YA

Book Review: This Book Kills

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This Book Kills
by Ravena Guron

My rating: 2 / 5
Genre: YA murder mystery

When a murderer copies details from a short story that Jess Choudhary wrote for school, it puts her smack in the middle of the investigation of the murder of one of her fellow classmates. When she starts getting death threats of her own, then police don’t inspire confidence, so she knows it’s up to her to solve the murder.

I am at a bit of a loss with this book. I don’t understand the title, don’t agree with the “perfect murder” claim on the front of the book, and am baffled by a major component of the mystery. The story is 1st-person as if written by the MC to help her cope with what happened, so maybe the title is referring to what she’s writing down, but there’s nothing inherently dangerous about it. The short story she used inspired a killer, but that’s it…no reference to books of any kind killing. The tag line on the front of the book says, “She wrote the perfect murder. One of her classmates carried it out… Now she’s next.” There was literally no mention in the book of the short mystery story she wrote for class being a perfect murder. It was just a murder. And she’s not even the only one who is ostensibly targeted to be another victim, so the tagline is pretty clearly sensationalism that isn’t delivered on.

The murder the MC wrote for her short story had 2 specific elements that were copied (well, 3, if you count the murder happening in the woods, but that’s not super specific): the victim was killed with a trophy and the murderer spelled out “help me” with twigs next to the body. That least one is what baffles me. I kept waiting for an explanation or at least some theories about the “help me,” but nothing ever came. So I can’t help but wonder…why did she have the murderer in the short story do that? To pretend it was the victim who did it (to what end, though, I have no idea)? Was it a cry for help from the murderer, either real or faked? Was it a taunt, saying that the victim needed help even though they were already dead? None of these jumps out as an obvious reason for the twigs, because to me there isn’t an obvious reason, and it’s literally never questioned by anyone in the book. Supposedly the MC put it into her story to show off her creativity, but to me, it’s not creative so much as…pointless? The murderer copied it, and truth be told, I don’t think I ever even understood why the murderer bothered to copy the short story details. Then, at least to me, the author was trying so hard to keep the reader from guessing the murderer (which I didn’t, but I rarely do) that she threw in too many sub plots and red herrings. In the end, it was underwhelming, confusing, and just not enjoyable. Around halfway through, my 15-year-old daughter (who was interested in the book when I started reading it) asked me what I thought so far, and all I could say was, “Meh.” It was just kind of boring. It was clearly not for me, but if the book interests you, please do check out other reviews at the link below.

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Book Review: Sadie (re-read)

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Sadie
by Courtney Summers
read by Rebecca Soler, Dan Bittner, Fred Berman, & Gabra Zackman

My rating: 4.5 / 5
Genre: YA suspense, drama

See original review here.

I don’t normally write a new review when I read a book I already reviewed on my blog. But this is a special case. The first time I read this book, 5 1/2 years ago, I still gave it 4 stars, but I had some issues with the audiobook. I couldn’t handle listening to Sadie’s parts for 2 main reasons. The first is that there was a lot of language, and though it doesn’t generally stop me from reading books, it bothered me more to keep hearing it out loud. But I also struggled with feeling like the narrator made Sadie sound angry all the time, even when giving the description of a room she’d entered or something. So I switched to a format where I read Sadie’s portions myself and listened to the “podcast” parts. Recently, I listened to a couple of audiobooks by the same narrator, and I quite liked her. So when I realized it was the same narrator, I wanted to give it another try.

I can honestly say that I don’t know what my issue with the “angry” narrator was those 5+ years ago. I think that the fact that I had barely listened to any audiobooks back then, but now I have extensive experience with them probably has a lot to do with it (I still cringed when there was a lot of cussing though, especially dialog with many f-words). The story is still dark and gritty with subject matter that means I couldn’t really recommend this YA book for anyone younger than 16 (see content warnings in my original review at the link above), but it’s compelling and engaging.

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Book Review: Scarlet

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Scarlet
The Lunar Chronicles #2
by Marissa Meyer
read by Rebecca Soler

My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: YA sci-fi

Spoiler notice: The following review will contain some spoilers for the previous book in the series, Cinder.

