerald
Sourcebooks Fire, 217 pages

At this boarding school, even the wildest rumors don’t measure up to what’s really going on…

Rachel Ross is asthmatic and “more bottled up than ketchup,” but that’s fine. Nothing will prevent her from graduating at the top of her exclusive new boarding school and getting into Oxford.

Rachel refuses to be distracted by the present until she uncovers a shocking secret on campus. She realizes that someone is in desperate need of help and that she actually has something to share-and more friends than she knew.

With an utterly original, hilarious, and honest voice, Amelia O’Donohue delivers a sexy new boarding school tale with true heart-and a surprise ending you won’t forget.

This book had me at “asthma”. Being an asthmatic myself, I like reading about characters who deal with the same thing. Amelia O’Donohue Is So Not a Virgin sounds like a fun book from the title alone. Rachel Ross (sidenote: Friends reference, anyone? :D) is uptight…but that’s okay, because her parents finally allowed her to go to the boarding school she wanted, so she can go to Oxford. She works hard to be the best in class, until she discovers a secret that could totally change the life of someone in school…if only she can figure out who it is.

Did I say fun? Oh yes, it was, and I found myself smiling at several parts of the book. I realized, though, that Rachel is really uptight, and sometimes it gets tiring to be in her place. Loosen up a little, girl! I found myself getting annoyed at her for not even trying to reach out…until the mystery is uncovered. When the secret was revealed, I had a teeny tiny suspicion about who owned that secret, but I wasn’t sure. I mean, there were no clues! Until I got to the end, and I had to flip through some of the previous parts to look for proof. Talk about mind games, Helen Fitzgerald. Well played.

Amelia O’Donohue is So Not a Virgin is a fun and smart book that talks about friends and family and a lot of mystery that can only happen in a boarding school. It’s a quick escape, and I enjoyed reading it. Oh, and this is not about Amelia O’Donohue. ;)

Rating: ★★★★★

The Treasure Map of Boys by E. LockhartThe Treasure Map of Boys by E. Lockhart
Ruby Oliver # 3
Delacorte Books for Young Readers, 244 pages

Ruby is back at Tate Prep, and it’s her thirty-seventh week in the state of Noboyfriend. Her panic attacks are bad, her love life is even worse, and what’s more:

·        Noel is writing her notes,
·        Jackson is giving her frogs,
·        Gideon is helping her cook,
·        and Finn is making her brownies.
·        Rumors are flying, and Ruby’s already sucky reputation is heading downhill.

Not only that, she’s also:

·        running a bake sale,
·        learning the secrets of heavy metal therapy,
·        encountering some seriously smelly feet,
·        defending the rights of pygmy goats,
·        and bodyguarding Noel from unwanted advances.

Ruby struggles to secure some sort of mental health, to understand what constitutes a real friendship, and—if such a thing exists—to find true love.

I liked the first two Ruby Oliver books I read, and I wasn’t planning to buy The Treasure Map of Boys, until one day I was left waiting somewhere without a book. So I finally got this so I would know what happened to Ruby and her state of Noboyfriend. In this book, Ruby seems like she’s back to square one, but this time there’s Noel. And Hutch. And Jackson again. And there’s lots of baking, and Nora and friendship that may or may not be ruined because of boys.

Oh poor Ruby. It was nice going back into the Tate Prep world, but I really, really want Ruby to have her happy ending. But I’m not even sure if her happy ending should involve a boy, because I think she should find a way to be happy by herself first before going out of the state of Noboyfriend. Not that I personally know, of course, but I wanted to give Ruby a hug every time she gets a nervous breakdown in this book! She becomes a bit more mature here, but even so there were wise and stupid decisions made. In a way, I think there’s a little Ruby Oliver in all of us.

As always, I liked how real Ruby’s voice was here, and funnily enough, her thoughts are not just thoughts of teenage girls but also sometimes, thoughts of someone who’s way past that age. Ehem. :p I loved the other characters, too, especially Ruby’s friends. I didn’t like how she treated some of them…but high school, oh high school. The pettiness makes me cringe, but I can’t say I didn’t go through the same incidents  Oh, Ruby, you are not alone! I’m looking forward to reading the last book in the series, and I really, really hope that she gets the ending she really and truly deserves.

