Twice Baked Thursday: The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman

Title: The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Author: Neil Gaiman

Pages: 181 
Publishing Date: June 18th, 2013

Genre: Fantasy, Horror

Audience:  Adult

Source: Library (Randi & Becky) 

Rating: 4 I'd serve this book fresh honeycomb & cream (that I collected myself, of course) (Randi)
4 I'd get coffee with this book, or maybe just stop by the farm for some fresh milk (Becky)

Goodreads Summary:

Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn't thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she'd claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.

Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways. The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy. And Lettie—magical, comforting, wise beyond her years—promised to protect him, no matter what.

Our Thoughts  

Randi in Black
Becky in Red

Oh, this book. First off, let me state that this is the fourth Gaiman book I've attempted to read. (I finished Coraline and The Graveyard Book, both which I liked, but didn't love...and I could not finish Neverwhere.) I did that too! However, this book gave me an idea of what it is that creates so many Gaiman fans. I feel like I've finally joined the club.  I'm not joining, but I'll admire from afar. The writing contains a lyrical and almost mystical quality that I enjoyed falling into.  The atmosphere was exceptionally strong.  It was the strongest part of the story. The book is short at around 170 pages, but it feels complete and whole, something that I can't say for many books . Do you know that I thought I wrote this review, because our thoughts about it are so similar? I loved the Hempstocks and their farm...I would visit in a heartbeat. While I'm kind of so-so on magical realism (sometimes it just seems too outrageous for me and I end up hating it with the biting passion of a thousand scorpion stings) (I LOVE magical realism.  The closer it is to reality the better), Gaiman flawlessly fuses the magical world of the Hempstocks and the "real" world  in this lovely novel.   I'd agree, up into the end when I think he crosses the line into the ridiculous a few times with dramatic monologues and shows of power.

This story is gruesome and beautiful, shudder-inducing and awing in turns (especially the worm in the foot, OH MY GOSH). Despite my other experiences with Gaiman's work, after reading The Ocean at the End of the Lane, I would not hesitate to read more of his work, especially if it's as delightful as this. I'm not sure what else to say about it since my mind's still a bit muddled as to what it has just experienced at the hands of this book...a bit like our protagonist's, in fact. Suffice to say, don't miss out on this one if you're looking for magical realism for adults with a bit of horror.  I can't fully commit to this book, but I do think it was well written.  If you're a Gaiman fan, you won't be disappointed.

Thrice Baked Thursday: The Coldest Girl in Coldtown (Guest Reviewer: Kelsey)

Title: The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

Author: Holly Black

Pages: 419
Publishing Date: September 3rd 2013

Genre: Fantasy (paranormal/vampires)

Audience:  Young Adult

Source: Library (Kelsey & Randi & Becky) 

Rating: 
4 stars-I would take this book with me into an abandoned shack to sweat out an infection for 88 days. (Kelsey)
4 stars- I would chain this book up to keep it from going cold, unless it really wanted to go cold, in which case I'd find it a tasty murderer to eat (Becky)
 2.5 stars I'd air-hug this book...I don't want to get too close in case it's Cold (Randi)

Goodreads Summary:Tana lives in a world where walled cities called Coldtowns exist. In them, quarantined monsters and humans mingle in a decadently bloody mix of predator and prey. The only problem is, once you pass through Coldtown’s gates, you can never leave.

One morning, after a perfectly ordinary party, Tana wakes up surrounded by corpses. The only other survivors of this massacre are her exasperatingly endearing ex-boyfriend, infected and on the edge, and a mysterious boy burdened with a terrible secret. Shaken and determined, Tana enters a race against the clock to save the three of them the only way she knows how: by going straight to the wicked, opulent heart of Coldtown itself.

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown is a wholly original story of rage and revenge, of guilt and horror, and of love and loathing from bestselling and acclaimed author Holly Black.

Our Thoughts  

Kelsey in Black
Becky in Blue
Randi in Red

Well, I guess I’ll start by saying that this was the most fun read I’ve had in a while. I don't even LIKE fun reads and I enjoyed it. Fun reads are the BEST. But I didn't have that much fun. ;) I didn’t know much about this book before reading it, besides that it was by Holly Black and featured some vampires. Nowadays, I’m quite skeptical about any tales featuring vampires, because Twilight kind of ruined that genre for me. That's sad, Kelsey, don't let Twilight win. I'm convinced that's what it wants. LOL. Honestly, I second Kelsey. I try to avoid vampires as much as possible, for that exact reason. And I'm thinking that may be a big part of the reason that I didn't love this. But I shouldn’t have been worried. Vampires in Holly Black’s hands are not sparkly. They are dark, gritty, and slightly insane. Yessssss.

