We were liars by e. lockhart (@elockhart )

“Tragedy is ugly and tangled, stupid and confusing.”

This book. Oh man. This book! It was not what I expected. So not what I expected. It did me in. It’s fresh and new and yet unbearably familiar. Before I get into what I was expecting from the book, I’m going to address something right up front. If you have any interest in reading this book, just go do it. Go in blind. You shouldn’t know what to expect. Let the story build as you read it. Just ride the wave. I’d noticed in reviews that people weren’t really talking about the book content in their reviews. I didn’t really understand why. They were all saying what I’ve just said – go in blind. I didn’t really understand why so many of them were saying this. Now I do. You just can’t really talk about any part of this book without ruining it for the new reader. Even I won’t talk specifics, and I am an unapologetic spoiler reviewer. I’m not going to do that here. I’m only going to talk about the concepts in the book. But you shouldn’t even read those. Just go get it and read it. It will take you somewhere if you let it.

Throwback Thursday – She-ra: Princess of Power

In a couple months, I’m heading down to a local comic expo. That means we’re currently in the weekly guest announcement phase. I wait impatiently every week to see who’s been added to the list. I’m generally not super drawn to the voice actors. Not because I’m not interested but because I generally don’t know who they are. It’s just not my area of nerd. But today, they announced Melendy Britt and Alan Oppenheimer are coming. She-ra and Skeletor!

This makes me super excited, especially the She-ra part. I loved She-ra as a child. LOVED. I have this memory of being a child and playing in a friend’s basement (I cannot remember exactly who that friend was…

Top Ten Tuesday – Books to Talk About

This week’s top ten comes to us, as always, from the ladies over at The Broke & Bookish. To close out the first month of the new year, we’re talking about book club books. Books you’d like to discuss with your real/fictional/started-as-a-resolution-but-has-fallen-to-the-wayside book club. My book club is fictional. I’ve been part of a few of them (real ones I mean), but they always seem to die after a couple meetings when only one or two of us (not always me) would have the book finished. But, I have this fantasy of this dream book club where everyone (including me) reads all the books and has all the intense discussions and drinks all the coffee without ever getting coffee mouth. I live in a fantasy world. My fantasy book club may also involve me getting to hang out with Felicia Day…

In my book club, we get to read whatever books we want t from whatever genre. There are no guidelines here other than stimulating thoughts. So, these are the books I’d like to spend some time discussing with other people. Or think I would. I haven’t read all of these, but they seem like good discussion books.

Books I’ve Already Read:

Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist

It is autumn 1981 when the inconceivable comes to Blackeberg, a suburb in Sweden. The body of a teenage boy is found, emptied of blood, the murder rumored to be part of a ritual killing. Twelve-year-old Oskar is personally hoping that revenge has come at long last—revenge for the bullying he endures at school, day after day.

But the murder is not the most important thing on his mind. A new girl has moved in next door—a girl who has never seen a Rubik’s Cube before, but who can solve it at once. There is something wrong with her, though, something odd. And she only comes out at night….

This is a Vampire story that isn’t really a vampire story. Like any good paranormal story, it’s about the people not the entity. Mostly, I’d like to discuss the concepts of loneliness within the book.

Fiendish by Brenna Yovanoff (@brennayovanoff )

I finished my first Yovanoff novel in a day. This one took me several weeks. On its face, that might seem like a bad thing, but it’s not. This book was just as intriguing and strange and good. It was just so weirdly removed but still within reality that I had to take breaks to let me head wrap around the content. Magical realism always takes me a little longer to absorb than other genres. But Yovanoff’s incredible strength at creating atmosphere got me through. So spooky and strange is this world that I just wanted to know more and more. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Yovanoff is a master craftsman of mood.

Based on the title alone, I had expectations for this book. I kind of expected that our main character would be imbued with titular quality. That she would be evil. Let’s set the stage for Fiendish (as always, I’m going to talk about the content, so spoilers) – as a child, Clementine is bound and hidden in a closet while her home and family burn around her. Ten years later, she’s still sitting in this cupboard, waiting. How can she not be the fiend in the title? How could this happen to a person without them becoming a raging ball of anger. But that’s not Clementine. She knows time has passed, but not how much. She can see, but not really. She has visions she can’t explain. Her time seems verge on comfortable. A boy her own age, Fisher, finally finds and saves her. Both know they were drawn to each other, but they can’t explain what’s causing the pull.

In the YA genre, girl meets jerky boy and instantly falls for him and helps to make him better is a trope that’s been done to death and often done poorly. So, when I realized that this would be a major focus of the book, I took it with a salt shaker’s worth of salt. Yovanoff had done it well in Paper Valentine, but could this book live up to what she’d done there? I’d read some reviews that panned this book for being nothing but a girl saves boy and finds the love of her life story. I gotta say, I do not agree. Yes, there is a relationship in the book, but there’s more to it than simple sexual attraction.

TTT – Freebie – 2015 Rereads Challenge

The ladies over at the B&B are giving us a freebie today. I could do lots of things, but I’ve been busy, so I’m doing rereads. Alright, so I kind of already did this post back in November, but I’ve decided to actually schedule some re-reading this year as part of the #reread2015 Challenge.

Instead of reading a specific number of books this read, I’m re-reading specific books instead. Getting to enjoy books I really enjoyed the first time around again? Yes, please. Thinking I won’t read a single new book over the course of the year is a ridiculous and unattainable goal, so I’ve chosen twelve books. One a month. I should be able to make this goal no problem.

Harry Potter 5,6,7 by J.K. Rowling

I’ve been doing my Potter re-read for over the last year. Picking up all the things I’ve forgotten by watching the movies so many times. I started book five just after Christmas, so I’m already on track to get these reads done. I actually think I’ll finish this one today or tomorrow. Book five is so much better than I remember it being. I’m super excited to reread the last two – especially since I’ve only read the seventh book once.