Scarlet’s grandmother is missing, but the police don’t seem to care. She starts following clues to track her down on her own, somewhat reluctantly accepting the aid of a mysterious street fighter called Wolf. Meanwhile, Cinder has to escape from prison and figure out where to go next on her quest to understand her identity.

I didn’t love this book as much as the previous, but I did still enjoy it a lot. I think the main difference here is that there was a lot of focus on the building relationship between Scarlet and Wolf, and I just wasn’t really feeling it. On the plus side, though, since we have a new main character in this book, I was glad that Scarlet is different enough in her personality compared to Cinder that I didn’t feel like it was a repeat of Cinder and I didn’t have a hard time keeping the two characters separate in my mind when Cinder had her own POV scenes throughout this book. Scarlet is quick-tempered and stubborn, though maybe her personality is part of why I had a difficult time buying her growing relationship with Wolf.

Scarlet’s search for her grandmother was broken up by Cinder’s continuing story and, less often, Emperor Kai trying to prevent war with Queen Levana. My favorite thing about this book came in the form of a new side character—Thorne. Though he’s quite inappropriate at times, he’s a great comic relief. The overall advancement of plot in this book kept me invested, and I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes from here.

I listened to the audiobook, and the narrator did a great job with the different characters, though she seemed to drop Scarlet’s slight accent now and then. I still recommend this book (though definitely start with Cinder; these are not stand-alone books) to fans of futuristic sci-fi and/or fairy tale retellings, maybe around age 15 and up (there was more in the way of physical interaction in this book than the previous, though it was still pretty clean overall).

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Book Review: Cinder

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Cinder
The Lunar Chronicles #1
by Marissa Meyer
read by Rebecca Soler

My rating: 5 / 5
Genre: YA sci-fi

As a cyborg, Cinder and her kind are considered second-class citizens, so much so that cyborgs are chosen at random to be test subjects for possible cures to the plague that has been threatening New Beijing and the surrounding country. But when the nation’s prince brings Cinder, a gifted mechanic, an android to fix and then Cinder’s step-sister falls sick with the plague, events lead to a more dangerous adventure than Cinder ever could have anticipated. And her mysterious past will prove to be more of a liability than she ever knew.

There’s so much going on in this book, and while sometimes that can be bad in a book, it all worked together here. It’s no secret that this is a Cinderella retelling, but really, that’s just a small part of it (though it still made me think of Ever After a lot while I was reading). It’s a starting point and a vehicle for part of the plot, but the bulk of the story revolves around secrets that Cinder begins to learn throughout the story. I enjoyed the unfolding of all of these secrets and the connections that were made between seemingly separate subplots. There were several side characters that I also really enjoyed, including an android sidekick with a particularly perky personality chip.

There were a couple of revelations in this book that I predicted, at least one pretty early on, but I don’t think much of it was meant to be a huge twist or anything. I would have been pretty surprised and even a little disappointed if I’d turned out to be wrong. At the end of the book, I was surprised when the story ended on a cliffhanger. I’m not usually a fan, but I think I’m starting to realize that how much it bothers me depends a lot on how much I enjoyed the book up to that point (which makes a lot of sense, really). So though it felt abrupt, I’m pretty invested and am definitely happy to continue the series.

I listened to the audiobook, and the narrator did a great job with the different characters, including a couple of accents. My 15-year-old daughter has read most of this series and loves it so much that she kept wanting me to listen to the book when she could be around and listen with me. That’s an endorsement in itself, but I also recommend this to fans of futuristic sci-fi and/or fairy tale retellings around age 14 and up—it’s quite clean in all respects, which isn’t too common for YA these days.

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Book Review: Dead Fake

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Dead Fake
Bleak Haven #1
by Vincent Ralph

My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: YA horror thriller

When a new trend takes over Ava’s school that lets students Swipe to Die, Ava seems to be the only one who wants nothing to do with it. It’s been ten years since her uncle murdered three people before dying himself, so death isn’t a game to her. Then fake videos of students being murdered start to appear, and Ava is appalled at how excited her fellow students are over the pretend tragedies. But when a student dies for real, in the same way he did in his fake video, Ava can’t help but look for patterns and answers, even if it means dredging up the not-so-buried past.

