Book Review - Hunger

Hunger by Michael Grant
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Gone series began with the vanishing of all adults - everyone aged 15 or over - leaving behind only children, babies to be cared for, and a handful of pre-teens with sudden, unexpected responsibilities they aren't exactly ready for. When a fight broke out between the two factions in town - those from the private school on the hill, as it were, and the townies from public school - it nearly became a war. After the dust settled, the kids realized that while living on chips and candy had been fun, they'd let the fresh food rot on the shelves, and were now down to making meals out of a jar of gravy or relish.

They were hungry. And angry. And looking for someone to blame. Those who they had trusted responsibility to seemed to have disappointed them. And it was time for a rebellion.

Meanwhile, Caine had not recovered, as the ipso facto leader of the Coates Academy (private school) kids from his humiliating defeat. His time under the mine with "The Darkness" - possibly the cause of the curses these kids have had to bear - has infected him with a madness that seems unrelenting. His second, Drake, with his mutation of his whip hand, also granted by The Darkness - has only grown more evil and power hungry while Caine has been partially disabled by the invader in his mind. They hatch a plot which at first seems to be to torture the Townies (in reality, it is in service to their master, The Darkness) which Sam and Astrid will have to work hard to overcome.

This follow-up stays true to the original book; I wasn't bored at all. It's entertaining and a quick read, and again is well-written and makes you forget it's a YA book.

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Book Review - Salem Falls

Salem Falls by Jodi Picoult
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Some people have all the bad luck.

Jack seems to be one of them. Though he was born to wealth and priveledge, he was falsely accused of rape by one of his students when working as a high school teacher and soccer coach. On the advice of his lawyer, he took a plea bargain in the case, serving only eight months compared to the many years he would serve if convicted. But what he lost was formidable; his career, his best friend (the cop who arrested him), his mother (a woman's advocate who would not abide someone who would hurt women in her family), his home, and even his pride, thanks to the tougher guys in prison with him. When he gets out of prison, he picks a small town at random to start over, and things begin to look up; he finds a job, and is taken by his beautiful boss, and even makes a friend in her father.

But once word gets around town about his past, a vindictive teenager decides to do the unthinkable, and once again, Jack finds himself falsely accused.

I like Picoult as an author, and there isn't one of her books that I haven't really liked. This was no exception. While I didn't find it as absolutely riveting as some of her others, I was still drawn in and enveloped in the world she created. Like most of her books, this is very character driven, and her precisely drawn people of all sorts that populate the town will affect you; some will anger you, some make you sad, some make you reflect. The wonderful thing is, though, how very poignantly they make you feel for them, and that's the real beauty of this piece.

That, and the fun of the courtroom drama. If Picoult ever decides to go law and order, Grisham better look out!

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Book Review - The Fox Inheritance

The Fox Inheritance by Mary E. Pearson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was... Well, it was a book. Yeah.

It started off interesting enough. The concept, in fact, was one I found fascinating; after a serious accident, the brains of three young people were downloaded to preserve them and somehow keep them alive. One had an artificial body created for her. Two sat on a shelf for more than 200 years before someone did the same for them. The trouble is, they were awake and aware and trapped the whole time. Imagine what that might do to a mind, and how they might adjust whee given a body again?

That said, the storytelling is slow in places, trips over itself (a bot who it just said can't breathe taking a deep breath for instance) and loses all momentum about three quarters through. The characters lose focus, are not so bright for minds that are supposed to be brilliant... I just had so many problems. Everything fell apart in the second half, but three stars for a unique concept and interesting beginning.

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Book Review - Tricks

Tricks by Ellen Hopkins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Brilliantly written with remarkable prose and a-little-too-good poetry (to believe it was written by the teens in the book, anyway!), Tricks is a dark book about the descent into prostitution as told by a varied group of young men and women who wind up on the streets of Las Vegas, with little to trade for their livlihoods other than their bodies.

Tricks exposes the dirty little secret that it isn't just bad kids from bad families who wind up on the streets. Sometimes it's good kids from good families, sometimes it's borderline kids who have a tragedy. Sometimes their parents push them out there, even if they don't want to be. Every kid's story is different, and heartbreaking, and very real.

I cried a couple of times during this book, and teared up at least a dozen times more. I got angry, and felt my heart break, and felt elation in some cases. You can't help but feel for these very poignant characters; they are so true to life, and so young that it just grabs you right around the heart.

