artsy musings of a bibliophile

romance

Review: The Distance Between Us by Kasie West

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KSTDBU

ABOUT THE BOOK

The Distance Between Us by Kasie West
young adult contemporary published by HarperTeen on July 2nd, 2013

Seventeen-year-old Caymen Meyers studies the rich like her own personal science experiment, and after years of observation she’s pretty sure they’re only good for one thing—spending money on useless stuff, like the porcelain dolls in her mother’s shop.

So when Xander Spence walks into the store to pick up a doll for his grandmother, it only takes one glance for Caymen to figure out he’s oozing rich. Despite his charming ways and that he’s one of the first people who actually gets her, she’s smart enough to know his interest won’t last. Because if there’s one thing she’s learned from her mother’s warnings, it’s that the rich have a short attention span. But Xander keeps coming around, despite her best efforts to scare him off. And much to her dismay, she’s beginning to enjoy his company.

She knows her mom can’t find out—she wouldn’t approve. She’d much rather Caymen hang out with the local rocker who hasn’t been raised by money. But just when Xander’s attention and loyalty are about to convince Caymen that being rich isn’t a character flaw, she finds out that money is a much bigger part of their relationship than she’d ever realized. And that Xander’s not the only one she should’ve been worried about.

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Review: Dirty Little Secret by Jennifer Echols

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ABOUT THE BOOK
Dirty Little Secret by Jennifer Echols
young adult contemporary published by MTV Books on 16 July 2013

Bailey wasn’t always a wild child and the black sheep of her family. She used to play fiddle and tour the music circuit with her sister, Julie, who sang and played guitar. That ended when country music execs swooped in and signed Julie to a solo deal. Never mind that Julie and Bailey were a duet, or that Bailey was their songwriter. The music scouts wanted only Julie, and their parents were content to sit by and let her fulfill her dreams while Bailey’s were hushed away.

Bailey has tried to numb the pain and disappointment over what could have been. And as Julie’s debut album is set to hit the charts, her parents get fed up with Bailey’s antics and ship her off to granddad’s house in Nashville. Playing fiddle in washed-up tribute groups at the mall, Bailey meets Sam, a handsome and oh-so-persuasive guitarist with his own band. He knows Bailey’s fiddle playing is just the thing his band needs to break into the industry. But this life has broken Bailey’s heart once before. She isn’t sure she’s ready to let Sam take her there again…

THE RATING

THE REVIEW
What I’d like to say to Dirty Little Secret is perfectly worded by Avril Lavigne, “Why do you have to go and make things so complicated?” I struggled with rating this book because frankly, where it lacked in depth in the first half, it definitely more than made up for it before the end. And that wasn’t even an issue when I started reading the book. 
The beginning of Dirty Little Secret was… boring. I honestly didn’t care for Bailey dressing up and playing her fiddle in tribute groups. But then she meets Sam at the mall, plays with him and he zones in on her. Now Bailey has to make a difficult decision, would she risk being seen as the loser sister of a rising star at a gig or cast her eyes down and carry on? This is when I saw life in Bailey and I was finally into the story.
Bailey accepts the gig because let’s face it, spending time at home playing the fiddle endlessly with her grandfather hovering, who wants that? She made a perfect rebel with bold fashion sense, asymmetrical hair, red lips and boots-to-die-for, but she couldn’t go on with it. Same gave her the out and she took it.
But the infamously titled Sam Hardiman’s band is trouble from the start. Oh who am I kidding, Charlotte is hate-worthy. Given that the drummer had a thing for Sam and is still okay with being not okay with whoever Sam dates. Because you see, Sam likes Bailey. But does he like her because she gives the oomph factor to the band or because she is talented?
Sam started out as a pretty normal guy and then he became persuasive as hell and who’d have guessed from that that he was pretty messed up from the inside. So while I was out admiring his ability to make everyone do what he wants to do, I was also in the state where I just wanted to quietly strangle him.
But then Sam said, “I like doing things that make me uncomfortable. I try not to have a comfort zone” and everything was perfectly clear. After going through a hard family life and counselling, you have to admire the guy. And Bailey does. Their conversation is beautiful and where Sam is trying to make up for the lack of channeling his emotions, Bailey is trying to get away from them by writing them down into songs.
I understood Bailey because even though she got treated horribly by her family, she didn’t give up on them. And I understood Sam because he wanted to not be like his father and wind up a loser. So they perform gigs together, discover each other, fight and then it all ends (not necessarily in that order). It was a moment of holding-my-breath-reading where you don’t know what’ll happen and how it’ll all go down. It is a difficult feat to achieve but I was going through it so Echols did achieve it.
Dirty Little Secret more than surprised me and made me feel despite the rocky start. People who like to read music-themed YA must read this. You’ll smile, go argh, get shocked and definitely swoon.
THE QUOTES

“And I was bitter. Bitterness and I were old friends by now, but at the moment bitterness was trying to go down my bra in public.” 

