Book Break-Ups: Mini Review: Envy by Gregg Olsen

Title: Envy
Series: Empty Coffin
Author: Gregg Olsen
Publisher: Splinter
Publication Date: 7 Sep 2011

Synopsis: From Amazon

This new Young Adult fiction series stars Hayley and Taylor Ryan, crime solving (as long as mum doesn't know), butt-kicking (when they have to) and otherwise normal 15 year-old twin girls. Each novel takes place in Port Gamble, WA, otherwise known as Empty Coffin, so dubbed thanks to an old town legend. Each novel in the series is based on a ripped-from-the-headlines news story with fictionalised characters, real crime-solving techniques and a bit of twin senses thrown in. Told in a non-linear narrative that flashes back and forth in time and bit-by-bit revealing a secret past that even Hayley and Taylor don't know about, each novel tells a satisfying true crime inspired tale as well as peeling back another layer of the overall series arc to the reader at the same time that the main characters discover it. A dedicated series website will include exciting bonus extras. Envy, the debut book, centres around a teen bullying situation that ends in death. But is it an accident, or murder? The novel will include a sneak peek at the sequel, as well as a smartphone Tag code on the back cover.

REVIEW:

I loved the premise of this book combining crime fiction and the paranormal, surprisingly it was a DNF. As the synopsis states it is told in 'non-linear narrative', what this translated to for me is that it goes off at tangents and had a disjointed feel to the flow of the story. I am sure there are a lot of people that like tangents and intricate descriptions of every little thing , unfortunately I am not one of them.

Being of the adult age group I couldn't help compare this style of writing as distinctly adult rather than YA, with YA the aim is to keep the attention of the reader to the maximum, adult writing had more leeway as you expect the reader to have a higher concetration level  - oh gosh this must mean I have a low concetration level and get distracted easily (goes to look for the squirrel someone just saw). I know this about myself, that I get distracted easily not the squirrel, and maybe this is one of the reasons I steer clear of adult books and stick to YA. although I do think there is a lot more to it than that.

The powerful prose at the beginning was heartfelt and realistic (unfortunately) which gave me high hopes for the rest of the book. I honestly did give it a good go and read about two thirds of it, then skipped to the ending to see if I liked it more to keep going. I really, really felt it didn't flow, all the odd little bits of information thrown in were just distracting. We have already established that this is not a good thing for me.

What I would have like to have seen is far more focus on the characters themselves, a lot of questions arise within the plot relating to past event and they aren't really given any clear answers just a few hints placed here and there. On the whole the characters are just awful, cruel, self centered and downright evil lurks beneath their surface. No redemable qualities, I just couldnt cope with that. I think that because of the awful people in real life I don't want to be confronted with then when I read. Reading is my escape from harch reality and this didn't provide me with that escape.

This is definately the case of it being the wrong reader for this book that is why I am putting it on UK Book Tours so that it can find the right reader.

Thanks to Carla at The Crooked Shelf for the use of Book Break-Ups

Musical Moments: Guest Post: Emma and Bennett's playlist on Shuffle by Lee Nichols

It is my pleasure to welcome Lee Nichols to Book Angel Booktopia today. As you are probably aware I adore the Haunting Emma series (you totally know it is about me right [ ; D ]) So to have some of the play-list Bennett gave to Emma has completely made my day; and yes I have added them to my iPod. Imagine if you will Emma's play-list on shuffle, these are the first 5 songs to be played:

Mirror Ball by Elbow. This song always reminds me of the scene in Deception when Emma and Bennett walk through the dark village streets down to the harbor and he explains to her their shared history.

Review: Abandon by Meg Cabot

Title: Abandon

Series: Abandon #1

Author: Meg Cabot

Publisher: Macmillan Children's Books

Publication  Date: 2 Sep 2011

Synopsis: From Amazon

Last year, Pierce died - just for a moment. And when she was in the space between life and death, she met John: tall dark and terrifying, it’s his job to usher souls from one realm to the next.

There’s a fierce attraction between them, but Pierce knows that if she allows herself to fall for John she will be doomed to a life of shadows and loneliness in the underworld. But now things are getting dangerous for her, and her only hope is to do exactly what John says . . .

REVIEW:

Although I was aware that this book is based upon the Greek myth of Hades and Persephone, it only know the basics of that story so it didn't affect my judgement or preconception of this story at all. The use of the Persephone and Dante's Inferno quotes added a sense of depth to the narrative, reinforcing the main plot while adding a sense of realism.

