Crescendo Trailer!

So, I'm very excited for the October release of Crescendo, the sequel to Hush, Hush by the lovely Becca Fitzpatrick. In addition to the super-awesome countdown widget, which is embedded in my review of Hush, Hush, there is this super-awesome book trailer:



I don't embed videos often, so I really hope the formatting works. Yay trailer!

Forever is Beautiful.

I'm not talking about forever as in infinite time, I'm talking about Forever, the third Wolves of Mercy Falls book by the lovely Maggie Stiefvater. The cover was revealed today and it is simply gorgeous. But don't take my word for it. Here. Look. Bask in its loveliness.

And if you visit Maggie's blog (at this link), you can find out all about an awesome contest to win awesome Wolves-of-Mercy-Falls-related prizes by preordering Forever here.

Oh my goodness, you guys. I do not know how to tell you how excited I am about this book.

Review: Wicked

Title: Wicked
Author: Sara Shepard
Publisher: HarperTeen
Pages: 310
Series: Pretty Little Liars #5
Rating: 4 stars
**Warning: Spoilers for earlier books in the series.**
From the book jacket: 
In idyllic Rosewood, Pennsylvania, where Burberry earmuffs keep diamond-studded ears warm, four very pretty girls have done some very wicked things...

High school juniors Hanna, Spencer, Emily, and Aria have paid dearly for their sins. A stalker named "A" terrorized them for months and revealed their darkest secrets. But now that A's true identity has been revealed, the girls can finally go back to their pretty little lives.

Only, once a pretty little liar, always a pretty little liar - and these girls just can't help but be bad. Hanna will do anything to be Rosewood's queen bee. Spencer's digging up her family's secrets. Emily can't stop thinking about her new boyfriend. And Aria approves a little too strongly of her mom's taste in men.

As the secrets get darker and the scandals juicier, the consequences turn deadly. After all, girls who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. And in Rosewood, someone is always watching...

**********

I am enjoying these books, but I must confess, the book jacket descriptions are really annoying. I think the characters are all relatable to some degree (some more than others), but the jacket copies make the books sound like they're about a bunch of super-popular witchy gossip-queen girls who are all about doing every awful thing they can think of. (Only one of them is like that, and even then not the "do every bad thing she can think of" part. I mean, Hanna is my least favorite character, but she's not evil.)

However, jacket flap aside, I enjoyed Wicked. It went by too quickly! One thing about these books is that the plotlines all run right into each other and it's sometimes hard to pick out the one definite story arc that defines each novel as independent of the others. Or maybe it's just that there's so much going on! At any rate, I definitely want to read Killer ASAP.

Sara Shepard really does an excellent job of establishing mysteries that leave you wanting to know more, and she doesn't give us too many clues. All too often I figure out the plots of stories way before the characters do, and I love that with this series, I haven't. Okay, so the jacket flap pretty much gave away what each of the girls are going to be up to in the novel (even if the issue in question doesn't come up until halfway through the book), but I still don't know who New A is or who killed Ali or anything like that. I haven't solved the big mysteries yet.

I feel like I'm rambling a bit. This is probably the least coherent review I've posted to date (I blame the fact that I've been really busy and consequently sleep-deprived, although it's probably just that I'm in a rambly mood today). But to sum up my review of Wicked in just a couple of sentences: Definitely an excellent continuation of the series, but I'm starting to think that I'd enjoy these books a lot more if I just gave up on reading the covers.

Links: 
Pretty Little Liars website

In My Mailbox (4)

In My Mailbox is a weekly meme hosted by Kristi at The Story Siren where book bloggers share what books they got each week. My books this week didn't actually arrive in my mailbox, they're from the library, but here they are anyway:

Wicked by Sara Shepard. This is the fifth book in the Pretty Little Liars series, which (as you may know if you've followed my blog in the last few weeks) I've been reading recently. I actually finished this one earlier today, and my review should be up tomorrow.

Intertwined by Gena Showalter. I've seen this one around but never actually read it. Since the second book just came out, I figured maybe I should check it out. I have heard good things about it, especially for fantasy fans, so hopefully it will be good!

The Eternal Ones by Kirsten Miller. I don't know a whole lot about this one, but I know it's relatively new and I know I like the cover and I know the description is intriguing. Definitely can't wait to read it!






That's all I've got this week. What's in your mailbox?

Review: Prophecy of the Sisters

Title: Prophecy of the Sisters
Author: Michelle Zink
Publisher: Little, Brown Young Readers
Pages: 343
Series: Prophecy of the Sisters #1
Rating: 4 stars
Description from Goodreads: 
Sixteen-year-old Lia Milthorpe and her twin sister Alice have just become orphans, and, as Lia discovers, they have also become enemies. The twins are part of an ancient prophecy that has turned generations of sisters against each other. To escape from a dark fate and to remain in the arms of her beloved boyfriend James, Lia must end the prophecy before her sister does. Only then will she understand the mysterious circumstances of her parents' deaths, the true meaning of the strange mark branded on her wrist, and the lengths to which her sister will go to defeat her.

**********

I've had a copy of Prophecy of the Sisters on my bookshelf for ages now and just hadn't picked it up. All the hype for the second book made me think that maybe I should read it, and I think on the whole, I'm glad I did.


I didn't realize when I started that this novel is actually set in the year 1890. I'd been expecting something a bit more modern, so that was kind of a surprise, but a pleasant surprise, because it worked perfectly. The novel opens with Lia and her family at her father's funeral. The circumstances of his death were strange, and the night he died, a strange circular mark appeared on Lia's wrist. Not long after, her boyfriend James shows her a book he found in her father's library: a book with all the pages missing except one. This page contains a prophecy about Lia and her twin sister Alice. Her father and the mark on her wrist have more to do with it than Lia understands, but she's determined to find out.