“Deana Carter sings about it. Lady Antebellum sings about it. Eric Church. Gosh, not just country artists. Katy Perry. Everybody has a song about it because everybody’s been through it. You find that person at eighteen and you lose yourself. And the tragedy is, it’s the person who’s completely opposed to everything you’ve ever wanted. You bond with that person, and that person breaks your heart. I’m that tragedy for you, and you’re mine.” 

Thanks to MTV Books and Edelweiss for providing me an eARC of Dirty Little Secret for review.

Review: Unremembered by Jessica Brody

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ABOUT THE BOOK

young adult science fiction fantasy published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on 5 March 2013
first book in the Unremembered trilogy

With no memories and no identity, the sixteen-year-old girl who was found floating among the wreckage of a devastating plane crash knows only one thing for certain: nothing is what it seems. Crippled by a world she doesn’t know, plagued by abilities she doesn’t understand, and haunted by a looming threat she can’t remember, Seraphina struggles to piece together her forgotten past and discover who she really is. But with every clue comes more questions. And she is running out of time to answer them. Her only hope is a strangely alluring boy who claims to know her from before the crash. Who claims they were in love. But can she really trust him? And will he be able to protect her from the people who have been making her forget?

THE RATING

THE REVIEW
I had been crazy excited for Unremembered ever since I discovered its existence. What really attracted to me about Unremembered was the main character being the lone survivor in a plane wreckage with a definite memory loss. I thought it didn’t get any better than that. Only it got worse. I wanted to like Unremembered, I really did. But I just couldn’t connect with it. Despite being just over 300 pages long, it took the book more than 250 pages to finally pick up its pace.
Not only that, I felt there was a lot of repetition. It’s one thing for Zen to find her but it took more than a few meetings for him to finally say something substantial to her. I know people are lying to her and what not but I wanted to scream at her to believe the guy already. More so when she almost trusts the wrong guy.
I also had a lot of issues with Cody. He’s supposed to be this 13-year-old foster brother but he acts like he’s Seraphina’s age fellow. He drives cars and can apparently leave and come home whenever he pleases. And it doesn’t help that he has a bit of an attitude despite his claims that pretty girls tend to look through him. Naturally, there is a lot of talk about the supermodel beauty of Seraphina which I got tired of really fast.
Seraphina is a pretty decent character; she doesn’t have a sense of belonging and only a meager amount of clues. She talks in foreign languages without even realizing it and she is this super smart math geek with an urge to count everything around her. However, she lacks depth which could’ve not been the case. Her thought process is predictable and she isn’t memorable at all.
Zen is the love interest and though we only get glimpses of how they fell in love, it is clearly not enough. He doesn’t have much of a back story so you really don’t get to know him. There’s the Sonnet that they just keep repeating throughout the book and the warm feeling Sera gets in between her eyebrows. Their romance is just really unbelievable somehow.
Just when I was about to give up on Unremembered, it decided to get better. The whole mystery was unveiled and while a lot of questions were answered, some are left unanswered. I was quickly awed by the whole mystery of how Sera ends up in the wreckage and who she’s running away from.
Honestly, if the whole book could have had more depth, I’d have definitely loved it. I loved how it ended, I finally felt the ohmigodyes feeling right there. And that was the Seraphina I was hoping to read about. So while I’m not giving up on the series, I just hope Unforgotten is way better than Unremembered.
THE QUOTES
“Forgetting who you are is so much more complicated than simply forgetting your name. It’s also forgetting your dreams. Your aspirations. What makes you happy. What you pray you’ll never have to live without. It’s meeting yourself for the first time, and not being sure of your first impression.”
“Death is not a memory you can fake.”
Thanks to MacKidsBooks for sending me an ARC of Unremembered. 

