Fluttering Butterflies

Written by: Melissa de la Cruz This novel seems to me similar to a weak cup of unsweetened tea. The Ring and the Crown follows the lives of several girls in the age of ball gowns and the London season. All have different tales of love and loss, but they all end up entwined in some small way. Each is a prisoner of duty, and each wishes to be rid of the bonds of responsibility to their families. There are several different characters in this book, and I think the teaser on Amazon gives a good summary, so I won't try to imitate it. The link to the teaser is here . De La Cruz's intended message of the book was clearly to show how strong women are, especially in the past when they were expected to do what is right by their families at all times. Women were married off for strategic or monetary reasons, and they were seen always as the weaker sex. Their misfortunes and bleak futures were demonstrated well in the novel. Unfortunately, the actual main characters, the women, did not li...

By Emma Trevayne This is the sequel to Coda , an intriguing futuristic story about a society that is controlled by addictive music until a boy named Anthem creates his own music and leads a revolution.  Chorus is the story of his younger sister, Alpha, who has moved to Los Angeles and is working hard in school so she can discover a cure to strange and powerful flashbacks that have been haunting her and her twin brother, Omega. There was a lot that bothered me about this book.  There was one of the most pointless deaths I have read (which I won’t expound on to avoid spoilers) as well as a character just being able to guess a super important password, which is something that always bothers me in books.  When setting a password on a top-security system, it’s not going to be something that someone can just guess . However, what bothered me most of all was that the author hid relevant information that the main character knew.  For the first few chapters of the book, A...

By Bethany Hagen . Release date: February 4th 2014 (tomorrow!)        Madeline Landry lives in the luxury of the antique Landry estate with her mother and father. They are among the few elite living in a post-war Jane Austen-romance-novel-styled society. Their opulent lifestyles are supported by a large common lower class. Below the lower class are the Rootless, the poorest of the poor stuck with the worst jobs: handling spent radioactive charges used for generating electricity. There's a lot of responsibility on Madeline's shoulders to step up to the role of the next of her line, the most powerful family in the United States. As Madeline receives more pressure from her father to follow family responsibility, she learns more about the Rootless than she ever knew before.        The upper class in this book is literally modeled after a Jane Austen novel. Inexplicably, in post-war society, they reverted to the 1700's. They drink t...

Written by: Leslye Walton The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender: Best taken with an almond pastry and a steaming cup of nostalgia. This is the story of love, the ups and downs, the misunderstandings, devotion, sweetness, and of course, sorrow of falling in (and out) of love. The stories of four generations of Lavenders are told in a sincere and poignant style, all narrated by the youngest of the clan, Ava. The book divulges the most secrets passions and regrets of each of the women, in such an easy manner that you are left wondering how you came to be so familiar with the characters in such a short time. Walton ties in whimsy and bleak desperation that creates an air of sorrowful beauty. By the middle of the book, I felt as if I had known these women personally for a number of years. I was invited to cry, laugh, and stare in awe in the magical domesticity of their lives. Up until about halfway through, I was completely roped in. Oddly, Ava Lavender, the main character, seem...

By: Sonya Sones After the first 100 pages I was super excited to continue with this book.  It was amazing how well the narrator, Colette, would tell a story and then tell you at which point she started lying.  Starting from where she started lying she would continue to tell you her story until she once again told you at which point she was lying.  She continued on like this for the first 100 pages.  These 100 pages were great.  Colette and I could have been talking to me.  This is a novel in verse but was more like a conversation for the first 100 pages.  The next 350 pages or so were not as good.  Colette falls in love with Connor...la la la... things go wrong, what a SURPRISE!!!! How else would the book progress? Basically nothing happened in this book. Colette was in love with Connor and stuff happened between them.  Just like in any other romance.  There is an extremely predictable twist, so maybe just a bend.  The  only ...