This is a great read, but isn't for the faint of heart.

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Book Review - Heart and Soul

Heart and Soul by Maeve Binchy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While this book was a slow starter, it had a nice payoff in the end.

Heart and Soul centers around a Irish clinic that treats patients with heart disease, helping them to learn to live with their condition, rather than dying from it - dietician Lavender holds cooking workshops, trainer Jimmy puts them through their paces in the gym, Dr. Decklan monitoring their health, nurses Fiona and Hillary minding the patients, clerical Anya working her behind off in every way, and administrator Clara overseeing them all.

The chapters are divided into the stories of different characters, so that you are changing perspectives off and on. The book starts with Clara, and while I can't remember the exact order, I do know that I was pretty bored until Anya's story was picked up in Chapter 4. I was considering giving up on the book, to be honest, but once I got into the tale of this lovely Polish immigrant and her troubled background, I was hooked!

The story is very character driven, and there seems to be someone to relate to for everyone who might read this book. There are some hints that several characters are reappearing after being highlighted in other books Binchy has written, but I haven't read enough of her recent work to have known who they were or what the connections might have been. It didn't detract too much from the story, but did pique my curiosity. If there had been more information about the other books, I probably would have picked them up to see the background, but I can't seem to find much info on that. If you have any - let me know!

By the end, I was very wrapped up in this story and stayed up late to finish it. Though parts of the book dragged, overall I really enjoyed it.

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Book Review - The Walking Dead: The Road to Woodbury

The Walking Dead: The Road to Woodbury by Robert Kirkman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

After recently finishing the first book in this prequel series of The Walking Dead, I was really excited to move onto the next; more learning about the history and motivation of characters, more in-depth analysis of the community at Woodbury and how exactly the people there became complacent to the horrors The Governor perpetrated.

Imagine my disappointment when this book turned out to be extra gory and extra violent with no real payoff in the character development department, leaving me with more questions than answers.

This book was okay. I liked some of the new characters that were introduced, but in the end I felt like it went in circles a little bit too much. Instead of introducing new conflicts with the new characters, there was much repetition and lots and lots of gory, zombie slaughtering scenes. I'm not sure if I'll go on to check out others in this series as now I just feel like I wasted a good lot of the time spent reading this.

Why then, does it get three stars instead of a lower rating? I still appreciate an intelligently written horror story. I liked the few surprises that I got, and really enjoyed the first 100 pages or so. At that point I was ready to go 4 star or higher. But the rest of the book left me so unsatisfied that I had to drop the overall rating to a 3.

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Book Review - Dark Life

Dark Life by Kat Falls
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Well, this was another one of those stay-up-til-2 to finish books, where I'm so wired after the ending that I figure I might as well stay up a little longer to pen a review!

In the aftermath of global warming, the earth is almost - but not quite - the vision of WaterWorld we've all worried about since we saw the Kevin Kostner movie. No? That was just me that had those nightmares? Okay, well then. At any rate, almost the full surface of the world is water, with some land peppered here and there (Colorado Islands anyone?) overstuffed with millions of people living in one-room apartments in tiny towers. Except for the pioneers. Homesteaders get 100 acres if they work it for five years. The only catch is, the land is underwater - at the very bottom of the sea.

There is some very fun world building going on in this book, which probably is terribly inaccurate all over the place when it comes to science, but since I know nothing about scuba diving, let alone what it would take to engineer an undersea house (or casino, as the case may be), I just went with it and enjoyed the ride. And a very interesting ride it was, too, full of novel ideas and gorgeously described landscapes that tickled my imagination.

I loved that this book had a male narrator. So many main characters in YA fiction - even the post-apocalyptic sort that I favor - tend to be females. And I know it's because that is who tends to read the stuff, like it or not, but Ty was charming and had a very real and exciting story to tell. I hope there are more in store in this underwater colony, as I'm eager to re-visit the depths, and the fascinating characters there.

The only point I found vaguely unsettling was the way Ty called his parents "Ma and Pa..." sure, they're pioneers, and it hearkens back to Little House on the Prairie and all that, but this is the future, right? I don't think kids are time traveling backwards in terms of their verbiage. It struck me as a little weird; one "off" note in an otherwise lovely piece.

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