Featured Post: New Releases in YA for April 2015

Sometimes, after scrolling through endless lists of Goodreads recommendations, any reader can (understandably) feel bored and overwhelmed. Either none of the books sound like what you currently want to read, or all of them do, and you don’t know what to do. Well, the YA world is constantly getting new additions, and if you want o read something fresh and new, you’re in the right place. Here is a list of a few of the new books coming out in April.

1. An Ember in the Ashes, by Sabaa Tahir – Coming April 28, 2015

The Blurb: Set in a terrifyingly brutal Rome-like world, An Ember in the Ashes is an epic fantasy debut about an orphan fighting for her family and a soldier fighting for his freedom. It’s a story that’s literally burning to be told.

LAIA is a Scholar living under the iron-fisted rule of the Martial Empire. When her brother is arrested for treason, Laia goes undercover as a slave at the empire’s greatest military academy in exchange for assistance from rebel Scholars who claim that they will help to save her brother from execution.

ELIAS is the academy’s finest soldier—and secretly, its most unwilling. Elias is considering deserting the military, but before he can, he’s ordered to participate in a ruthless contest to choose the next Martial emperor.

When Laia and Elias’s paths cross at the academy, they find that their destinies are more intertwined than either could have imagined and that their choices will change the future of the empire itself.

This is my most anticipated book of this month. After reading the first few chapters online, I was completely hooked. The premise is very similar to Legend, one of my favorite books of all time, and according to reviewers, this one is even better. I have high expectations for this book, hopefully it won’t disappoint!

Die For Me, by Amy Plum

Actual Rating: 3.5 stars

“I had feared that love would make me vulnerable. Instead I felt empowered.”

Blurb: In the City of Lights, two star-crossed lovers battle a fate that is destined to tear them apart again and again for eternity.

When Kate Mercier’s parents die in a tragic car accident, she leaves her life–and memories–behind to live with her grandparents in Paris. For Kate, the only way to survive her pain is escaping into the world of books and Parisian art. Until she meets Vincent.

Mysterious, charming, and devastatingly handsome, Vincent threatens to melt the ice around Kate’s guarded heart with just his smile. As she begins to fall in love with Vincent, Kate discovers that he’s a revenant–an undead being whose fate forces him to sacrifice himself over and over again to save the lives of others. Vincent and those like him are bound in a centuries-old war against a group of evil revenants who exist only to murder and betray. Kate soon realizes that if she follows her heart, she may never be safe again.

When I first started reading Die For Me, I thought of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight, and that’s usually not a good thing because…. it’s Twilight. But, you know what? I actually kind of liked this!

The story progressed well, and it had just the right amount of everything, although I didn’t like how quickly the truth came out to Kate. It felt like the Revenants make the mistake of telling humans what they are somewhat often. The writing was also very nice. The descriptions of Paris were vivid and well-done, and not boring.

Love Letters To The Dead, by Ava Dellaira

Actual Rating: 3.5 stars

“You can be noble and brave and beautiful and still find yourself falling.”

Blurb: It begins as an assignment for English class: Write a letter to a dead person.

Laurel chooses Kurt Cobain because her sister, May, loved him. And he died young, just like May. Soon, Laurel has a notebook full of letters to the dead—to people like Janis Joplin, Heath Ledger, Amelia Earhart, and Amy Winehouse—though she never gives a single one of them to her teacher. She writes about starting high school, navigating the choppy waters of new friendships, learning to live with her splintering family, falling in love for the first time, and, most important, trying to grieve for May. But how do you mourn for someone you haven’t forgiven?

It’s not until Laurel has written the truth about what happened to herself that she can finally accept what happened to May. And only when Laurel has begun to see her sister as the person she was—lovely and amazing and deeply flawed—can she truly start to discover her own path.

In a voice that’s as lyrical and as true as a favorite song, Ava Dellaira writes about one girl’s journey through life’s challenges with a haunting and often heartbreaking beauty.

I almost abandoned Love Letters to the Dead because of the constant similarities to The Perks of Being a Wallflower, but I’m glad I didn’t because it was actually somewhat worth reading.

I found the story to be a little slow and redundant at times, but the feelings of the characters were nicely expressed at the right times. The story entirely was actually very relatable. There were many lines that I really liked and they were all very thoughtful and real.

Twisted Fate, by Norah Olsen

Rating: 1.5 Stars

12 hours after finishing this book, I’m still left wondering what I just read.

Twisted Fate was a book with a lot of potential, but sadly, didn’t deliver. After finishing, I spent an hour ranting to just about anyone who would listen, and although I’ve cooled down now, my feelings haven’t changed.

Let me start by saying that this is going to be a very difficult book to review. As all my reviews, as a requirement, are spoiler-free, writing this one in the same way is going to make it considerably harder to properly express my opinions(But don’t worry-it’s still spoiler free). Twisted Fate, while it could have worked in theory, it didn’t, and I’ll try to explain why.

First of all, Twisted Fate is about sisters Allyson and Sydney Tate, who are both enamored by a boy who moves next door. However, Ally and Syd share different views of the world, and while Ally thinks that Graham it cute and has a crush on him despite his secretive past, Syd believes that he’s a psychopath, although she can’t help but like him too.

Jennifer Lawrence Book Tag

So I’ve been watching a lot of booktubers lately… and I’ve been really liking this idea of “tags”. I’ve decided to try one of these tags and today I have chosen an altered version of the Jennifer Lawrence Book Tag which was created by booktuber Natasha Polis (Tashapolis)! I am not necessarily going to tag anyone(expect maybe Aliza), I’m just going to answer these “bookish” questions. Let’s get started!

