(source) Woah! Arena! This book totally took me by surprise. It is a good read, but when I realized how subtle the author was with big ideas I was very, very impressed! Kali Ling is part of a team that plays virtual games for a living. In 2054, you are just as strong in-game as you are in real life so you’re really an athlete if you play professionally. These games are also super popular, so if you play them…
(source) I really didn’t see this book coming. This book is love, pain, losing yourself, finding yourself, happiness, and makes you wonder if you’re doing everything you can to get the most out of life. And it makes you feel like you absolutely must cruise a boat down a river in France. Jean is the proud owner of a bookstore-on-a-barge on the Seine in Paris. He is sure to keep his life absolutely sense-free to keep himself from thinking of…
Throne of Glass was a very up-and-down read for me. The beginning and end were pretty weak for me but the middle was very interesting and exciting. This story follows Celaena, a notorious assassin who was caught and sent to a prison camp with horrific working conditions; most prisoners don’t last three months but Celaena has lasted one year. One day, the crown prince comes to ask her if she will agree to compete as his champion in a search…
After reading Sunshine and seriously loving it, then finding out the same author wrote a story on the classic (and my absolute favorite) Beauty and the Beast, I knew I had to read it. Robin does a great interpretation of this story. In it, Beauty (her real name is Honor but she didn’t like it as a child and everyone started calling her Beauty) has two sisters, Grace and Hope, and they live with their father and brother-in-law. On his…
I was very surprised at how much I liked Shadow and Bone. I downloaded the audio book when audible had a really good sale going on and started it soon after. I had just finished Beauty by Robin McKinley and I was being stubborn about starting a new book, as one is after finishing a really good one. So I started listening, digging my heels in at the beginning. Before I knew it, I was so into the story. Alina…
January always feels so… new. I also have my birthday at the end of the month so it is one big time for new beginnings for me. Instead of resolutions, I like to choose new directions I would like my life to go in. Sometimes they’re big, sometimes they’re small, and sometimes small decisions lead to big life changes. My main goal this time last year was to get a new job, and I finally found one in July. The…
Taken in the Washington Park Arboretum when the skies were still blue. Well, I took an unexpected holiday break from the blog. I’ve still been reading and still writing reviews, hoarding them ^.^ I also have a post coming on what’s been going on and what I have coming up, but in the mean time here’s a recap of my reading last year: I really put the pedal to the metal as far as reading books go. My goal was…
The medium in which I consumed The Forest Bull is by audiobook. It was a fairly painful experience; the audiobook narrator is a woman but the book is from the point of view of a man (…wut?), thus making her sound terribly like a female trucker for the entire book. Narration aside, I tried to get past this poor move and focus on the great story that this book had the potential to be. The book is about three humans…
(Lila Bowen = Delilah S. Dawson, for the record)This is another book that I just had to give a 100/5 Stars score. It is SO GOOD. Every word, every move, and each piece of the story is so captivating and absolutely magical. Wake of Vultures is set in 1860’s Texas and follows Nettie Lonesome, a young woman who is as alone in the world as her name suggests. She was orphaned as an infant and adopted/enslaved by two pretty terrible…
Ink and Bone was a great story told by a terrible storyteller. The whole time I kept waiting for the moment where something amazing would happen, the story to click, and for me to feel like a part of the book. This first half was pretty painful- very slow and I had a difficult time caring about what happened. I wanted to stop reading so bad, but it really takes a lot for me to stop reading a book. After…