Rainy Day Reads

I really enjoyed this book, and it was actually a pleasant surprise since I haven’t had the best of luck with my TBR Jar reads lately (or ever).  This book is about a young girl, Lennie, whose sister suddenly dies. She doesn’t really know how to cope and pushes everyone away until a new boy, Joe, turns up. They pretty much immediately fall for each other, but Lennie is not really making great life decisions and some of her not-so-great-ones come between them. This makes is sound like the entire book is about that relationship, but there is much more too it than that. We see how Lennie tries to deal with the grief of losing her sister and how this affects her relationships with pretty much everyone she knows.  As I said I enjoyed this book, even though I found it a little melodramatic at times. Both plotwise and the writing style itself. Sentences like “we drank the rain from each other’s lips” (quoted from memory so probably not exactly what it says but some...

This is a YA contemporary about a pair of twins. We hear the story from both perspectives. Noah narrates when they are about 13/14 years old and Jude, the girl, narrates when they are about 16 years old. During the time in-between something has happened to make the two twins avoid each other. Slowly we figure it out as Noah tells the story leading up to the event, and Jude tells the story of the aftermath and looking back on the event.  The chapters alternate viewpoints and while I thought this was basically a good idea, the individual chapters seemed way too long. Just as you were really getting into the story the viewpoint changed, and because not only the viewpoint changes but also the time, it’s like reading two different stories. I figured it was meant to create tension or mystery or whatever, but I just found it frustrating. Just as one person was figuring something out, it changed, and the plot was pretty much completely different.  As for the characters ...