Rating: ★★★★★

Amplified by Tara KellyAmplified by Tara Kelly
Henry, Holt and Co, 293 pages

When privileged 17-year-old Jasmine gets kicked out of her house, she takes what is left of her savings and flees to Santa Cruz to pursue her dream of becoming a musician. Jasmine finds the ideal room in an oceanfront house, but she needs to convince the three guys living there that she’s the perfect roommate and lead guitarist for their band, C-Side. Too bad she has major stage fright and the cute bassist doesn’t think a spoiled girl from over the hill can hack it. . .

I like music, but I can hardly play any instrument or even really sing (except in karaoke sessions), but for some reason, I love books about music. Or books with characters who are in a band. I don’t know why — perhaps it’s because I secretly dreamed of being in a band? Or is it because one of my dream jobs is to become a band’s manager? But I love reading books with them, so I’ve been wanting Amplified by Tara Kelly for a while now. Thanks to Celina for giving me a copy!

Amplified is about 17-year old Jasmine Kiss, who was kicked out of her home after saying she wanted to defer college so she can become a musician. She goes to Santa Cruz to find a place to stay and stumbles upon C-Side, an industrial rock band looking for a new guitarist ASAP and offering a room to rent, as well. Jasmine tries out, even if the band wants a male guitarist, and she has no idea what she will do with her stage fright when they told her they need the new guitarist for an upcoming show.

Just like the other books with a band that I have read, Amplified is full of rocking fun. I liked Jasmine, even if she was a little too uptight. She stuck to what she believed in, and she was so out of her comfort zone in her new place that I almost wished she’d give up and go back home because some of the things they tell her were painful. I also liked the other band members, especially Veta and Felix, who were both darlings. The romance was also well-developed, and there was good enough tension and slow enough development that made it believable — and Sean very crushable. ;) I liked their band dynamic, although I wished I could’ve seen a bit more of what makes the other characters tick — like more conversations between them, instead of just Bryn being almost as uptight as Jasmine or you know, having too many band practice.

But overall, Amplified is a novel full of rocking band fun and music. I still wish I could hear some of the songs they sing, though, just for the fuller experience of reading something like this. The author is writing a companion novel for Amplified entitled Encore. Sign me up, please — I want more of C-Side!

Rating: ★★★★★

Unseen Moon

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Unseen Moon by Eliza VictoriaUnseen Moon by Eliza Victoria
220 pages

Ghosts in a mansion. A home invasion. A group of friends haunted by a murder. An unlikely friendship, a dead body in an abandoned house. A girl falling to her death, and another falling into the viewless darkness.

Unseen Moon collects five suspenseful stories by award-winning author Eliza Victoria.

When Eliza Victoria sent me an email about sending a review copy of her newest book, I couldn’t say no. Note that I’m not really a fan of dark fiction, or horror or suspense, but this is Eliza, guys. I read her stuff and liked it, even if they’re not the usual things I go for. I’m not really one for scaring myself, but I make certain exceptions especially when the author just writes really, really well.

Unseen Moon is Eliza’s newest collection that contains several of her short stories, most of them never been published in print. They’re part horror, lots of crime and suspense…and well, lots of dead bodies. Like her other works, the stories are well-written and I think they are exactly what she intended them to be — dark. Sometimes, a bit too bloody. But definitely dark. Here’s a mini-review of each of the stories, and my rating for them.

Needle Rain (3/5) – This is the story of Cleofe, Cedric, Brian and Emily, their friendship and the murder that happened in their town. For some reason, this story felt distinctly Filipino. The combination of the small town, hanging out with friends in the afternoon while eating, and the storms that raged in the story reminded me of my own younger years, where I would work on projects at home while a storm happened outside and it was only a matter of minutes before the house is plunged in darkness because the storm caused a power interruption. Of course, that’s the only thing that I related to in this story. :P Needle Rain comes off as a murder mystery story at first, and then it spirals into something else. I was quite prepared to be scared at first, but in the end I felt more sad. If only the characters were wiser, then it wouldn’t have turned out that way.

The Ghosts of Sinagtala (4/5) – This is a story of Ben and Emma, who inherited a mansion from their grandparents that had a dark history. Oh what a creepy, creepy story. Tricia was tweeting about this when she read it first, so I knew well enough to read this in broad daylight. And even then, I still got terribly creeped out. This is my favorite in the book, and I really liked the connection between the mansion’s past to Ben and Emma. This is the story that successfully made me not want to go out of my room at night to get a glass of water because I was afraid to find a little girl crying in the darkness. O_o

Summer Evening (2/5) – Twins Amarilis and Carlos were left behind by their older brother, Nathan, to his ex-girlfriend, Alicia, because he had a job to do. The twins hate Alicia, so when two guys entered their house to do something to her, they turned their backs. I wasn’t really a big fan of this because it felt too violent for me, and it kind of took me by surprise. That, and there was just something a little too disturbing with the characters — perhaps I just refused to believe that they are capable of what they are doing in the story? It’s still well-written, though, and the ending kind of made me want to wring one of the characters’ necks, but this was one story that I kind of wanted to end quickly because the events made me just a bit queasy.

