Donnie Darko Girl

I received a review copy of this book for my stop on the blog tour at Donnie Darko Girl.

Family Heir is a really cool urban fantasy novel that left me craving more. The cover drew me to reading the synopsis, sounding like a book I'd love - and I was right! The writing was awesome, the world building was creative, and the characters were a LOT of fun to read about.

Kelley is on a date when her ex, Troy, comes storming in to find her. They're needed to hunt down a killer. Attacks are increasing in frequency, and they're gory. Innocent people are being killed, even very young children. Kelley and Troy are divorced, but you don't find out why for quite a while. I was dying to know why and actually found myself wanting them to get back together when I didn't know why they split up in the first place.

In their world, scientists have confirmed the existence of creatures such as vampires and werewolves. The vampires and werewolves don't trust the government as much as they do the Families of Hunters spread out around the world. They work in conjunction with the Hunters to make sure any dangerous rogues are arrested or even killed if necessary. There was even mention of two mermen who had to be killed because they were raping and killing tourists. *shivers*

Kelley and Troy are Hunters, and their Family is based not far from where they currently live in Wyoming. They've trained as partners since they were kids. Even though they're now divorced, Troy refuses to work alone or with anyone but Kelley, which led me to start thinking he might not have wanted the marriage to end. I was looking forward to seeing how they work together and also with the addition of a newbie federal agent (Brent) whom Kelley thinks is cute and loves making him blush furiously.

Kelley is a character I loved instantly. She's witty, intelligent, and fierce when she needs to be. Troy is one of the most interesting characters I've read about - he speaks in one to two words at a time. That's it! But Kelley knows him so well she can fill in the blanks for others who don't know what he's talking about.

With everything Family Heir has going on - the interesting dynamic between Kelley, Troy, and Brent unfolding, the tension with the unlikely trio hunting down the killer, the mystery of why Kelley and Troy divorced, and the reaction Kelley has to getting sucked back into the world of werewolves and vampires that she was trying to leave behind - there's never a dull moment in this novel. There was so much I wanted to find out and had a wild ride to get there, which I'd take again any day. I highly recommend this book to fans of Urban Fantasy or to anyone who wants to escape with some really awesome characters into a suspenseful story.

I received a review copy of this book for my stop on the blog tour at Donnie Darko Girl.

When I saw that Starla Huchton had another book up for review, I automatically signed up didn't need to know anything else about it, not even the synopsis. I know that sounds a bit crazy, but after reading the first three books in her Evolution series which I'm now obsessed with, she's become an author on my auto-read/auto-buy list.

Starla's writing is magical, inventive, and unique. It transports you to places you didn't even know you wanted to go, and once you get there, you don't want to leave. Her novel Shadows on Snow is no different as a re-imagining of the Snow White fairy tale. I describe the novel as a re-imagining rather than a retelling because while elements of Snow White are present, Shadows on Snow is quite different and stands on its own.

First of all, Snow White is male (Prince Leopold) instead of female! Prince Leopold is born to parents who had tried to have children for a long time. When he's born, they rejoice over their miracle baby, and he's described as having an almost ethereal and otherworldly beauty and grace surrounding him. Everyone in the kingdom instantly loves him. He's the personification of all that is good and positive in the world.

The story is told in first person not from Prince Leopold's POV but from the POV of a boy working in the stables. Prince Leopold's father has died, and his mother is gravely ill. The boy from the stables is tasked with finding out why the Queen is so ill. This is really all I can say to give you an idea of how Shadows on Snow begins because anything more and I risk giving away too much. And I definitely don't want to ruin any of the surprises coming your way!

There's so much awesomeness in this story! It's full of magic, romance, suspense, and hope. There are some dark times, but I kept holding onto the hope that everything would turn out okay. I desperately wanted them to turn out okay! It's amazing to me how the same author can create completely different characters and completely different worlds - a testament to the talent of Starla Huchton. It's my mission to read every book she has written and will write.

