Attention Mister Rick Yancey,

I have kidnapped your review.  Your review is not harmed and shall be released as soon as you meet my demands.

In exchange for giving you back your review, which I am prepared to do, you will first need to provide for me:

1 copy of The 5th Wave #2 – undamaged, complete, unmarked (except for your signature or a stylized message to me).

This copy of The 5th Wave #2 must also contain certain characters unharmed and ready for me to snuggle them in my imagination.

Characters include:

Cassie – Because she’s badass

Zombie – Because he’s adorable.

Nugget – Don’t ever even think about hurting him.

Ringer – She is my hero.

The Silencer (I won’t mention its real name here so as not to spoil) – This character is essential.  Failure to provide this character will result in immediate disposal of your review.  I’m not even kidding.

Interview with Jessica Shirvington about her new novel, Between the Lives:

1. In Between the Lives Sabine switches between two different lives and is suffering trying to maintain the two completely different situations. 

How did you handle maintaining the character of Sabine while everything else around her changes?

I gave a lot of thought to how a person would adapt and learn to survive in Sabine’s unique situation. In the end, I decided that Sabine’s solution would be to fully embrace each of her lives for what they were supposed to be. When she is in Wellesley, where she had more access to money, fashion, social events, she plays that role. But of course, when she is in Roxbury she knows she can’t be that person and survive, so she fully embraces what it means to be Sabine in Roxbury – how to dress, the right amount of sass and attitude to not be hassled, etc And in each world she adapts to her family and siblings and tries as much as possible to forget about her other world while she is not there.

I was very, very excited when I started Fear.

I know that, for many (if not most) fans, this installment is their favorite.  I’ve known this since the very beginning, before I even started my series marathon with a rereading of Gone.  For the last four books, this little fact has been sitting in the back of my mind, leading me to believe wholeheartedly that I was going to absolutely love this installment.  When I read Lies, the weakest book for many fans, and was blown away by it, my expectations for the fourth and fifth novels skyrocketed.  I was certain that the next two were going to, somehow, be even better, as that’s what most reviews seemed to point towards.  I mean, sure, my opinion of Lies was a bit off from the general consensus, but that was probably a one-time thing, right?

Unfortunately, no.  My expectations for Plague were so high that the end result managed to be a bit of a disappointment. 

The general consensus seems to be that Plague is a superior sequel to Lies, which many fans see as the weakest installment in Michael Grant’s series thus far.  I read both with this in mind, under the assumption that my opinion would end up being similar, if not identical.

And, wouldn’t you know it?  I ended up loving the latter more than the former.  Go figure.

To be honest, I feel that this series may have peaked with Lies.  While Plague is an excellent follow-up, it feels more like a maintainer than an innovator, keeping the quality of the story steady instead of enhancing it.  Rather than significantly improving upon the aspects of its predecessors, as the last two books have done, this installment keeps the status quo.

Now, I’m not saying that Plague is a mediocre book, much less an outright poor one.  It’s a fantastic installment, to be sure, and I enjoyed it immensely. 

Be warned: This review does contain mild spoilers.

You know that feeling when you are expecting one thing out of a book and it completely delivers something else, and not for the better? It’s the kind of situation where you expectations completely sabotage your reading experience. That’s what happened with Unremembered and I. Technically, there isn’t anything wrong with the story. I fairly enjoyed the writing style and the characters, but in the end it’s not very memorable. It reminds me a lot of a few other sci-fi novels I’ve read recently: Origin and Eve & Adam. They all feature people created by science in some way or another, each with varying degrees of complexity. I’d situate Unremembered somewhere in between the two.

The premise is what really drew me in. Seraphina is found at the scene of a plane crash with no memory of how she got there or anything from her past, including her name.

I approached the third installment in Michael Grant’s series with caution.  From the reviews that I’ve glanced at, it seems that, for many fans, Lies is the weakest book in the series thus far.  Since I tend to agree with the majority opinion when it concerns YA fiction, I was fully prepared to enjoy Lies, but perhaps not to the extent that I did Gone and Hunger.

And, as it was to be expected, I had several issues with this installment.  Certain things that frustrated and annoyed me a great deal.  While I’ve loved this series from the beginning, I’ve had to wrestle with varying degrees of disappointment since my rereading of Gone and beyond.  To put it bluntly, I’ve had to get over the fact that these books aren’t perfect.  They’re flawed in many ways, and after being so eager to read them for so long, this fact came as a fairly significant letdown. 

This review may contain spoilers.  And by may, I mean most certainly will.

False Memory by fellow Horde player, Dan Krokos, caught my attention.  Mainly because, well, FOR THE HORDE!  But also, because it looked badass.   The basic idea is that Miranda wakes up with no memories and no real clue who she is.  She soon discovers that she’s a superhero and part of a team of four Roses with the ability to cause fear and panic to normal people.

I mean, it’s an alright ability. Not as good as the ability to burn people with your eyes or use an alien ring to wish anything into existence.  But you take what you can get!

So what I might have expected was good writing and interesting, action-packed pages.  But that author, he has a soft spot the size of the Mariana Trench.  This book was a little more saucy than I expected and I liked it!

Pivot Point, I’m not quite sure what you are… but I think I kinda loved it. I have this issue where I feel the need to categorize things. I can’t explain it, I guess that’s just the way my brain works. Pivot Point was really an enigma for me because I just couldn’t tell what genre it would fall in. From the blurb, it clearly screams sci-fi, but when you start reading it feels so contemporary. And that was a very, very pleasant surprise because the novel kept me guessing from beginning to end.

Addison lives in a little community that is very different from our world. Everyone she knows has abilities similar to those right out an X-Men comic book. She herself can see into her future by Searching different paths for her to take. Unfortunately for her, she has to use this ability to choose which parent she wants to live with when they spring their divorce on her.

Prose is a very subjective thing.  What one reader finds to be beautifully written, another finds trite and overdone.  Is it excess, or great writing?  It all depends on your personal reading tastes and preferences.

I bring this up because Tahereh Mafi’s Shatter Me is a debut novel that is pushing those who read it to extreme opinions.  You apparently either think that it’s a great start for a promising new author, or you think that it’s a poorly written lump of ridiculous metaphors and horrid imagery.  It’s been interesting to see such conflicting reactions, and that’s the primary thing that drove me to pick this one up.

The other reason is that I’ve been wanting something similar in style to Daughter of Smoke and Bone.  Taylor won me over with her gorgeous prose, and I demand more!

Anyway, Shatter Me is a difficult book to review, because I can’t definitively choose a side. 

Lengthier, grander in scope, and significantly darker than the already mature Gone, the second installment in Grant’s ambitious series is a marvelous sequel that is much better than its predecessor.

And while I desperately wanted to give this one a perfect rating, I couldn’t bring myself to award that final star.  In the behemoth that is Hunger, Grant manages to fix some of the nagging problems that Gone contained, but he simultaneously leaves others to grow worse.  This book isn’t a perfect work, but it’s a lot of fun, and the author does a lot of things right.  The story is still wildly intriguing, and has grown even more convoluted (which I say in the most complimentary way possible).  The world-building is bigger and better, with several new twists and revelations.  The characters, both old and new, are easy to connect with and root for.

Because this series is a rather lengthy one, I’m not going to bother exploring every aspect of every installment.