December (3/5) – Gabriel makes an unlikely friend in an orphan named December, who has her own issues with the people around her. A dead body in an abandoned mansion, a dead body in the lake and lots of music form the core of this story. This one sort of reminds me of Summer Evening, but it was less violent and a little more melancholic than the previous story. In some ways it was a little bit disturbing, but I was able to sympathize with the two main characters in the story more than I did for the previous story.

The Viewless Dark (4/5) – I read this back in October 2012 and I really liked it. I didn’t exactly reread all of it when I read this book again. I still read parts of it, though, and felt the same chill I had when I first read it, and felt the same attachment to the characters, both dead and alive. I think this is a good story to end this collection.

Overall, Unseen Moon is another good collection of Eliza’s stories. It’s not as scary as I expected (except for The Ghosts of Sinagtala – remembering several scenes still gives me the creeps), but it was really quite dark. This collection is a little bit more similar to Lower Myths than A Bottle of Storm Clouds, sans the paranormal aspect. If you want to get to know Eliza’s works but you’re not a huge fan of anything that is out of the normal world, then Unseen Moon might be the right Eliza book for you. If you’ve read Eliza’s other works and you want more, then you won’t want to miss this one. :)

The ebook edition of Unseen Moon is available via Smashwords right now (four stories only, since the ebook edition of The Viewless Dark is available via Flipreads), but if you’re a print person, you can pre-order a print copy of Unseen Moon until May 10 through Eliza’s blog. An excerpt of the stories is also posted in the same blog entry.

Rating: ★★★★★

My copy: review copy sent by author — thank you!

Discount Armageddon

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Discount Armageddon by Seanan McGuireDiscount Armageddon by Seanan McGuire
InCryptid # 1
DAW, 352 pages

Ghoulies. Ghosties. Long-legged beasties. Things that go bump in the night… The Price family has spent generations studying the monsters of the world, working to protect them from humanity-and humanity from them. Enter Verity Price. Despite being trained from birth as a cryptozoologist, she’d rather dance a tango than tangle with a demon, and is spending a year in Manhattan while she pursues her career in professional ballroom dance. Sounds pretty simple, right? It would be, if it weren’t for the talking mice, the telepathic mathematicians, the asbestos supermodels, and the trained monster-hunter sent by the Price family’s old enemies, the Covenant of St. George. When a Price girl meets a Covenant boy, high stakes, high heels, and a lot of collateral damage are almost guaranteed. To complicate matters further, local cryptids are disappearing, strange lizard-men are appearing in the sewers, and someone’s spreading rumors about a dragon sleeping underneath the city…

I’m a fan of Mira Grant, but I have never read any of her other novels that she wrote as Seanan McGuire. Or, rather, I liked Seanan McGuire’s books that she wrote as Mira Grant. But anyway, I haven’t read the October Daye series only because there are already a lot of books in the series and I kind of felt that if I started it and I liked it, I would have that compulsion to complete it, too. So when I heard that she had a new series coming out, I set my sights on it and eventually ordered it from Book Depository.

Verity Price comes from a long line of cryptozoologists, someone who studies and protects various kinds of ghouls, monsters and beasts (aka cryptids) from humanity and protect humanity from them. But all Verity wanted to do was dance. Given her interesting family history, however, she had to make a compromise — she stays in Manhattan to do her job as a Price, and she gets to dance under a completely different persona. It was a good enough deal, until she runs into one of her family’s enemies, a member of the Covenant of St. George. What’s more, local cryptids are starting to disappear, and there’s news of a dragon sleeping somewhere…how will Verity ever dance, now?