I had sky high hopes for Shadows on Snow - the title, the cover, the synopsis, the author, and the promise of great writing heightened my anticipation of starting this book. I'm so glad I'm one of the first to read it because now I can recommend this novel as well as Starla's Evolution series. Shadows on Snow needs to be on your TBR today!

I received a review copy of this book for my stop on the blog tour at Donnie Darko Girl.

I'm a sucker for beautiful covers. And starlight. Put the two together, and you've got me hook, line, and sinker! Starlight is a fun read that draws you in right away; I love it when I begin a book that's so easy to get into quickly. There were times I laughed and other times I felt like punching those popular bullying girls even though I'm not a violent person. (I swear I'm not!)

Chelsea M. Campbell brings plenty of humor into Starlight - for instance, I couldn't help but laugh when Adrienne's genie, Saiph, insisted on staying at her house which leads to her hiding him in the attic away from her mom. When he sees that her bedroom is decorated in unicorns (she hasn't redecorated since she was six years old), he teases her about needing help with style. I personally would love for my bedroom to be decorated in unicorns, but I don't think my husband would like that too much! Those scenes had me giggling.

I liked the light and non-preachy way the subject of bullying was dealt with which in my opinion made a greater impact than if it had been presented in a hard hitting way. Bullying is so rampant nowadays, and Starlight shows both sides. You see the ugly way the popular girls behave towards Adrienne, and the way she shrinks into herself when those girls go out of their way to insult her.

The shenanigans (there's really no better word!) that go on with Saiph around made me laugh, especially when Adrienne had to scramble to cover his presence around her mom, in front of her coworkers, and at school. There are also cute moments, too, where she realized he treated her with dignity and respect, something no one has done before. While reading about Adrienne and thinking of all the different ways she could respond to those stuck up girls, I was taken back to my own high school days where I wish I had defended myself instead of letting a small group of other girls push me around.

When she starts to fall for him, I was dying to know what was going to happen. Would he fulfill her wishes and then leave? Would he find a way to stay with her? The possibilities were endless! Starlight was exactly the kind of book I needed after reading so many dark and heavy stories lately, and I recommend this to anyone looking to lose her/himself in an uplifting and fun story.

I received a review copy of this book for my stop on the blog tour at Donnie Darko Girl. 

Lately it seems like I'm reading books back to back about life and loss. I believe I'm drawn to those topics especially at this time of year when the vibrancy and liveliness of summer gives way to the unforgiving bleakness of winter. The Girl Who Came Back to Life is about both - how do you keep on living after losing loved ones? 

Since Sophie lost her parents, she's decided to find a way to the City of the Dead and bring them back with her, thinking everything can go back to the way it was. Sophie's grandmother has taken in her in, but she isn't emotionally available to Sophie. Since Sophie's grandfather died, her grandmother sleepwalks through life. The only times she allows the sharp edges of her personality to fade are when she reads a mysterious letter that seems to give her comfort. 

I find the idea behind this story oddly comforting, and I say oddly because I like knowing the souls still exist but you don't know what the next plane of existence will be. But you know they're going somewhere. I'm also not sure I could let go. What if you didn't want to Send your loved ones? What if you wanted them to stay with you rather than allowing them to move on to the next stage? 

Once I heard there are some who believe if you don't "let go" of your loved ones and move on from their death, their spirit will remain here and be prevented from going on to Heaven or wherever you believe your soul goes. That always horrified me because I didn't want to let go of them, but I didn't want to prevent them from going to where they could be at rest. The Girl Who Came Back to Life had me thinking about all of this, and I like to think about it as morbid as that might sound. 

I was glued to this book - I couldn't wait to find out if and how Sophie would make it to the City of the Dead and what she would ultimately do when/if she arrived there. And her grandmother intrigued me with the way she has emotionally closed herself off. The sacrifices Sophie makes to get to the City touched me. I'd like to think I would have done the same as she did. She's clever and quick thinking. I'm not sure how much I'm like that, or if I'm like that at all.

The Girl Who Came Back to Life is an amazing story. The pacing was a bit slow for me at times, but I believe it's a personal preference. I think I was impatient, wanting to find out what was going to happen next so badly. Other than this minor issue, I loved reading Sophie's story.