Q: What is a book you refuse to read? (swearing off social media)
A: I don’t refuse to read any book! 🙂

Q: What’s a book/series that hit a snag? (the Oscar trip)
A: I’ve actually hit a snag on a lot of books (I’m not especially proud of that, but I will get back to them!), but the most recent one is The Immortal Rules Trilogy. I was reading The Eternity Cure, the sequel to The Immortal Rules, and I just saw so many other good books sitting on my bookshelf, so I gave into the temptation! I am totally going to get back to TEC because I was actually enjoying it.

Q: What is a book/series that you didn’t know would get so popular? (the viral Taylor Swift photobomb at the Golden Globes)
A: I don’t have a lot of answers for this one… but I will just say The Maze Runner series. I think it was somewhat well-known before the movies, but it got pretty popular after the movie came out.

Q: Dysfunctional character you can’t help but love? (working with David O. Russel)
A: Cadence Sinclair Eastman from We Were Liars is my pick. Cadence is quite dysfunctional, but she’s actually very relatable and you can’t help but feel for her at the end.

Q: A villain who thinks what they are doing is right? (playing Mystique in the new X-Men series)
A: This is probably every villain… but I’m going with Valentine Morgenstern from The Mortal Instruments series. A lot of books these days (especially angel books) have villains that have no motivation whatsoever, but Valentine is actually pretty developed.

Sway, by Kat Spears

Rating: 4.5 Stars

Sway is a book I went into with no expectations at all, which is probably one of the reasons I loved it as much as I did. It’s a raw, poignant, and sweet book, one I thoroughly enjoyed from start to finish.

Sway is about Jesse Alderman, a high school senior who specializes in getting things that people want, whether it be fake ids, school assignments, or a date with the head cheerleader. His life is just a series of business transactions, and he never gets emotionally invested in anything. So when Ken, the captain of the football team, asks Jesse to get him a date with Bridget Smalley, it’s just another job to him. Until he falls in love with her.

Jesse is one of the most 3-dimensional characters I’ve had the pleasure of reading about this year. His internal struggle with his way of life and his quiet anguish over his mother’s death a year ago makes for a very rounded character. His growth throughout the book is unlike anything I’ve ever read; Spears has managed to create a character so real that he’s impossible to dislike. The other characters were pretty one-dimensional and stereotypical, with the exception of Pete, Bridget’s brother, who has cerebral palsy and whom Jesse forms an accidental friendship with.

Under The Never Sky, by Veronica Rossi

“She absorbed the terror and beauty of him and his world. Of every moment over the past days. All of it, filling her up like the first breath she’d ever taken. And never had she loved life more.”

Rating:
Under The Never Sky is a science-fiction book about Aria and Perry, whose lives come together when they both set out to retrieve and bring back lost family members.

I enjoyed the story quite nicely. The action-sequences managed to keep me very engaged and really had me on the edge of my seat at moments! Surprisingly, even though the writing was actually a bit repetitive, I was able to feel the emotions and understand Perry and Aria quite vividly.

I absolutely loved Perry. This is normally the part where I would rant about having a personality and whatnot, but shockingly, even though Perry isn’t my type of guy, I liked him! My perfect fictional guy would usually consist of being funny, witty, and having that overall sense of goofiness, but I can make an exception. Perry felt so real, and I felt his pain throughout the entire book. He was sincere and honest from the beginning to the very end. Aria was a different story. I never really connected with her, probably because she had no flaws at all. She’s absolutely beautiful(which many characters feel the need to mention), she’s an incredible singer, she has a (view spoiler), and get this: her freaking period smells like flowers.

Moving on!

The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender, by Leslye Walton

Rating: 

I’ve been hesitant in writing this review and stalled for several days after finishing this book because I’ve been feeling so conflicted about what to say. The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender is a piece of work unlike anything else of ever read; and no other book has depicted the themes of love and love lost as beautifully and realistically as this does. But first, let me start at the beginning.

The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender starts with a note from an older Ava Lavender in 2014, who explains that this book is her retelling of her life in the 1940s. After that, we see hardly any of this Ava, as the book is entirely her past. The first part of the book follows Emilenne, Ava’s grandmother, and her tragic story of love, and later Viviane, Ava’s mother. However, it is only when Ava comes into the picture that the story takes off. Born with the wings of a bird, she is shut off from the outside world, and we see the story of how she lived in those 15 years, and how her family dealt with the ghosts of their pasts.

The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold

Rating: 

If I were to describe this book in one word, that word would be disturbing. Very, very disturbing.

I have no doubt that Sebold meant for The Lovely Bones to be a ground-breaking, inspiring, thought-provoking novel, but sadly, everything was so jumbled that I couldn’t understand it.

First of all, there was no plot. It felt like Sebold kind of just made up everything as she went, so naturally everything was all over the place. Nothing really drives the story, Susie just dies and watches over her family from heaven. The whole thing was just a situation in which the characters were put into.

Secondly, the characters. All of the characters were card-board cut outs. None of them seemed to have a motive of any sort, and what irked me the most, was how weak everyone was. Especially the women. Most of the girls and women in this book were either having sex, getting raped, crying, or smoking cigarettes. It was quite disgusting the number of times the word “rape” was mentioned in this book.

Cover Lust: My Favorite Book Covers (so far!)

I’m usually not one to pay much attention to book covers(well… that’s kind of a lie), but recently I’ve been going crazy about some specific covers. So, today I just decided to share some of my favorite book covers ever!

But seriously guys. Don’t judge a book by its cover. Don’t do it.

1) A Thousand Pieces of You by Claudia Gray

2) The Bronze Horseman by Paullina Simons

3) The Impossible Knife of Memory by Laurie Halse Anderson