audio reviews by Jaye: The Year of Secret Assignments by Jaclyn Moriarty

Yay! another review by Jaye! This is a book I listened to first, then gave to Jaye because I enjoyed it so much. I agree with everything Jaye wrote, or I would've written one of my own, too.

pub date: April 1, 2005
publisher: Scholastic
pages: 340
appeals: A light, humorous romance; School serves as the main backdrop; Told entirely through correspondence; The girls are the main characters, but the guys are heavily involved, stealing the spotlight at times; Multiple, diverse characters that are pretty well-drawn, but not deeply so
content: Some language and innuendo, no sex or graphic situations

Jay's thoughts:
Wealthy Ashbury 10th graders Emily, Lydia and Cass were not excited to start the “pen friend” program with “low-life” Brookfield students. However, once Em began corresponding with Charlie, and Lydia with Seb, things started to look up. Cassie, on the other hand, has an unexpected and frightening experience with Matthew.



This book is composed entirely of written correspondence, whether it is letters back and forth, notes from parents, or entries in Lydia’s NotebookTM (she’s an aspiring author). It was confusing at first, trying to get a solid hand on who was writing who and each of their situations. It did settle down a little further into the book.


The beginning was chronological, but as I got further in, it took turns focusing on one “couple” before going back and showing what other characters had been doing at the same time. Maybe that helped in keeping the characters straight, and I did get to follow each drama to its conclusion. However, it was confusing in its own right, and I would have liked everything to follow along without the inadvertent time travel.


I listened to the audio, which had a cast rather than a single narrator, and that helped define characters as well. Everyone performed very well, and made the characters their own. It takes place in Australia, so the accents were enjoyable, too.


The characters had distinctive voices, and it was nice to learn about the girls’ friendship, and get to know the guys they were writing. They all had faults, but I liked them anyway, even if I did roll my eyes at Emily’s snobbishness, or Seb’s over-the-top flirting. Favorite character: Charlie, and even he wasn't without fault.


They were all surprisingly willing to break the law. The main difference was that the girls mostly managed to avoid getting caught, but the guys were pretty familiar with the form master’s office. I was laughing out loud at parts, wondering how their antics were going to play out. Sometimes I was outraged on someone’s behalf, and a few times I had to cheer them on, even when what they were doing was stupid. There were some definite surprises.


It was a solid, enjoyable read with romance, drama, and a hint of danger. Plus, a hilarious “courtroom” scene near the end.

reviews by Jaye: My Sister's Stalker by Nancy Springer

I convinced my friend Jaye to write some reviews for me. And here is her second review. Enjoy.

pub date: February 20, 2012
publisher: Holiday House
pages: 128

Jaye's Thoughts:
This book is almost a novella, and that may be part of the reason for its being so different than many teen books around today. It comes in at a whopping 93 pages, and pretty much every one of them moves.

Synopsis: Rig discovers a stalker-ish website about his sister, who is away at school and gets worried. From there, it diverges from typical teen books, in that the first person he thinks to go to is his dad. In my experience, parents—most any adult, really, is the last person teens go to for help, and parents are generally largely absent. But hold on, it gets better—his dad believes him, and they start working together. Even his absentminded, sweetly naïve mom gets involved. And drives him crazy. I liked that.



I like how Rig’s character was drawn. 93 pages isn’t much time to flesh out the characters, but with thrillers, that’s not usually a high priority. Still, I found Rig a sympathetic hero, someone to root for. He went through a bit of self-discovery, too, which was interesting, though I would have liked more development and exploration with it. One aspect of this self-discovery was revealed at the very end, and it didn’t seem to fit. Came straight out of left field, and left me wondering, “Huh?” Other than that, a fun, short read. One for an afternoon. At least an hour of one, anyway.

summary:
When 15-year-old Rig, a loner, discovers that his popular older sister is being stalked while away at college, he sets out to save her, with unexpected help from his divorced parents.

reviews by Jaye: A Million Suns by Beth Revis

Because I've been such a horrible blogger the past few months, I convinced my good friend Jaye to write some reviews for me to post on my blog. Which is awesome because I get to be a horrible blogger and still post reviews. Yay! Here is the first of Jaye's reviews, hopefully more will follow. I'm crossing my fingers for one a week.

pub date: January 10, 2012

publisher: Razerbill

pages: 386

Jaye's Thoughts:

Book two of a trilogy, Suns suffers from that horrible middle-book symptom, filleritis. I really enjoyed book 1, Across the Universe. In this second book, though, Amy seems designed to annoy. She goes back and forth, saying she can’t have feelings for Elder because they’re the only teens on the ship, then flipping back to, “Wait, Elder’s mine!” and not having a problem with it. Plus, she acts incredibly selfish the entire book.

In fact, there are several things like that in the book. On one page, a certain thing will be said, or explained, or whatever. Then, maybe two paragraphs later, maybe two pages later, the real truth comes out, which is the complete opposite of the earlier bit. I got more and more frustrated.

As for plot structure, it was illogical to me. It turns out that Orion (a main player in the first book) has planted clues around the ship for Amy to follow, because she is the only one who can make The Choice. But he never tells her what The Choice is. Also, because of other things going on (like people fighting against Elder because he shut off the phydus machine to let them think for themselves, and the murders that have started up—more on that later) time is kinda of the essence. Orion knew other things, too, but they would be spoilers, so I won’t say them here. Suffice it to say, it makes no sense to send Amy on a scavenger hunt for clues when he knows there’s no time for it. If it’s so important—and it is—just tell her straight up! He can still send her off to see these things, but don’t make her hunt—what if she can’t find one of them? It’s still a choice that needs to be made, but because of the scavenger hunt, she could easily miss out on an important part. It all seemed designed to take up a few hundred pages before the third book.


Okay, the murders. This is a later development, but I’ll try to avoid spoilers. People start getting killed. Gasp! Anyway, there’s always a message with the body. The same message every time. I guess the murderer felt the point wasn’t getting across. The thing is, when we find out who the murderer is, and why they were killing people, it still doesn’t make sense. It was about a secret very few people knew, and leaving the cryptic message was never going to resolve anything.


Overall, it was a second book that struck me as a 386 page tour to get us to the start of the concluding volume. I’ll still pick up the last one, but it’s going to be a skimmer.

summary:
Godspeed was once fueled by lies. Now it is ruled by chaos. It’s been three months. In that time, Amy has learned to hide who she is. Elder is trying to be the leader he’s always wanted to be. But as the ship gets more and more out of control, only one thing is certain: They have to get off the ship.