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Passenger - Alexandra Bracken

Title: Passenger
Author: Alexandra Bracken
Pages: 496
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Source: Netgalley
Goodreads rating: 

About: passage, n.i. A brief section of music composed of a series of notes and flourishes.ii. A journey by water; a voyage.iii. The transition from one place to another, across space and time.

In one devastating night, violin prodigy Etta Spencer loses everything she knows and loves. Thrust into an unfamiliar world by a stranger with a dangerous agenda, Etta is certain of only one thing: she has traveled not just miles but years from home. And she’s inherited a legacy she knows nothing about from a family whose existence she’s never heard of. Until now.
Nicholas Carter is content with his life at sea, free from the Ironwoods—a powerful family in the colonies—and the servitude he’s known at their hands. But with the arrival of an unusual passenger on his ship comes the insistent pull of the past that he can’t escape and the family that won’t let him go so easily. Now the Ironwoods are searching for a stolen object of untold value, one they believe only Etta, Nicholas’ passenger, can find. In order to protect her, he must ensure she brings it back to them— whether she wants to or not.
Together, Etta and Nicholas embark on a perilous journey across centuries and continents, piecing together clues left behind by the traveler who will do anything to keep the object out of the Ironwoods’ grasp. But as they get closer to the truth of their search, and the deadly game the Ironwoods are playing, treacherous forces threaten to separate Etta not only from Nicholas but from her path home . . . forever.

I have an immediate two-fold reaction to things involving time travel: 1) too complicated.  No time travel story plays with exactly the same rules, so a significant portion of the store becomes establishing boundaries, and 2) it’s too easy to mess up your own timeline and that makes me so nervous.  But, it’s Alex Bracken, so I knew I was going to read it no matter what it was about.

First off, I want to say that I am 100% in love with this cover.  It’s freaking gorgeous, big gold star for the cover designer.

The beginning of this one was a little slow.  Because of the world building involved and having a narrator that is totally ignorant of the world she’s thrust into to there’s a lot of information to slog through. I really liked how time travel worked in this story – there are set passages that take you to certain places and certain years, but it’s always the same date that it is when you started.  So, like, if it’s January 5, 2015 and you go through a portal to 1940s London, it’s still going to be January 5^th.

Both main characters are great, but I think Nicholas stands out just a little bit more for me.  He’s a pirate!  

Okay, he’s a privateer, which is like a legal pirate?  (Everything seemed very gentlemanly when he was overtaking the other ship’s crew in the beginning.)  Being the half-black, illegitimate son of the ruling time traveling family, based in the 1700s, he’s had a bit of a hard life.  All he wants is to get away from his terror of a family and spend his life in his own time, sailing the open seas.  That is, until Etta comes along.

He is tasked with “helping” Etta (read: making sure she doesn’t take off with it) bring a valuable time traveling artifact back to the Ironwood family.  Etta wants this artifact for her own purposes: to get back to her own time and save someone’s life. Also, you know, to keep it out of the hands of the corrupt Ironwood family.  I loved how Etta's mom had given her a map of sorts without actually giving her a map.  Or any idea that she could time travel.  Or that time travel was an actual thing.  Whatever, it was awesome.

Of course Nicholas and Etta fall in love along the way.  The build up of this relationship was perfect. There's a lot of denying their own feelings, which was frustrating, but in the best possible way.  I'm a sucker for a good 'this will never work' couple.  I really loved seeing how their views (stemming from their different time periods) on race affected their relationship.  Nicholas’s amazement that they would be able to dance together out in the open in her time was such a lovely moment.

Although there was a lot of set up to get through in the beginning, I loved Passenger.  Having an evil-ish ruling family and a treasure hunt through time was such cool way to see all different periods of history.  Etta and Nicholas have such a complex relationship and were the perfect duo to travel through time with.  Of course, we’re left with a little bit of a cliffhanger, so I can’t wait to see what Wayfarer brings!

