Some of my favorite reading experiences involve reaching that tipping point in a book where you make a conscious decision to eschew every other thing in your life to finish the book. That happened to me the other night in the midst of E. Lockhart’s We Were Liars. I can’t remember what exactly tipped me over into obsession. What I do remember is that spent a good three-and-a-half hours racing to finish the book.

It was a good race with a finish I could see coming, but didn’t wholly mind.

Cadence Sinclair Easton is a member of such a ridiculously wealthy family that the entire lot of them spend their summers in four luxurious houses located on their private island near Martha’s Vineyard. Yes, they own an island.

Cady is the eldest grandchild of the Sinclair clan, beating out her cousins Mirren and Johnny by a matter of weeks. The trio spend their idyllic summers on the island snorkeling, swimming at the tiny beach, avoiding “the littles” (the younger cousins/siblings) and generally living in the very lap of luxury. When they’re eight one of the Aunties starts dating an Indian man with a nephew the same age as the cousins. Gat is seamlessly integrated into the cousin group and they dub themselves the Liars.

Things go really well until Summer 15 (the liars mark the summers by their age) when Cady and Gat cannot deny their attraction to each other. I love the way Cady describes Gat, “He was contemplation and enthusiasm. Ambition and strong coffee. I could have looked at him forever.” As a reader I was a little swoony right with her.

Anyway, they spend the summer getting handsy and schmoopy all over the island much to the chagrin of family patriarch ol’ Harris Sinclair. That summer ends tragically though, with Cady involved in a harrowing accident that leaves her wracked with life-destroying migraines and a traumatic brain injury. She spends Summer 16 away from the Liars, barfing and wracked with pain in a variety of European countries with her estranged father. She longs for the Liars and a chance to fill the holes in her Swiss cheese memory.

She returns to the island during Summer 17 determined to find out just what in the hell happened Summer 15 and why the Liars abandoned her when she needed them the most. Their reasons are pretty good. I won’t say anymore lest I spoil the ending that you kind of see coming but not entirely.

This is one of those books that once the big reveal is made all sorts of things you read forty, fifty pages ago slide into place with an audible click. As I raced through to the end I found myself actually nodding in appreciation for the sly way E. Lockhart structured her book. There were a lot of “Ahhh, now I get it. Nicely played.” moments.

It could have been easy for this to go so wrong. An unreliable narrator with amnesia? Come on! But the book never comes off as coy or hokey. That’s impressive. I appreciated Cady’s earnestness and the struggles she has with her privilege and the lessons she learns from that privilege. Plus, the mystery about what happened Summer 15 is pretty engrossing. The ending is a little neat, but feels honest.

I dug this one quite a bit.

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When a friend of mine said How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff had a better, more believable love story than John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, I was all in. Hell yes, I thought. In a year with a majority of the books I’m choosing on the meh-side of okayness, I was ready for something to knock my socks off.

Clearly I must have misheard him because this one is a big, dull dud.

Fifteen-year-old Daisy is banished from New York by her dad and pregnant stepmom, sent to live with an aunt and a gaggle of cousins in the English countryside. It’s a rough transition from Manhattan to the bucolic farm, and she struggles connecting with her four cousins. This inability to connect feels like foreshadowing, because I too had an inability to connect to this book.

Within days of her arrival Daisy’s Aunt Penn has to go away for work, and shortly after that bombs are dropped on London and the entire country is under siege. Meanwhile Daisy is getting up close and personal with cousin Edmond, who she can talk to with her mind, and bonding with the others. The kids hideout at the farm for as long as they can, playing house and swimming in the river.

One day they’re torn apart by war. Boys are sent to one place and girls to the other. The rest of book follows Daisy and Piper, her nine-year-old cousin as they try to get back to the farm and the boys.

With everything going on, it surprised me that this one was kind of snooze. The entire story is told by Daisy whose voice is detached and pretty void of emotion, and that makes the “love affair” with Edmond feel hollow. Mostly though, this one suffers from just too much going on, let’s count the ways:

1. There’s the city mouse/country mouse thing with Daisy being the big city transplant dropped on a farm
2. There’s a vague war that we never learn much about
3. There’s the odd coincidence that Aunt Penn is some kind of peace-keeping negotiator who agrees to house a niece she hardly knows as war is about to break out
4. There’s Daisy’s eating disorder
5. There’s Daisy’s issues with her dead mom
6. There’s Daisy’s issues with her dad & stepmom
7. There’s the cousin sex
8. There’s the cousins’ ability to “talk” to animals
9. There’s the walking, walking, walking through dangerous territory to get back to the farm
10. There’s the mystical thing where Edmond and Daisy can sort of talk to each other in their minds
11. There’s the Deus Ex Machina phone call after a few hundred pages that provides an easy out for everything

And what’s really missing is any sort of believability with this story. I could buy the war, I could buy the fact that her dad would send her to a country on the brink of war and that her Aunt, who is obviously very involved in this, would allow her to come, and I could even buy that city-raised Daisy is savvy enough to haul her and Piper across the war-torn English countryside. However, what I didn’t buy was the “love” between her and Edmond being enough to sustain her through everything. I didn’t see it, and even though Daisy said it was there I didn’t believe her. And if you can’t buy into that main premise, the rest of the book doesn’t work. At least it didn’t work for me.

