Review: Fateful by Claudia Gray

Title: Fateful
Author: Claudia Gray
Release date: September 13, 2011

Let's just get this right out in the open: this book is about werewolves on the Titanic.

Yes, werewolves, as in the paranormal creature, and Titanic, the ship that hit the iceberg and sank and inspired the movie that defined my adolescent notions of romance. Werewolves on the Titanic. Someone actually published a book about werewolves on the Titanic.

When I read the summary, I knew I'd have to buy and read this book. The concept is just so ridiculous and cracky, I couldn't stay away. You all know what I'm like with crappy books, I mean really. It's like this book was written just for me.

Fateful can be summarized like this: Think Jack (Alec) and Rose (Tess), except with their positions reversed, and Jack (Alec) turns out to be a werewolf who is being hunted by an evil werewolf Brotherhood and the ship still sinks. Got it? Good.

Fourteen year old me would have loved the crap out of Fateful, especially when I was back into my Titanic phase. Do you know how many times I longed for YA books about the Titanic as a teenager? (I have bad taste and a one track mind, okay, I can admit this.) Fateful probably would've gone on my favorites shelf in an instant until I pulled it off a few years later, aghast at my bad taste.

It's not a terrible book - it's actually incredibly engrossing, especially once you get past the first couple of chapters. The characters are interesting and well-fleshed out, the love interest isn't a jackass, despite being of the paranormal variety, and the plot isn't an afterthought as it usually is in paranormal romances. It's the setting that kills this book.

I'm a massive Titanic nerd, but that doesn't mean I'm required to love every piece of media that uses it as a setting, especially if it's used as ineffectively as it is in Fateful. If an author is going to use the most famous ship in history for their setting, they better have a good reason for it and Claudia Gray did not. As far as I'm concerned, Tess and Alec's love story and the plot could have happened anywhere. There was nothing about setting it on the Titanic that made it unique or special, other than the pure WTF factor. The sinking, which should arguably be the most important part of the story, is an afterthought in the overall story and it creates some seriously lazy storytelling that makes the ending beyond cheesy. I spent the last chapters rolling my eyes at Tess and Alec's ONE TRUE LOVE torn apart by UTTER TRAGEDY. I think Leonardo DiCaprio summarizies my feelings on their relationship quite nicely:



While it's an engaging read, in the end Fateful doesn't bring anything new to the table for paranormal romances. The concept is cracky enough to catch some attention, but it's poorly executed and is just plain lazy in parts.

Grade: C+

Advance warning of my disappearance (for once!)

I haven't done nearly enough reading or blogging as I wanted to this summer, and I blame a very hectic life schedule for that! It's probably not going to slow down any time soon either.

By this time next week, I'll be in the process of moving to a new city so I can start my Big Girl Job. It's going to take a while for me to get used to the town, my schedule, and get everything sorted out, but I promise I'll be back and with more books and heroines for you all. If all goes to plan, I should have a few more reviews up this weekend, but you know me how my plans tend to go...

Review: Entwined by Heather Dixon

Title: Entwined
Author: Heather Dixon
Release date: April 1, 2011

A YA fairy tale re-telling can always be a hit-or-a-miss read (please see the suck-fest known as Little Red Riding Hood), and Heather Dixon scored a huge hit with Entwined, her re-imagining of the Twelve Dancing Princesses fairy tale.

In Entwined, crown princess Azalea promises her dying mother to take care of her eleven younger sisters – a steep promise considering their father, the King, wants nothing to do with them and heads off to war soon after her mother's passing. Azalea and her sisters love nothing more than to dance, but are not allowed to due to strict rules of mourning. When Azalea discovers a secret passage leading to a magical pavilion in the castle, the girls believe they'll be able to dance the nights away to their hearts' content. But the Keeper of the pavilion isn't content on letting them dance for free and requests a favor in turn that could bring the whole kingdom crashing down.

I'll admit, I was wary about Entwined due to the fact that it has a gorgeous cover and I have come to greatly distrust gorgeous covers as of late. But the old adage proved true, and once I started, I couldn't put Entwined down. Dixon's world building was simple, if a little too sparse in places, but it was intriguing and I wanted to know more about Azalea and her sisters' world. A back story novel to Entwined would probably be amazing. I also appreciated the life she breathed into the Twelve Dancing Princesses fairy tale, fleshing out the princesses in a way they weren't in the original tale.

