My Weekly Book Haul: 22/03/2014

Friday Finds is something that was started over on ShouldBeReading and Stacking the Shelves over at TyngaReviews, I am in love with all of these as I love finding other blogs to follow and books to read through these! So check them all out and see what you find, Stacking the Shelves has a lot of participants as well which is great. This is basically a way for me to show what books I have received, borrowed or bought each week. All book covers and their summary come from back of book or Goodreads.

This week has involved a lot of work but a lot of fun too. We celebrated the boyfriend's 23rd birthday with a fun night in with friends. I have been watching the same two youtube videos a lot recently:

This one because of how beautiful it is.

And then this one because I'm amazed at how many different voices he can sing in! Mega impressed with Mickey, Minnie & Goofy.

Half Bad by Sally Green

You can't read, can't write, but you heal fast, even for a witch.
You get sick if you stay indoors after dark.
You hate White Witches but love Annalise, who is one.
You've been kept in a cage since you were fourteen.
All you've got to do is escape and find Mercury, the Black Witch who eats boys. And do that before your seventeenth birthday.

Yes, okay, I admit that the Goodreads ad got to me! I had to buy it because it does look interesting and I managed to get mine signed! 

Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins

Anna has everything figured out - she was about to start senior year with her best friend, she had a great weekend job, and her huge work crush looked as if it might finally be going somewhere... Until her dad decides to send her 4383 miles away to Paris. On her own.
But despite not speaking a word of French, Anna finds herself making new friends, including Etienne, the smart, beautiful boy from the floor above. But he’s taken – and Anna might be too. Will a year of romantic near-missed end with the French kiss she’s been waiting for?

I've already read this but I didn't own it. I love the new covers and so I finally decided to cave and buy this for myself. 

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

When two girls are abducted and killed in Missouri, journalist Camille Preaker is sent back to her home town to report on the crimes. Long-haunted by a childhood tragedy and estranged from her mother for years, Camille suddenly finds herself installed once again in her family's mansion, reacquainting herself with her distant mother and the half-sister she barely knows - a precocious 13-year-old who holds a disquieting grip on the town. As Camille works to uncover the truth about these violent crimes, she finds herself identifying with the young victims - a bit too strongly. Clues keep leading to dead ends, forcing Camille to unravel the psychological puzzle of her own past to get at the story. Dogged by her own demons, Camille will have to confront what happened to her years before if she wants to survive this homecoming.

I got this in a buy one get one for £1 deal with Anna & the French Kiss. I read and enjoyed Gone Girl so thought I'd try something else by the author.

Trouble by Non Pratt

A boy. A girl. A bump. Trouble.
Hannah’s smart and funny ... she’s also fifteen and pregnant. Aaron is new at school and doesn’t want to attract attention. So why does he offer to be the pretend dad to Hannah’s unborn baby? 
Growing up can be trouble but that’s how you find out what really matters.

This came in at work and it's the first I have seen this. It looks like a great read and I adore the cover, front and back.

House of Secrets by Chris Columbus & Ned Vizzini

The Walker kids had it all: loving parents, a big house in San Francisco, all the latest video games . . . but everything changed when their father lost his job as a result of an inexplicable transgression. Now the family is moving into Kristoff House, a mysterious place built nearly a century earlier by Denver Kristoff, a troubled writer with a penchant for the occult.
Suddenly the siblings find themselves launched on an epic journey into a mash-up world born of Kristoff’s dangerous imagination, to retrieve a dark book of untold power, uncover the Walker family’s secret history and save their parents . . . and maybe even the world.

Chris Columbus writing a fantasy kids book? Okay, I'll give it a try. Ned Vizzini too, okay I am definitely in. 

Red Moon by Benjamin Percy

Every teenage girl thinks she's different. When government agents kick down Claire Forrester's front door and murder her parents, Claire realises just how different she is. Patrick Gamble was nothing special until the day he got on a plane and, hours later, stepped off it, the only passenger left alive. A hero. President Chase Williams has sworn to eradicate the menace. Unknown to the electorate, however, he is becoming the very thing he has sworn to destroy. Each of them is caught up in a war that so far has been controlled with laws and violence and drugs. But an uprising is about to leave them damaged, lost, and tied to one another for ever. The night of the red moon is coming, when an unrecognisable world will emerge, and the battle for humanity will begin.

