Bloggin 'Bout Books Blog

Movies: 1. In Your Eyes: So good! So cute! Thanks to Jamie at Perpetual Page Turner for posting it on her own monthly review. 2. Baawat-e-Ishq: I don't watch a lot of Bollywood movies, so I don't know how good this is quality-wise, but I loved it! A girl who is tired of having guys ask her father for exorbitant dowrys (which are illegal anyway but still frequently required for marriages), decides to fool a suitor into believing her father and her are very rich and to give them a dowry. The plan is to blackmail them into giving them the dowry in order to drop the lawsuit, and then Gullu and her father can go to America. Of course, nothing goes according to plan. It was really interesting watching this movie because a lot of it is in, I'm guessing, Hindi, but a lot of words are also stolen from the English language and Gullu loves speaking English too. So you definitely have to read the subtitles, but there are also parts that are understandable to English speakers. ...

In middle school, I was a member of this reading club where we had a set of books to read as a team, and then we did like little quizzes on them against other teams. (SUPER NERD!). And now, I'm not entirely certain, but I feel pretty sure that club was where I read this book for the first time. The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare is a Newbery award winning historical fiction novel. Orphan Kit Tyler has been moved from her home in the Caribbean to her puritan relative's home in Connecticut.  She feels like she has nothing in common with these relatives, but she does form an attachment with an old Quaker woman and a young sailor, Nat. Of course breaking out of the mold is not without its price, and Kit learns this for herself when she is accused of witchcraft. This is one of those books that I think about constantly. I haven't reread it in several years, but I always want to. I recommend it frequently to other. This is a book for readers...

Another new crush. Unfortunately, this author doesn't have a backlog of books for me to read my way through. Leslye Walton's debut novel The Strange & Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender came out in 2014. It's a Morris Award nominee, and oh boy does it deserve it.  Walton has an MA in writing, and she also teaches middle school (brave soul!). She lives in Seattle, and I think that fondness for the Pacific Northwest definitely comes through in Ava Lavender .  Walton's prose is extraordinary beautiful and lyrical. I wanted more constantly. I cannot wait for her next book to be published. 

Hello Lovelies!! Today's Top Ten Tuesday is right up my alley, but also really really hard to choose. This week is all the best heroines. And because I love the fan art options, I've linked the name to where I retrieved the image from. (Hopefully that's the creator!!) Deryn :  Liesel :  Verity : Wren-178 : Karou :  Puck : Ella : Kestrel : Eleanor : Linh Cinder :

A Little Something Different by Sandy Hall is a delightful love story from an outside perspective. Everyone can see that Lea and Gabe are meant for each other. In 14 different viewpoints, the reader gets to see what other people see. Why do these two keep orbiting around each other? Will they ever get together? The concept of this book is really inventive. Seeing how two people interact through all the other people they cross paths with was interesting. As a people watcher myself, I love to wonder about other people's lives. And this book sort of fed that. At the same time, I think a lot of my favorite, heart-clenching love moments come from the personal thoughts or private interactions between two people. So while I enjoyed this a lot, I also felt like it was missing something.  Some of the viewpoints were also a bit cheesy. Baristas, professors, classmates, and friends are all pretty normal viewpoints. But the squirrel and the bench were odd. And I love using in...

I received an advance e-copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Nightbird by Alice Hoffman is a delightful bit of magical realism for middle grade readers.  Twig lives in Sidwell, MA--a town known for its pink apples and its monster. But Twig knows more about the monster than anyone else. And when someone starts framing the monster for grafitti, Twig finds herself hanging out with the new girl next door to help solve the problem. While I know Hoffman works usually in adult fiction, I would have never guessed that this was her first foray into middle grade. She pulls it off perfectly. I was enchanted by Twig's story. There's a touch of nostalgia too it. It doesn't seem to be set in contemporary times--there're no cell phones, and basically no computers. It's not a historical novel: there are cars and sewing machines and regular phones. But Twig and the other young people don't have the electronic addiction which most kids today have....