The characters were easily the best part of the novel. Azalea was a lovely protagonist and she grows up enormously throughout the novel. Plus, she gets to save the day, so yay for that! The sisters were well-crafted and had their own personality, and I adored the way Dixon explored the different dynamics between the sisters. The male characters were also very well done. I loved the King by the end of the novel; some of his scenes with Azalea had my eyes brimming with tears. I also really enjoyed that it was Azalea and the King's father/daughter relationship that was the prime focus of the novel, and that the storyline with Mr. Bradford took a backseat. It made Entwined very refreshing for me.

Grade: B+

Review: Beauty Queens by Libba Bray

Title: Beauty Queens
Author: Libba Bray
Release date: May 24, 2011

Hooray for Libba Bray!

Her latest novel, Beauty Queens, is one of the most fun and insightful books I've read this summer and it was definitely what I need to get me out of the DEAR GOD, WHAT IS HAPPENING TO YA funk that the last couple books I've read put me into.

Beauty Queens begins when a plane full of Miss Teen Dream contestants crashes on a desert island. Most of the beauty queen contestants are no more by the tenth page of the book, but for the handful that survive the crash, the adventure is only beginning. Led by Miss Texas, who insists the girls must keep preparing for the pageant once they're rescued, the Miss Teen Dreamers learn how to survive in the wilderness and discover their inner strength. They're not the only ones on the island, however, and soon the girls find themselves as main players in an international incident.

Libba Bray is one of my favorite authors, and I'm so glad Beauty Queens didn't disappoint. I had some issues with the first part of the book, mainly with the parts that screamed, "Look at my clever satire of pop culture. LOOK AT IT," more than anything else. Bray beats the parody horse dead in the first chunk of the book, but thankfully lays off when the story and characters start to develop more. It's really a pity because there are tons of hilarious lines in the first couple chapters, and they didn't get my usual laugh-out-loud reaction because I was so sick of the parody nature of the story by then.

The story really gets good once the parody is (mostly) exhausted and Bray starts to explore the beauty queens a bit more. There wasn't a single character I disliked. I was even attached to the obnoxious Miss Texas by the end! Bray manages to bring a diverse cast to the pages of Beauty Queens and tackles a lot of issues for teen readers. Race, sex, class, and LGBT issues all make an appearance and are handled beautifully. Beauty Queen also tackles female empowerment and feminism, which were some of my favorite sections of the book. For young readers who might not have been exposed to feminist theory yet, Beauty Queens will definitely get them thinking and that's a good thing.

I also applaud the way Bray presented female sexuality and teenage sex. Some people are probably going to say it's too racy for teens (Imma lookin' at you, Wall Street Journal), but it was realistic and wasn't preachy ... unless you think telling girls to be gatekeepers of their sexuality as preachy, which I totally don't.

Beauty Queens is the perfect book for summer. It's funny and fun, but it'll also challenge you and make you think.

Grade: B+

Your fierce heroines suggestions?

Quite a few people have left some comments suggesting books for me to check out or read, so I decided to start a suggestions post!

If you have a book series you think I should check out (whether it has a Fierce Heroine in it or not), drop me a comment and let me know. If I don't get to it, one of your fellow commenters might!

What's on my YA reading list right now:

- Beauty Queens by Libba Bray
- Uncommon Criminals by Ally Carter
- The Scorch Trials by James Dashner

Review: The Magnolia League by Katie Crouch

Title: The Magnolia League
Author: Katie Crouch
Release date: May 3, 2011

Before I get into the nitty gritty of this review, I'd like to start out with a quote from an article Katie Crouch wrote for Slate.com about writing YA. If you're on Twitter, you might've seen Maureen Johnson, Rachel Hawkins, and others tweeting up a storm about this article, and once I saw who wrote it was written by, I knew I had to speed up my reading of The Magnolia League.

Because you see, Katie Crouch is new to the YA scene (crossing over from "adult" books, like so many other authors are doing) and makes the serious mistake of condescending to her readership, among other things:

But readers in Y.A. don't care about rumination. They don't want you to pore over your sentences trying to find the perfect turn of phrase that evokes the exact color of the shag carpeting in your living room when your dad walked out on your mom one autumn afternoon in 1973. They want you to tell a story. In Y.A. you write two or three drafts of a chapter, not eight.