 

Awaken & Middle Ground by Katie Kacvinksy

Maddie lives in a world where everything is done on the computer. Work, school, even dating can be done from home, and people do not venture out. Maddie plays soccer, and likes the physicality and camaraderie of team sports, but for the most part, she's okay with the solitary digital life - until she meets Justin.

Justin likes being with people. He enjoys the physical closeness of face-to-face interactions. People aren't meant to be alone, he tells her.

Suddenly, Maddie feels something awakening inside her - a feeling that maybe there is a different, better way to live. And maybe it's his attentiveness, or the physical closeness of actually being with someone, or just that he's very good-looking, but Maddie is definitely drawn to Justin.

I have seen some really interesting reviews and really want to give this one a try.

The Kiss of Deception by Mary E. Pearson

In this timeless new trilogy about love and sacrifice, a princess must find her place in a reborn world.
In a society steeped in tradition, Princess Lia’s life follows a preordained course. As First Daughter, she is expected to have the revered gift of sight—but she doesn’t—and she knows her parents are perpetrating a sham when they arrange her marriage to secure an alliance with a neighboring kingdom—to a prince she has never met.
On the morning of her wedding, Lia flees to a distant village. She settles into a new life, hopeful when two mysterious and handsome strangers arrive—and unaware that one is the jilted prince and the other an assasin sent to kill her. Deception abounds, and Lia finds herself on the brink of unlocking perilous secrets—even as she finds herself falling in love.

EEEEEEEEEEK!!! YAY! 

Two chances to win a Kindle Fire HDX or $229 in Paypal Cash/Amazon Gift Card

And my giveaway to celebrate reaching 500 Bloglovin' followers!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Side Effects May Vary by Julie Murphy: Review

Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell: Review & discussion

Five Friday Favourites: Contemporaries

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Five Friday Favourites: Contemporaries

Five Friday Favourites is a weekly event hosted by Book Badger, where once a week, a five favourites subject is posted and everyone is welcome to join in. You can find out more about Five Friday Favourites and the future subjects here.

I only read this for the first time late last year and I really wish I had heard of it sooner. It's such an amazing book and I instantly fell in love with it. Jace Garrett became my book boyfriend from the very moment he appeared in this book. The story had me laughing, crying and everything in between. Truly an amazing book, you can read my review here. 

Buy My Life Next Door

This book had me sobbing. It's such a sad book and yet it's beautiful and uplifting all at the same time. After her mother, father and brother are all killed in a car crash Mia is left clinging to life. Her body is in a coma but she's watching from the outside as the other people she cares about deal with the fallout from the accident. She knows the decision is hers - to stay or to go. Does she really want to live the rest of her life without her family?

Buy If I Stay

This is one of those books that I literally want to chuck in peoples faces in order to make them take notice and read it. It's one of those books that needs to be read and shared. It's a story I have never seen told before, especially for a young adult audience. It's messy, heart-wrenching and had me feeling more emotions than I can count. If you haven't reads this then I implore you to go give it a try. You can read my review here.
Buy Forbidden

This was one of the very first New Adult books I read and it really blew me away. It wasn't what I was expecting at all. It provided me with a really sweet romance and I fell in love with the story and the characters. If you are looking for a great NA or just a sweet romance then I definitely recommend Slammed. You can read my review here.
Buy Slammed

This book blew me away. I really want to reread it so that I can review it for the blog and share the awesomeness with you. This tells the story of Lennie Walker who is trying to come to terms with the death of her sister. In a time where she should be grieving Lennie finds herself falling in love. It's a really beautiful story and I definitely recommend it.
Buy The Sky Is Everywhere



Next weeks topic is: Five Favourite Book Covers

Two chances to win a Kindle Fire HDX or $229 in Paypal Cash/Amazon Gift Card

And my giveaway to celebrate reaching 500 Bloglovin' followers!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Where You'll Find Me by Erin Fletcher: Review

Easy by Tammara Webber: Review

My Weekly Book Haul

Five Friday Favourites: Overall Series

Side Effects May Vary by Julie Murphy: Review

Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell: Review & discussion

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Feel free to link up to your FFF post.

Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell: Review

Title: Fangirl
Author: Rainbow Rowell
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Buy This Book: Book Depository / Amazon  

Cath and Wren are identical twins, and until recently they did absolutely everything together. Now they're off to university and Wren's decided she doesn't want to be one half of a pair any more - she wants to dance, meet boys, go to parties and let loose. It's not so easy for Cath. She's horribly shy and has always buried herself in the fan fiction she writes, where she always knows exactly what to say and can write a romance far more intense than anything she's experienced in real life. Without Wren Cath is completely on her own and totally outside her comfort zone. She's got a surly room-mate with a charming, always-around boyfriend, a fiction-writing professor who thinks fan fiction is the end of the civilized world, a handsome classmate who only wants to talk about words ...And she can't stop worrying about her dad, who's loving and fragile and has never really been alone. Now Cath has to decide whether she's ready to open her heart to new people and new experiences, and she's realizing that there's more to learn about love than she ever thought possible ... (Goodreads summary)


WARNING: This review will be ridiculously long. I feel I need to fully explain every problem I had with Fangirl... And when words fail me, gifs will have to do!

Okay, it's time for me to be honest with the blogosphere: I didn't love Fangirl. For the first 300 pages or so I was really struggling with it and I was pretty mad about that. I kind of felt like the internet lied to me, Goodreads lied to me, the blogosphere lied to me and every single person who recommended this to me lied to me! I went in with my expectations ridiculously high because I had seen nothing but ridiculously high praise for it. And then I was just left feeling let down and disappointed. So please bear with me because this might be a lengthy one but I want to totally explain why I didn't get it.

I went into Fangirl not knowing an amazingly large amount about it because I didn't want to ruin anything for myself. I did know that Cath is a total fangirl who writes her own fanfiction and I loved the sound of that. I mean, if you're a lover of books then you have probably had at least one book that has made you totally fangirl. My worst one would of course be Harry Potter and I will fangirl till the day I die over those beauties. But I have to confess that I didn't realise how much of a big role that fanfiction would play in this novel.

I first must comment on Cath's name, which is actually Cather. Now it has a back story which does make total sense but the name itself is still hideous. I don't get why a person would actually name their child that... unless of course they hated their child. And seeing as Cath's mum ran off and left her, she probably did. Cather, I can't even figure out how you pronounce it. If it is how you start Catherine then it really is horrible and sounds far too much like a racial slur that's used over in South Africa.

When they dared to mentioned Harry Potter.

The fanfiction! I had a huge problem with the fanfiction in this book, mainly because I didn't care about it and didn't really understand why it was needed. Cath writes fanfiction based off a series of books called Simon Snow & the 'something something something something'. It is basically Harry Potter and that is the whole point, but that's where the problem began. It isn't Harry Potter, but it basically is and this is set in a world where Harry Potter still actually exists. That made absolutely no sense to me and it would have if Harry Potter didn't exist in this book. At one point Cath gets a telling off from a professor for using fanfiction for her writing piece, saying that it is plagiarism and I wanted to laugh. This is in a book where we are supposed to believe that during the time when Harry Potter was still being released that a woman was able to get the Simon Snow books published. A series where an 11-year-old orphan boy gets into the Watford School of Magicks to become a magician and realises he is their only hope against an evil force trying to destroy the magic world. Seriously, that would not get published because that is plagiarism. As I said, if this was a world where Harry Potter didn't exist then I would get it, but in a world where it does it makes no sense that Simon Snow would even get published. Not without the author having a HUGE lawsuit on her hands. But no, in this no one seems to notice that it's a carbon copy of Harry Potter and instead it's sold over 380 million copies worldwide. That I can't buy and that really bothered me because then the whole book just didn't feel realistic or at all real to me. The moment they mentioned Harry Potter and I realised it still existed within this world I about lost the plot altogether.

I'm with Harry on this one.