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Wow, is Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl kind of a disappointing, too-long mess. It’s shocking because Eleanor & Park is such a beautiful, poignant book, and this is the opposite of that.

Cath, our protagonist is a freshman at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Her twin sister Wren has decided that they need a trial separation. So Wren is off in another dorm partying it up with her roommate, while Cath is left with a sort of brusk roommate who is in and out of the room a lot, often accompanied by tall, rangy Levi who likes to eat Cath’s protein bars. Another thing you should know about Cath is that she’s the writer behind wildly-popular Simon Snow fanfiction. Simon Snow is a Harry-Potteresque character. There are Mages and wands and successful movie adaptations in his thirteen-book series.

Fangirl follows Cath through her first year of college — how she struggles to fit in, navigate a world with a roommate who is not her sister, and the various academic hurdles she must clear while keeping up with her fanfiction story.

ZZZZZzzzzzzzzzz.

This one is a snoozer, which is kind of surprising considering Rowell throws every college-aged drama you can think of at Cath: a strange roommate, mental illness, alcoholism, learning disabilities, plagiarism, and the return of an absentee parent. It’s too much and not enough all at the same time. Each of these issues is enough to build an entire book upon, and yet they are glossed over and quickly resolved here.

And then there is the fandom, something that we know is really, very important to Cath but as a reader you never actually understand why. She doesn’t tell us. It’s not apparent in the book, it just is. It’s kind of a gaping hole in a book called Fangirl. Maybe it’s supposed to be a sort of shortcut description of Cath’s personality. “Oh, she’s a fangirl.” Maybe that descriptor means something to a certain segment of people, a segment I don’t belong to.

But the biggest problem with Fangirl is that there is nothing at stake for Cath. The biggest dilemma she faces is outing her fangirlism to the boy she kind of likes. It’s not a matter of coming of age, realizing that there is more to life than Simon Snow. It’s not about the dichotomy of having a rich online life (from what I can tell there isn’t a tight-knit fanfic community here, though she does mention replying to comments) when your offline life is kind of a bummer. It’s frankly just a slice of life about a girl bumbling through her first year of college.

All the problems that come up — the alcoholism, the estrangement from her sister, the mental illness, the learning disabilities, the plagiarism — are all dealt with quickly, efficiently and in a way that leaves Cath unscathed. It’s so disappointing.

And Cath? Cath is just kind of an icky character. She’s super judgmental and a prude (refusing to kiss the boy she’s been dating for three weeks because kissing means something to her). She consistently refers to her dad, who is suffering with some sort of bi-polar disorder, as crazy, and she tsk-tsks everything her sister does.

Yuck.

This is one I struggled to get through, hoping and hoping and hoping it would get better. It never did.

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Warning: Unmitigated, unapologetic gushing ahead.

I loved every single sentence in every single paragraph on every single page of Rainbow Rowell’s young adult novel Eleanor & Park. I loved it with the irrational and all-consuming love of a sixteen-year-old girl, which is apropos because Eleanor and Park are a couple of sixteen-year-old weirdos from the wrong side of the Omaha tracks. Park’s a mixed-race kid whose mom is Korean and whose dad is from Omaha. He feels his otherness acutely and shows it outwardly in punk rock t-shirts, floppy bangs, and an ever-present Walkman coupled with a fistful of comicbooks.

Eleanor is the big, redheaded new girl who lives in a house filled with poverty, siblings, domestic violence, and alcoholism. Eleanor’s got it rough and the skinny bitches on the bus who make fun of her flaming hair and who pick on her for being the fatgirl in gym really are the least of her concerns.

But on one fateful day in the fall of 1986, Eleanor boards Park’s bus and finding no place else to sit, flops down next to him. What follows is one of the sweetest and most painful teen romances since, well, The Fault in Our Stars. I know that’s a bold claim but I believe Eleanor & Park could give Hazel & Gus a run for their money when it comes to star-crossed teen romance.

This book had everything I love in books: humor (Eleanor is funny as hell), music (the two bond over The Smiths & The Beatles), flawed, realistic characters who feel so real it’s like you know them. Hell, if Eleanor had been a six-foot-three peroxide blonde I could have been her.

