Alluring Reads

Friday, July 05, 2013

Right of Way Review

TITLE Right of Way
AUTHOR Lauren Barnholdt
PUBLICATION July 9th 2013 by Simon Pulse
READ June 19 to 20, 2013
SOURCE From the publisher for review

Can a road trip repair a romance gone wrong? Find out in this standalone companion to Lauren Barnholdt’s Two-way Street.

Here are Peyton and Jace, meeting on vacation. Click! It’s awesome, it’s easy, it’s romantic. This is the real deal.

Unless it isn’t. Because when you’re in love, you don’t just stop calling one day. And you don’t keep secrets. Or lie. And when your life starts falling apart, you’re supposed to have the other person to lean on.

Here are Peyton and Jace again, broken up but thrown together on a road trip. One of them is lying about the destination. One of them is pretending not to be leaving something behind. And neither of them is prepared for what’s coming on the road ahead…

And to think, this one held so much promise. I was really excited heading into Right Of Way. A road trip novel and a complicated romance? Yes, please. Unfortunately this story quickly began to feel rather childish and I failed to connect to any of the characters.

Peyton and Jace have had a complicated relationship, actually their relationship has ended. After meeting over Christmas, having a few good dates and then experiencing their relationship growing over the phone, their relationship was cut short when Jace stopped responding. It was a cold way for the relationship to end and Peyton was heartbroken. Luckily, we do get both perspectives here and we quickly find out that Jace is also heartbroken by something that Peyton never told him that led him to cut the relationship off. As these threads were revealed in alternating chapters and we got to find out why the relationship ended I was definitely left feeling underwhelmed. Jace’s reason for cutting Peyton out of his life is pretty selfish and absolutely childish. I know that sometimes in romances we don’t make the best choices, but this one was pretty darn ridiculous.

The two are reunited at Peyton’s uncles wedding and they finally decide to talk about what happened all those months ago. This story was pretty confusing at times. It took place after the wedding when Peyton was planning on running away from home to North Carolina only to be ditched by her best friend and have to hitch a ride with Jace. We also get chapters leading up to the wedding titled “before” that show how the two of them were feeling leading up to their big reunion. It got pretty confusing at times and I constantly had to flip back to find out who I was reading about and what time frame the story was currently taking place in. The two perspectives really didn’t feel distinct to me. Sure Jace’s POV had a few more swears in it, but the thought patterns and inner dialogue when thinking about things felt far too similar to be two different people.

Peyton was what I would call a runner. Instead of dealing with any of her issues head on, she finds a way to cut all the important conversations short that she doesn’t want to deal with. Her rather childish behavior for someone 17 years of age had me feeling detached from her actually to the point of strongly disliking her. Her mother is a shopaholic and has done some pretty thoughtless, cold things in the wake of her addiction and Peyton’s solution to this is to run away. I was so frustrated with her inability to deal with anything that was thrown at her in the story. When you look at Jace’s character I guess he was a bit of a runner too, after all he dropped Peyton like a hot potato when he found out her secret (which was really none of his business anyway.)

While the time line does jump all over the place in this one the plot is pretty typical. The last 40 pages or so I felt like I didn’t even need to bother reading because I knew exactly how everything was going to play out (and I was right by the way.) I don’t think there is anything in this novel that stands out among the million other contemporaries out there and if you are looking for a strong connection to characters, I wouldn’t look here.

Thursday, July 04, 2013

Contaminated Review

TITLE Contaminated (Contaminated #1)
AUTHOR Em Garner
PUBLICATION July 23rd 2013 by EgmontUSA
READ June 24, 2013
SOURCE From the publisher for review

After the Contamination—an epidemic caused by the super-trendy diet drink SlimPro that turned ordinary citizens into violent, uncontrollable creatures—the government rounded up the “Connies” to protect the remaining population. Now, two years later, the rehabilitated are being allowed home, complete with shock collars that will either control, or kill, them.

Velvet Ellis has struggled to care for her ten-year-old sister since her parents were taken in the round up. When she finds her mother in one of the “Kennels,” Velvet resolves to do whatever it takes to put her family back together. But the danger isn’t over. It’s beginning all over again…

Gritty and grabbing, Velvet is a harrowing, emotionally charged novel for fans of Carrie Ryan and The Walking Dead.