by Elizabeth Knox Canny is 16 years old and lives in a world "very like our own" in 1959.  She is a mathematical genius, remembers pretty much everything, and has the unique ability to see "Extra," which she later discovers is part of an intricate magic system that only some can use, mainly the Zarenes.  The Zarenes are a family that live in Zarene Valley, and Canny stumbles upon them while traveling with her older brother, Sholto, and his girlfriend, Susan, on a research project of the 1929 coal mine explosion that happened near the valley.  The only Zarenes that live in the valley are between five and thirteen, plus Iris, Cyrus, Lealand, and Ghislain.  Canny spends a lot of time wandering around, lying to her brother, and discovering the secrets of the valley and her past.  After quite a lot of this, the end happens.  And it's not because she figures anything out.  It just happens.  Canny comes up with various ways to do what she wants, most of ...

This galley, set to be released in August 2013, is by brother and sister David and Perri Klass .         I was told that two other people (who happen to be athletes) wanted to take out this book before I nabbed it. We were all drawn to it for the same reason: concussions. I myself had a concussion that lasted for months a couple years ago, so this book immediately interested me. The title is coined after Second Impact Syndrome (SIS) which is where the brain swells after receiving a second trauma when it is still recovering from a previous trauma. It can quickly lead to death, especially without emergency treatment. A frustrating part is that the only emphasis on SIS concerning the plot in the book is literally at the fifteenth-to-last-page. I counted. You have to read 264 pages before you breach the issue as proposed by the title. Grrr.         This book is told through the perspective of two bloggers, Jerry (high sch...

by Jennifer Archer      While cupcakes are delicious, these days with cupcake shops on every corner and gourmet cupcakes are almost more common than simple ones, I can't help but feel they are over done.      Recently, I read The Shadow Girl by Jennifer Archer and I have to say, I was just like one of those gourmet cupcakes. The inside cover was very interesting, like a beautiful frosting maybe even a promising ganache, but like most cupcakes it just wasn't what it promised.      The Shadow Girl is about a seventeen year old named Lily. Her father's death unveils secrets about her and the mysterious 'shadow girl' named Ivy who only she can hear.  She investigates her family’s past with the help of the boy next door and the hot new guy in town. Although some of the ideas are outside what most YA Lit is doing right now, there are a lot of classic side plots, that are a bit over used. I think people who liked The Adoration of Jenna Fox by M...

Firstly, I must mention that normally, I'd never read, not even mentioning picking up , a book like this. If I hadn't gotten it for free (thank you), I don't think I'd ever read it. In terms of manga, it's unarguably shoujo . I tend to dislike those - the fantasy romances that always have a happy ending. This book was pretty interesting, but... well. It starts with the blatant, oh I'm a new girl moving in, everyone hates me this is a dumb countryside . Blegh. She has a cool name, though: Katla Leblanc. The mishmash of two different languages. She's trendy, bold, and attracting attention - and her head itches, badly. It turns out that she's part of a secret society named the Storks, or something like that. They deliver babies. In a magical way. And there's an old lady. There's plenty of romance. That I kind of skipped in my brain. I can't give a summary of that. There's a shocking secret about Katla's past, including ice, amnesia, and ...

By Caridad Ferrer      Once, Soledad thought that the best thing in the world was the percussion encouraging to move faster, jump higher, reach the skies. But things change. She gets into a relationship with Jonathan, a horn player from a corps, and he invites her to dance with the group.      First impressions were good, a not so usual fairy dancer, Soledad, but one with actual substance. But then, it got really cliche. She falls for the guy, obsesses over him, then, is faced with a problem that might bring her apart from him. And it kept going. She falls for another guy, Taz, a spanish soccer player, then has to choose between Jonathan and the hot soccer player. It goes the whole jealous boyfriend cycle as well. Then a twist almost brought it back from the dead for me, but it somewhat disturbed me. It reminded me of Pink's music video for  Don't Leave Me  (which I don't recommend watching). Then, guess what! It got cliche a And she even end...