Review: Cursed by Jennifer L. Armentrout

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Title: Cursed

Genre: Young Adult, Paranormal
Publisher: Spencer Hill Press
Release Date: 18 September 2012
Pages: 288 (ARC)
Synopsis
Dying sucks and high school senior Ember McWilliams knows firsthand. After a fatal car accident, her gifted little sister brought her back. Now anything Ember touches dies. And that, well, really blows.
Ember operates on a no-touch policy with all living things–including boys. When Hayden Cromwell shows up, quoting Oscar Wilde and claiming her curse is a gift, she thinks he’s a crazed cutie. But when he tells her he can help control it, she’s more than interested. There’s just one catch: Ember has to trust Hayden’s adopted father, a man she’s sure has sinister reasons for collecting children whose abilities even weird her out. 
However, she’s willing to do anything to hold her sister’s hand again. And hell, she’d also like to be able to kiss Hayden. Who wouldn’t? But when Ember learns the accident that turned her into a freak may not have been an accident at all, she’s not sure who to trust. Someone wanted her dead, and the closer she gets to the truth, the closer she is to losing not only her heart, but her life. 
For real this time.
My Rating
* * *
The Review
You know just when you think that something cannot get any worse, it does? That’s what it’s like to live Ember’s life. She was supposed to be dead; only her younger sister Olivia brought her back from the dead. Now Ember feels cursed because her touch is deadly, her mother has a dead-to-the-world state of mind since her father died and Olivia keeps resurrecting animals. It’s like a family of freaks and even though Ember wants to just disappear, she can’t leave Olivia alone.
So in between juggling bullies at school and keeping up with Olivia’s demands, Ember is swamped, tired and lonely. She only has Adam to fall back on but even he doesn’t know her secret or the real reason behind her wearing gloves. And then she spots a Hot Dude and thinks, “My brain must have felt sorry for me, so it’d created the only type of guy I could touch—a fantasy one.”
Things take a turn for the worse when her ex-boyfriend dies at Ember’s hands, someone takes Olivia from school and the Hot Dude ends up squeezing her hands instead of dying when she attacks him knowing he has something to do with Olivia’s disappearance. Turns out there are gifted people out there and a man named Cromwell protects them. So it’s only natural that he forces takes in Ember’s family in order to protect Olivia’s gift. 
The fact that Ember is a danger to others is made painfully obvious to her by the other gifted people her family is now living with. All except Hayden the Hot Dude. He has the power to absorb energy and he believes that Ember can control her touch of death if she practices.
Ember is fierce yet extremely vulnerable ever since the accident and so she has a hard time trusting people and rightly so. There is something amiss with Cromwell and that doesn’t sit well with Ember so she tries to break free of him. I really connected with Ember on a certain level because she didn’t feel like she belonged anywhere however much she tried to make it all better. And boy does she! It’s like a battle of touch-don’t-touch going on inside her head.
As deeply emotional and captivating it was to read Cursed, it also has light and funny moments to offer. The romance between Ember and Hayden is built slowly and steadily. Hayden has his own demons to deal with and together they fit with that connection. Though they go through certain misunderstandings, Hayden really believes in Ember and gives her hope. However, Ember is convinced that Cromwell is bad news and tries to work out theories which agitates Hayden to an extent because he thinks highly of him.
Cursed is an engaging read and Jennifer Armentrout has put her own concept into it with the way the story is crafted. It has mysterious elements and a villain with a twisted mind. If you like books about deadly touches, Cursed is a must read and it will leave you feeling satisfied at the end.

The Quotes:

“You worry about hurting me, but you never seem to worry about me hurting you. And I’m the one with the killer touch.”

“My heart jumped in my chest, and then sped up erratically. The thick tension hit a new all-time high. Surprisingly, I found that I still had the ability to speak.”
Thanks to Spencer Hill Press for providing me an ARC of Cursed for review.

Review: Tundra 37 by Aubrie Dionne Blog Tour

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Title: Tundra 37 (A New Dawn, #2)
Author: Aubrie Dionne
Genre: Science Fiction, Romance
Publisher: Entangled Publishing
Release Date: 7 February 20
Pages: 288 (eBook)


Synopsis
Gemme is a hi-tech matchmaker who pairs the next generation of Lifers aboard the Expedition, a deep space transport vessel destined for Paradise 18. When the identity of her lifemate pops up on her screen, she’s shocked that he’s the achingly gorgeous and highly sought after Lieutenant Miles Brentwood—a man oblivious to her existence. Believing everyone will think she contrived the match, she erases it from the computer’s memory.
Just as comets pummel the ship and destroy the pairing system forever. 
With the Expedition disabled, the colonists must crash land on the barren ice world of Tundra 37 where Gemme is reassigned to an exploratory mission, led by Lieutenant Brentwood. Only in the frozen tundra does she understand the shape of his heart and why the computer has entwined their destinies.
My Rating
* * * *
The Review

It was simply an astoundingly melancholic and an unlikely emotional experience for me to read Tundra 37. So, to say that Tundra 37 is an unpredictable read would be an understatement. I didn’t expect the book to tug at my heartstrings. The book really made me appreciate the life on Earth more than anything else. All the loss and the madness that then ensues longing and deprivation is enough to make anyone lose their minds.
The story of Tundra 37 is not limited to the protagonists alone. The twin sisters aboard the Expedition, known as Seers, play an important role in the story as well. This is where the unpredictability kicks in. Without giving much away, the way the memories connected with the orb blew me away. The flashbacks to Old Earth painted a very vivid picture which made reading those scenes very engrossing.
Gemme, with her job as a Matchmaker, is a determined women and a true Lifer which is why she gives preference to predestination over choice and organization over chaos. But life certainly has entirely something else in store for her starting from her pairing with Brentwood, one of the Lieutenants on board the Expedition. Then she lands a job as an explorer from a matchmaker, talk about a makeover!
Brentwood, on the other hand, has his whole life laid out for him and has never expected more than that. So when something beyond their control happens, altering their course and the foundation of their mission, Brentwood is left to be the leader of his people. 
But the question remains, is it enough to go through with what destiny seems to have chosen for them and not merely computers? From then on, Tundra 37 plunges into the heart of the ice on the planet making it a fast-paced book with never a dull moment in between. The life of the Seers still has me reeling in unbelief. I would highly recommend this book to lovers of science fiction and to everyone else simply because the book has a lot of elements of humanity and the value of human life.
Best Quote:

“The moment felt inevitable, each second pulsing forward to bring them here, at the edge of this world, at the beginning of their own.”

Aubrie Dionne can be found at 
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