Overall, I enjoyed this book and was caught up in the slasher elements enough to have a hard time putting it down in the last third or so. It took a little bit to get going, but even early on, the hints about not only Ava’s uncle, but apparently quite a few mass murderers or serial killers in this town’s past intrigued me. There’s clearly a whole background here that I wanted to know more of. (There are 3 more books either already released or planned that are set in this same town, so maybe more of the town’s bloody history will be explored.) Some tropes of this genre were subverted in ways that I appreciated, like the town’s sheriff actually giving credence to Ava’s thoughts and discoveries.

I have to admit that the reveal of the killer was a little bit of a letdown for me, at least partly because there were some clues peppered here and there that seemed to be leading one way…only for them to be completely unrelated. Red herrings are one thing, but this felt a bit too deliberate. Plus, the killer’s revealed motivations and actions taken over time are either underwhelming or unrealistic. But even with these things, the story was overall pretty good, and I am definitely going to read more of this series. There is a little bit of language, including the f-word several times, but not nearly as much as I’ve read in other books in the same genre. And there is no sexual content that I can recall, beyond the mention of the MC’s friend and her new boyfriend making out a lot. Also incredibly light for the genre, which I appreciate. I’d recommend this for people who enjoy slasher fiction or thrillers in the teen/YA age range.

Thank you to Netgalley and St. Martin’s Press for providing me a copy of this book to review.

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Book Review: Chasing Echoes

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Chasing Echoes
by Jodi Perkins

My rating: 3 / 5
Genre: YA fantasy romance

Topaz “Taz” Aevos and her sisters each have powers that they can’t explain. Taz’s seem to be the most useless, though, since all she can do is make things fall. But when her youngest sister becomes the victim of a cruel prank during a school dance, she’s not the only one who wants to use a supernatural power to punish the prankster, Stryder Black. He also gets cursed into a time loop by someone who didn’t appreciate his prank, and when his path crosses further with Taz, the curse could become fatal.

The premise and at least some of the fantasy aspects in this book are interesting. I get what the author was going for with the reveal regarding Taz and her sisters’ powers, and there’s even a villainous aspect that will spill over into future books without feeling too much like a contrived cliffhanger. However, the time loop aspect of the story could have been done better. Stryder starts to fall apart after only 3 loops, which seems fairly quick for a “tough guy,” especially one who’s been warned he’s in a loop rather than being completely in the dark and wondering if he’s just going crazy. And his theories about how the loop works, both for him and for those “outside” the loop vary wildly and don’t always make sense to me.

There are also several cliches in the story that bugged me, including what turned out to be the change Stryder needed to make in order to break the curse. It was always my least favorite aspect of Groundhog Day and just made me roll my eyes here. (This is already semi-spoilery, so I won’t be more specific to avoid full-on spoilers.) I also had a difficult time buying that Stryder’s prank, brutal as it was, was worth the curse put on him, and the curse-giver, when confronted, was far too casual about the whole thing.

Overall, the book isn’t bad (especially for one that’s self-published, since it’s not full of errors, though it could have used a little more proofreading). But I think it’s more suited to an audience of people who like more contemporary romance or romantasy. I’m okay with both of these but prefer that the romance be a little more substantial than what I found here, and I might have liked a little more explanation about some of the fantasy elements. But if you’re interested in time loop stories and contemporary romance with fantasy elements, you might just enjoy this book.

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Book Review: The Disappearances

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The Disappearances
by Emily Bain Murphy

My rating: 5 / 5
Genre: YA historical fantasy

When Aila’s dad is drafted to fight in WWII not long after her mom’s death, she and her little brother Miles are sent to live with an old friend of their mom’s in the small town where their mom grew up. The siblings quickly begin to notice some strange things about their new home, like the lack of mirrors in the entire house. And how the flowers in the backyard don’t have any smell. As it turns out, every seven years, the people in the town lose something, like the ability to smell or dream. It’s been happening for 35 years and no one knows what made it start or what might make it stop. And the next Disappearance is only days away.