The two struggle through their sophomore years like every high school kid, trying to figure out love and who you are and how you cope with the shittiness in your life. Eleanor really has the struggle here because she’s got the bullying at school and at home in the form of her mother’s abusive new husband, Richie, who creeps her out. She has so much shame about being poor and Richie’s drinking that it’s a wonder she can barely function. She keeps it bottled up and you know there is only a matter of time before it explodes all over her life, and the question is will Park be there? Will he understand?

And another thing I love about this book? Is that even though both Eleanor & Park are the weirdos they don’t suffer from Holden Caufieldization. They aren’t the friendless weirdos who are friendless and weird merely because they like books and music like you so often see in Young Adult novels. They both have actual friends, and their weirdness is kind forced upon them — Eleanor because of her size and her falling apart thrift shop clothes, Park because he’s biracial and embraces the punk rock aesthetic.

And another thing I love about this book? The tender steps toward sex they take. The fact that Eleanor wants Park as much as he wants her. That he wants her even though she doesn’t fall into the strict standards of beauty fed to us by the media. I love that they constantly ask each other for consent before they go around those fabled bases. Both of them.

And another thing I love about this book? As I rushed to the stories climax I had to put the book aside and cry for a little bit less I ruin the ending with all my smeary tears and inability to breathe.

And another thing I love about this book? Just everything all the time all about all of it. It’s been awhile since I fell this hard and fast for a book (well, November when I read Tell the Wolves I’m Home seems like awhile especially because I am just coming out of a bad, bad slump of hating all the shitty books I was reading).

And the thing I love most about this book? Is that talking about it or typing about it makes my heart race like that first time Cam Anderson turned around in 7th grade English/Social Studies and leveled me with his brown eyes and said “You like to read, right?”

The post This is a Light that Never Goes Out appeared first on I Will Dare.

To enjoy Kat Rosenfield’s young-adult novel Amelia Anne is Dead and Gone, you have to buy into the conceit that a pretty, blonde, recent college grad can disappear for two months without anyone raising an eyebrow. Apparently Amelia Anne, the corpse of the title, had the kind of friends and family who could go more than two months without hearing a peep from her and not be concerned.

I didn’t buy it, and that was only the first problem with this book.

The novel opens with teenage Becca, whose boyfriend, James, is pulling out both figuratively and literally. As the two finish having sex on the night of her high school graduation, James claims they’re finished. She is, obviously, sent into a spiral of teen-angst breakup depression.

The next morning, the tiny town of Bridgeton is rocked when the body of a young woman is found on the side of the road. Nobody knows who she is, where she came from, or who killed her. The murder sets the town abuzz with gossip and suspicion and countless, endless rumors.

The murder takes Becca’s mind off her heartbreak. A little. She’s also got college in the fall to worry about.

The chapters alternate between telling Becca’s story as it unwinds over the summer after Amelia’s body is found, and Amelia’s story in the months, days, and hours leading up to her murder. This alternating point of view sounds good in theory, but doesn’t quite work out in practice. The point of view is kind of slippery and loosey-goosey. Becca sometimes takes on the POV of the entire town, a sort of omniscient, third person plural. Amelia’s POV starts with a close-third, following Amelia, and then flips into her boyfriend Luke’s POV for a few paragraphs, and then flops back to her. While this wasn’t too confusing, it was jarring and annoying.

As far as characters go, spending time with Amelia was far preferable because she had an actual personality. She was a feisty business major who discovered in her final semester of college she had a passion for theater, and even though her domineering boyfriend wasn’t thrilled, she was going to follow that dream.

Becca, on the other hand, was a dud. Allegedly, she was a driven young women keen on getting out of the claustrophobic small town that had a knack for sucking people in for life. I only know this because Becca told me. As far as I could discern she didn’t have any actual goals other than getting out of town. She had no hobbies or passions other than pining for and worrying about her boyfriend, James, the one she stupidly got back together with the day after he so cruelly dumped her.

If it hadn’t been for Christa’s glowing review coupled with John Green’s (author of The Fault in Our Stars and half of Will Grayson, Will Grayson two books I adored) praise, I’d have abandoned this one faster than you can dump a dead body on the side of the road.

I persevered through endless flowery descriptions of small town life and the way information flows through them. I struggled through the side story about a young boy, a summer vacationer who died because he jumped into the lake from the wrong side of the bridge, what this had to do with Becca and Amelia’s story, I do not know. I kept going waiting for the scariness, the paragraphs that made Christa’s “legs go numb in fear.” I never got there and here’s why. In the climactic, scary scene, as Becca’s about to discover what happened to the dead girl this happened:

His voice was drowned in noise as the sky suddenly lit overhead. A jagged scar of electric white opened across the sky, accompanied at the same time by a terrifying, earsplitting crack of thunder.

Oh yes, the scary scene actually takes place during a thunderstorm. The only thunderstorm they have all summer. The cliche. . . I just. . . yeah. It’s really easy to pile on a book you don’t like. I could go on, but instead I’ll stop and just say, I did not like this book. At all.

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