When my face don't seem to want to shine.
Wither by Lauren DeStefeno
2/5 - nothing special
dystopia, love story, own
By age sixteen, Rhine Ellery has four years left to live. She can thank modern science for this genetic time bomb. A botched effort to create a perfect race has left all males with a lifespan of 25 years, and females with a lifespan of 20 years. Geneticists are seeking a miracle antidote to restore the human race, desperate orphans crowd the population, crime and poverty have skyrocketed, and young girls are being kidnapped and sold as polygamous brides to bear more children. When Rhine is kidnapped and sold as a bride, she vows to do all she can to escape. Her husband, Linden, is hopelessly in love with her, and Rhine can’t bring herself to hate him as much as she’d like to. He opens her to a magical world of wealth and illusion she never thought existed, and it almost makes it possible to ignore the clock ticking away her short life. But Rhine quickly learns that not everything in her new husband’s strange world is what it seems. Her father-in-law, an eccentric doctor bent on finding the antidote, is hoarding corpses in the basement. Her fellow sister wives are to be trusted one day and feared the next, and Rhine is desperate to communicate to her twin brother that she is safe and alive. Will Rhine be able to escape--before her time runs out?
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I didn't think there was any chemistry between Rhine and Gabriel. I thought he was kind of a wimp.
I couldn't picture any of it. I kept seeing Linden as a creepy old man who needed to kidnap girls to be his bride. Even though he was ignorant of this and he was only 20.
I didn't like Rhine. I don't think the character was developed at all, and you didn't really know who she was.
The Moon and More by Sarah Dessen
3/5 - good
coming of age, contemporary, family, realistic fiction, kindle
Luke is the perfect boyfriend: handsome, kind, fun. He and Emaline have been together all through high school in Colby, the beach town where they both grew up. But now, in the summer before college, Emaline wonders if perfect is good enough.
Enter Theo, a super-ambitious outsider, a New Yorker assisting on a documentary film about a reclusive local artist. Theo's sophisticated, exciting, and, best of all, he thinks Emaline is much too smart for Colby.
Emaline's mostly-absentee father, too, thinks Emaline should have a bigger life, and he's convinced that an Ivy League education is the only route to realizing her potential. Emaline is attracted to the bright future that Theo and her father promise. But she also clings to the deep roots of her loving mother, stepfather, and sisters. Can she ignore the pull of the happily familiar world of Colby?
Emaline wants the moon and more, but how can she balance where she comes from with where she's going?
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It had a bit of a different feeling than other Dessen books. I didn't really know what to expect like her other books.
i really didn't like Theo. He was annoying and weird.
Parallel by Claudia Lefeve
1/5 - bad
alternate views, family, high school, sci-fi
Destiny has a way of catching up.
Saddled with powers she doesn't understand, Etta Fleming's world is turned upside-down the day she meets Cooper Everett, the man who transports her to an alternate reality. A reality she was meant to be a part of.
One minute, she's an orphan living at Dominion House for Girls, an institution for delinquent foster kids, then finds herself attending the exclusive Dominion Hall Academy.
Plucked from the only world she's ever known, Etta now has to deal with an aunt she never knew, a boyfriend she doesn't know, and a best friend who can't know.
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There wasn't much to this book. It was pretty boring. Big thumbs up for mentioning Fringe in the beginning.
Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me (And Other Concerns) by Mindy Kaling
4/5 - just wonderful
non-fiction, kindle
In Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, Mindy invites readers on a tour of her life and her unscientific observations on romance, friendship, and Hollywood, with several conveniently placed stopping points for you to run errands and make phone calls. Mindy Kaling really is just a Girl Next Door-not so much literally anywhere in the continental United States, but definitely if you live in India or Sri Lanka
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I think Mindy Kaling might be my soulmate.
Welcome To Utopia by Karen Valby
2/5 - nothing special
non-fiction, own
Utopia, Texas: It’s either the best place on earth, or it’s no place at all.
In the twenty-first century, it’s difficult to imagine any element of American life that remains untouched by popular culture, let alone an entire community existing outside the empire of pop. But Karen Valby discovered the tiny town of Utopia tucked away in the Texas Hill Country. There are no movie theaters for sixty miles in any direction, no book or music stores. But cable television and the Internet have recently thrown wide the doors of Utopia.
Valby follows the lives of four Utopians-Ralph, the retired owner of the general store; Kathy, the waitress who waits in terror for three of her boys to return from war; Colter, the son of a cowboy with the soul of a hipster; and Kelli, an aspiring rock star and one of the only black people in town-as they reckon, on an intensely human scale, with war and race, class and culture, and the way time’s passage can change the ground beneath our feet.
Utopia is the kind of place we still think of as the “real America,” a place of cowboys and farmers and high-school sweethearts who stay together till they die. But its dramatic stories show us what happens when the old tensions of small-town life confront a new reality: that no town, no matter how small and isolated, can escape the liberating and disruptive forces of the larger world.
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It wasn't terrible, but there didn't seem to be a point to this book.
Beautiful Disaster by Jamie McGuire
4/5 - just wonderful
angst, love story, mature, romance, young adult, kindle
Abby Abernathy is a good girl. She doesn’t drink or swear, and she has the appropriate number of cardigans in her wardrobe. Abby believes she has enough distance from the darkness of her past, but when she arrives at college with her best friend, her path to a new beginning is quickly challenged by Eastern University’s Walking One-Night Stand.
Travis Maddox, lean, cut, and covered in tattoos, is exactly what Abby wants-and needs-to avoid. He spends his nights winning money in a floating fight ring, and his days as the ultimate college campus charmer. Intrigued by Abby’s resistance to his appeal, Travis tricks her into his daily life with a simple bet. If he loses, he must remain abstinent for a month. If Abby loses, she must live in Travis’s apartment for the same amount of time. Either way, Travis has no idea that he has met his match
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Highly addictive. I have to admit that I did feel a bit disturbed at certain points. Travis is frightening, angry, violent, and possessive. Not good.