Chime by Franny Billingsley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Ok, so five stars, and here is why: this book richly deserves five stars. It is BEAUTIFULLY written. It is not, however, going to seem beautifully written to many or even most people, for the very reason it is a dark-twisty-wonderful mess of beauty.

I won’t lie, it almost lost me. I was about 30% of the way through when I stopped reading and started looking for something else. Reading the first half of this book, to me, was a lot like a reading assignment for school. I’m an English major who enjoys poetry only when it is not force fed. And that (being an English major) gives me the authority to refer to the twisty rabbit warren mind of Briony, the narrator, in this first part. It is complex, it is boring, but BOY HOWDY will it all start to make sense later.

Take it in, slowly. Small chunks. Pace yourself, take your time, be patient with this book. Let yourself get bored, but please please try to finish it, because it is so worth the effort!

Usually I have trouble immersing myself into anything that isn’t info-dump-tastic and incredibly oversimplified without massive distrust of the author’s skill, and to a certain extent that happened here. Once I started to figure out what was going on in the story, my brain was highjacked, my disbelief suspended.

The characters were really well done. My favorite part of the story is Elderic. I am usually not so susceptible to male characters, but I couldn’t help but be charmed. He was just so dang understanding and raffish and frankly calling any man leonine is enough to make my imagination do implausible things.

Ok, now I’m just gushing and not saying anything particularly useful. My final remark is that I liked this book for the same reason I love Diana Wynne Jones’ Fire & Hemlock. There are some similarities, but mostly I am referring to the fact that it’s hard to tell exactly what is going on but you love it all the same.

Just read it, all the way through. I probably will again soon.

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How to Be Popular by Meg Cabot
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Ok, so I picked up a copy of this book in a thrift store and it just happened to be autographed! I couldn’t just LEAVE it there. And I also couldn’t NOT read it. So after I read Jinx, which I also found in the same thrift store, I gave it a go.

And I liked it, sure. But given how incredibly similar the elements of the characters and even some of the story was, well… Let’s just say I wasn’t bowled over. But I liked it.

Meg Cabot is absolutely knock-your-socks-off wonderful, but she’s proven that she has her highs (Mediator series) and her lows (Insatiable). I’d say that if I were the intended age, this book would have fallen somewhere in the middle. But since I’ve long since left high school, I am very meh about it. A good meh, though. A worth-reading-if-you-have-the-spare-time meh.

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Bossypants by Tina Fey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I like Tina Fey a lot. I think she’s a really good female role model, and hilarious to boot (or maybe that should have gone first, since that is basically the foundation of her career). Bossypants was funny, but not hilarious. The self-deprecating humor I usually appreciate actually read a lot like, gasp, humility, a good amount of the time.

It was a good read, and funny, and I gained a lot of insight as to what she’s gone through to get where she is today, and how under-appreciated women comediennes are and have been. But if I hadn’t already loved her, I doubt the book would have interested me much at all, which is sad to say. Because I do love her, and I guess that means I came in with unreasonable expectations. Ah well, my love for Tina Fey is forgiving. And I always refer to her that way, Tina Fey, not just a single name, like every cute boy I never had a chance with in school.

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Storm Born by Richelle Mead
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I picked this paperback up in a thrift store for 35 cents, after reading the blurb. I almost never do this, because the blurbs can be well written, and the books hilariously, well, not.

This one was! Well-written, I mean. Granted, I don’t like Tucson, AZ very much (I’m from a desert and they are awful places to be) and it is a paranormal romance (I think?) which is not my thing, usually, but I like it. It was fresh, and the shaman bit was pretty cool.

The whole thing smacked loudly of a 15 years-more-modern Anita Blake, minus the heavy-ego-hardboiled-detective aspect mixed in with Hamilton’s other Meredith Gentry series. Which I have read, ad nauseum. Maybe I should not spend so much time knocking Laurell K. Hamilton’s authorly choices if I am going to read all of them.

Hopefully as this series continues it will also stay minus the absurd amount of group sex…because I went out and bought the next three. And was ashamed to see, printed on every cover “Author of the Vampire Academy series.”

Well, as Storm Born’s blurb says, “A girl’s gotta eat.”

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The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’m not sure I have it in me to go into a really descriptive review of this novel. But I will say a few things about my response to it.

1) It made me sad. Well, sadder. I was already pretty sad for a number of reasons and this book did not help. It’s about a girl who is a victim to all of the emotions in the world. Her brother is mentally and later physically absent from her life, her dad gives up, and her mother is an incredibly selfish, self-absorbed woman, and Rose suffers a lot of disappointment.

2) It did not give me any closure. There is not a single event in Rose’s life (including her discovery of the French cafe with lovingly made food), that gives her any (seemingly) real happiness, nor does it give the reader fulfillment or catharsis.

3) I was totally engrossed. This book is really very well written. Just don’t read it when you’re down in the dumps.

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Lola and the Boy Next Door by Stephanie Perkins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Stephanie Perkins is amazing. Her characters are better developed than I am as a living human being, and the way she traverses her settings makes you feel like you’ve known the place your whole life.

I read Anna and the French Kiss two and half times consequtively when it first came out, and I don’t like romance centered fiction! SHE’S THAT GOOD.

Lola and the Boy Next Door is wonderful, though not quite as good as her debut, but the elements of teenager-hood and heartbreak and romance are all there, in such a realistic way it’s astounding they read like fiction. The character of Cricket Bell didn’t intrigue me the same way Etienne St. Clair did in A&tFK (truthfully I was more into Max, woof) but I will rave about Stephanie Perkins anyway. She can do whatever the hell she wants and I will eat that shit up because she holds the key to the pathetic, sappy, forever-sixteen-year-old inside of me.

Okay now I’m kind of mind-boggled by how long it’s been since I was sixteen.

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Death’s Daughter by Amber Benson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I came into this book with absurdly high expectations, which was totally unfair to Amber Benson. Like most, I loved her in Buffy and expected Joss Whedon-esque humor and darkness and campy fun.

What I got was…different. Because she is not Joss Whedon (stay with me here, I don’t plan to Captain Obvious my way through the whole thing) and well, she’s also not a bad writer. It’s just that I have no interest in reading about a self-absorbed fashion glutton with a mediocre sense of humor. But I finished the book. And then I read the second.

Positive aspects of this book include the array of mythological creatures employed, and the original concept. That is one good book blurb. The book itself? Meh. Not for everyone. Especially the snobbish ones who have pretensions of literary taste.

Will I continue to read the series? Possibly. I’m tempted by the romance cliff-hanger and Callie’s evolving personality (it IS evolving!) but I imagine the series will always take a backseat until I get really bored.

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The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Clicking that fifth star is a pretty big commitment. People will expect you to have some seriously well reasoned and thoughtful/thought provoking things to say about the book in question.

Frankly, right now I really couldn’t write the review that could do this book justice. Because it was really fucking good. But it was also a little sad, and a lot more truly honest.

Which, really, is why John Green is so good at what he does, because he can write a story that can seem completely impossible and wonderful and totally realistic all at once, and you can stop yourself believing it is totally made up. Because you really want to think such things can happen, to anyone. To you. And that is pretty awesome.

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