I received an advance e-copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Bleeding Earth by Kaitlin Ward scared me more than possibly any other book I've ever read. Lea's just your average teenager, with a secret girlfriend and a best friend and a pretty tight-knit group of friends, when the world starts to bleed. The blood comes out of the ground, and it doesn't stop. Then hair starts to appear and then bones. And no one knows when it will stop. I don't read many books that can be classified as horror novels. I love horror movies, but books tend not to impress me. Also there aren't many books in YA that I would consider horror books. Usually they are ghost stories or mysteries or fantasy books with a horror element. But this one, even though some people might consider a fantasy novel is more of a horror novel than I've read.  While I was really freaked out, and I had a couple hard times waiting in the very crowded train station or readin...

I received an advance e-copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Of Shadow & Stone by Michelle Muto is an interesting mix of Gargoyles and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Kate Mercer has just finished filming the last installment of an action series. She's a major star. She might have just broken up with her cheating boyfriend, but everything's fine. Except she's been having weirdly vivid dreams about a castle, and about gargoyles coming to life. Now, she's been told that its her destiny to control the gargoyles and stop them from killing.  There were a lot of things I liked about this book. I loved that it used gargoyles. It reminded me of being seven and watching Gargoyles repeatedly on video cassette. That of course, also had the unfortunate side effect of me picturing the Gargoyles cast instead of real gargoyles. There's also a layer to the story where Kate is chosen because its her inheritance. One person to rule the gargoyles...

This is another one where I read it relatively recently, but just long enough ago that I didn't have my blog yet.  Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld is a steampunk novel set during WWII. I loved it. Here's my review from Goodreads. Scott Westerfeld manages to create an alternate history which makes sense. He fabricates a reality where gene splicing has become very common by the beginning of the 20th Century. Because of this, half of the world calls themselves Darwinists, people who live their lives surrounded by creatures made by combining gene traits. On the other half of the world are those who prefer machinery. Complex machinery has also become common place (although not to the extent of computers, more along the lines of giant, oil-based monsters in a steam punk way.) Leviathan follows two young adults who have managed to find themselves at the center of what will become the War to End all Wars. World War 1 wasn't averted by the changes in history, but it ...

This week's wcw features a baby crush. A blooming crush. A I need to read the rest of your books immediately crush. Elizabeth Wein is the semi-recently newly published author of several YA historical fiction books, as well as many short stories.  Her first series is the Arthurian Sequence which is a retelling of the Arthur legends. Her newest books while not a series, have a main connecting theme.  Code Name Verity  was the first historical fiction novel I'd read in a while and it was fantastic. It's been awarded several major honors. There's a sequel of sorts out: Rose Under Fire. And a third Black Dove, White Raven coming out in March.  Wein currently lives in Scotland, although she lived in numerous places when she was younger.  I would recommend her books to fans of historical fiction or people who enjoy strong female characters in any genre.  

Hello Lovelies! Today's Top Ten Tuesday (as always brought to you by The Broke and the Bookish ) looks at the problems of loving books.  So here are my top ten book related problems. 1. Space!! I have four tubs of books at my parents house, just chillin. And I have eight boxes of books which my mom is supposed to be shipping to me, but six months later, it still hasn't happened. But I only have one small book shelf anyway, so I don't know where I would put them! 2. Physical copies vs. E-books. I love phsyical books. Like more than anything else in the entire world, I love books. But ebooks have the benefit of being immediately accessible and not taking up any space. So I love renting them from the library, but I kind of hate paying for them myself. Like if I'm going to spend money on something, I kind of want to be able to hold it in my own two hands. But if you get a book and then decide later you don't need or want a copy, they can be really hard to ge...

Marissa Meyer's Fairest shows the back story to Queen Levana (otherwise known as the equivalent of Snow White's Evil Queen). Maybe that's why it failed to thrill me. Levana is fifteen when the book opens. Her parents have been assassinated and her ruthless sister is about to be crowned Queen. Levana knows that her sister will make a terrible ruler. Levana wants to rule her people, she wants to marry a member of the guard with whom she's infatuated, and she wants to be beautiful.  In some ways Levana sounds like the epitome of the teenage girl. She wants to be in love, she wants to be beautiful, and she wants to be in charge. But I just couldn't get behind the story line because in order to do these things, she becomes progressively more evil. To some extent, I'm hoping that was Meyer's intentions. I don't think she wrote this back story to make Levana an endearing character, but I am a little worried that readers might take it that way. ...