From the first page of Discount Armageddon, I knew I was going to have fun. There’s a lot of wit in the books reminiscent of what I read in the Newsflesh universe, but also a bit leveled-up because Verity seems to drip sarcasm all the time. I loved the banter between her and her family, her and her work mates, her and the cryptids in Manhattan and especially with the Covenant boy. I loved the quotes that start off each chapter, because it gives the story more depth and it makes me want to get to know their entire family history, too. Verity is the kind of heroine you’d definitely want to be on your side, and I like how loyal she is to her family and to her causes. She doesn’t have much issues, save for her need to dance, and that makes me like her just as much as I liked Kate Daniels.

The universe is also well-written. I loved all the cryptids that appeared in the book, and how each has their own personalities. It was a little confusing keeping track of them, but since this is the start of a series, it is pretty forgivable. There was just a time when I felt that the story was dragging too long, like the action should have been here but it happened a few pages later. The climax was action-packed and fun. I kind of predicted how things will unfold, but even so, I liked how things were wrapped up.

Discount Armageddon is a fun book, and urban fantasy lovers will get a kick out of this new universe. I’m not quite entirely sure if I want to read the rest of the series just yet, because that means I would have to wait a while to read the next ones. So maybe I should wait. Except that I heard that there’s a manananggal in the second book. Eee.

Oh, and I want my own Aeslin mice. HAIL!

Rating: ★★★★★

My copy: mass market paperback, ordered from Book Depository

Other reviews:
Whimsical.nu
Specfic Romantic

The Comeback Kiss

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The Comeback KissThe Comeback Kiss by Lani Diane Rich
StoryWonk Publishing, 336 pages

Sometimes love just won’t go away. — ALL IT TAKES IS ONE LITTLE KISS… — In order to keep custody of her teenage sister, Tessa Scuderi told a small (okay, big) lie to the people of Lucy’s Lake, Vermont, about what really happened ten years ago when Dermot Finnegan took off with her virginity, her car, and the town bell. It had been working, too, until she found her old car parked in front of her house, keys in the ignition, and a telltale red hair stuck to the headrest.

TO TOTALLY SCREW EVERYTHING UP.

All Finn wanted to do was return the stupid car and get going. But he stopped to save a burning pet shop (big mistake), ended up kissing Tessa behind the drugstore (big mistake, but worth it), and discovered that Tessa’s been building him up as some kind of town hero all these years (gonna have to puzzle that out). Now Finn has to find out who’s behind a string of mysterious fires and deal with the heat between him and Tessa. Hey, one more kiss can’t hurt — or can it?

I discovered Lani Diane Rich back around 2008, when I was searching for writers who published their NaNoWriMo novels. I managed to get copies of her books and loved it, but they were always so hard to find that I sort of gave up on completing her entire backlist. I have very fond memories of reading The Fortune Quilt, and wishing that I could write something so funny and still so real like that. So now that I am actually in a romance writing class (long story, will talk about it next time), I decided to stock up on books in the genre. I stumbled into Lani Diane Rich again, and was very happy to finally get another one of her books.

Tessa Scuderi knew it’s wrong to lie, but if it’s a lie that would make her keep custody of her younger sister, then she would stick by it. Especially when it also means that she would forget about her best friend and first love, Dermot Finnegan, who had left with her car, her virginity and the town bell after their last escapade. But when she finds her old car parked in front of her house, Tessa realizes that Finn is back, and her life is turned upside down again.

Reading The Comeback Kiss reminds me of my reading experiences with Sarah Addison Allen and Kristan Higgins. There’s the small town charm with lots of really fun secondary characters, just like Sarah Addison Allen’s novels, and then there’s the laugh-out-loud scenes and swoony romance of a Kristan Higgins novel. The Comeback Kiss is a fun read, and it’s comforting because it’s fluffy, but not too fluffy that it’s almost just brain candy. This isn’t just another romance novel, but it had real emotions, and real complications of past choices and repercussions of the characters’ actions.

I think the best part of this book is how Finn and Tessa were portrayed, especially with their friendship. Their love story is one that is borne out of years of friendship, and it made sense how they both knew each other so well that they were not just lovers (complicated lovers, but still) but also best friends. One of my favorite passages in the book describes just that:

…Finn yelled, “I gots Tootsie Rolls!” from the sidewalk where he stood watching. Tessa froze in her spot, staring at him, transfixed…The next day, Finn stole a bag of Tootsie Rolls from the corner market and went to Tessa’s house, where he found out that she was four years old and that her favorite color was yellow. They’d been friends ever since.

The friendship angle gives their relationship more credibility, and it was fun reading their interactions and how Finn saw himself and how Tessa saw Finn and how he saw her. Ah, it had just the right amount of mush, and it was realistic enough to know that love isn’t always rainbows and butterflies, even if you know each other very well.

