Archives for March 2016

(ARC) REVIEW • The Metaphor in Rocks (This Is Where The World Ends by Amy Zhang)

March 20, 2016 Comments : 5

This Is Where the World Ends

Janie and Micah, Micah and Janie. That’s how it’s been ever since elementary school, when Janie Vivien moved next door. Janie says Micah is everything she is not. Where Micah is shy, Janie is outgoing. Where Micah loves music, Janie loves art. It’s the perfect friendship—as long as no one finds out about it. But then Janie goes missing and everything Micah thought he knew about his best friend is colored with doubt.
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myreview

[note note_color=”#BFD1D1″ text_color=”#ffffff”]I received this book for free from HarperCollins for review consideration. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.[/note]

First sentence: “Everything ends.”

What happened to Janie Vivian? All Micah Carter wants to know is what happened to his friend, but he can’t remember. In This Is Where the World Ends, readers join Micah and Janie as they recall the events of what happened before and after the incident, and it really looks like the end of the world for this pair of friends.

Reviews

(ARC) REVIEW • Desert Inn Strangeness (The Inn-Between by Marina Cohen)

March 18, 2016 Comments : 4

Inn Between

The Shining meets “Hotel California” in this supremely creepy middle grade novel about the bizarre things that happen to two girls stranded at a desert inn.

Eleven-year-old Quinn has had some bad experiences lately. She was caught cheating in school, and then one day, her little sister Emma disappeared while walking home from school. She never returned.

When Quinn’s best friend Kara has to move away, she goes on one last trip with Kara and her family. They stop over at the first hotel they see, a Victorian inn that instantly gives Quinn the creeps, and she begins to notice strange things happening around them. When Kara’s parents and then brother disappear without a trace, the girls are stranded in a hotel full of strange guests, hallways that twist back in on themselves, and a particularly nasty surprise lurking beneath the floorboards. Will the girls be able to solve the mystery of what happened to Kara’s family before it’s too late?[/note]

myreview

[note note_color=”#BFD1D1″ text_color=”#ffffff”]I received this book for free from Macmillan for review consideration. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.[/note]

First sentence: “The sound was faint at first.”

Never stop to rest in an old Victorian hotel in the middle of nowhere. You’ll end up losing people you care about.

What kinds of things can happen in a desert inn? Well, in The Inn-Between, you get a pair of friends on their last hurrah together before one of them moves away; these friends are stranded; their family members disappear without saying a word; staff members continuously smile eerily at them and won’t let them leave; creepy figures chase and grab at the girls; and many other weird things that just doesn’t make any sense.

Comics

FROM PANEL TO PANEL · Get your 1960s homemaker-killer fix!

March 17, 2016 Comments : 3

Lady Killer

Who moonlights as a homemaker and mother in the daytime, and a knife-wielding assassin by night? You bet your ass it’s this lady here, Josie Schuller. Welcome to Lady Killer, a comic that is filled with carefully perfected smiles and gory bloodshed about a lady carrying on a double life in the 1960s.

Letters

SINCERELY, CEE | A letter from yours truly to Victoria Schwab & This Savage Song

March 16, 2016 Comments : 3

**Dear Victoria Schwab and This Savage Song,**

This book = ultimate heart eyes!

[quote cite=”Goodreads” url=”https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26074170-this-savage-song”]There’s no such thing as safe in a city at war, a city overrun with monsters. In this dark urban fantasy from acclaimed author Victoria Schwab, a young woman and a young man must choose whether to become heroes or villains—and friends or enemies—with the future of their home at stake.

Kate Harker and August Flynn are the heirs to a divided city—a city where the violence has begun to breed actual monsters. All Kate wants is to be as ruthless as her father, who lets the monsters roam free and makes the humans pay for his protection. All August wants is to be human, as good-hearted as his own father, to play a bigger role in protecting the innocent—but he’s one of the monsters. One who can steal a soul with a simple strain of music. When the chance arises to keep an eye on Kate, who’s just been kicked out of her sixth boarding school and returned home, August jumps at it. But Kate discovers August’s secret, and after a failed assassination attempt the pair must flee for their lives.

In This Savage Song, Victoria Schwab creates a gritty, seething metropolis, one worthy of being compared to Gotham and to the four versions of London in her critically acclaimed fantasy for adults, A Darker Shade of Magic. Her heroes will face monsters intent on destroying them from every side—including the monsters within.[/quote]

Reviews

(ARC) REVIEW | The Wonders of Palais du Papillon (A Drop of Night by Stefan Bachmann)

March 14, 2016 Leave a Comment

Seventeen-year-old Anouk has finally caught the break she’s been looking for―she’s been selected out of hundreds of other candidates to fly to France and help with the excavation of a vast, underground palace buried a hundred feet below the suburbs of Paris. Built in the 1780’s to hide an aristocratic family and a mad duke during the French Revolution, the palace has lain hidden and forgotten ever since. Anouk, along with several other gifted teenagers, will be the first to set foot in it in over two centuries.

Or so she thought.

But nothing is as it seems, and the teens―bitter, iron-hearted Anouk, gentle Will, bubbly Lilly, and crazy Jules―soon find themselves trapped in a game far more sinister, and dangerous, than they could possibly have imagined. An evil spanning centuries is waiting for them in the depths. . .
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myreview

First sentence: “The whole thing feels like a prank at first, like something they planned—a joke with a punch line.”

I just–the Butterfly Man better not visit my dreams.

What mysterious things will you find in A Drop of Night? You have the Palais du Papillon, aka Palace of the Butterfly, that’s actually hundred feet below Paris and has a history that started during the French Revolution; five teenagers who are all excited for this big adventure and are trying to escape their family; danger lurking in the underground palace; and so much more that’ll keep you on the edge of your seat!

Reviews

(ARC) REVIEW | Save Me, Lassie! (The Girl in the Well is Me by Karen Rivers)

March 12, 2016 Comments : 6

the girl in the well is me

Longing to be one of the popular girls in her new town, Kammie Summers has fallen into a well during a (fake) initiation into a club whose members have no intention of letting her join. Now Kammie’s trapped in the dark, growing increasingly claustrophobic, and waiting to be rescued—or possibly not.

As hours pass, the reality of Kammie’s predicament mixes with her memories of the highlights and lowlights of her life so far, including the reasons her family moved to this new town in the first place. And as she begins to run out of oxygen, Kammie starts to imagine she has company, including a French-speaking coyote and goats that just might be zombies.[/note]

myreview

[note note_color=”#BFD1D1″ text_color=”#ffffff”]I received this book for free from Algonquin Books for review consideration. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.[/note]

First sentence: “The whole thing feels like a prank at first, like something they planned—a joke with a punch line.”

When you’re a kid, one of the worst nightmares is getting stuck in a well. You’re in an enclosed space with nothing to stare at except the brick wall and possibly the sky, waiting for somebody to find you and get you out.

That’s what we have in The Girl in the Well is Me. Kammie falls into an abandoned well after trying to impress the mean popular girls. While she’s stuck in the well, waiting for help to arrive, she falls deep into the confines of her mind, remembering moments in her life, regretting her decisions, and hallucinating things like French-speaking dogs.

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