I received a review copy of this book for my stop on the blog tour at Donnie Darko Girl. 

Most likely the shortest synopsis I've seen for a novel, Following Zippy only intrigued me even more because so little is given away. I didn't know what to expect, and it was exciting to walk into the unknown. I sensed the book's theme was life and death, and stories with that kind of theme always draw me into them. 

At only fifteen years old, Gabe finds out he has a terminal illness, and his reactions are realistic and heartbreaking. I can only imagine I'd deal with the diagnosis the same way he dealt with it. His wit and candor made me laugh at times and other times I wanted to slap him for hurting his mom's feelings. Around the same time he's diagnosed, he begins seeing a girl with wavy golden hair named Zippy and is the only one who can see her. People think he's hallucinating, and even he begins to think that himself due to the nature of his illness. 

It's hard to have hope while things look so bleak, but Zippy gives Gabe something no one else has - the insight that he could be spending what he has left of his life in a way that gives meaning to him and those around him. My favorite scene between the two of them is when they're talking about whether fish know what purpose they serve, and the conversation turns to whether human beings know their purpose. I thought it was a clever comparison - aren't we like those fish? Couldn't we be like them with someone we might not even be able to see wondering if we know our purpose? 

For me, Following Zippy is really easy to talk about and review, but I struggled with rating it. There are a lot of mistakes editing can fix - such as punctuation errors, you're versus your, and incorrect grammar - but the story was so compelling to me, I flew through the pages. I would have easily been able to give Following Zippy five stars had there not been the mistakes either missed by editing or if the book was edited at all. I wanted, no, I needed to know if Zippy was a hallucination and what was going to happen to Gabe. Just looking at the cover makes me happy knowing what story lies within its pages, and for that, I'm giving Following Zippy four stars.

I received a review copy of this book for my stop on the blog tour at Donnie Darko Girl. 

Let's get our pi on! Charlie and Charlotte were fun to read about, and I'm not gonna lie - there were some emotional moments in there as well. Love and Other Unknown Variables is the perfect title for not only this novel but also life (let me just get a bit sappy here for a moment, okay?) itself. Because let's face it, there are a LOT of things in life that come our way many times unexpectedly, and sometimes those things are happy and positive, other times they're sad. 

I adore Charlie - he's a math genius trying to solve Charlotte as though she's a math problem because he can't figure her out and can't resist solving a problem. At his age, girls are a mystery anyway, and when Charlotte comes into his life, her presence has him questioning everything he thought he knew. I love that his future suddenly doesn't seem so clear and that he's forced to think about things differently. Life isn't a straight path; we're thrown curves all the time. That he hasn't been thrown a curve in his path until now is amazing. 

Greta and her boyfriend James are great minor characters as Charlie's friends. James gets the ball rolling in messing with the new literature teacher, Ms. Finch, who also happens to be Charlotte's sister. Every year the students cause the literature teacher to quit because they don't believe the subject is as important as math and science. They've gotten away with it every year until now. Ms. Finch is determined to find a way in through the cracks in the wall they've built. 

Charlie's sister and Charlotte become close friends, and Charlotte ends up spending a lot of time at Charlie's house as a result. She surprises him at every turn. She breathes fresh air into his life, proving to him he doesn't know everything about people like he previously thought. I love it when characters' lives are turned upside down like this. Charlie was so cute wanting to kiss Charlotte and picturing it while missing what she was saying!

I think if I were Charlotte, I would have kept my illness to myself, too. I wouldn't want the looks of sympathy or to be treated differently. It's understandable but also unfair to Charlie in a way since he grows close to her not knowing she has this huge secret. And when he finds out, it doesn't compute in his head. 

I just found out what it's like to have your heart in a blender while reading Love and Other Unknown Variables. It was terrible and wonderful all at once. Exactly the way real life is - terrible and wonderful at the same time.

I bought my own copy of this book and reviewed it for my stop on the blog tour at Donnie Darko Girl. 

