Category Archives: 4 stars

Review: Devilish by Maureen Johnson

Posted on by — Leave a reply

DevilishDevilish by Maureen Johnson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Jane Jarvis and Allison Concord are desperate to get through senior year at St. Teresa’s Preparatory School for Girls, where barbed wire keeps the boys out and the ancient nuns keep the girls in.

Jane and Allison have always been too quirky and different to be popular, but at least they’ve had each other. Then, after a hideous, embarrassing disaster, Allison comes to school transformed. Suddenly she has cute hair and clothes. She’s fluent in Latin, she won’t even speak to Jane, and within days she’s stolen Jane’s ex-boyfriend, Elton.

A strangely wise freshman boy, Owen, helps Jane discover the outrageous truth–that Allison has sold her soul to the devil. At first Jane doesn’t quite buy it. She plays along with the weirdness–and even gambles her own soul in order to rescue Allison. But events take a turn for the real, and Jane will have to save Allison before the bizarrely exclusive Poodle Prom, a party of biblical proportions that just might blow apart the world as Jane knows it.

So, I love Maureen Johnson’s personality. I’ve only had a chance to read a few of her books but I’ve noticed a certain disparity between her ability to be the best writer ever and actual evidence of that. For instance, I loved The Name of the Star but was underwhelmed by 13 Little Blue Envelopes. I still liked it, sure, but the pacing and the characters were so very different from NoTS and MJ’s wonderful zany Twitter delightfulness. I figured that it could have just been a sort of chronological developing process. But then I read Devilish.

I really liked this book you guys. It’s a really great read, and actually reminded me a good deal of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and Good Omens (w/ Terry Pratchett).

It wasn’t entirely perfect, but it has definitely shored up my opinion of MJ’s novels. I am not at all afraid to delve into her older works as I was before. Because like the song goes, I wanna keep on loving you, MJ. *pats*

View all my reviews

Review: The Girl Who Chased the Moon by Sarah Addison Allen

Posted on by — Leave a reply

The Girl Who Chased the MoonThe Girl Who Chased the Moon by Sarah Addison Allen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I rant and rave about Sarah Addison Allen a lot, but she’s just so good at what she does. Granted, what she does is very formulaic, but I really like the formula.

Sleepy southern towns with very particular social circles and sets of rules, prickly oppressive mothers and society types, lots of traditions, rebellion, repressed or unrequited feelings and usually a protagonist who really hasn’t found him or herself fully, yet. And magic.

Sign. Me. Up.

As willing as I am to love these stories, I am not so blinded by love that I can’t see their flaws, too. The Girl Who Chased the Moon had every single thing that Allen’s books always have, but for some reason the emotional connection wasn’t there. There were a lot of characters who could have received more stage time and really yanked on my unraveling heart-strings, like Stella, Vance, and the character breezily mentioned throughout but not introduced at the end.

Emily could have gone to high school and been tormented more than the normal, high school-standard amount. Win could have a personality, not just a completely baseless (other than hormonal) motive. Julia could have been more reserved, emotionally scarred. Sawyer could have been more reserved, more emotionally scarred. I mean, that whole “Alexander men” thing was just tossed at me and then snatched away. I want depth and family legends damnit! Speaking of…

The family legend thing could have been explored in more depth. To sum up, a LOT of things that could have really enriched this book lay fallow in the field.

But it was still a very good read. I can only hope that in any subsequent stories Sara Addison Allen will be in top form and will emotionally devastate me just the way I like it.

View all my reviews

Review: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender

Posted on by — Leave a reply

The Particular Sadness of Lemon CakeThe 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.

View all my reviews

Review: Lola and the Boy Next Door by Stephanie Perkins

Posted on by — Leave a reply

Lola and the Boy Next DoorLola 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.

View all my reviews

Review: The Sugar Queen by Sarah Addison Allen

Posted on by — Leave a reply

The Sugar QueenThe Sugar Queen by Sarah Addison Allen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I love Sarah Addison Allen, and I loved The Sugar Queen almost as much as I loved Garden Spells and much more than what I’ve read of her other novels, even though I managed to figure out a major plot twist pretty early in. Despite the minor element of predictability the rest of the book was excellent.

