Divergent by Veronica Roth

In Beatrice Prior’s dystopian Chicago, society is divided into five factions, each dedicated to the cultivation of a particular virtue—Candor (the honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), and Erudite (the intelligent). On an appointed day of every year, all sixteen-year-olds must select the faction to which they will devote the rest of their lives. For Beatrice, the decision is between staying with her family and being who she really is—she can’t have both. So she makes a choice that surprises everyone, including herself.

During the highly competitive initiation that follows, Beatrice renames herself Tris and struggles to determine who her friends really are—and where, exactly, a romance with a sometimes fascinating, sometimes infuriating boy fits into the life she’s chosen. But Tris also has a secret, one she’s kept hidden from everyone because she’s been warned it can mean death. And as she discovers a growing conflict that threatens to unravel her seemingly perfect society, she also learns that her secret might help her save those she loves . . . or it might destroy her.

You’ve probably heard about this book. If you haven’t, I’ve bet you’ve heard of THE SERIES that started the new trend that took out the Paranormal Romance trend. I’ve heard about this book early last year and I was curious about it enough. It wasn’t as big as it was now, but since I am a big dystopian fan, I decided to add it to books I would read in the future when they got published.

Now fast forwarding to the now, I’ve finally read this book and it’s gotten a lot more buzz once its publishing date was coming nearer and nearer, and once it got published it was popular enough to debut on the New York Times List. This, however, was the moment where I kind of was just okay with dystopian books after reading some substandard ones and I was kind of tired of these new ones that weren’t as good as some of the better ones I’ve read, e.g Unwind and some of the Dystopian classics.

Divergent is different from the newer dystopian books. It has action and trials and factions. The book is interesting enough that it makes the reader want to turn pages and keep them interested. Which, based on that alone and the easy to read writing, would be given 5 stars. Not to mention the last 50 or so pages as well. But the thing that kind of didn’t make me buy the idea of Divergent was the history of how it can to be a dystopian society and the world building which really wasn’t much outside of its descriptions of Chicago. Because if you peel away the outer layers of the book, you don’t get a real dystopian society. It was one of the reasons why I liked it more than some dystopians not because of the dystopian aspect, but the way it kept the reader reading. And it doesn’t help that I am not big on the faction aspect, because the idea of factions is popular enough to sell.

But on a whole, I couldn’t agree with it because if you file everyone in this whole world into one faction, many, if not all, could be in more than one faction than what the book shows. It’s just not that plausible for everyone to be in one faction that pertains to them and only have a few anomalies. Based on this, I really think that it’s probably better to not have a faction to be in a faction at all if you fit into more than one faction.

I will still continue to read the sequels in this series, however, due to its ending and how it kept me interested in reading it.

Mercy by Rebecca Lim

A fallen angel haunted by her past. Yearning for her immortal beloved. Forever searching for answers.Who will show her Mercy?

Mercy has lost herself. She can’t count how many times she’s “woken up” in a new body, and assumed a new life, only to move on again and again. During the day she survives in the human world on instinct and at night her dreams are haunted by him. Mercy’s heart would know him anywhere. But her memory refuses to cooperate.

But this time is different. When Mercy wakes up she meets Ryan, an eighteen year old reeling from the loss of his twin sister who was kidnapped two years ago. Everyone else has given up hope, but Ryan believes his sister is still alive. Using a power she doesn’t fully comprehend, Mercy realizes that Ryan is right. His sister is alive and together they can find her. For the first time since she can remember, Mercy has a purpose; she can help. So she doesn’t understand why the man in her dreams cautions her not to interfere. But as Ryan and Mercy come closer to solving the dark mystery of his sister’s disappearance, danger looms just one step behind.

Will Mercy be able to harness her true self and extraordinary power in time?

To call Mercy by Rebecca Lim another angel book is not something you should do. In fact, describing the book itself is complicated if you don’t want to be too wordy. But this book has a lot of mystery inside.

Starting the book was a bit strange, but mostly because Mercy, the main character, is disoriented as the book begins. I wasn’t sure what was going on in the book but as more was revealed, the more I started to like the book. However, that does not mean the initial confusion the reader gets when starting the book goes away.

As I was getting to know Mercy and Carmen, the newest host for Mercy, the storyline of Carmen/Ryan/Lauren was more interesting to me than with Mercy/Luc. So when Lauren’s mystery increased, the more I didn’t want to stop reading.

Smaller subplots, such as the musical aspect in the book, surprisingly did not confuse me as much as I thought it would have.

And once the mystery surrounding Lauren is solved and what happens to Mercy next, makes me really want to read the next book

A brief summary of my TBR pile.

After remembering how, last year, I swore I’d never get a TBR pile like some people do, I couldn’t help but grin at how wrong I was. Especially after finishing up a new batch of books that had just entered my TBR pile. Right now I have about 30+ to go and then I’m finished. Pretty much it.

