Oyyyyyyyyyyy. This book. This well-written, stylistically self-assured, engaging book. This frustrating, sorta smug, but ultimately cliched, little book. This is one of those times where things are complicated. First, the book was good, but that doesn’t mean I like it. Second, the ending ruined everything. I try not to deliver spoilers in my reviews anyway, but in this case the enjoyment of the book is almost entirely based on knowing absolutely nothing going in, so I will say absolutely nothing about it. At least, not […]
Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History
If I could press any book into the hands of my teenaged self, it would likely be The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart. The novel is funny, thoughtful, well-written, and most of all, feminist as fuck. It’s the kind of book you want to buy multiple copies of and disseminate to everyone you know. The Disreputable History details Frankie’s journey from quiet freshman to criminal mastermind sophomore at Alabaster Preparatory Academy, a private boarding school in northern Massachusetts. At the beginning of […]
This book in one word: Wut.
The tagline for We Were Liars promises a huge twist and then admonishes readers, if anyone asks you how this book ends, lie. Wut. No, really. LOL. How do you expect to drum up business for a book with such a cheap trick? It’s one thing to vaguely allude to the shocking twists that occur in a book, and it’s quite another to forecast it and then try to get readers so hyped up about that you JUST have to read it for YOURSELF so […]
Looks like M. Night Shyamalan has some competition
There was a lot of talk about We Were Liars a few months back (see popcultureboy’s review from earlier this year), and about the surprise ending. The buzz on the book was huge, and the tagline in the publicity for it said, “and if anybody asks you how it ends, just LIE.” This piqued my interest. And so I went into it cautiously, hoping that the “twist” didn’t detract from the storytelling. Thankfully, it didn’t. We Were Liars is about a girl named Cady (short for Cadence), […]
Unreliable narrators for the win
I think I have written before about how when I was growing up, YA wasn’t really a big deal, and I honestly can’t recall reading books aimed specifically at my age group when I was fifteen. This is why I read lots of Stephen King and the like when I was growing up and probably accounts a lot for my warped world view. As much as I loathe Stephenie Meyer and every book she’s ever published, there’s no denying that Twilight finished what Harry Potter started and […]
Playing Catch-Up — Five 100(ish) Word Reviews for the Price of One Click!
Flat-Out Celeste – Jessica Park Flat-Out Celeste is the story of a girl who’s not quite like everyone else. Sometimes she starts to Google “Asperger’s” but can’t quite pull the trigger. At 17, Celeste is looking forward to leaving behind the awkward interactions of high school for the intellectual freedom of an Ivy League education. And then she meets Justin. Justin is a student-ambassador for a California liberal arts school, 3000 miles away from Celeste’s world. He doesn’t save her, but he helps her embrace […]