Love fantasy? Love epicness? How about parallel worlds? Then Orenda will be right up your alley. One of my bookish goals is reading all of Ruth Silver's books, and this is my second one by her. I recently read Dead Girl Walking and loved it. I'm happy to find out Orenda is the first in a series - when I initially added it to my to-be-read list, I thought it was a standalone - and after reading it in one sitting, I need more of Lil and Willow. 

Lil thought she was having a dream when she finds herself in an alternate reality - she's still in her house but her family photographs have been replaced with pictures of her with a little boy. No photos of her parents or sister can be found. She's can't find her parents or her sister anywhere. When she wakes up, a small clue leads her to believe it was more than just a dream, and she's right. 

It's up to Lil to save Willow in Orenda, the world parallel to Lil's, and if she doesn't, her own world will be in danger, too. I can understand her trepidation in helping out virtual strangers in a world she didn't know existed until a day or two ago. I think for me, I probably would have been like, "Yeah, let's go beat that demon sorceress!" I'm always looking for adventure though - one of the reasons I love reading and losing myself in books. I've never read about a demon sorceress, so that was fresh and original - and I LOVED IT! 

When Lil finds out her friend Bray has been kidnapped along with Willow, I admired her for taking up training with a sword to make the rescue. I love reading about romance, adventure, and kick ass characters, and Lil and Willow are definitely both kick ass ladies. 

While the pacing was a bit quick for me, I still enjoyed Orenda immensely. It was a breath of fresh air, and I can't wait for more!

I received a review copy of this book for my stop on the blog tour at Donnie Darko Girl. 

Clever and unlike anything I've ever read before, Scott Pinsker's The Second Coming: A Love Story is a tour de force in the "war" between Red America and Blue America. But I don't think this story is quite as simple as one side versus the other, and Pinsker has created a story with all the complications of religion and politics, especially when they mix together. 

I must admit parts of the story were over my head, but this novel was amazing and creative. You have to pay attention to what you're reading without distractions, or you might miss something. The concept intrigued me, and one of the aspects I liked the most was not knowing which was man was Satan and which was not. That made the reading even more interesting.

Earlier I mentioned I don't think this story is as simple as one side versus the other. Pinsker wrote The Second Coming without taking a side, which was genius to me, and I think the right move to make on his part since this is a fictional story, not a dissertation on religion. The religious right, in my opinion, loves to portray the liberal leftists as godless and without any morals whatsoever; however, I think the right doesn't realize it's more complicated than that. Liberalism does not necessarily equal godlessness, and to anyone who thinks so hasn't taken a deeper look into the way people think and feel. 

I did my best to go into this novel with an open mind and not allow my beliefs to affect my reading experience. I wanted to think more deeply about my own beliefs without coming out feeling jaded, and I believe I was able to achieve just that. Nearly everyday I think about life and if there's a rhyme and reason to it or if everything is random - sometimes I think I think too much if that makes sense! This book opened me up to thinking in new ways about the questions we all have as human beings about life, whether we're happy or not and why or why not, and what's the purpose of our existence. I'm grateful for those new ways of thinking to incorporate into my already held ideas and beliefs. 

I'm definitely planning on reading the next installment of this trilogy. I need to know what Pinsker has in store for me next - 2015 can't get here soon enough.

I received a review copy of this book for my stop on the blog tour at Donnie Darko Girl.

With the promises of geeking out to Star Wars and reading about awesome witty characters, I couldn't wait to dig into Neurotica! Having read Eliza Gordon's previous release, Must Love Otters, I knew I was going to be laughing out loud with every page. 

Jayne is just...REAL. She's not perfect, doesn't look like a model, and loves Star Wars. She's average like me! I love reading about characters that are down-to-earth and don't wake up looking like they're ready to walk down a runway. I adored her - she has some psychological hang-ups about getting romantic, and I can understand that fear she had. She's witty and intelligent, and you can't help but want her to succeed in finding happiness.