I really enjoyed the setting. Coldtown is a lot like an internment camp for vampires and people who are infected with the Cold virus but haven’t quite turned into a vampire yet. That was the most unique element for me and it really hooked me. I loved how it was largely televised, I could definitely see that happening. I hadn't thought of Coldtown as a sort of internment camp, but I can definitely see that now that you mention it! And I could see the televised reality show thing happening in real life. In fact, that makes it seem pretty "realistic" (as realistic as it can be) for our times. Once you enter Coldtown, there’s no leaving unless you have a marker. Everyone on the outside sees Coldtown as a glamorous setting with lots of swanky parties, but we get to see the underbelly with Tana, our kick-ass heroine. Let’s talk a bit about how much I loved Tana. Me too Me too! She’s sarcastic, stupidly brave, and a typical teenage girl. Well, I don't know about typical. Typical is Bella Swan. I found her admirable and easy to empathize with while still avoiding the Mary Sue trap. Okay, so I'm the odd one out here. I thought Tana was kind of annoying. She faces a lot of tough situations in the novel and basically just kicks a lot of ass. I also loved how quirky and colorful all the side characters were as well—Aiden, Valentine, and Gavriel are among my favorites. (Gavriel is pretty much the only reason this book didn't get one start from me. LOVED him.) I only wish we would have gotten a little bit more about them. That was my major complaint as well. This was not a short book, but it felt like it needed to be longer or many a two book series. It felt SO long to me. But seeing as this is a stand-alone YA novel (which, although I want more, is kind of refreshing in a genre that’s all about the series), it does a good job of at least telling us what is motivating them. One thing I did appreciate is that this novel didn’t seem to take itself too seriously. It never got melodramatic, though I think my biggest complaint is that the end tends towards sap. I thought it got melodramatic but was aware of it and gently mocked itself, kind of like a cult classic (Lost Boys anyone?) So you're saying I should avoid that movie? ;) Really, though, I think I'm in the extreme minority on this one. But even though I wasn't a fan, I have to say that I enjoyed Holly Black's writing enough to look forward to reading her Curse Workers series, which Becky has been trying to get me to read.

Blood, gore, grit, love, revenge, humor...it’s all here and all worth reading, if you ask me.

I'm so glad Kelsey joined us! This was fun. We'll have to do more Thrice-Baked Thursdays. Huzzah! Thanks for having me on your blog Randi and Becky! Happy October!

Review (Becky): I Hunt Killers, by Barry Lyga

Title: I Hunt Killers

Author: Barry Lyga

Pages: 361

Genre:  Realism (contemporary, horror)

Audience:  Teen

Source: Library 

Rating: 4-I'd find this book fascinating but also be a little too scared to have coffee with it.

Goodreads Summary:

Jasper "Jazz" Dent is a likable teenager. A charmer, one might say.  But he's also the son of the world's most infamous serial killer, and for Dear Old Dad, Take Your Son to Work Day was year-round. Jazz has witnessed crime scenes the way cops wish they could—from the criminal's point of view.

What if the world's worst serial killer...was your dad?

Jasper "Jazz" Dent is a likable teenager. A charmer, one might say.

But he's also the son of the world's most infamous serial killer, and for Dear Old Dad, Take Your Son to Work Day was year-round. Jazz has witnessed crime scenes the way cops wish they could—from the criminal's point of view.

And now bodies are piling up in Lobo's Nod.

In an effort to clear his name, Jazz joins the police in a hunt for a new serial killer. But Jazz has a secret—could he be more like his father than anyone knows?

~My Thoughts~ 

This was an exceptionally creepy red. I didn't think the concept would make much of an impression on me because it feels so familiar (Dexter), but the crimes are really disturbing and often Jasper's memories and reactions are just as disturbing. This is really not sugar coated at all, and you can see how damaging his early life was to his sense of normalcy and ability to connect to others.  I did know who the impressionist was right away, though, within the first meeting of him. I also never bought Jasper being a danger to Connie or Howie. It was to obvious that he cared about them too much to ever hurt them deliberately. While his confusion seems very real, its only at the crime scene where he is trying to revive his teacher where I had any doubt about his motives.  The secondary characters didn't have much depth but were still colorfully drawn.  Overall it was an engrossing read and I'm definitely checking out the sequel.

Twice Baked Thursday: The Uninvited, by Liz Jensen

Title: The Uninvited

Author: Liz Jensen

Pages: 320 
Publishing Date: January 8th, 2013

Genre: horror,sci-fi, apocalyptic

Audience:  Adult

Source: Library (Randi & Becky) 

Rating: 2 I'd give this book an awkward hug, but I don't trust it not to stab me (Becky)
3 I'd friend this book on Facebook, but only so I could monitor its movements and stay far, far away (Randi)

Goodreads Summary:

A seven-year-old girl puts a nail gun to her grandmother's neck and fires. An isolated incident, say the experts. The experts are wrong. Across the world, children are killing their families. Is violence contagious? As chilling murders by children grip the country, anthropologist Hesketh Lock has his own mystery to solve: a bizarre scandal in the Taiwan timber industry. 

