January 2013 Purchases

Jan26

I had a lovely time with my friend over at Books and Berries last weekend. After having a few pots of tea at my favourite teahouse, Yumchaa, we breezed through Soho in the bitter wind. Down through the streets, rounding corners and dodging other people walking with speeds of an urgent mission, we finally made our way to Foyles bookstore.

It’s so nice to be surrounded by so many books, even if it did become overwhelming after ten minutes. I settled on these two books, one because I believe it was suggested by the Seattle Public Library YA newsletter and the other because my friend works for that publisher and said I should give it a go! Here are the summaries provided from Goodreads:

Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Black:

Just your average boy-meets-girl, girl-kills-people story…

Cas Lowood has inherited an unusual vocation: He kills the dead.

So did his father before him, until his gruesome murder by a ghost he sought to kill. Now, armed with his father’s mysterious and deadly athame, Cas travels the country with his kitchen-witch mother and their spirit-sniffing cat. Together they follow legends and local lore, trying to keep up with the murderous dead—keeping pesky things like the future and friends at bay.

When they arrive in a new town in search of a ghost the locals call Anna Dressed in Blood, Cas doesn’t expect anything outside of the ordinary: move, hunt, kill. What he finds instead is a girl entangled in curses and rage, a ghost like he’s never faced before. She still wears the dress she wore on the day of her brutal murder in 1958: once white, but now stained red and dripping blood. Since her death, Anna has killed any and every person who has dared to step into the deserted Victorian she used to call home.

And she, for whatever reason, spares his life.

Black Spring by Alison Croggon

Inspired by Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, BLACK SPRING reimagines the passionate story in a fantasy 19th century society sustained by wizardry and the vengeance code of vendetta.

Anna spent her childhood with Damek and her volatile foster sister Lina, daughter of the Lord of the village. Lina has magical powers, and in this brutal patriarchal society women with magical powers are put to death as babies. Lina’s father, however, refuses to kill her but when vendetta explodes in their village and Lina’s father dies, their lives are changed forever. Their new guardian Masko sends Anna away and reduces Lina to the status of a servant. Damek—mad with love for Lina—attempts to murder Masko, then vanishes for several years. Anna comes home five years later to find Lina about to marry a pleasant young farmer, and witnesses Damek’s vengeful return and its catastrophic consequences.

Passionate, atmospheric and haunting, BLACK SPRING will stay with readers long after they turn the final page.

I am so excited to read these! Did anyone else buy something they can’t wait to start breezing through the pages?

The Long Walk by Stephen King – Vintage YA

Jan24

People love to complain that Battle Royale was the original of The Hunger Games. True, both of the stories have similarities: Teenagers being forced to kill each other until one stands as the living victor within a secluded ‘battleground’. BA was published in 1999, HG was published in 2008. However, there is a book that was written before either of these dystopian realities. 20 years prior, Stephen King under the pen name Michael Bachman wrote The Long Walk that was published in 1979.

Every May there is a lottery where boys enter their names. 100 are selected to embark on a walking contest until one of them remains. This last survivor is crowned the winner. The winner of the contest receives whatever he wants for the rest of his life.

There are similarities to BR and HG: it’s set in a futuristic time period, technology is used to determine that the boys are walking more than 4 mph at all times and if they try to leave the road they get shot.

Thrilling and horrific, The Long Walk precedes these books that have rocked the world with their cruelty and grief. King, the master of terror has paved the way with this book that was before it’s time. Can King write YA? With this book I think the proof is more than exceptional.

Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion

Jan22

R is a zombie. It’s hard to tell how long he’s been dead or how long the zombies have been around. What R does know is that there is a hunger inside him that must be fed or he’ll die. What starts as a routine feeding session with his best friend M changes the moment he sets his cold grey dead eyes on Julia.

In that moment something alters. Something inside him stops. He protects Julia but does savour her boyfriend’s brain. R stumbles upon a beautiful love story through ingesting one’s memories.

R doesn’t understand why Julia is so special; there is just a feeling deep in inside that has been still until now. It’s as if Julia somehow has breathed new life into R’s decaying corpse and he’ll do anything to keep her safe from his kind.

What a TREAT this book is! I was turned on to this story by seeing the movie trailer, and by luck my friend had been given this book for Christmas! (I read it in two days to make sure I got my share) I was also ecstatic to learn that Marion is from Washington State himself! It’s rare to read about a male focused romance YA, but this book is done cleverly with humour and insight out of the ‘normal’ zombie genre.

I found this book to be a delightful read. It’s also short, and I loved how the chapters are separated by old school drawings of body parts. In a time where the zombie genre has arisen to its height, this book has the goods to keep it around for a long time. I hope the movie lives up to the book, and I also hope that the series continues in this strange ‘love conquers’ all track. It’s a simple story of hope and that message makes it essentially timeless.

Many thanks to my dear friend Rachael for letting me read her book and to her friend Michael for being awesome and winning it for her.