Blergh. I really didn’t want to finish this book. But I did. Through the first 100 pages I had hoped that something would happen that would suck me into the story and really get the ball rolling. Then once I was passed those 100 pages and it hadn’t happened I felt that I was past the point of no return and decided to finish off the book even though I wasn’t a fan of it.

My main issue with this book is that it felt completely aimless. The story focuses on Velvet and Opal. Two sisters who are surviving on their own after a weight loss drink has contaminated the world and turned people into living, breathing zombies. When the outbreak first occurred it was thought that the only way to save these people was with an ice pick in the eye to do a lobotomy but things have moved forward and when we meet Velvet they are quite different. They have found a way to neutralize the Connies (what they call the contaminated.) They use shock collars to keep them tame and they have them living in kennels until loved ones come and lay claim to them.

When we meet Velvet she is a frequenter of the kennels as she searches for her mother. Of course she finds her and signs all of the papers so that she can finally bring her mom home and they can be a family again. That is basically the story. It’s a lot of Velvet playing house and taking care of her younger sister and her mom. Her mom is basically an invalid, needing to be bathed and wearing a diaper and all that jazz. Along with taking in her mother from the kennel, Velvet also gets a heavy dose of discrimination. There were moments where I felt bad for Velvet and how she had to grow up so fast and be responsible for her little sister and eventually her mother. But I can’t say that I ever found myself caring enough to actually get emotional about anything. In my waiting for something to happen I had a constant feeling of detachment from the story.

While I did find myself at least feeling bad for Velvet, I didn’t find myself feeling anything for any of the other characters. Her first boyfriend, Tony, was an ass who cheated on her so I hated him. At the tail end of the story she meets a new guy in Dillon and he felt too much like a knight in shining armor to me. He came in and was so sweet and overly good to Velvet that it just felt too good to be true. After such darkness was used to portray pretty much everyone in the world he felt much too perfect and I think I would have been able to be sold on his character had I gotten to see some of his flaws. They also fall for each other pretty fast with left me longing for more natural development so that I could ship them, but it just wasn't there.

Some of the early buzz for Contaminated that I saw uses phrases like “relentlessly horrifying” and “bone chilling” and “unputdownable”, I have to say that I didn’t see any of this. I put the book down after every few chapters and had to force myself to pick it back up, so I am deeming it “unpickupable”.

Tuesday, July 02, 2013

Midwinterblood Review

TITLE Midwinterblood
AUTHOR Marcus Sedgwick
PUBLICATION April 22nd 2014 by Square Fish
READ June 17 to 18, 2013
SOURCE Purchased

Have you ever had the feeling that you've lived another life? Been somewhere that has felt totally familiar, even though you've never been there before, or felt that you know someone well, even though you are meeting them for the first time? It happens. In 2073 on the remote and secretive island of Blessed, where rumour has it that no one ages and no children are born, a visiting journalist, Eric Seven, and a young local woman known as Merle are ritually slain. Their deaths echo a moment ten centuries before, when, in the dark of the moon, a king was slain, tragically torn from his queen. Their souls search to be reunited, and as mother and son, artist and child, forbidden lovers, victims of a vampire they come close to finding what they've lost. In a novel comprising seven parts, each influenced by a moon - the flower moon, the harvest moon, the hunter's moon, the blood moon - this is the story of Eric and Merle whose souls have been searching for each other since their untimely parting.

I’m not sure how I feel about Midwinterblood being classified as horror. I mean sure, a vampire rears it’s head in the pages, and there is a strong theme of sacrifice that becomes quite gruesome, but through all of this it is a love story. It is an epic love story that transcends time.