But along the way as I tried to get rid of the (hopefully) never-ending list, I’ve been writing less and less and so far, it’s been ignored the past few days.

Aside from a few messed up proportions here and there (like the second top book and the bubbles because I did them first) from the doodle, I think this best summarizes what my tbr pile is like, if books could talk, and how I feel about it. (If you can’t tell, it’s the note on the chair)

Enjoy. (Click image to view full size if the font is too small for the eyes)

Legend – Marie Lu

The United States is gone, along with its flooded coasts. North America’s two warring nations, the western Republic and the eastern Colonies, have reached a breaking point. In the midst of this broken continent and dark new world are two teenagers who will go down in history….

Born into the slums of Los Angeles, fifteen-year old Day is the country’s most wanted criminal. A mysterious boy with no recorded image or fingerprints. A boy who should no longer exist. A boy who watches over his family until one evening, when the plague patrols mark his family’s door with an X–the sign of plague infection. A death sentence for any family too poor to afford the antidote. Desperate, Day has no choice; he must steal it.

Born to an elite family in Los Angeles’ wealthy Ruby sector, fifteen-year old June is the Republic’s most promising prodigy. A superintelligent girl destined for great things in the country’s highest military circles. Obedient, passionate, and committed to her country–until the day her brother Metias is murdered while on patrol during a break-in at the plague hospital.

Only one person could be responsible.

Day.

And now it’s June’s mission to hunt him down.

Thoughts? I remember stumbling upon this, months before it earned a cover, and was only a summary on goodreads. I was pretty in love with the summary because it sounded very interesting against the wave of dystopian that came in when Hunger Games was published, a new wave of romance, and now it’s more varied.

The cover is something I think will look great in person, I bet it’s going to end up embossed. Looking forward to it’s fall release!

Miles from Ordinary by Carol Lynch Williams

Thirteen-year-old Lacey wakes to a beautiful summer morning excited to begin her new job at the library, just as her mother is supposed to start work at the grocery store. Lacey hopes that her mother’s ghosts have finally been laid to rest; after all, she seems so much better these days, and they really do need the money. But as the hours tick by and memories come flooding back, a day full of hope spins terrifyingly out of control….

I have to admit, this is the first book I’ve actually read from this author, actually. I’ve heard many things about her other books though (The Chosen One), and I keep on reminding myself to go on and read them, but I haven’t. I will soon, eventually. When picking up and reading this book, I wasn’t sure what to expect, even after reading the jacket flap’s summary.

The novel’s events take the course of one full day, including a lot of flashbacks so in a way, it’s a short book but still a powerful one. The flashbacks explain why Lacey’s mother is the way she is and who her mother’s ghosts are as bits and pieces of Lacey’s past are shown.

For the start of Miles from Ordinary, it began out pretty slow. But eventually it picked up its pace and soon I was anticipating for what the ending might be as tension rose from the last forty pages or so. What Lacey’s mother wanted to do was pretty horrifying if you’ve read it.

I found myself liking, besides Lacey, some of the other cast of characters you see from the book. And in the end, I think the only gripe I have is the way Lacey thinks about one thing and twists it around and says that it’s wrong. It’s pretty strange.

I’ll be looking forward to reading the author’s other novels in the future.

Where She Went by Gayle Forman

It’s been three years since the devastating accident … three years since Mia walked out of Adam’s life forever.

Now living on opposite coasts, Mia is Julliard’s rising star and Adam is LA tabloid fodder, thanks to his new rock star status and celebrity girlfriend. When Adam gets stuck in New York by himself, chance brings the couple together again, for one last night. As they explore the city that has become Mia’s home, Adam and Mia revisit the past and open their hearts to the future – and each other.

There are many words to describe Where She Went and those words are a mixture of colorful adjectives that might as well sound corny. Amazing, heartbreaking, beautiful, and emotional. Lots of bright words here, folks.

I remember when, in the months after I finished this book’s predecessor, If I Stay, I couldn’t help but wonder what happens after the novel and what happened to all the cast of characters in the first book. Lo and behold came the form of Where She Went (On a sidenote, I do kind of wish they stuck to the old covers though, but that’s okay) set three years after the first book’s events. I was pretty excited and thrilled to see that there was another one, especially when the summary came out and in it was the fact that Mia and Adam separated. Pretty positive my thoughts were an incoherent mess of why’s.

I’m glad this book is in Adam’s POV. Very raw and emotional. I really enjoyed reading and staying up until midnight past to be in his head. The writing was easily able to capture his emotions, even in the most intense scenes. Even as a reader, I could feel what he went through and I couldn’t help but wonder why Mia did what she did.  I  just wanted to go out there in the book, hug him, and then infodump here and there, even though if I did do that, this book would become a really crappy mess and we wouldn’t really want that, would we?