Hesketh has never been good at relationships: Asperger's Syndrome has seen to that. But he does have a talent for spotting behavioral patterns and an outsider's fascination with group dynamics. Nothing obvious connects Hesketh's Asian case with the atrocities back home. Or with the increasingly odd behavior of his beloved stepson, Freddy. But when Hesketh's Taiwan contact dies shockingly and more acts of sabotage and child violence sweep the globe, he is forced to acknowledge possibilities that defy the rational principles on which he has staked his life, his career, and, most devastatingly of all, his role as a father. 

Our Thoughts  

Becky in Black
Randi in Red

I found this book unexpectedly boring.  The writing was technically good, but nothing about it hooked me. Agree! I kept waiting and waiting to care about somebody, anybody. And it never happened.... The closest I came was Freddy K.  He was kind of adorable and I liked his relationship with Hesketh, our narrator. I kind of thought Hesketh was a little crazy when it came to his "protection" of Freddy K. I was constantly thinking things like, "He's gonna kill you! Get outta there!" Hesketh has Aspergers Syndrom, which partially explains why I felt so distant from everyone and everything in the book.  He seemed most excited about Freddy, origami, and color shades.  Showing the story from his viewpoint sucked the horror and suspense out of even the creepiest of events. That's a good point; I hadn't thought about that, but I do agree. Horrific things were happening, but it was difficult to relate to Hesketh's actions, so I didn't feel very scared or horrified.

 The first 150 pages of the story are incredibly slow, and while bad things are happening occasionally, it is mostly just us learning about Hesketh. I found him somewhat unlikable due to his attitude towards sex and uninteresting due to him being extremely uninteresting lol. Awww, poor Hesketh! I usually enjoy reading about characters with Aspergers Syndrome (ever since I read Jodi Picoult's House Rules - which I loved), but...it felt like pulling teeth to get me to pick this book back up every day.

I think what made me the most upset was when I soldiered through all the way to the very end of the story (which involved lots of half-comprehended speed reading through the boring parts) and I still had no idea what was happening. N0 idea, people.  Nothing. We're supposed to think that there is some kind of science fiction time warp where the children are simultaneously from the future and the present and are adapting to live in the barren wasteland that will be earth.  That's as far as I got. Yeah, I think the explanation (and the fact that we get it from Hesketh's view, so it's couched in very intellectual terms) turned me off the most. I love post-apocalyptic stories because I think they truly get to the core of what it means to be human; however, this one just didn't do it for me. Overall, I'll probably put this on my horror display at the library, but it will go nowhere near my favorites shelf. 

Top Ten Tuesday: Book Turn Offs

Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature/weekly meme created at The Broke and the Bookish.  

Here are my top ten book turn offs, or the techniques and character types I typical don't enjoy.  There are always exceptions for me when a book does so much right that I can overlook the downsides, but usually these things make me want to throw my book.

1. Love Triangles. These CAN be done well, but they usually aren't.  I only like a love triangle when there is legitimate confusion about which person you love (Raven Boys I love you) and none of the wishy washness that is Twilight.  I think we all knew you were going to choose Edward, Bella.

2. Hand of God rescue endings (Dues Ex Machina) I'm sorry Dean Koontz, but you are the primary offender.  Any time the characters should die at the end of a story or something bad should happen but there is a last minute rescue from a completely unbelievable source.

3. Mary Sue characters.  I make a few exceptions, but when a character is kind and pretty and good at EVERYTHING it is boring.  They need faults to balance them out. The worst is when characters have faults that are actually strengths.  This is not an interview!

4. Lack of quotation mark.  A lot of the time when quotations are dropped it just makes the reading more confusing and turns a lot of readers off. (not you "The Road", I love you always). 

5. An Object of Power in fantasy.  Just let the lord of the rings have this one guys, you know you can't top it and you seem like copycats.  Harry Potter kind of overdid this in my opinion, but I still love it.  Please don't stone me for saying that.

6. Reworkings of literature that butcher everything beautiful about the originals. Some people will never get to read the original story because you poisoned them.  I'm all for allusions to other works, but using it as the basis of your own feels too much like theft to me.


7. The morally and emotionally tortured Vampire.  I accept it in Louis from the Vampire Chronicles, otherwise it just feels stale.   If you really cared that much you'd step into the sun, you emo.


8. Prophecies.   Let me tell you the entire story in a few paragraphs so that the rest of the book has no suspense.  Sometimes there are cool twists on the meanings of prophecies that saves them from this fate, but often times they just suck the life out of a story.