I had a tough time easing into this one. The writing is what I have come to expect of a gothic novel in that it feels rather old and formal. However, once I was able to get into the flow of the prose I did get sucked into the story. We are treated to 7 stories that are in revers chronological order. So we start off in 2073 and work our way all the way back to before the 10th century. I’m not sure how I felt about this, I mean I liked it but it seemed to me that things were overlapping in a way that could only happen if time were moving forward. For example, the second story tells a tale of an archaeological dig in 2011 that takes place on Blessed Island in which they find a coffin (cairn) that contains two bodies. Jump one story after that and it is 1944 and we get the story of a fallen airman who finds himself stranded on the island with a broken ankle. He reads in the paper about an archaeological dig on an island that he just knows he has been to before. See, it makes sense if time is moving forward, but how did someone in the past make that connection. Unless he lived the 7 lives in reverse, but that just doesn’t make sense because the 7th life was in 2073. See! I am confused folks, maybe something went over my head here, and I am going to look like an idiot when someone explains it to me but this is how I feel right now.

I did enjoy the epicness of the love story here. I loved how we got the end of their story in the beginning and worked our way back, so I guess you can say I liked the general idea of it though the execution left me scratching my head a bit. Reading all the stories and connecting little strings was fun. Every time a new one would start I was so excited to find out who Eric and Merle were in that life. I also did come to really enjoy the darkness of the writing. In my head it read very ominously and I did feel a little creeped out during the last few stories.

Midwinterblood is beautifully written, incredibly dark novel that will make you long for a love like the one you are reading. I do wish that I didn’t end up being so confused for most of it because I do think that it took away from my immediate enjoyment of the novel but looking back it’s definitely a solid story worth reading.

Monday, July 01, 2013

Book Girls Don't Cry - Where are the parents?

For this weeks topic we have decided to voice our thoughts on parents in young adult books. It seems that I am constantly coming across absent parents or overbearing parents in the books that I read. Rarely do I find a happy medium is achieved by the author on the parental front, it is always either one extreme or the other and that ends up being a big complaint of mine when I finish up the book.

When I look back on the parental intervention in my life growing up I think it was a bit on the slack side. I was incredibly close with my mother and I would always creep into her room when I got home from wherever I was to talk to her about my night. It didn't matter what time it was that I came creeping in, she would wake up and we would talk for a bit, sometimes hours. I wasn't told what time I had to be home, I was expected to use my head and make sure that I was back at a decent time. I think the open door policy between my mother and I is really what kept me in line in my younger years. We would talk through things and she would straight up tell me when I was being an idiot.

I think that the freedom that I was given in my teens lead to me being pretty level headed. Sure I was a hot head when it came to boys and such but I never got myself into scary situations and was able to be pretty level headed. Now, because of this freedom that I had I can always understand when the parents aren't completely present in the kids life in books. But when I see that the communication is completely lacking I begin to have a problem with the relationship. I'm always bothered when I don't see the parents taking an active interest into where their child was or who they were with. I know you can't keep your teenager on a leash for their entire life but a good conversation can go a long way. A simple conversation between a parent and their kid can achieve so much in a book.

I am always a fan of a novel with a good family unit because I love reading about family dynamics. There are so many places the author can take the relationships of siblings and parent/child so I always like to see it explored. Now, I understand that not all families get along and there ARE parents out there who are absent in their child's life so seeing it here and there is definitely not a bad thing. But it just seems to me that more often than not the parents are absent in the books that I read. Maybe that is why I started venturing into MG a little more, it seems that age group focuses on the family unit a lot more.

So this is just my take on parents in YA and what I would like to see a bit more of. I understand that the parent/child relationship can get in the way of the progression of the plot in a lot of books but I think that the building of that relationship can really add to the development of the character. Character development is always first and foremost in the importance department on my checklist of what makes a good book so I think that adding layers there in any way you can is always a good thing.

What do you think about the parents in YA books? Would you like to see their relationships with their kids get a bit more development?

Also, don't forget that we are always looking for topic suggestions for future posts.

Fill out the suggestion form here!

Sunday, June 30, 2013

Cover Madness Giveaway - Round 4!

It's time for the 4th Cover Madness Giveaway! This one is super exciting because Giselle of Xpresso Reads and I have opened it up as a hop and we have gotten a great response. There are over 60 blogs signed up so there are way more opportunities to win this time around. There have been so many awesome covers revealed lately so we are happy that so many people will be featuring them and that readers will have so many chances to win them!

Books Up For Grabs: