Rainy Day Reads

I thought this book sounded really interesting, and I’ve been hearing good things about Katie Cotugno, so I decided to give this one a go.   This book is about Molly, who is returning to her hometown for her last summer before college. Returning to the hometown she fled from when her mother’s bestselling novel based on her life revealed all her secrets and turned her into a pariah.  Slight spoilers below.  As I said I had high hopes for this book, but they were not met. I really wanted to root for Molly but in the end I found her really annoying and frustrating. She ruined her relationship with Patrick when she hooked up with his brother, Gabe, wrecking her friendship with their sister Julia as well. She does nothing but describe how hard her life back in this town is because of her past mistakes, but then she makes the exact same mistake!! And keeps making it!! ARGH! I have never been in love, so I don’t know if feelings can actually make you that stupid,...

This book follows Lily who is not doing so well in chemistry class. In stead of taking notes she scribbles song lyrics on the desk. Next day she discovers that someone has continued the lyrics, and the two start a correspondence hiding notes under their shared desk. Alongside this exchanging of notes we follow Lily’s slightly chaotic home life and her trials at school struggling with the popular kids, and trying to overcome her awkwardness to ask her crush out.   This was a cute and fun contemporary, but nothing more really. It is pretty obvious from the start who the secret letter writer is going to be but I didn’t mind it too much. I really liked the person and when we got their backstory through the letters it made me really invested in them. It was fun to see Lily balance her opposing views of the letter writer in the letters with the person in real life once she found out who they were. As I said it was fun and cute, but not much more. I gave it 3 stars out of 5, maybe 3...

Challenges:   Around the Year in 52 Books: A book with a dual timeline I’ve read a few books of Marchetta’s by now and all the rest of them got 3 stars out of 5. Books get 3 stars when I don’t actively hate them, so all of her books have been “fine” so far. But this one blew it out of the water! We follow Taylor, a young girl who lives at a boarding school mainly for young people who don’t have anywhere else to go. She tries to stay out of life and just get on with her existence, but when she is elected the leader of the entire underground network of the school she is forced to care. The students at the school have a war going on during the months when cadets come to stay for their outdoor training camp. Kids from the town join in and the 3 factions conduct a war strictly guided by the rulebook that has been passed down over the years. To be honest I was surprised at how vicious this war was and how it could take place without any of the adults knowing about it. ...

This is the first book of a dystopian YA trilogy, and I must admit I did not have high hopes for it. What little I had heard of it on Youtube was not great, but my library had it on the shelves, so I decided to give it a go. As you may know, I usually don’t like the majority of the books everyone else seems to love, so I thought I might like this one, even if everyone else doesn’t. But no such luck!  The book is about our main character Cassie, who lives in the near future. Something has happened (I don’t believe it is ever specified) and life is now run by the Society who control people in the smallest ways. The Society decides who you should marry, when you should marry, when you should have kids and how many, what your job is and what you can do for fun. Apparently our present society had too much surplus, so they have decided to cut things down to more manageable numbers. This means there is only 100 poems, 100 songs, 100 paintings and so forth left to the people. I ...

I loved this book so prepare for a gushing review! I feel like 2016 is going to be a good reading year, since I have already read a few good books, and I finally feel like I am coming out of the last of my reading slump of 2015.  Anyway this book is about a boy and a girl who meet in the school bell tower, each standing on the ledge looking down. The boy, Theodore Finch, is contemplating what this type of suicide would be like, when he sees the girl, Violet Markey, posed on the ledge. He talks her down, but because of their high school status, and because Finch is a nice guy, the story ends up being she talked him down. She is branded a hero, he a weirdo. He doesn’t seem to mind too much, as he is already an outcast in school and he lets people think what they want. He takes an interest in Violet, however, determined that she should know that life is worth living. The story goes on from there and I really loved the structure of it. It sort of ends up taking the form of a...