New Year's Resolutions #4

Welcome to New Year's Resolutions, or all those classic books you "should" be reading, but don't really want to. But I only talk about the really cool ones, that ones that are classic books for a reason! This week's theme is supernatural romance.

 The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne (Amazon/IndieBound). I'll be 100% honest here and say that I actually haven't finished this book, because I dropped it in the bathtub and the very old binding on my $3.00 used bookstore edition completely fell apart.  But as far as I got in, I couldn't help but think that this book's beautiful language and darkly romantic theme reminded me an awful lot of one of this year's bestsellers...

Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl (Amazon/IndieBound).  Ethan can't wait to get out of the southern small town he calls home, and he especially can't wait to escape the horrific nightmares he has of falling, and a beautiful girl who seems strangely familiar.  But when Lena Duchannes moves to town, he finds himself falling in a whole different way.  Soon he's tangled up in a world of seers, vampires and magic that's beyond his wildest dreams...or nightmares.  (I liked this book a lot, by the way, even if supernatural romance isn't really my thing.  That's four out of five stars.)

So when I eventually get around to buying myself a new copy of Seven Gables, I'll be excited to dive back into the realm of old houses, curses and a doomed love story!

Impossible

This book was purchased as a final published edition. In no way was I paid or subsidized for this review by the author or publisher. (See Disclosure in Accordance with FTC Guidelines)


Impossible by Nancy Werlin

ISBN 9780142414910

Associate links: Amazon/IndieBound

Lucy can’t complain—her life could be worse.  For example, she could still be living with her insane bag-lady of a mother, instead of her wonderful, supportive foster parents.  Or she could be pregnant at seventeen, like the dozens of girls her foster mother treats every year.  But when her mother returns one day at school, singing her own haunting version of “Scarborough Fair” and referring to an unbreakable curse, it seems like a bad omen that’s hard to ignore.  And when prom night goes horribly awry, Lucy begins to wonder if perhaps she’s cursed after all.

Wow.  I can’t really say that I was expecting this book!  A beautiful cover, a fairy tale idea and a lyrical, flowing, almost skimming prose style—but a story that felt like a kind of sort of better version of Breaking Dawn.  What to make of it?

Maybe if I hadn’t read Breaking Dawn first I could have enjoyed it more, because even though Impossible is definitely better than Breaking Dawn, the teen pregnancy love story theme feels a little tainted.  And the elfin antagonist of Padraig Seeley is a bad guy you can see a mile away—a little subtlety would have been nice.

However, Impossible has something that Breaking Dawn definitely didn’t have, and that’s wonderful, sympathetic protagonists—however 2-D the supporting characters might be.  Lucy was believable, likeable, determined, relatable and strong, without being an iron-willed warrior woman.  Don’t get me wrong, those can be fun to read about; but it’s nice every once in awhile to have a character that can be vulnerable, too.  Zach, as well, made a sweet addition as the literal boy-next-door-turned-soulmate; even if I was a little bothered by the fact that everybody seemed to take a fairytale curse pretty much as an everyday thing.

All in all, if you can accept the world as somewhere between ours and the mythical beyond, this touching romance is one of the best rainy day books I’ve ever read.

The Final Verdict: Smooth, surreal and lovely, despite a few character flaws.  Four out of five stars.

Waiting on Wednesday #1

Madapple by Christina Meldrum. (Amazon/IndieBound)

I actually read this book a year ago and wasn't too impressed by it, but after I returned it to the library I had a hard time forgetting the dark, haunting tone of this supernatural mystery.  Teenage Aslaug has spent her entire life in seclusion, homeschooled by her mother and raised to be closer to plants than other people.  When her mother dies, Aslaug flees to the home of her aunt and cousins, exploring a frighteningly large new world between Christianity and mysticism, truth and deceptions.  And when she finds herself on trial for triple murder, she must fight to prove her innocence.

I can't wait to re-read this one with fresh eyes!

The Fire Stone

Originally reviewed and published at www.readerviewskids.com as a Free Review (see Disclosure in Accordance with FTC Guidelines) 


The Fire Stone by Riley Carney
ISBN 9780984130702
Associate Links: Amazon/IndieBound

Fifteen-year-old Matthias seems like a humble boy from the Western Reaches of Mundaria—albeit one with unusually cruel parents and a magnet for trouble.  But when three horrifying creatures attack him and he is saved by a mysterious wizard, not to mention the baby alorath he kidnaps from a careless circus, it becomes clear that Matt and his friends hold the key to saving their world.

Before anything else is said, the conflicting thing about this book is that it was written by a fifteen-year-old girl, one who’s now sixteen and the founder of a children’s literacy organization called Breaking the Chains, which the sales of this book will fund.  In all honesty, I was not particularly impressed by the writing and the story, but it’s hard not to admire somebody who’s clearly so dedicated and only a little bit older than me!

But the story really was unoriginal—boy with unusual powers and a dragon-like creature meets elves and discovers plots to destroy his world—something of a poor man’s “Eragon,” also written by a dedicated teenager, and a novel that has also been accused of unoriginality.  And that’s what was going through my head every paragraph I read, with every piece of clichéd dialogue and every character right off the shelf.

Despite that, with “The Fire Stone,” Riley Carney shows a lot of determination—something that’s needed to succeed in the YA fiction world.  And if her writing and her voice mature, I think we’ll have a force to be reckoned with in tomorrow’s realm of teen fiction.  Apparently she’s finished this series, “The Reign of the Elements,” and has started on another.  I’m not particularly interested in what happens next to Matt and his friends, but Riley Carney has captured my attention—and has established herself in my mind as a name to remember.

The Final Verdict:  If you liked Eragon give this one a try, but if fantasy's not your thing, avoid this cliche.  Two out of five stars.