This is one of those books that leaves me struggling to figure out where to start with my review. I was so caught up in the story that I had a really hard time putting the book down and ended up staying up an hour later than normal to finish it. The Disappearances, the way the town reacts to them, their attempts to counter them—all of it comes together in an intriguing story. Add to that Aila’s and Miles’s grief over their recent loss, worry for their endangered dad, and difficulty in settling into a new town, which is all really well done and feels authentic. 

As the main story is unfolding, we get glimpses of another plot that seems to have connections to the main story, though it isn’t immediately clear what those connections are. But as the story goes on, more and more hints are dropped. I actually looked something up online based on a clue from the book and made a connection before the book brought it up. I had no idea why it was significant, but the excitement I felt at my realization was just further proof of how invested I was in the book. I can’t say a lot due to not wanting to spoil anything, but I already mentioned how caught up I was in the last quarter or so of the book. There are some details that aren’t explained in the end, but nothing that was left unexplained bothered me. I don’t need to know how the “magic” worked. I just loved the way the author worked everything out. It actually reminded me of Holes, which is not really touted as fantasy, yet has a curse-related overall arc that is similar to this book. I also have to admit that the book doesn’t feel particularly historical, even though it’s set in 1942, but I just didn’t care enough to be bothered by it. I don’t give 5 stars easily, but I haven’t enjoyed a book of this genre this much in a while. If the book interests you at all, I strongly urge you to give it a read!

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Book Review: The Infinite Glade

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The Infinite Glade
The Maze Cutter #3
by James Dashner

My rating: 1 / 5
Genre: YA dystopian

Not only did this book have a lot of the same problems as the previous two—too many characters, too little to care about, too many factions and no clear understanding of who was good or bad—but on top of all of that, there was far too few answers given. Elements that were touted as super important throughout the trilogy (like the Cure and the Evolution) are seriously downplayed here and never come to fruition of any kind. More characters are added that end up being completely pointless and a POV character added in the previous book also really had no point by the end. I struggle to understand what Dashner was going for in general or why these books didn’t get stopped before publication. But here’s the thing that is probably important for anyone reading this review to know: I didn’t particularly care for the first trilogy either. I liked the first book and truly wanted to know more about the world set up within it. But it felt like Dashner had written himself into a corner and proceeded to pants his way through the rest of the series, which ended up a convoluted, shallow mess. It was probably my mistake to read this follow-up trilogy, but I really hoped that it would be more of a call back to The Maze Runner, something that could possibly redeem the world for me. Instead, it deteriorated even further. This means that I obviously don’t recommend this trilogy to anyone. And yes, a lot of people enjoyed the first trilogy more than me and thus might enjoy this follow-up more too. Beware, though, that the overall rating, at least on Goodreads, of this trilogy is quite a bit lower than for the original trilogy, and reviews I’ve read indicate that plenty of people who loved the original didn’t like these books nearly as much.

I received a free review copy from the publisher in exchange for my honest unedited feedback.

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Book Review: The Godhead Complex

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The Godhead Complex
The Maze Cutter #2
by James Dashner

My rating: 2 / 5
Genre: YA dystopian

The Flare, the Cure, Cranks, the Maze, the Remnant Nation, the Godhead, the Evolution, pilgrims, villas, Orphans…I don’t know what is going on in this series anymore, it’s just so convoluted and bloated with characters and plot threads. The pacing is slow enough that even in this 2nd book in the trilogy, I feel like nothing really happens until near the end. That’s not to say that actually nothing happens, but it all felt so underwhelming. By the end of the previous book, I knew so little actual information, and then in this book, almost everything I thought I knew turns out to be either wrong or at least suspect. I still am not entirely sure who the good guys and bad guys are (maybe they’re all bad? or neutral? or just trying to survive?). And I really don’t care about any of the characters enough to want to hang in there to figure out what I don’t understand when everything is so messy.