I love the premise of this book. The idea of the prophecy of the sisters is really awesome, and putting it in a historical setting just makes it better. I like the characters, too - I wish we had gotten to see more of James, and I love Luisa and Sonia's characters too. I wish there had been more Henry, too!


I will admit that for a lot of the book, I was really annoyed by how predictable it was. I figured out what the keys were (part of the prophecy mentions keys) within a few pages of the first mention of them, but it took Lia a good fifty or a hundred pages after that, which is never a good sign. I like reading to discover new things, and if I know what's going to happen within fifty pages, then why read past that? But there were still a few questions that I hadn't guessed the answers to, so I kept reading, and I'm so glad I did.


By the end of the novel, I was blatantly ignoring everything else I needed to be doing (such as feeding the cat. He was not pleased) so I could finish. I didn't realize until the last few chapters how much of an emotional connection I'd made with Lia! Oh, and another random thing that I really loved about this: it was not all about boys! Lia already has a boyfriend who she loves, and the focus of the story is not on that romance, it's on the plot. Hooray for plot variation!


Long story short: I do recommend this, with a warning attached: It's a little slow and predictable in places. Still, though, I did enjoy it, especially in the second half once it really got going. And definitely check it out if you like paranormal in a historical setting.


Links: 
Michelle Zink's new website (which you should definitely visit, as it's awesome)
Michelle Zink's old website (also awesome, although her new posts are on her new site)
Prophecy of the Sisters series website

Waiting on Wednesday

I apologize for my silence over the last few days - turns out taking five AP classes can really eat your brain. ("Wait! What? School is a zombie? It eats brains?" Yes. Yes indeed.) Also, physics projects are really, truly evil. (Unless you find grenade-textured water balloons to launch from your water balloon launcher, and then proceed to have a war with them in your street, as my friend and I did just a few minutes ago.)(I'm using a lot of parentheticals today....hm.)

BUT ANYWAY...this week, the cover for Tessa Gratton's upcoming YA debut, Blood Magic, was released. So this week, I'm waiting on Blood Magic. Is this cover gorgeous or what?

Description from Goodreads:
For Nick Pardee and Silla Kennicot, the cemetery is the center of everything.


Nick is a city boy angry at being forced to move back to the nowhere town of Yaleylah, Missouri where he grew up. He can’t help remembering his mom and the blood magic she practiced – memories he’s tried for five years to escape. Silla, though, doesn’t want to forget; her parents’ apparent murder-suicide left her numb and needing answers. When a book of magic spells in her dad’s handwriting appears on her doorstep, she sees her chance to unravel the mystery of their deaths.


Together they plunge into the world of dark magic, but when a hundred-year-old blood witch comes hunting for the bones of Silla’s parents and the spell book, Nick and Silla will have to let go of everything they believe about who they are, the nature of life and death, and the deadly secrets that hide in blood.

*****

This book sounds amazing and I cannot wait to read it! Blood Magic comes out April 26, 2011. I'll definitely be looking for it then! What are you waiting on this week?


EDIT: I was so wrapped up in playing with grenade-colored water balloons that I completely forgot to credit Jill at Breaking the Spine with this awesome meme! Sincerest apologies. 

Review: Birthmarked

Title: Birthmarked
Author: Caragh M. O'Brien
Publisher: Roaring Book Press
Pages: 361
Series: Birthmarked Trilogy #1
Rating: 4 stars
From the book jacket: 
In the future, in a world baked dry by the harsh sun, there are those who live inside the wall and those, like sixteen-year-old midwife Gaia Stone, who live outside. Gaia has always believed it is her duty, with her mother, to hand over a small quota of babies to the Enclave. But when Gaia's mother and father are arrested by the very people they so dutifully serve, Gaia is forced to question everything she has been taught to believe. Gaia's choice is now simple: enter the world of the Enclave to rescue her parents, or die trying.

-----------------

Birthmarked took me a while to get into it and at first I was afraid I wasn't going to like it. I really wanted to like it, because it came really highly recommended by some of my best friends, but it was just really slow getting started. Of course, that might have been because it took me ages to read any of it thanks to school, but it just felt painfully slow.

Fortunately, it got better. Much better. By the time I got to the end, I was completely ignoring everything around me so that I could keep turning pages. I wanted to know what happened. The characters were only part of it - I liked Gaia, but she was kind of slow sometimes; my favorite was definitely Leon - and the plot was well-crafted but it's hard to get a whole lot of variation in dystopian fiction; it's always someone fighting the system. I think what made this book for me was the world that Caragh O'Brien created.

Those who live inside the wall are privileged and have everything they need. Those who are born outside the wall, are born healthy, and are one of the midwife's first three babies of the month can be advanced - taken inside the wall, to be adopted and raised as an Enclave child. Those like Gaia, who are scarred or imperfect or simply unlucky, live outside the wall - a much harder, less privileged life. Gaia is training to be a midwife like her mother, and has learned all of her mother's traditions and practices. So when her parents get arrested, Gaia is asked to unravel the coded birth record that her mother left behind.

I really loved the set-up with the code (which I solved before Gaia did! At least partially...I was excited) and the DNA testing and everything. Birthmarked was not my favorite book ever or anything, but I definitely enjoyed it once I got into it. I was afraid there wasn't going to be a sequel, because the ending could go either way (I don't think that's too spoilery), but fortunately the author's website says that it's going to be a trilogy. I'll certainly be looking for book two once it comes out!

Links: 
Caragh M. O'Brien's website