Powerfully descriptive writing style brings the words to techni-colour life within my imagination.

Written in first person narrative from Pierce's point of view, at 17 she had a near death experience at 15 which resulted in the breakdown of her parents marriage and relocating back to the island her mother grew up on. Pierce is one of those genuinely nice people, you can see this in the selfless way she puts other people first and rescues injured animals. Her privileged background and self absorbed parents make this fact quite surprising, I would have expected her to be a pampered princess.  I do think that it is her 'inner' beauty that really draws John to her even though the way she looks on the outside obviously helps, from her description I had images of Snow White flying around in my imagination.

The waiting in what can only be thought of as Purgatory by the River Styx is wonderfully portrayed in the narrative; the notion of the different lines and boats leading to different places was ingenious. The difference in the length of the lines really brought home how little people worry about the consequence of their actions. The desperation of the people in the longer line drifted from the pages.

The way in which Pierce escapes the Underworld had me giggling like a maniac into my book. However, there are repercussions. Following her visit to the Underworld Pierce does retreat into herself a bit and this is where you can see the way in which her childhood could have really shaped her personality. The irony of the history of the island they move to made a wonderful addition to the plot.

The chemistry between Pierce and John crackles from between the pages. Wow, I really admire Pierce's self control and adored the portrayal of John torn between his emotions and his 'job'. He is very protective of Pierce and for good reason [ ; D ]

Bringing me nicely onto John, *swoon*, well you pretty much can't get more bad boy than John. From his black clothes to his imposing height and threatening demeanour, right down to the way he first charges into the book on his horse - I am so there [ : D ] Pierce shows so much restraint especially when confronted with that dreamy white bed [ ; D ] which provides such a visual contrast to John himself. I am really, really, really desperate to know his background story and how he ended up having a 'job' in the Underworld. Obviously the theme song would have to be Don't Pay the Ferryman with the images of the River Styx. I have the feeling that this is just so much more to John and I NEED to know it.

All of the characters are very well written, providing extremes of personalities and quirkiness. Not only am I following the plot for the development of John and Pierce, I am genuinely interested in the other characters development  the high school cliques, the family dynamics and so much more - I NEED ANSWERS!!!!!

The only aspect of the story that I had a problem with is the portrayal of The Fury's. these have always been tormentors but their abilities in this story really took them to another level and it took me a while to get used to picturing them as such.

That's all I can say is thank goodness this is a trilogy as I really want more and I need those questions answered. *Goes to look on Amazon to see the publication date of the next book - eeepppp it only says 2012 - how will I cope*.

Trailer Tuesday: Abandon by Meg Cabot and ARC Give-Away

Title: Abandon

Series: Abandon #1

Author: Meg Cabot

Publisher: Macmillan Children's Books

Publication Date: 2 Sep 2011

Synopsis: From Amazon

Last year, Pierce died - just for a moment. And when she was in the space between life and death, she met John: tall dark and terrifying, it’s his job to usher souls from one realm to the next.

There’s a fierce attraction between them, but Pierce knows that if she allows herself to fall for John she will be doomed to a life of shadows and loneliness in the underworld. But now things are getting dangerous for her, and her only hope is to do exactly what John says . . .

Review up tomorrow [ : D ] 

Bad boy overload *swoon*

As I am unable to put ARC's in the school library and I like to share my books AND I appreciate every single follower I have I thought I would do something a bit different. I have 268 followers at last count when I was writing this post. So I have hidden the book on a grid with the squares numbering 1 to 268. 

One entry per person.
Duplicate entries will be deleted.
Open Internationally to accommodate all my lovely followers.
Check the spreadsheet to make sure the number you have chosen hasn't already been taken. Please place your name by the number on the spreadsheet here by pressing F2 and adding your name to the spreadsheet and confirm the number on the form below.

MG Monday: Guest Post: Literally Random by Helen Moss

Hailed as the new Enid Blyton by my lovely friend Karen at Teenage Fiction for all Ages (you can see the reviews by clicking the link)  it is my great pleasure to welcome Helen Moss to Book Angel Booktopia today to talk about the use of pop culture terminology and its longevity in writing. A topic to discuss with Year 9 I think [ ; D ] Over to Helen:

 

Literally Random

Towards the end of The Mystery of The Whistling Caves, twelve-year old Emily Wild is stranded in a deep, dark cave in the cliffs. The tide is coming in fast. Surely Jack and Scott should have come back down the secret passage by now? To Emily’s horror, her little dog Drift is almost swept away. The water has risen much higher than she thought...