I really wish that someone had explained to Dashner or any of his proofreaders that every single use of “god(dess)” in this book should have been a lowercase G. It’s a minor detail, but it grated on me that Alexandra, the our main connection to the Godhead (at least this is something of a title, so I guess the capital makes sense) in these books, is always referred to as a God with a capital G, amongst other uses of the word. I’m going to finish this series, but only because I jumped the gun and requested an ARC of the 3rd book in the trilogy. Considering my track record with this series, I can’t imagine the final book is suddenly going to make everything better. At this point, I wouldn’t really recommend this continuation series to anyone, whether you’ve read the original trilogy or not. (On the other hand, if you enjoyed the entirety of the first trilogy, that probably means that what bothered me about it doesn’t bother you, so there’s a decent possibility that you’ll enjoy these newer books more than me.)

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Book Review: Finding Phoebe

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Finding Phoebe
by Ellie Katz

My rating: 3 / 5
Genre: Coming of age YA drama

Growing up, Phoebe Carasso developed a stutter that made life difficult for her. She survived up to and through high school by relying on her twin brother, David, to talk for her, protect her, and be her best friend. After graduation, David goes to college out of state, while Phoebe is staying near home, thus forcing her to face the world on her own.

The heart of this story is overall well done, with Phoebe learning who she is without her brother and trying to navigate social situations that she used to avoid. Though “avoid” really means that she went to social events with her brother but sat in the corner. What I find the most interesting about this book is the exploration of an introvert that might not be a true introvert, but only became such due to psychological issues. Her stutter does not manifest around people she’s comfortable with, so being around strangers or mere acquaintances, which during her adolescence included everyone outside of her family, she either wouldn’t speak or would give only the shortest of responses when addressed. Thus, she’d be wiped out from every social encounter, which is the mark of an introvert. However, to my mind, at least, when Phoebe gets out into the bigger world, she actually seems quite happy to be around people. Maybe not to the point where she gains energy from it, as an extrovert would, but when she’s mostly with friends and in situations she’s grown comfortable with, she doesn’t seem as sapped of energy when she doesn’t spend as much time trying to avoid stutter. It made me question the source of my own introvertedness, if perhaps it at least wouldn’t be as strong as it is if I didn’t have the social anxiety issues that I have.

On the other side of things, though, this book suffers from being fairly bloated. There is a lot of focus on what is being eaten at meals, on outings Phoebe and various friend groups go on, and on minor details in the plans being made for those outings that are completely unnecessary to the story. By the halfway point, I started to do a lot of skimming when Phoebe and her friends were going to go ice skating or to a museum, and I think the book could have been cut down by at least 100 pages and not suffered any loss to the story and character development.

Phoebe herself comes across as nearly a Mary Sue. Yes, she has a couple of flaws, but outside of her stutter and a stubbornness that crops up close to the end of the book, she’s interested in everything, great at everything she tries, and, even though she spent all of her life until now in silence, somehow a great friend and host without really having to try too hard. She attracts everyone she meets, whether they knew her when she was still quietly sitting in her brother’s shadow or have only met her as she’s tried to break free. And there are times when she is talking to someone she only just met, says more than the 2-3 words that help her avoid her stutter—multiple full sentences that I thought must be a triumph for her, but turned out to not be anything? Maybe she was doing her other trick, very carefully enunciating the words, and the author felt it would be tedious to explain that every single time she did that, but since the alternative is that Phoebe just doesn’t stutter and somehow isn’t aware that she’s managed to avoid it, I think the reminder would have still been helpful.

Due to Phoebe’s tendency to be great at nearly everything she tries her hand at, this book has almost no conflict. Her brother provides most of it, but overall, it feels really shallow and…nice. I don’t know another word for it. Maybe because the book’s author is a psychotherapist, the characters are really good at analyzing themselves and each other (when they get past Phoebe’s stubbornness and take the time to discuss their issues). It just felt overall shallow and unrealistic to me. However, since my issues with the book are probably more based on my own personal preferences as a reader and a writer, if you’re interested in the book, please check out other reviews at the link below.

I received a free review copy from the publisher in exchange for my honest unedited feedback.

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