I loved that Luke had so much in common with Jayne. They could geek out over Star Wars together, he helped her out by giving her a job at his food truck when she was laid off from the newspaper, and I kept wondering when are they going to realize they would be great together??? 
You know, there's another guy in this story who really surprised me, and I wondered where, if anywhere, that was going to go.

My only problem was the drama towards the end. It changed the way I looked at a couple of the characters, but it didn't ruin the book for me or anything. 

I love Eliza Gordon's sense of humor that she infuses into her books, and Neurotica is definitely a side-splitter. The characters she breathed life into in this book are quirky and remind me in some ways of people I know in real life. Jayne is like the underdog everyone will want to root for. If you like laughing, witty characters, and spectacular writing, you need to read Neurotica!!

I received a review copy of this book for my stop on the blog tour at Donnie Darko Girl. 

One of my favorite songs in high school was "Stupid Girl" by Garbage, so the title and the cover of this book called my name. I HAD to read it!! The synopsis definitely drew me in - I wanted to know how Brax's dare was going to play out, and Olivia sounded like a super smart girl. Astronomy is not an easy subject - I took an intro class for an elective thinking it's a fascinating subject (and it is), but I had quickly drop it. The class was over my head. Stupid Girl is about a girl who is anything but stupid, trust me. 

Olivia Beaumont has lost trust in people, especially guys, after what her high school boyfriend did to her during her junior year. After spending a hellish senior year of high school, she moves a few hours away to college for a fresh start where no one knows her or anything about her past. There at college she meets Brax, not even ten minutes after arriving! 

I loved the way Brax called her Gracie (Grace is her middle name). While Olivia is a Texan, Brax is from Boston, and I liked how she teased him about his accent. He had a way of disarming her and slowly began crumbling the walls she had built up. I'm not sure why, but he felt protective of her. Though my first inclination was to roll my eyes when he thought about how different she is from all the other girls, he's right. She isn't like other girls at all. That's why I could really relate with her. I know what it's like to want to make a fresh start and to want to go to college to learn, not party. 

Olivia's roommate, Tessa, is as high energy as a tornado - she's fun to be around, and I loved how well she and Olivia connected right away. Girls can be bitchy to one another, so it was awesome that Olivia made a friend. While Tessa can be immature at times, she makes it clear that she'll always be in Olivia's corner, and I loved her for that. Her warnings to Olivia to stay away from Brax are so strong I wondered if SHE had personal experience with him...

Overall, I loved Stupid Girl and couldn't get enough of Brax and Olivia's banter. Both of them made me laugh more than once. I just enjoyed reading about them so much. When they weren't together, I counted the minutes until they were again. Stupid Girl flew by for me - I read it in one sitting and had no intention of putting it down. I'm definitely reading the next book, Stupid Boy, and highly recommend this series if you're a fan of new adult romance with a lot of heart and wit.

I received a review copy for my stop on the blog tour at Donnie Darko Girl. 

There are many reasons why I love Louder Than Words, which by the way is the perfect title for this book. Ellen, the main character, is my favorite kind of heroine with humor and wit and courage. She's insecure with herself as she's very young, but she handles herself well. With what she's been through with losing her dad and basically her mom, too, personally I'd want to curl up in a ball forever. But Ellen keeps going on. 

Rex was definitely charming, and in a genuine way. I enjoyed Ellen and Rex's witty banter the most. Every time their dialogue made me smile or even laugh out loud, I couldn't help but think of how much I was loving this book and these characters. They spilled their darkest secrets to one another within a day of meeting and were able to connect through the family problems they were facing. 

Ellen and Rex also frustrated me on many levels. If only Ellen could have seen in the beginning that Rex had an interest in her and might not be a bad guy after all! But I can understand why she reacted in the ways she did due to her issues with trust, especially after her teacher crossed the line and violated her trust. Some of Rex's actions had me scratching my head and cringing - I so badly wanted to tell him that's NOT how you win over a girl! 

I wasn't sure how Louder Than Words was going to end, which was a happy surprise. I thought it might end predictably, but for me it didn't. I could read this book again and again for the witty dialogue and for Ellen and Rex's interactions. I loved reading about them and want to do it all over again!