So I absolutely knew the book would have an ending I didn’t expect. Maybe it would be a happily ever after (although it hardly seemed unlikely) or maybe it would have everything resolved but nothing wrapped up in a pretty bow, packaged in a way there would be a happy ending. But whatever it was, I knew even before I read this book that I would enjoy the ending no matter what. And I did.

But really, just writing a review for this is tough, mostly because I’m not sure what to say because one wrong slip and I may as well give you a spoiler. All in all, this was what I wanted this book to be. A really great sequel to a great book. Which, if you haven’t read the first book, you should go read it and then this. Because they are asking to be read right now.

Rival by Sara Bennett Wealer

What if your worst enemy turned out to be the best friend you ever had?

Meet Brooke: Popular, powerful and hating every minute of it, she’s the “It” girl at Douglas High in Lake Champion, Minnesota. Her real ambition? Using her operatic mezzo as a ticket back to NYC, where her family lived before her dad ran off with an up and coming male movie star.

Now meet Kathryn: An overachieving soprano with an underachieving savings account, she’s been a leper ever since Brooke punched her at a party junior year. For Kath, music is the key to a much-needed college scholarship.

The stage is set for a high-stakes duet between the two seniors as they prepare for the prestigious Blackmore competition. Brooke and Kathryn work toward the Blackmore with eyes not just on first prize but on one another, each still stinging from a past that started with friendship and ended in betrayal. With competition day nearing, Brooke dreams of escaping the in-crowd for life as a professional singer, but her scheming BFF Chloe has other plans. And when Kathryn gets an unlikely invitation to Homecoming, she suspects Brooke of trying to sabotage her with one last public humiliation.

As pressures mount, Brooke starts to sense that the person she hates most might just be the best friend she ever had. But Kathryn has a decision to make. Can she forgive? Or are some rivalries for life?

I don’t watch Glee much. Or at all. Sometimes I watch episodes. Others, I don’t. So, reading the author’s blog post about how this was good for Glee fans, the fact didn’t really matter to me (although it is true). But I know that at first glance for the cover, I didn’t realize that there was a piano in it. It’s kind of expected because when it comes to covers, I don’t notice things at first glance. Not sure why, but it happens.

Rival was a pleasant read, enjoyed it much more than I thought and it was different from my first expectations. That being the fact that I kept on thinking there was more romance in this. And the part with the competition rising between the two main characters? Hollywood left this weird piece of expectation for me to think that this would be filled with Action! Drama! More Drama! Glaring! and some really dramatic scene that involved (if it were a movie) cameras zooming in to focus on the scene as the two singers try to rise against each other. It’s… strange.

Told in two alternating point of view’s showing what’s happening now and the events in the past that led up to their friendship breaking, I was a bit surprised to find out that I disliked one of them because of said actions she did in the past even though we were alike (hobby-wise). While I sympathized with the other narrator, who had flaws like the other narrator, I still gave said character a hard time for her past actions and what she did in a certain scene in the present.  But in the end, I did warm up to the narrator I didn’t like.

Reading about the backstory to each of the girls were interesting and it was easy to tell who was who with their distinct voices that were different. The events leading up in the present as to whether or not they’d get other what happened in the past was one of the things I was wondering would happen when I was reading.

And as for the ending, despite my very weird expectations in the beginning, it was pretty satisfying to see who won, although the aftermath of it was a bit too brief for my tastes. In the end, this was a good debut novel and I’m curious to see what the author has else in the works.

Ten Miles Past Normal by Frances O’Roark Dowell

Janie Gorman wants to be normal. The problem with that: she’s not. She’s smart and creative and a little bit funky. She’s also an unwilling player in her parents’ modern-hippy, let’s-live-on-a-goat-farm experiment (regretfully, instigated by a younger, much more enthusiastic Janie). This, to put it simply, is not helping Janie reach that “normal target.” She has to milk goats every day…and endure her mother’s pseudo celebrity in the homemade-life, crunchy mom blogosphere. Goodbye the days of frozen lasagna and suburban living, hello crazy long bus ride to high school and total isolation–and hovering embarrassments of all kinds. The fresh baked bread is good…the threat of homemade jeans, not so much.

It would be nice to go back to that old suburban life…or some grown up, high school version of it, complete with nice, normal boyfriends who wear crew neck sweaters and like social studies. So, what’s wrong with normal? Well, kind of everything. She knows that, of course, why else would she learn bass and join Jam Band, how else would she know to idolize infamous wild-child and high school senior Emma (her best friend Sarah’s older sister), why else would she get arrested while doing a school project on a local freedom school (jail was not part of the assignment). And, why else would she kind of be falling in “like” with a boy named Monster—yes, that is his real name. Janie was going for normal, but she missed her mark by about ten miles…and we mean that as a compliment.