When I read this section it the article, it shed so much light on why the first chapters I had read of The Magnolia League were so ridiculously terrible. I mean, I'm willing to forgive first-time authors for bad writing (unless they get a seven-figure deal, then I better be getting a masterpiece (yes, Josephine Angelini, I'm looking at you)), but when authors don't take YA seriously just because it's YA? Hoo boy, you're pressing my hot buttons.

In The Magnolia League, Alexandra Lee moves in with her Southern grandma after the death of her mother. Alex, who's grown up on a hippie commune/pot farm her entire life, is having a tough time adjusting to her grandmother's stiff, proper Savannah society, especially when she finds out she's supposed to be inducted into the upper crust Magnolia League by Christmas. Members of the Magnolia League enjoy wealth, power, and beauty ... all because of a pact made between Alex's grandmother and the Buzzard family. Alex must decide if she's going to fall in line with the rest of the League or bring the pact to an end.

I think the best summation of The Magnolia League can be this: It is a hot frickin' mess.

Crouch clearly needs to indulge in a few more revision for the sequel because the writing in this book was bad. You know how writers are told to "show, not tell"? Yeah, there was a whole bunch of telling in The Magnolia League. It drove me nuts while I was reading, as did the occasional, inexplicable POV shifts from 1st person present to 3rd person present. And then there were the awkward, "OMG, this is totally how teenagers talk, amirite?" dialogue moments...

Thanks to one of those inexplicable POV shift chapters, readers had the mysteries of the Magnolia League figured out before for the 50 page mark. Too bad it took Alex another 100 pages and being spoon fed information to get it figured out. There were quite a few repeated exposition scenes. For instance, Alex picks up a book to read about hoodoo magic and literally less than 20 pages later, her grandmother repeats the exact same information to her. Plus, there's not exactly a plot to this book. Crouch just wanders her way through different themes and finally decides on something out of left field so she can have a sequel in the last 15 pages. Literally.

I wasn't impressed by any of the characters either. On my scale of awesome to annoying heroine, Alex ranked Pretty Damn High on the annoying scale. She's supposed to be ~edgy~ because she has dreads and smokes pot and totally cares about the environment and whatever, but she really just comes off as pretentious and a caricature of a liberal teenager. The other characters are just as flat -- even Alex's grandmother, who could have been a marvelous character if she had been utilized properly. And the love interest? Just forget it. He's cute, and that's about it.

So what's the lesson that we've taken away from The Magnolia League?

If you're writing YA, respect your damn audience. We can tell when an author truly loves the genre and when they're just trying to cash in by spitting out words on the page.

Grade: D+

Review: Queen of the Dead by Stacey Kade

Title: Queen of the Dead
Author: Stacey Kade
Release date: May 31, 2011

If you haven't picked up Stacey Kade's debut novel The Ghost and the Goth yet, you should probably do it right this instant. Don't be fooled by the slightly ridiculous title, just go and pick it up in any form, and then come back to this blog so you can thank me for pointing you in the direction of the most underappreciated YA series on the shelves right now.

The Ghost and the Goth was one of the final books I picked up last summer before school resumed, and I've been practically wetting my pants since then to get the sequel, Queen of the Dead, in my grubby, bloggy little hands. Forget stalker vampires and werewolves, the Ghost and the Goth series is everything paranormal YA should be.

Queen of the Dead picks up about two months after its predecessor left off. After dying and coming back as a ghost, Alona Dare is supposed to help ghost talker Will Killian guide lost souls to the after life. But when her family starts to move on from her untimely death a little too fast for her liking, Alona decides to take things into her own hands and stirs up trouble that she might not be able to get out of. Will, meanwhile, is beginning to unravel his father's secret past and learning much more about his abilities after a chance encounter with another seer.

My main (and really, only) problem with Queen of the Dead? It's too damn short! There were a few plotlines I felt could've been expanded more or got dropped in the last few chapters, but really, the only reason I'm so annoyed by the length is because I just want more Will and Alona!

Kade's characters are the true joy of this series. While the ghost/seer relationship has been explored by other authors (most excellently by Meg Cabot in her Mediator series), it's Will and Alona that set this series from the others. Alona is a redeemable brat and I love her for it, and she gets all the best lines. Will is neither creepy or controlling, and is totally YA boyfriend material. And when they're together, it makes for some great laugh out loud moments.

If you're looking for a fun, quick read this summer, this is definitely the book for you.

Now if only I could time travel to get that third book now...

Grade: A-