Waiting on Wednesday (57)

Title: The Dark Days Club

Author: Alison Goodman

Pub Date: 1.26.16

London, April 1812. On the eve of eighteen-year-old Lady Helen Wrexhall’s presentation to the queen, one of her family’s housemaids disappears-and Helen is drawn into the shadows of Regency London. There, she meets Lord Carlston, one of the few who can stop the perpetrators: a cabal of demons infiltrating every level of society. Dare she ask for his help, when his reputation is almost as black as his lingering eyes? And will her intelligence and headstrong curiosity wind up leading them into a death trap? 

Top Ten Tuesday (89)

This week's topic is 2015 releases I totally meant to get to (but didn't).  Listen, my TBR pile grows at an alarming rate, sometimes sacrifices have to be made.

It's just not realistic.

1. Queen of Shadows - Sarah Maas
2. Red Queen - Victoria Aveyard
3. The Winner's Crime - Marie Rutkowski
4. The Darkest Part of the Forest - Holly Black
5. All the Rage - Courtney Summers
6. Things We Know By Heart - Jessi Kirby
7. I'll Meet You There - Heather Demetrios
8. Slasher Girls and Monster Boys
9. Lock & Mori - Heather W. Petty
10. Soulprint - Megan Miranda

It looks like i failed in all genres last year.  I've already prioritized a bunch of these for the coming months, so fingers crossed I'm able to check some of these off by the end of this year.  Is there anything you guys missed out on last year that you're going to try to attempt again?

Firsts - Laurie Elizabeth Flynn

Title: Firsts

Author: Laurie Elizabeth Flynn

Pages: 320

Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin

Source: Netgalley

Goodreads rating: 

About: Seventeen-year-old Mercedes Ayres has an open-door policy when it comes to her bedroom, but only if the guy fulfills a specific criteria: he has to be a virgin. Mercedes lets the boys get their awkward, fumbling first times over with, and all she asks in return is that they give their girlfriends the perfect first time- the kind Mercedes never had herself.

Keeping what goes on in her bedroom a secret has been easy- so far. Her absentee mother isn’t home nearly enough to know about Mercedes’ extracurricular activities, and her uber-religious best friend, Angela, won’t even say the word “sex” until she gets married. But Mercedes doesn’t bank on Angela’s boyfriend finding out about her services and wanting a turn- or on Zach, who likes her for who she is instead of what she can do in bed.
When Mercedes’ perfect system falls apart, she has to find a way to salvage her reputation and figure out where her heart really belongs in the process. Funny, smart, and true-to-life, FIRSTS is a one-of-a-kind young adult novel about growing up.

I’m going to say it right up front, Firsts made me feel like an old.  Which I am, so, I mean, that’s fine.  It’s just that not much really makes me feel that way.  I consider myself a connoisseur of teen media (all mediums- from movies and TV shows to books and music) and when something makes me sit up and count my actual years I take notice.  I really liked it, as you can tell from my Goodreads rating, but it sort of made me uncomfortable?  Like, at the start, Mercedes is very confident in what she’s doing and very sure that she’s in the right.  She definitely acts older than she is, projecting a maturity and behaving in a way that is a little unsettling to me, a self-confessed old.

Firsts is a different ‘first time’ story than we usually see in the YA world.  Mercedes had a bad experience for her first time, which isn’t explored in detail right away, and then starts devirginizing boys in service to their girlfriends.  She teaches these boys some moves and really just some basic ‘how-to treat a girl so she feels like she matters to you and you’re not just an a-hole trying to bang her’ things.  I like that we come into this story when Mercedes is done with this whole set up.  She’s helped 10 virgins, that was her cap, and she wants to move on.  Except that she doesn’t stop and everything starts spiraling out of her control.