While there’s nothing really completely new with the story as far as the romance goes, I think The Comeback Kiss is still a completely enjoyable book. It put me in the proper writing/outlining state of mind when I finished reading it, enough to submit one assignment for my romance writing class. :)

Rating: ★★★★★

Other reviews:
Trashionista

Reunited

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ReunitedReunited by Hilary Weisman Graham
Simon & Schuster, 336 pages

1 Concert
2000 Miles
3 Ex-Best Friends

Alice, Summer, and Tiernan are ex-best friends.

Back in middle school, the three girls were inseparable. They were also the number one fans of the rock band Level3.

But when the band broke up, so did their friendship. Summer ran with the popular crowd, Tiernan was a rebellious wild-child, and Alice spent high school with her nose buried in books.

Now, just as the girls are about to graduate, Level3 announces a one-time-only reunion show.

Even though the concert’s 2000 miles away, Alice buys three tickets on impulse. And as it turns out, Summer and Tiernan have their own reasons for wanting to get out of town. Good thing Alice’s graduation gift (a pea-green 1976 VW camper van known as the Pea Pod) is just the vehicle to get them there.

But on the long drive cross-country, the girls hit more than a few bumps in the road. Will their friendship get an encore or is the show really over?

I got my first taste of boyband love when I was in Grade 5, when I first saw the Backstreet Boys perform Get Down on a noontime show when they stopped by the country. I had no idea who they were, but I thought the song was catchy, so I asked for a cassette tape (!!!) of their first album. I fell in love with them (specifically, Nick Carter!) ever since then. I had several friends who were also fans, but I think I was the biggest fan among them. By high school, some of them have moved on from the boyband phase to other pop stars, while I stayed happy in my teenybopper bubblegum pop world a little while longer.

In Reunited, we meet Alice, Summer and Tiernan, best friends who share the love for the rock band Level3. That is, until high school, anyway — when Level3 disbanded and their friendship dissolved for reasons that they didn’t really want to remember. Alice is the good girl, the one who held them together and would want to remain friends with them if things didn’t fall apart. There’s Summer, the budding poet who eventually became Miss Popular. Then there’s Tiernan, who’s the school’s resident rebel, and this rebellion reaches even in her home life. When Level3 announced that they will have a reunion concert, Alice buys tickets without thinking and convinces Summer and Tiernan to go on a road trip with her to watch this one-time reunion concert. So here we have three (ex) friends, a band, and a road trip — oh, I am definitely sold.

The story switches from the point of view of each of the girls, which gives us a pretty equal glimpse of how they feel about each other. There’s this big mystery of sorts about why they fell apart from the first place — things were alluded to, but I couldn’t really guess what happened that made them swear off each other like that. The voices of the three girls were pretty distinct, and I liked being in Summer’s head the most because it felt like she had the most to lose and the first to let the trip go. That almost came true, and in the end, I was happy how she pulled through for the two other girls, and I felt sympathetic with what really happened between the three of them.

As with every road trip, there’s craziness: from an ex-convict to having no gas to falling in love/in crush, to dance contests and parties. There was this one part that felt a little too hard to believe, and I felt like it was used to make that one thing happened, and I wasn’t really completely sold. It set a lot of things in motion, that made the ending a little bit more hilarious than I expected.

I’m not sure how I feel about the ending. It was cute, but it felt like it was a little bit on the wish-fulfillment side. It’s the stuff my high school fan girl dreams were made of, actually, which is probably why I feel like I can’t really believe it. But maybe that’s just me. It’s not like some of my fangirl dreams never came true, anyway.

Oh and as much as I like reading books that has bands and music on it (Audrey, Wait! and Five Flavors of Dumb, for example), it feels a bit hard to really get into the music when I don’t know how the songs sound like. The lyrics were a nice touch, but I wish books like these come up with a soundtrack of sorts. Although it might be a little bit difficult for this one because Level3 has a pretty big discography in the story. ^^

Reunited is okay — quick and fun and interesting. While I didn’t really feel like it’s totally awesome and groundbreaking, I enjoyed reading it. It’s the type of book I would recommend to anyone who has ever been a big fan of any kind of band at some point of their teenage life. Better if you share it with friends who love the same band, too. :)

Rating: ★★★★★

Other reviews:
Buried in Books
Kirkus

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