One thing I DIDN’T like is how Josey Cirrini is described as being unattractive so much early on, but after she starts dressing better and wearing makeup the other characters consider her pretty. This sets up a number of assumptions about standards of beauty that I don’t quite care to address, since there is a character limit for these reviews that I could EASILY exceed.

View all my reviews

Review: Sunshine by Robin McKinley

Posted on by — Leave a reply

SunshineSunshine by Robin McKinley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I finished this book a few weeks ago and have pretty mixed (but mostly positive) feelings about it. I certainly liked it a great deal, but I did have trouble with the idea of Robin McKinley writing a book about a human who ultimately has some sort of physical or romantic attachment to a vampire. Even though she started out amazingly by portraying Sunshine’s fear and disgust of the inhuman and repulsive vampires, in the end it kind of warped into the same old over-done thing.

I wasn’t as shocked by the language as a lot of other readers seemed to have been, probably because I’ve read much, much, more gratuitous language in urban fantasy and been summarily disgusted with it. I was surprised, but since it was brief I didn’t think it was so bad. This is definitely McKinley writing for a more mature audience, which is good because there is no shortage of darkness in Sunshine.

Nor is there a shortage of baking. If you don’t want to go mad from sugar cravings, be prepared with cinnamon rolls beforehand. I have become quite the aficionado for homemade cinnamon rolls from scratch since reading this book. After spooning honey out of a jar while reading Chalice I should have known to be prepared.

In short, Sunshine was a nice, solid read, as long as I like books to be (since I read through them so quickly) with tons of imagination and very little for me to criticize. I’ll look forward to a sequel, if it ever materializes.

View all my reviews

Review: The Magicians and Mrs. Quent (Mrs. Quent, #1) by Galen Beckett

Posted on by — Leave a reply

The Magicians and Mrs. Quent (Mrs. Quent, #1)The Magicians and Mrs. Quent by Galen Beckett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It’s Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, + Jane Eyre + “magick”. Seriously. But in a good way? Sort of?

I’ve also read reviews that say that much of the plot in the first-person-narrated-for-reasons-indecipherable-to-the-reader-and-probably-the-author-too second part is based on Turn of the Screw, which I haven’t read, but probably will now.

Don’t get me wrong, the plot rip-offs aren’t as bothersome as they should be, mostly because they’re intentional. It says almost-clearly on the book jacket that author Galen Beckett wrote the series to explore the question of what it would be like if there was a solid reason women in 19th century literature functioned the way they seem to do. Or something. Does this get cleared up in the novel? No. But it’s kind of fun to read. It doesn’t really tax the brain, given you can pretty much guarantee what will happen next (I was kind of disappointed Gennivel Quent wasn’t inside the locked room, to be honest. Her character would have been interesting), and the scientifically impossible day/night lengths thing is pretty interesting, even if it is reminiscent of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series and its long winter/summer seasons, as well as the mythology of this alternate world, and the function of the illusionists (I’m still not sure what differentiates them from magicians and whether or not they’re human), the magicians, and the witches in the general hierarchy of magic in relation to the plot.

Pretty much I’m hoping the second and third books in the series will tie up some loose ends (like what was up with Westen?) and lend this “experiment” some credibility. I placed a lot of trust in Galen Beckett as an author with whom I am unfamiliar and un-endorsed, and I didn’t dislike the book. I just wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to anyone without a large store of patience or a rabid love for the genre(s).

View all my reviews

Review: How To Be Good by Nick Hornby

Posted on by — Leave a reply

How To Be GoodHow To Be Good by Nick Hornby
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The first two pages of this book are hilarious, and the narrative stays consistently amusing beyond that point. The characters’ limited perspectives are so wonderfully flat and self-centered! Not a single character in this book desires to actually be good, not if it interferes with their self-righteousness or their conception of what, exactly, the term entails. Katie Carr is a wonderful unreliable narrator, funny and sarcastic and a seeming projection of the mind of every guilty liberal stuck on his or her First World problems.
How To Be Good is a highly polished mirror held up to society with the same cold, sharp objectivity Hornby can bring to seemingly any type of character, along with his gift of the over-warm, squishy embarrassment of everyday life delivered perfectly on the page with uncomfortable accuracy. The in-depth examination of what it is to be good, and be human at once really hit home for me, and I’d recommend it to anyone interested in a smart novel guaranteed to make you examine one’s own state of “Good-ness”.

View all my reviews