Marathon Reads

You know that high pitched squeal that only dogs can’ hear?  I imagine not, as you’re not a dog. And if you are a canine AND reading this, Good Dog!  Well done!   But for the rest of us non canines, imagine the highest pitched squeal you can.  It might even break glass.  That was the sound I made when I went to the library check out counter and found three books waiting for me.  I’m surprised I didn’t deafen someone.  And then there’s the girly dance of shaking my arms like playing manic maracas.  I must be a sight to behold at the library.  I’m lucky we’re friends!

What books?  Well let’s not dilly dally. 

We’ll Always Have Summer by Jenny Han (book 3 in the Summer series, or as I call them The Summer I Turned Pretty Series)

Anya’s Ghost by Vera Brosgol – an incredible debut  Graphic Novel that Neil Gaiman called “A Masterpiece.”  And you all know who I feel about him.  I want the man in my rolodex and on my cell phone speed dial. 

Silence by Becca Fitzpatrick (Book 3 in the Hush Hush series)

 Of course, another marathon reading session ensued.  (My poor husband must feel so neglected.)

Anya’s Ghost was first on the list.  I’d seen it reviewed by Cory Doctorow – another YA author -  on BoingBoing.net.    I never thought in my life I’d be someone reading what I would have considered comic books until just a few years ago.  I was too old for that.  They were too childish.  Well The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi which depicts  the author’s memoir in pictures of her growing up during the Islamic Revolution in  Iran blew my expectations to a million powder dust smithereens.   These are sophisticated, intricate, beautiful pieces of art and storytelling intertwined so completely that they cannot be separated.

And just look at that cover.  How cool is that?  I love the ghost in the hair. 

Anya is a young woman, who doesn’t fit in at her high school.  She’s embarrassed of her family, of their Russian-ness (they arrived in the States when she was very young).  Basically she’s a normal teenage girl.  On the way home she falls into an old open well.  And she realizes she’s not alone.  There’s a ghost in there, who is determined to be BFFs, to not be left alone, and she'll do anything in her power to make that happen.    

What started out as fun and useful in having a friend who could see all the answers to the tests, who could coach Anya with boys, takes on a sinister turn when the ghost who has been living vicariously through Anya, is determined to not lose her new chance at life.

I think it took all of an hour to read the book.  Perfect for Halloween.  Spine tingling.  Creepy.  But still incredibly beautiful, and masterfully written.

 I think I may have gotten brain freeze from reading it so fast.  Lucky for me the next book  on the reading marathon was We’ll Always Have Summer, the third book in the Summer I Turned Pretty Series. 

This series is like all the things you wished you had in your own teenage life.  It’s perfect escapist, non annoying, no angst, but just beautifully written stories.

Belly was caught between loving Conrad who she thought loved her back but ditched her at the last minute and basically pushed her into the waiting arms of his brother Jeremiah.  This book finds Jeremiah and Belly in college, Belly’s a freshman, Jeremiah’s a sophomore.  They’re the perfect couple .  Until he comes clean that on spring break, when Belly and Jeremiah were on a ‘break’ from each other, he slept with another girl. 

On the verge of breaking up, Jeremiah pulls a Hail Mary and proposes because he can’t stand to lose her.  And of course Belly says Yes.   Except she loves Conrad too.  Of course the parents are mad, and things get terrible.  So Belly goes to the one place she could take comfort, the beach house in Cousins, where they spent every summer together since she was a little girl, where she first fell for Conrad and Jeremiah. 

I am friends with one of the lunch ladies from my school.  And whenever I get a hankering for something specific that was made there, Chinese Chews, or the apple crisp with the vanilla sauce, or apple sticks….. I drop her a line, and sooner or later, a recipe shows up in my mailbox.  And when I make the recipe, it is exactly the same.  It tastes the same.  Just how I remembered it.  And everything comes rushing back – well not everything - but all the nostalgic nice parts of being a kid….. climbing the monkeybars, the mary go round playground equipment that we had before insurance companies made them take it off the grounds for being too dangerous; the slides, the swings where you could just fly and fly and fly, and at the same time watch the neighboring farms cows graze in the pasture.

Reading these books is exactly like that.  It’s being taken back, whisked back, minus all the rubbish you may or may not have had in your own teenage young adult years, and you get this instead.  Such fun.

And then of course, last but not least was Silence by Becca Fitzpatrick (who just said there’s going to be a FOURTH!!!! Book in the series!  Insert Squeals and girly hand shake maraca dance here!)

When I first read this series, I initially remember calling it a Twilight knock off, just better.  The similarities for Hush Hush were striking, at least to me.  But then, it developed into something else.  Nora Grey is a vulnerable girl. She is scared.  She is recovering from the death of her father, and the new life she and her mom have.  But she is still strong.  She still makes her own decisions, regardless what those around her say.  (that and she doesn’t drive me absolutely batty with  angst ridden dialogue.) 

The second book was more annoying.  There she was really whiney.  But whatever.  Everyone had a bad day or a bad book.  Harry Potter whined like crazy in Order of the Phoenix.  But then he recovered.  And Nora recovers too in Silence.   Picking up just about where we left off in Crescendo, Nora wakes up in a graveyard, with amnesia unable to remember the past five months.

What Fitzpatrick does for us is to lead us again into the world of Nephilim, of fallen angels, and into the war that’s brewing.  She allows us to discover Nora’s family again, and then to swoon and fall in love with Patch again and again in here.  (who says amnesia can’t be a good thing!)  But even on top of that, there is the person who kidnapped Nora who is the big chief baddie among the Nephilim who is starting a revolution between the Nephilim and fallen angels. Nora is in the middle of it all. 

I have been counting down the days until this book came out.  Literally.  And it surpassed all I could have hoped it to be.  It made up for the whiney Crescendo, and blew everything out of the water. 

Now I have to wait for the fourth book…… sigh.

So there you go.  Three excellent YA books at the library. Right now.  Two excellent series.  So great were they that I couldn’t wait to talk about them.