9. Series Recaps. I hate it when the second book (or third or fourth...) does a tv style recap of "what you missed in the last episode".  Anyone who can't remember should reread the first book or look up a summary.  I know I don't pause midlife and say "in case you didn't know me when I was 12, here's what you missed".


10.  Characters that are blatantly a glorified version of the author. I'm talking to you Stephen King, Joe Hill and especially Glen Duncan.  I can't prove it, but I know you think you're that werewolf.

  

What's are your Book-turn-offs?  Leave us a link & we'll be sure to visit!

Twice-Baked Thursday: The 5th Wave

Title: The 5th Wave

Author: Rick Yancey

Pages: 457
Publisher: Putnam Juvenile
Publishing Date: May 7th, 2013

Genre: sci-fi, post-apocalyptic

Audience:  Young Adult

Source: Library (Randi & Becky) 

Rating: 2 I'd give this book and awkward hug before running the other way (Randi)  3 I'd friend this book on Facebook, but I'd unfollow it in my feed (Becky)

Goodreads Summary:

After the 1st wave, only darkness remains. After the 2nd, only the lucky escape. And after the 3rd, only the unlucky survive. After the 4th wave, only one rule applies: trust no one.

Now, it’s the dawn of the 5th wave, and on a lonely stretch of highway, Cassie runs from Them. The beings who only look human, who roam the countryside killing anyone they see. Who have scattered Earth’s last survivors. To stay alone is to stay alive, Cassie believes, until she meets Evan Walker. Beguiling and mysterious, Evan Walker may be Cassie’s only hope for rescuing her brother—or even saving herself. But Cassie must choose: between trust and despair, between defiance and surrender, between life and death. To give up or to get up.

Our Thoughts  

Randi in Black
Becky in Red

Well, I'll begin by saying that 1. I'm not a fan of aliens in my fiction (or non-fiction, I guess!), with the exception of one Daemon Black(I like aliens but not invasions). 2. However, I do love post-apocalyptic novels (Heck yes, The Road is A to the Mazing) ((Yes it is!!)). This means that this book should have started off on a neutral status with me . I'd heard nothing but awesomeness about this book, though, so perhaps I had some expectations (for me it started with extremely high hopes.  The Monstrumologist was so outrageously good, it did not occur to me this book might stink up the apartment). Needless to say if you peeked at my two star rating above, any expectations I had were not met. I was a little disappointed that there were multiple viewpoints in this book, though I usually like them. (I wasn't bothered by the multiple POV, although usually I am, lol) After finishing the book, it makes sense based on what the novel was striving for, but I was not impressed. 

Cassie was kind of a kick-butt narrator (for the chapters she had), but I really wasn't convinced by much else.  (She was sometimes, but sometimes she was a catty, shallow, boy-obsessed teen.  Blah.) A big reason I love post-apoc. fiction is because I adore that discussion of what makes us human, what happens to the people who are left after some cataclysmic event? While those themes were evident earlier in the book, they fell to the wayside in favor of a cheesy and somewhat predictable romance (Somewhat?). ((I was trying to be nice!!)) As the reader, I was apparently supposed to like both Ben and Evan. Oops, I didn't find either of them particularly desirable or interesting (They were both kind of bros). ((Hahaha!)) Ben's backstory with his little sister was not utilized enough to make me feel anything for him and, to me at least, he was a flat character whose motivations were not convincing. 

Anyway, that pretty much sums up my disappointment with this book. Though I am apparently in the extreme minority since the average Goodreads rating is 4.08 stars. Cheers!

You can do better Rick Yancey, you have done better.  Leave the sappy love triangles to Ally Condie, please, for the love of Pete. Let's focus on your real strengths, Bromance and Gore. This could have been an epic story, but I will forget it in a few months (unless you make a movie, I'll come back for that).

Super Six Sunday: Books Set in Schools

Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card. Ok so this isn't a typical "school", but battle school actually seemed pretty sweet, not that I'd want to go myself.

The Magicians, by Lev Grossman.  I want to go to Brakebills.  Sorry Hogwarts, but if I can't have Dumbledore I don't want anything to do with you.

Looking for Alaska, by John Green.  I don't actually want to go to this school, but this was an unexpectedly touching and well written book that made me interested in contemporary teen reads again.

Jellicoe Road, by Melina Marchetta.  I love the intricate battle rules in this story between the boarding school, the military school, and the townies.  We don't actually see much schooling going on, but I'm sure it happened.

Never Let me Go, by Kazu Ishiguro.  Ok, so this is actually a pretty horrifying place, but one of my all-time favorite books.

Harry Potter Series, by J.K. Rowling.  Ok, so I lied before.  I think we all want to go here.