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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Cat’s Claw by Amber Benson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I gave the first book of the serious a pretty heavy “meh.” I’m going to go ahead and lighten up that meh an octave or so, but still retain the fleshy meh-ness of my response.

This book is not amazing. It is neither wildly entertaining nor emotionally engaging. But if you are ever really really bored on a rainy day and you like mythology, go for it. Egypt in particular is featured here, but there be no dragons.

If this series ever gets up to a 6th or 7th book, I am going to be EXCITED. It’ll be probably be amazeballs. I’ll get back to you on the subject then.

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Mastiff by Tamora Pierce
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Truth be told, it had been so long since I read the first Beka Cooper book, Terrier that I’d forgotten a lot of Beka’s history, and so long since I read Bloodhound that I’d clean forgotten all of that, so Mastiff took me quite some time to get into.

I will preface this by saying I ADORE Tamora Pierce’s books. Adore them. I have over twenty (or thirty?) much loved copies of her Tortall and Circle books, and I love them all to figurative pieces. That being said, Mastiff was not what I was expecting. I still liked Beka’s character throughout all of it, especially with the hard choice she faced with Tunstall, or, that it wasn’t even a choice for her.

What I guess I didn’t like (here it comes, I cringe already) was how dry of the deepening romance that usually develops throughout her books it was. Yes, yes, I realize I am complaining about a lack of romance. Please kill me, I don’t know who this monster is that I’ve become. But seriously, where did the attraction to Farmer come from? I can make as many arguments about Beka being an independent woman who was single-mindedly focused on her work as the next (more rational) person, but the thing I think I liked about Beka from the get-go was her frank awareness of herself and the people around her. That Farmer evolved in her opinion could, I guess, be why she loved him, but I think her cop-like propensity for sizing up a person as objectively as possible (i.e. admitting she is attracted to them in her inner narrative) wouldn’t have allowed that. Anyway, I’m only annoyed because I wanted her to end up with Rosto. I totally understand WHY she couldn’t (law-abiding blah blah) but that doesn’t make me less of an idiotic shipper who can’t appreciate the book for its loftier themes. I’m all about the ‘ships baby.

Ugh, hate myself.

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Inheritance by Christopher Paolini
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read Eragon years ago; when it first came out I was in high school. I initially picked it up because of its length; it takes a serious beast of a book to last me out more than a few hours. I liked it then, and it has stood up to my one or two re-readings. Eldest and Brisingr, not so much. The writing kept getting more and more florid, the angst seemed less natural and more contrived, and dear, sweet God, the humor was so, so forced.

But the thing I did like about the series, and the reason I have actually sat down and read the dang things all the way through is the imagination and epic scale of the story. I liked the mystery of Angela (and the description of her flanged armor. Cool.), the culture of the different races, even the way the dragons were different or better explored than all of the dragons I’d read before. Paolini may lack the ability to come up with seriously funny dialogue (but to be fair, so do I. It’s pretty hard) but he really managed to pull that story together. Even down to the giant man-eating snails. Inheritance really wasn’t bad, and for the ending of a long series, and the closing of a story that had woven itself a lot of loose ends to tie together (whatever happened to Folkvir? Did the poor horse just hang out in the forest until Eragon remembered commanding him to stay there?) it did a pretty good job.

In fact, considering I spent the week or so before I read Inheritance re-reading the series just to refresh my memory, it slid pretty seamlessly in place in the narrative. I would have trouble telling you where the book began in the story’s timeline, which, on the one hand means it was consistent, but on the other hand means that Paolini’s stunted and sometimes downright awkward prose and inconsistently formal-ish and “archaic” dialogue didn’t improve at all.

So, in summary (tl;dr): Inheritance tied up the story pretty well, but its strengths didn’t outshine the previous books, and its weaknesses didn’t diminish. A nice solid read, but nothing amazing.

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The 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.

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