Emily’s has a dilemma. Should she; 

(1)   stay in the cave and wait for the others?

(2)   swim out and try to raise the alarm?

(3)   crawl up the secret passage?

I have a dilemma. As Emily plunges into the freezing water, does she exclaim;

(1)   Yikes!

(2)   OMG!

(3)   None of the above

You might think that getting the slang right is a predominantly YA kind of an issue. I’ve read some fascinating discussions of the pitfalls (and pleasures) of writing teen-speak¹. But I’ve found that some of the same questions bedevil writing for Middle Grade readers too.

It’s just so hard to get it right!

While yikes would be my own personal exclamation of choice for a trapped-in-cave scenario every time (yikes just happens to be one of my current favourite words along with dwindle, thwart, bedevil and crepuscular) - would any self-respecting twelve-year old allow such a decidedly retro utterance to pass their lips?  I might as well suggest Emily cry Gadzooks or Goodness Gracious!

‘Goodness Gracious, it’s little Doris Frost!’ cried Angela...^.2

On the other hand, to eschew the old-school and go down the OMG route, risks the even greater sin of getting it horribly, embarrassingly wrong. Nothing sparks the withering glare of pre-teen disdain more readily than an adult trying too hard to be cool. And even if OMG! were acceptable today, what happens if, in a year’s time, it’s so so-last-week that Emily sounds like a total twerp? Readers will be too busy sniggering to give a hoot about her speleological predicament.

I’ve listed below a selection of colloquialisms that made it past the linguistic bouncers to gain entry to Adventure Island. I make no claim whatsoever to have got the balance right, but, in general, I’ve been guided by my patented Everyone And Their Mums test³. To wit, if a word or phrase is one that I’ve actually heard 8-13 year-olds bandy about in everyday speech AND it’s also used at least on occasion by parents (without sounding self-conscious and/or ridiculous), then it’s probably both acceptable to young readers and well-enough established to have some staying power³.

On these grounds, words like cool, sad (meaning pathetic), dead (meaning very), lame (meaning feeble), whatever!, wuss, wimp and bottle (as in back out) are all in.

I’ve also allowed mega and epic to make occasional appearances, and also one instance of Chill! (Although I’m already having doubts about this one. As I said, I’m not claiming to have got the balance right!)

I dithered terribly over Awesome! It still sounds distinctly American to my ear and I’m not sure it technically passes the Everyone And Their Mums test. But kids say it all the time so I gave it a special permit.

It was also surprisingly difficult to settle on an insult or two that brothers can hurl at each other, which are in current usage (ruling out the delightful blighter and nincompoop!), not too rude (ruling out 50% of all known insults) or offensive (ruling out another 49%). I was tempted by the fabulous molehead, as overheard being hurled by one of my nieces at her sister in a heated moment several years ago, but ruled it out on the grounds of obscurity. Finally I settled on dork, wally, dingbat and idiot, with the occasional git, and, in extremis, plonker.

And finally, there’s random. What did we do before random smashed its way out of the statistics textbook? It’s ubiquitous from pre-school onwards. Although, speakers almost never really mean random, of course. They mean serendipitous or counter-intuitive or bizarre or vague or paradoxical or sporadic.  At a pinch, they might mean pseudorandom (a process that appears to be random but it is not). But literally random?  Very rarely.

But that’s OK. I was an experimental psycholinguist in a previous life and I know that word meanings evolve and mutate over time. (For example, adventure once meant a chance happening, silly meant happy and meat referred to any kind of food. For more recent examples, consider mouse, twitter and icon). Insisting every word remain tethered to the meaning it had when freshly coined would be a nonsense. And if we couldn’t stretch a word beyond its literal meaning, how (non-literally) flat and (non-literally) pedestrian life would be!³

So, not wanting to leave Emily stranded in the cave up to her armpits in freezing water a moment longer, what does the poor girl do as the tide rises.

The answer is (2) swim out and raise the alarm.

But, more to the point, what does she say. Is it a Yikes! or an OMG moment?

The answer is (3) none of the above.

I played safe and opted for a wordless gasp.

 

Helen

PS. I’d love to know what other Middle Grade writers think about the Yikes vs OMG Dilemma!

  

Footnotes

(I love footnotes!)

¹ Scott Westerfield of Uglies fame on the Notes from the Slushpile blog is very interesting on this, for example^.

http://notesfromtheslushpile.blogspot.com/2006/04/ya-voice-slang-and-teen-vernacular.html

²  Illustration and quote from That Boarding School Girl, by Dorita Fairlie Bruce, as presented to my Grandmother by her Aunt and Uncle in 1934.