I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop the whole time.  This arrangement is not a good one.  She was taking a whole lot on faith that these boys wouldn’t say anything to anyone just because they wouldn’t want their girlfriends to find out.  I’ll say it again – teenage boys not talking about sleeping with a hot girl for no reason except not wanting their girlfriend’s to find out.  I don’t have that much faith in teenagers.  If they don’t give a crap about actually having sex with someone who isn’t their girlfriend, I can’t imagine they would care about talking about it.

I think the stand out part of this book lies in its characters very complicated relationships with each other.  Mercedes and her mom don’t get along: her mom tries to be hip and young, while she craves a “normal mom.”  Angela and Mercedes are best friends, but Angela is totally in the dark about her best friend’s sexcapades and thinks she is a good little prayer groupie, just like her.  Mercedes feels drawn to Faye, the new girl in school, and can’t tell if she wants to be her or be with her.  Zack, her ‘Wednesday friend,’ the only boy she sleeps with for herself, wants an actual relationship, but Mercedes keeps him relegated to Wednesday fuck buddy.  I was really rooting for Zack the whole time.  He was such a good guy, but also really well developed.  He wasn’t just a doormat who was in love with Mercedes.  He kept putting himself out there, but he got hurt, he got angry, does some dumb things, and knows that he deserves better than being kept at arms length.

This book did a really good job of keeping Mercedes’s past hidden until exactly the right moment.  She has trauma in her past (that I’m not going to spoil here, it really keeps you invested), but it all brings her to where she is at the beginning of the book and what she’s doing.  You could feel something hanging over her, but Flynn does a really good job of playing the cards close, so the reveal is very satisfying.

I enjoyed this fresh take on the YA first time, even though it made me feel all of my years on this planet.  The characters were interesting and well written, and although I found parts of the plot hard to believe, it didn’t lessen my enjoyment of the story at all.  I love when YA pushes the perceived boundaries a bit (Shut Out by Kody Keplinger comes to mind) and I’m looking forward to seeing what Laurie Elizabeth Flynn comes out with next!

Waiting on Wednesday (56)

Hosted by Breaking the Spine

Title: The Love That Split the World

Author: Emily Henry

Pub Date: 1.26.16

Natalie Cleary must risk her future and leap blindly into a vast unknown for the chance to build a new world with the boy she loves. 

Natalie’s last summer in her small Kentucky hometown is off to a magical start... until she starts seeing the “wrong things.” They’re just momentary glimpses at first—her front door is red instead of its usual green, there’s a pre-school where the garden store should be. But then her whole town disappears for hours, fading away into rolling hills and grazing buffalo, and Nat knows something isn’t right.

That’s when she gets a visit from the kind but mysterious apparition she calls “Grandmother,” who tells her: “You have three months to save him.” The next night, under the stadium lights of the high school football field, she meets a beautiful boy named Beau, and it’s as if time just stops and nothing exists. Nothing, except Natalie and Beau.

Emily Henry’s stunning debut novel is Friday Night Lights meets The Time Traveler’s Wife, and perfectly captures those bittersweet months after high school, when we dream not only of the future, but of all the roads and paths we’ve left untaken.

Top Ten Tuesday (88)

Hosted by The Broke and the Bookish

This week's topic is

I'm going to break this down into personal and blogging resolutions.  First up, personal:

1. Participate in every Flex It Pink virtual 5k this year.  I did two of these last year with some friends and they were a lot of fun.  It's a regular 5k (or 10k, if you prefer), but you do it in your own space, on your own time.  There's no giant crowd of people and no finish line.  If you do all six races you get an extra finisher's medal, which is what I'm shooting for this year.

2. Save more money.  I am captain I need that this instant and then when it gets in my house I don't know what to do with it or where to put it.  I'm sure there are better things to do with my money besides buy 18,000 vinyl pops. (Maybe.)

3. Go outside more.  I write this on the coldest day of the season so far, but really.  I need to leave my couch no matter how much I don't want to.