Horse Thoughts

Jan21

Abbeylex, Ireland, 2012

Sneak by Evan Angler

Jan19

Logan has done the impossible: He’s refused his Mark procedure and escaped the facility with a rumour of where his missing sister might be held. Now on the run, Logan attempts to make his way to Acheron, a place that goes bump in the dark. It’s told to be a place that holds everyone that didn’t come back from his or her Mark procedure. No one knows where Acheron is, or if it even exists, but Logan will do anything if it means finding Lily.

Meanwhile, The Dust is on the move, travelling through an underground system for the Markless, they risk discovery and capture to continue their fight against the Government. However, there’s more to the Mark than any of them realise. There’s a secret the Government is keeping that is so big it has the possibility to destroy all that it has created. The holder of this secret is at Acheron

Sneak is at a faster pace than the debut novel, Swipe. I found it much more engaging and as the Government’s practices and how they run the world is further explained, I fell deeper into this world with renewed interested. The book follows along the same lines with it’s characters, making it perfect follow up for it’s reader base.

I was surprised to learn that this series is actually Christian Fiction. I didn’t find any evidence of this in the first book but it’s been made clearly in the second. It’s not overpowering and it certainly doesn’t take away anything from the book. It’s a low undertone that if anything, has made me really curious to check out the third book once it gets published. If you’re eager to get back to Angler’s world, he doesn’t disappoint.

I’ve received this book for free from Netgalley for an honest review. Many thanks to Netgalley and the lovely publisher Thomas Nelson for providing me with this book!

Freshly Published January 2013

Jan17

Oh to live in a world where one gets paid to sit around all day and read and write.

This is not my life, but perhaps, one day.

For the time being, these books are on my radar and are hot off the publishing presses this month! I really hope my local library will have a few of these titles in stock soon! Please note, all blurbs are from Goodreads.

Teeth by Hannah Moskowitz

Hannah Moskowitz’s (author of BREAK and INVINCIBLE SUMMER) TEETH features a sixteen-year-old boy whose family, in an effort to cure his ailing brother, relocates to a remote island where legendary magic fish are said to have healing powers, and he discovers the island has terrible secrets, including a half-teenager, half-fish.

The Archived by Victoria Schwab

Imagine a place where the dead rest on shelves like books.

Each body has a story to tell, a life seen in pictures that only Librarians can read. The dead are called Histories, and the vast realm in which they rest is the Archive.

Da first brought Mackenzie Bishop here four years ago, when she was twelve years old, frightened but determined to prove herself. Now Da is dead, and Mac has grown into what he once was, a ruthless Keeper, tasked with stopping often-violent Histories from waking up and getting out. Because of her job, she lies to the people she loves, and she knows fear for what it is: a useful tool for staying alive.

Being a Keeper isn’t just dangerous-it’s a constant reminder of those Mac has lost. Da’s death was hard enough, but now her little brother is gone too. Mac starts to wonder about the boundary between living and dying, sleeping and waking. In the Archive, the dead must never be disturbed. And yet, someone is deliberately altering Histories, erasing essential chapters. Unless Mac can piece together what remains, the Archive itself might crumble and fall.

In this haunting, richly imagined novel, Victoria Schwab reveals the thin lines between past and present, love and pain, trust and deceit, unbearable loss and hard-won redemption.

Level 2 by Lenore Appelhans

‘I pause to look around the hive – all the podlike chambers are lit up as the drones shoot up on memories … I’ve wanted to get out of here before, but now the tight quarters start to choke me. There has to be more to death than this.’

Felicia Ward is dead. Trapped in a stark white afterlife limbo, she spends endless days replaying memories, of her family, friends, boyfriend … and of the guy who broke her heart. The guy who has just broken into Level 2 to find her.

Felicia learns that a rebellion is brewing, and it seems she is the key. Suspended between heaven and earth, she must make a choice. Between two worlds, two lives and two loves.

Eek! Splintered, one of the books on my 2012 Wish list is finally published! Hurray!

Splintered by A. G. Howard

Splintered Cover

This stunning debut captures the grotesque madness of a mystical under-land, as well as a girl’s pangs of first love and independence. Alyssa Gardner hears the whispers of bugs and flowers—precisely the affliction that landed her mother in a mental hospital years before. This family curse stretches back to her ancestor Alice Liddell, the real-life inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Alyssa might be crazy, but she manages to keep it together. For now.
When her mother’s mental health takes a turn for the worse, Alyssa learns that what she thought was fiction is based in terrifying reality. The real Wonderland is a place far darker and more twisted than Lewis Carroll ever let on. There, Alyssa must pass a series of tests, including draining an ocean of Alice’s tears, waking the slumbering tea party, and subduing a vicious bandersnatch, to fix Alice’s mistakes and save her family. She must also decide whom to trust: Jeb, her gorgeous best friend and secret crush, or the sexy but suspicious Morpheus, her guide through Wonderland, who may have dark motives of his own.

Finally, the wait is over! I was lucky enough to get a early copy of this fantastic book. Check out my review here, but go out and get yourself a copy too! The cover is simply gorgeous!

Broken by A. E. Rough

Imagine a modern spin on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein where a young couple’s undying love and the grief of a father pushed beyond sanity could spell the destruction of them all.

What new books have you bought this month? Leave me a comment, I am curious to know!