³ I’m adopting a conservative approach here. Although the main characters in Adventure Island are twelve and thirteen, the books are aimed at readers of around eight to twelve and are suitable for reading aloud to children as young as six. Now I think about it, the Everyone and their Mums test might be useful in reverse for YA books. For most teenagers, any slang word their parents would comfortably use is, by definition, cringe-worthily passé and should therefore be denied entry?

⁴ Although having said that, don’t get me started on literally. “I literally died when I saw the time.” No, you didn’t!

Saturday Spotlight: Alyson Noel Week Winners

 

Alyson Noel Week at Book Angel Booktopia

I would also like to take this oppurtunity to express my sincere apologies to Alyson and Sall that the review of Everlasting did not go up. I did write it but blogger ate it with the scheduling issues; being an idiot I didnt save it anywhere else. So I have to re-write it asap. The lesson learnt is save and put on Amazon and Goodreads immediately Do no wait for the post to go live.

Prize Pack 1

Winner as chosen by Random.org

Lucky Number 4: Jules

Prize Pack 2

 

Lucky Number 2

Hannah

Congratulations both and thank you to all those that entered :D 

Saturday Spotlight: Guest Post: The Great YA Time Machine by Kate Harrison

I am so so so excited to welcome Kate Harrison to Book Angel Booktopia today to talk about the great age appeal of YA. As you are probably aware I am one of the people this post applies to as I am not a YA myself (although I am pretty sure I am still 22 in my head, lol). Over to Kate:  

I hope my mum won’t mind me telling you that she’s not in the target market for my first YA novel.

Yet she says it’s definitely her favourite. ‘It’s got an extra something the others didn’t have. And now your dad’s reading it too.’

            I tried to resist asking her what the ‘extra something’ was, or what the others lacked. Mum has a habit of speaking her mind.   

            But here are a few guesses about that something: murder, an imaginary other world, an avenging teenage girl, a dead hero, a geek hero, a thoughtful killer, a cheesy reality TV show, and a love that could cost the heroine her life.

            Hmm. Makes my romantic comedies – which I also love writing – seem a bit, well, tame.

            I’m not in the target YA audience either but, like Mum, I’ve developed a real taste for reading this ‘genre’ of fiction. Except it’s not really a genre at all – and that could be the very reason why YA is appealing to a broader range or readers, and writers.

            As a writer, it lets me tell the story I want to, without worrying whether I might be ‘breaking’ some of the genre rules: by putting a beach bar in the afterlife, for example, or having my heroine juggle homework with homicide investigations. In YA, anything goes, whether it’s a vampire love affair or a televised battle to the death.

            There’s nothing wrong with genre – readers often like to know what they’re getting when they invest time and money in a book.

            But the joy of YA is that you’re never quite certain what you’re going to get. After the success of Twilight, there was a fair chance a vampire might pop up, but YA is so much broader than that. What they have in common is that the young protagonists are facing big battles: for identity, for justice, for love.

            So why are older readers clamouring to read about teens? The truth is that even if those days are decades away, that time is probably the most exciting of our lives: it’s all about imagination, possibility and passion. Is it any wonder we use YA books as a time machine back to a more thrilling time?

            As writers, we seek extremes and we want our characters to be braver and fiercer than we are: my heroine, Alice, is open to possibilities from the first moment that she opens an email apparently from her murdered sister. An adult would probably have dismissed it as a hoax and deleted the mail without thinking.

            YA writers trust their readers – like their characters – to be open and challenging, to consider possibilities adults might dismiss, to ask the awkward questions.

            Talking of awkward questions, I did finally ask my mother what it was she liked most.

            ‘The Beach,’ she said. ‘The sunshine, the sand, the sea. I could imagine myself there...’

Title: Soul Beach

Series: Soul Beach #1

Author: Kate Harrison

Publisher: Indigo

Publication Date: 1 Sep 2011

Synopsis: From Amazon

When Alice Forster receives an email from her dead sister she assumes it must be a sick practical joke. Then an invitation arrives to the virtual world of Soul Beach, an idyllic online paradise of sun, sea and sand where Alice can finally talk to her sister again - and discover a new world of friendships, secrets and maybe even love . . . . But why is Soul Beach only inhabited by the young, the beautiful and the dead? Who really murdered Megan Forster? And could Alice be next? The first book in an intriguing and compelling trilogy centered around the mystery of Megan Forster's death.

Review HERE