4. Cut down the amount of concerts I attend.  Last year I felt kind of stressed every time I had a concert to go to and that was no fun.  Now, I already have two concerts lined up for this year, but I'm going to try my best to keep the number low.  That may be difficult depending on the state of Rooney, who, out of nowhere, announced a new song and more announcements in 2016.  On the flip side, One Direction's taking a break, so that means I'm already at least two shows down from where I usually sit.

5. Clear out the clutter.  I don't know if I mentioned this, but I freaking love stuff.  This makes for a really cramped living space.  I'm going to do my best to purge the things that I truly don't need anymore.  This way when I inevitably buy new vinyl pops (what is wrong with me) they can occupy the previously occupied spaces and not my bed.

My blogging resolutions can be summed up as 'be better':

6. Finish the challenges that I sign up for this year.  I haven't even picked them all out yet, but I know I want to finish them.  I've decided to stick with 100 books for my Goodreads goal and I've signed up for the Debut Author Challenge, so hopefully I can find some new authors to love this year.

7. Write more reviews.  I feel like I say this every year, but it's because I suck at it.  I read a ton of books, but then don't review them.  I'm going to keep my review notebook in my purse so I can write on the go, maybe that will help.

8. Be more inspired.  A couple months into the year I usually lose my blogging steam.  I get not excited about my posts and it's easier to just not blog.  I'm going to try not to let that happen this year.

9. Give my library card a workout.  Not going to BEA or ALA this year is going to hit me where it hurts - new releases.  I'm going to do my best to not let these slide on by and instead get them from my library.

10. While I'm on the library topic, I'm also going to try to not rack up fines.  I am literally the worst because the only reason I usually have fines is because I'm too lazy to drag my ass over to the library to return my stuff.  Like honestly, I took out a book before Christmas, finished it, renewed it because I didn't make it back to the library before Christmas, forgot to bring it back, accrued fines, and renewed it again.  This book is still in my room.  Please don't yell at me, I'm trying to be better.

So that's it.  #goals for 2016. How are you guys planning on making this year better than the last?

New year, new blogging habits???

Happy 2016 everybody!  I just wanted to write a little update post because it's been a while.  This year I'm trying to get myself re-inspired to blog consistently.  Usually that would start with updating the look of my blog, but I still really dig the graphics, so I'm going to keep them as is.  I'm looking for some new weekly memes as well as some challenges to make this year's reading exciting.

I've decided I'm going to once again participate in the Debut Author Challenge over at That Artsy Reader Girl.  The last time I did this one it helped me find some awesome new authors that have gone on my auto-buy list, so I'm really looking forward to trying it again.



A big change that I'm making this year is that I'm not planning on going to any of the trade shows.  They moved BEA to Chicago and while I would love to make the trip, I have a lot of weddings that I'm attending right around that date and can't justify taking another couple of days off.  I had thoughts about going to ALA Midwinter, but I just couldn't get myself together for it.  This means that it's going to be a lot more work for me to find new titles coming out.  If you're excited about something that you think I would be excited about too, shout it out!  I'm always looking for new books to love.

Anyway, I hope the first two days of this year have treated you well and you're just as pumped as I am to dive into another great year of reading! 

The Lost Girl - R.L. Stine

Title: The Lost Girl
Author: R.L. Stine
Pages: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Source: Netgalley
About: New student Lizzy Palmer is the talk of Shadyside High. Michael and his girlfriend Pepper befriend her, but the closer they get to her, the stranger she seems… and the more attractive she is to Michael. He invites her to join him on a snowmobile race that ends in a tragic accident. Soon, Michael's friends start being murdered, and Pepper becomes convinced that Lizzy is behind the killings. But to her total shock, she and Michael are drawn into a tragic story of an unthinkable betrayal committed over 60 years ago. 

I haven't read an R.L. Stine book in a million years, so when I saw this up on Netgalley I thought it would be the perfect inaugural book for my scary October reads.  

