Young Adult

Evil Librarian

2015, Books in Bed, Fiction, Sci Fi and Fantasy, Young Adult /

Who can resist a book called Evil Librarian? Not me, that’s for sure.

It was cute. YA cute. It was also a little slow for me. The first half of the book just slogged along, which it shouldn’t have since a lot did happen. It just wasn’t compelling. Or maybe I was just tired from a really hectic work week? I dunno. It was good. I didn’t hate it. Not sure whether I’ll read the next two books (there have to be two more because, well — I can’t imagine there wouldn’t be because of the deal with the demon…)

Oh, the book also made me want to see Sweeney Todd so there’s that. lol

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The Boy at the End of the World

2014, Books in Bed, Favorites, Fiction, Sci Fi and Fantasy, Young Adult /

I have no idea how The Boy at the End of the World ended up in my library bag. So weird. It’s an older book, so it wasn’t from me just randomly surfing the new arrivals stack or anything like that. I can’t remember seeing it mentioned in a recent blog post. It just… randomly made its way to me and that’s awesome.

It was really good. I didn’t want to put it down. And, that was only in part due to the appearance of mutant prairie dogs. MUTANT PRAIRIE DOGS.

I really enjoyed it and the only sad thing is that there’s no sequel. Wah! I wanted more stories about Fisher, Protein, Click, and Zapper!

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Pantomine

2014, Books in Bed, Cybil Challenge, Queer, Sci Fi and Fantasy, Young Adult /

Another Cybils shortlist book, Pantomine was… slow. It’s also trying to do a lot of things (slowly) and not necessarily succeeding with any of them.

I didn’t dislike the characters. The intersex/Kedi idea is interesting. The weird glass things are interesting but we didn’t get enough information about the world they’re living in to really understand why they were interesting, which made Micah/Gene’s connection to them less interesting than it might otherwise be. It’s ok to keep some of the story back, but giving us just a little bit more about why we should care, well, that would have been good.

I’m not sure I’ll read the next book, we’ll see.

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The Summer Prince

2014, Books in Bed, Cybil Challenge, Sci Fi and Fantasy, Young Adult /

The Summer Prince is from the Cybils shortlist. If it hadn’t been, I’d have never read it. I am not usually a fan of the summer prince storyline. I just… no. I don’t generally like the characters and I don’t particularly like this particular myth and books that use it tend to leave me cold.

This one… wasn’t bad. It was certainly better than others I’ve read, though I saw the ending coming from about 100 pages away.

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Two Audio Books

2014, Audiobooks, Books in Bed, Cybil Challenge, Sci Fi and Fantasy, Young Adult /

The second book in the His Fair Assassin series was on the Cybils shortlist but I hadn’t read the first book. So, I grabbed it on audio and we listened to it last month.

We enjoyed Grave Mercy. It’s definitely a YA book — there’s a lot of flowery lovey-dovey stuff that makes me and TW roll our eyes but we definitely liked it.

The second book, Dark Triumph, oh boy. Sybella is a hot mess. Horrible horrible descriptions of horrible horrible acts – killing babies, creepy brother/sister sex stuff. A whole lot of violence. Then, of course, there’s a lot of flowery lovey-dovey stuff which makes me and TW roll our eyes, particularly after we’ve just heard some really disgusting stuff about dead babies and gah. It was good. We liked it. We just needed strong stomachs to get through it.

I need a bit of a break from the series before I can bring myself to listen to the third book. Maybe in the spring? lol

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Shadows

2014, Books in Bed, Cybil Challenge, Sci Fi and Fantasy, Young Adult /

Oh look, another Cybils book that I wanted to love but couldn’t. Shadows turned out to be perfectly fine but not great. I don’t generally mind made up words or ordinary words turned into slang words but in this case — it was a struggle from beginning to end. Too much of it, not enough context and to make matters worse, there were Japanese words thrown in for fun. The struggle was real. Very real.

We also spent a whole lot of the beginning of the book listening to Maggie rant about her step-father and that took way too much time and used far too many made up/slang/Japanese words.

Once the story got beyond the hatred of Val the step-father, it was better. The author does a fabulous job with animals (the kind we know and the gruaa kind that we didn’t) and the use of origami throughout the book was fantastic. These last two things make the book worth reading. Mostly.

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The Waking Dark

2014, Audiobooks, Books in Bed, Cybil Challenge, Don't Read This, Young Adult /

Not only am I behind on reading, I’m behind on blogging what I have read. I’ve almost forgotten what I’ve read — thankfully, there’s GoodReads.

So, the easy one first. The Waking Dark. On audio. From the Cybils shortlist.

Shudder.

All the killing. And the descriptive killing.

Shudder.

Did not enjoy.

Also, too many characters and we found ourselves constantly confused by which was which.

Would hope my teens wouldn’t enjoy it if they read it.

Shudder.

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Three Graphic Novels

2014, Books in Bed, Children's Literature, Comics & Graphic Novels, Cybil Challenge, Young Adult /

All Cybils and all better than I expected.

I absolutely loved Templar and didn’t expect to.

Uzumaki was freaky. It’s hard to read a book while you’re covering your eyes. Also, I will never look at spirals in the same way. Shudder. Also, it’s been awhile since I read real manga (front to back) much less horror manga.

War Brothers is heartbreaking. I think I’d have liked the real book better than the graphic novel.

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Boxers & Saints

2014, Books in Bed, Comics & Graphic Novels, Cybil Challenge, Young Adult /

I really liked Boxers & Saints — I particularly appreciated the way the second book (Saints) tied into the first book (Boxers)… with the opera mask girl. I liked that very much.

What I didn’t like was good grief, how depressing. All the dying peoples. All the blood and gore. All the unhappy unhappy. I mean obviously there would be a lot of that, it was a difficult time period in China but sheesh. ALL the unhappy and ALL the blood & gore. Shudder.

Well drawn. Well written. (Some typos in my version, I hope there aren’t any in yours.)

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