Ask The Passengers

by A. S. King

Love love LOVE this book! I picked it up from the library after having seen it on BookRiot's list of best books they had read for the month (awesome blog, by the way. You all should check it out. www.bookriot.com). It's about a high school girl in small town America realizing that she is gay.

I love the way this book handles the confusion that the main character experiences as she comes to this realization. She spends most of the book putting off telling anyone that she's gay, less out of fear and more out of a desire not to be boxed into any one category. When her parents ask her point-blank if she's gay, she doesn't deny it, but she doesn't affirm it either. She recognizes that identifying as either gay or straight would result in everyone around her boxing her into a particular category and she doesn't want that. I had never thought of it from that viewpoint before. This book goes beyond the issue of gay pride or shame and deals with the fact that, however we identify ourselves, the people around us will box us in and make assumptions about us accordingly. And that's not always a good thing.

I also think this book did a brilliant job of handling small town high school gossip. The main character knows everything that is being said about her and her family because, somehow, it always makes its way around back to her, as gossip in the real world tends to do. When she talks about a rumor she says, "They say: blah blah blah"  which, to me, seems pretty much exactly how gossip works. She doesn't seem to let it get to her too much though, and I have an enormous amount of respect for her for that.

I also deeply respect her habit of sending out love to perfect strangers. Hence the title. She likes to lay on her back and watch the planes fly overhead and, when she sees one, she sends up her love to all of the passengers on the plane. Every second or third chapter has a short vignette with a passenger on a plane who seems to feel the love that has been sent to them. It's adorable but (IMO) not overly mushy. The end of the book I found particularly delightful. I won't ruin it for you here. Just read the book.

OH MY GOD MY BLOG IS BACK!!! Part II

The Last Colony

By John Scalzi

"You're humanity's only hope." Those words sound so cheesy and yet, somehow Scalzi manages take the cheesiness out of them. Part of how he does that is through his sense of humor. Always good for breaking the ice in tense situations and Scalzi does so numerous times throughout this book.

Also at play is his fantastic character development. The thing that impressed me the most about his first two books were moments when characters did something I hadn't been expecting, but still made sense. Although that never happened here, what did happen was that Scalzi gave me great understanding of characters and their relationships through simple interactions. No inner monologue rambling on for pages and pages. Just simple, straight-forward dialogue and body language which managed to speak volumes, not only about his characters, but about their relationships with each other without the narrator needing to spell it out for me. It was awe-inspiring.

I enjoyed this book as much as I enjoyed the last book of the series and I can't wait to read more Scalzi!

The Lightning Thief

by Rick Riordan

This is one of those books that I picked up on a whim. While I have nothing against reading YA as an adult, I was a little put-off when I realized that the main character here is twelve. So the target audience is slightly younger than YA. At which point I thought "Oh, whatever. I'll breeze through it in a few days. What there's a sequel? Yeah, well, I don't have to read that."

OMG you guys, I totally want to read the sequel! This book was so much fun! It was fast-paced, action-packed, and, well, Greek gods. Who doesn't love to see Greek Gods in the middle of New York city every now and then? I particularly loved the portrayal of Ares. It seemed pretty much exactly like how I think he would dress and act if he existed in the modern day.

I must admit to being a little rusty on my Greek mythology so I can't say how accurate the book was in that department. I can say that I did not entirely buy the explanation for Percy's dyslexia. The ADD explanation, I can sort of get on board with, but the dyslexia not so much.

I also loved Percy and his friends, and, given that the book ended on an excellent cliff-hanger, I definitely want to read the sequel to find out what happens next!

Beautiful Darkness

by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl

Not much to say about this book. I did enjoy it and, like the first book of this series, it sucked me in. Once I started reading it was all I wanted to do until I reached the end.

I give this book major props for making me question the relationship between the two main characters. I'm so used to knowing that so-and-so is clearly meant to be with so-and-so and, as a result, no matter what happens, I am never really in fear for their relationship. This book had me wondering though ... Not only if their relationship would survive this, but if it should survive. Or maybe that's just the cynic in me, who knows? In any case, I definitely recommend this book and I cannot wait until I have a chance to get to the sequel.

I just hope it gets made into a movie. I really enjoyed the first movie and was super sad that it crashed in the box office because I really want to see the rest of the series get made into movies. Pleeeeeeeeeeeease!

OH MY GOD MY BLOG IS BACK!!!

So, for the past few weeks, I've had this error message pop up every time I tried to write a new blog post. I tried to access Google "help" and they were super helpful (that's sarcasm, btw). I had all but given hope that I would never again be able to update my blog and had begun thinking of going to WordPress when BAM! I can write new posts again! Huzzah! Okay, so I'm not moving to WordPress ... yet ...

So! Here's all the books I've been reading that I haven't been able to write about. I'm going to break this up into 2 posts so it doesn't get too long.

Good Calories, Bad Calories

by Gary Taubs

This book will change everything you ever thought you knew about food and nutrition. It goes against everything we have been told about dietary fat, cholesterol, carbohydrates, and even salt. While I already knew much of this going into the book, I still learned quite a lot and I will never look at my food the same way again. I will certainly never look at nutritional "studies" the same way again.

This book does not focus exclusively on what studies do and do not find (which is all you'll ever find in a newspaper). It looks at how those studies were conducted, who conducted them (who paid for them) and what they actually found. The terrifying thing is the discovery that many studies, which are used as cornerstones for certain dietary mantras, have actually been misinterpreted in order to fit the dogma of the time.

Honestly, this book scared the bejesus out of me. Like I said, I'll never look at my food the same way again.

Kushiel's Justice

by Jacqueline Carey

Carey is back! I'm so glad! As I said in my post about "Kushiel's Scion", I was really disappointed by that book. I had been expecting so much more from Carey. Here, she delivered! Although, this book still was not the fast-paced, page-turner that her first three books were, at least it kept moving. I was never left wondering why I was reading this and it contained one whole, cohesive plot.

It's also a plot that I quite enjoyed. I don't know why Carey is so good at doing tortured lovers but she is. I was totally rooting for the two love-birds throughout the book and I can't wait to see how they face their challenges in the next book. Well done, Carey!

My only complaint is the poor editing. You can always tell when an author has started to make some real money because the editors suddenly just stop caring. There were a lot of typos and stupid grammatical mistakes in this book and that's really disappointing. Come on people, how much you do your job should not be inversely proportionate to how much money you make!

The Bonesetter's Daughter

by Amy Tan

Oh my god, this book! It has officially gotten me onto the Amy Tan bandwagon. I know everyone raves about "The Joy Luck Club" but, honestly, it didn't do much for me. Maybe I just wasn't old enough to get it. Or maybe it was the fact that Tan tried to develop several characters and relationships in the space of a fairly small book. By the time I got invested in one character, she'd switch to another.

Then I read "Saving Fish From Drowning" in a fit of determination to understand the genius of Amy Tan. It was an odd book, but I liked it better than "The Joy Luck Club".

"The Bonesetter's Daughter" is about another mother-daughter relationship but it focuses on just one relationship. That's why I think, for me at least, it works better than "The Joy Luck Club". Because it was devoted to one relationship, the book had time to thoroughly explore that relationship. It delved into a huge chunk of the mother's history, enough to explain her quite damaging behavior towards her daughter. It also devoted a sufficient number of pages to the daughter's POV so we could understand her feelings and motivations. By the end of the book, the reader doesn't blame either the mother or the daughter for the terrible pain they have wreaked on each other. And the characters understand that there is no one to blame. It is sad, but there is still love and time to heal.

It's a beautiful story and I highly recommend it.