If you've read a Fear Street book before, you know what you're getting into.  Crazy paranormal plots happening to normal teenage kids that have no idea what they're in for, but generally come out unscathed.   This one is no different.  It starts off with the story of Beth, a teenager in the 50s (with secret supernatural powers, of course) whose dad is gruesomely murdered in front of her before we're abruptly shoved into present times.  The present story, as the description states, is centered around Michael and his friends and a mysterious new girl that shows up in town - I wonder who that could be.  Michael hits someone when he's riding on a snowmobile with his friends and they flee, only to come back to discover the body has gone missing.  When he starts getting threatening messages, he can't figure out if he's being haunted or hunted.  Then his friends start being picked off and Michael doesn't know how to stop it.   I will say, there is a lot of casual death in this book - like, one of the friends die and the day after Michael is like, 'I can't believe my dad didn't tell me he got new snowmobiles at the store.'  It's a little disconcerting.  The resolution ties itself back into the 50s storyline, as one would expect.  

Now, this book wasn't even a little bit scary and it so reads like a book from the 90s, but every once in a while you want that nostalgia read.  If you loved Fear Street or Goosebumps as a kid, you will definitely get a kick out of The Lost Girl.

Tonight the Streets Are Ours - Leila Sales

Title: Tonight the Streets Are Ours

Author: Leila Sales

Pages: 342

Publisher: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

Source: BEA15

About: Seventeen-year-old Arden Huntley is recklessly loyal. Taking care of her loved ones is what gives Arden purpose in her life and makes her feel like she matters. But she's tired of being loyal to people who don't appreciate her—including her needy best friend and her absent mom. 

Arden finds comfort in a blog she stumbles upon called "Tonight the Streets Are Ours," the musings of a young New York City writer named Peter. When Peter is dumped by the girlfriend he blogs about, Arden decides to take a road trip to see him.During one crazy night out in NYC filled with parties, dancing, and music—the type of night when anything can happen, and nearly everything does—Arden discovers that Peter isn't exactly who she thought he was. And maybe she isn't exactly who she thought she was, either.

I feel like I flew right through this book.  The pacing was perfect, and physically splitting it into parts one and two really made sense for this story.  This book takes on a lot of things – different manifestations of love, people not being who you thought they were or who you wanted them to be, learning that you can’t live your life in a way that prioritizes and protects other people all the time…but it never felt like too much. 

I really liked Arden.  She’s lived her whole life according to this mantra that (the book’s version of) the Pleasant Company came up with for her when she won their doll of the year contest: recklessly loyal.  She even takes the punishment for her best friend Lindsey when she brings drugs to school.  (Note: this is an insane thing to do.  Do not try this at home.)  RECKLESS.  This is the event that really kicks off Arden feeling like no one would go to such lengths for her.  Not her best friend, not her boyfriend, not even her family who she is barely holding together.  Who, at some point, hasn’t felt like this?  Arden finds some solace in a blog asking the same question, “Why doesn’t anybody love me as much as I love them?”  She becomes obsessed with the story of Peter and Bianca.

A conflagration of events leads Arden to take off for the night with Lindsey in tow in search of Peter.  I think one of my favorite things about this story was that Sales didn’t take Peter too far into villainous territory.  It’s too easy at this point to play the ‘I’m not who I say I am on the internet, I’m actually a terrible monster’ card.  I like that Peter was the Peter from the blog, but Arden didn’t have the whole picture.  Of course she didn’t, we try to be our best selves on the internet.  Also, everyone doesn’t interpret our actions the way we do, they all have a different perspective.  All that being said, he did leave out/change some major details.

I really liked the parallels between Peter and Arden’s mom.  I liked Lindsey and have definitely had friendships just like this, that feel not totally one sided, but like you’re definitely giving more than the other person.  You can’t really force yourself to give less and you definitely can’t make them care more.  It’s really frustrating.  I also, as I may have mentioned, really dig tight timeframe stories and this really worked with the bulk of the story spanning one night.  Overall this was a win for me and I will definitely be looking out for more from Leila Sales.