Very strange summary right there, but it’s pretty true to what the novel is about. I would have imagined differently, but I remember stumbling upon this one randomly few months before I read it and was interested. So when given a chance to review on S&S’s Galley Grab, I decided I should.

It’s easy to say that the book is a charming coming of age story and is a pretty solid read. Because that’s just what this book is.  The writing is easy to read through as this is the author’s first young adult books after having published many middle grade ones.

Being a very quick read, reading from Janie’s perspective is enjoyable as she’s easy to relate to. Despite having not much expectations before reading the book, it was a quirky read with a good set of secondary characters and judging by the content on the book, would be easily liked from younger readers of YA.

Despite thinking this was a nice read, I couldn’t felt but feel that despite Janie herself feeling that she was different, I found her to be pretty ordinary than the book says she would. Definitely less Stargirl and more normal, I have to say.

But in all all, like I said, decent read and I could see others liking this.

Fall for Anything by Courtney Summers

When Eddie Reeves’s father commits suicide her life is consumed by the nagging question of why? Why when he was a legendary photographer and a brilliant teacher? Why when he seemed to find inspiration in everything he saw? And, most important, why when he had a daughter who loved him more than anyone else in the world? When she meets Culler Evans, a former student of her father’s and a photographer himself, an instant and dangerous attraction begins. Culler seems to know more about her father than she does and could possibly hold the key to the mystery surrounding his death. But Eddie’s vulnerability has weakened her and Culler Evans is getting too close. Her need for the truth keeps her hanging on…but are some questions better left unanswered?

When I knew that Courtney Summers was going to have another book, I knew I was going to get it. Although they didn’t have it the first time I looked for it in the store, eventually they did the second time. This is the third book I’ve read from the author, and actually in order by how her books are published. I find it quite strange how I managed to do this because it never happens to me.

Now, here’s the thing. I’ve read a lot of books involving death so some of them are not as appreciated as some because they kind of get repetitive after a while, no matter how the way the author treats the subject. Which I kind of feel sad for when I don’t like the book as much when it deals with that topic. So having death be a suicide was something I haven’t read before. Like any Courtney Summers’ book, the voice for their main character is just classic and easy to fit into like a comfortable pair of shoes. The conversations felt real. Eddie’s feelings felt real to me because I could relate to her in one moment of this book very much.

The characters in this book are complicated. Flawed for a better word, actually. I was pretty surprised about Culler’s actions in the novel. And what he planned to do after his actions. (Just… really?) Milo kind of gave me a mixed relationship, but I eventually did end up liking him as I wanted to.

An intense book about loss and death pretty much had an ending that didn’t need to fill in the spaces to complete everything. And that’s why it was a perfect way to end it. Now it’s time to wait for Courntey Summers’ next book. (*°ᗢ°)

Wither by Lauren Destefano

Thanks to modern science, every human being has become a ticking genetic time bomb — males only live to age twenty-five, and females only live to age twenty. In this bleak landscape, young girls are kidnapped and forced into polygamous marriages to keep the population from dying out.

When sixteen-year-old Rhine Ellery is taken by the Gatherers to become a bride, she enters a world of wealth and privilege. Despite her husband Linden’s genuine love for her, and a tenuous trust among her sister wives, Rhine has one purpose: to escape — to find her twin brother and go home.

But Rhine has more to contend with than losing her freedom. Linden’s eccentric father is bent on finding an antidote to the genetic virus that is getting closer to taking his son, even if it means collecting corpses in order to test his experiments. With the help of Gabriel, a servant Rhine is growing dangerously attracted to, Rhine attempts to break free, in the limited time she has left.

If I were to base my rating of Wither on the cover alone, I would have been prepared to easily rate the book five stars. But however, this is not the case with the book.

I remember when I first stumbled upon the book months before it was published and I knew I wanted to love it. The pretty cover and the idea of the book was one that I found really interesting.

I would have liked the book more if it weren’t for the shoddy worldbuilding and some other issues I had.

North America does not have the most advanced technology. Japan does. And I can’t help but wonder why the <i>whole</i> world except North America is demolished. Does not sit right with me. Also, in the book, Rhine claims that Columbus proved that the earth was sphere-shaped when at the time he sailed, the world was already proved that it is what it was.

Now scientific and historical nitpicking aside, these are the two issues that bothered me. First, if girls are so valuable for breeding, then why in the beginning, do they randomly kill girls? And also, if the first generation was artificially conceived with their kids dying young, what happened to the generation made before them? Generally, their kids would be free of the virus if they did not breed with the first generation or they would have a lesser chance of getting the disease.

But in the end, I could see the appeal for this book, but it’s just not for me. So I may as well be the odd one for not liking the book. Since I’m the type of person who likes to read series up until the end, I’ll probably read the sequel. It depends. But for now, I’ll read The Handmaiden’s Tale instead.