Then there was the huge sections of Cath's fanfiction that we had to read and then the chapter starters that were either parts of the actual books or fanfiction. It was really boring. I couldn't care less about fake fanfiction based on a fake book that's just supposed to be a Harry Potter equivalent. Why do I care for scenes between Baz & Simon, two characters I have never heard of, read about or care about. That completely made the whole experience a lot less enjoyable for me. Thankfully after about 250 pages I actually gave up and skipped the fanfiction and Simon Snow parts all together and it was for the best. I began to enjoy the book a whole lot better after that and I wish I had skipped them from the very beginning.

In regards to the rest of the story, I kind of feel like saying what story because to me there wasn't much of one. This book was 459 pages long and yet barely anything really happens. This book could have done with, and probably really needed to be about 100-150 pages shorter. For quite a while it just involved Cath sitting in her room, writing fanfiction, avoiding people and not wanting to socialise with anyone. I think Cath had the potential to be one of those characters that I can totally identify with. This quote in particular is spot on:

'I'm scared of everything. And I'm crazy. Like maybe you think I'm a little crazy, but I only ever let people see the tip of my crazy iceberg. Underneath this veneer of slightly crazy and socially inept, I'm a complete disaster.'

But I just couldn't get behind Cath because of how impossible she was at times. I didn't like the fact that she wouldn't let Levi into the room if Reagan wasn't there. Who makes their roommate's friend sit outside on the floor just because they don't want to make friends? She actively tries to not make friends and that infuriated me. I actually understood her twin sister Wren a whole lot more than I did Cath, and I am way more like Cath than Wren. But I got why Wren wanted to get away from Cath, to go out and make friends and actually live a little. I couldn't understand why Cath constantly tried so hard to not make friends with people and not socialise and that's coming from someone who is socially inept themselves. She got invited places and could have made friends but she just didn't even want to. I hated that about her. It would have been okay if it was just social anxiety, but at times it just seems like she isn't at all interested in the outside world... only writing about a world somebody else created. I wanted her to go out and live a little.

Levi was an okay character but a little on the dull side, especially as far as the romantic love interest goes. He was beyond sweet, he smiled constantly and wanted to be friends with everyone. He's the guy who will chat to anyone he meets and wants everybody to like him. But, if I am totally honest, I did not understand his attraction to Cath. I felt like it had to be 99.9% based on her looks because he barely has one conversation with her because she never talks to him. She brushes him off any time he tries to talk to her, she makes him sit out in the hall, she doesn't accept any of his invites to go to parties or hang out. And yet, even though she barely says five words to him, he really likes her and really wants to be with her. Why? Honestly I don't see any reasoning behind his attraction to Cath and I don't mean that in a bad way. I just really feel like I wasn't shown any real reasons why Levi liked Cath. She was mean to him, she practically ignored him and she never expressed an interest at all. It left me feeling like Levi must have some serious issues himself.

Reagan was IT for me! I absolutely adored Cath's room mate Reagan because she seemed like a real character to me. She was funny and she made me actually laugh out loud reading this book. She had some of the best lines in this book and I enjoyed it a lot more when she was around. I love her mostly for the fact that she describes Cath so well. Reagan was instantly likeable and she made this whole book ten times more enjoyable for me, without her I would have been lost.

I don't even have any complaints about the writing. The writing is solid and it hasn't put me off reading the authors work. I just think my dislike was a mixture of high expectations, not liking all the fake fanfiction and not completely understanding Cath and Levi as characters or as a couple. I think I might try one of her other books to see if I do better with one of those.

3/5 Stars

I really struggled at the very beginning, in fact I was pretty bored. The Simon Snow aspect seemed irrelevant to me and unnecessary. This was about 150 pages too long. Cath was a character I should have easily been able to understand and identify with but I just couldn't. She never tried at anything. Levi's attraction to her never made sense to me as she did absolutely nothing to warrant it. 

I'm not fangirling for Fangirl.

Discussion:

Okay, blogosphere this is where I actually want to discuss. I have seen nothing but rave reviews for this book and I need to understand this. What have I missed? What did you get that I just didn't? Did you love Simon and Baz? Should I try a different Rainbow Rowell book?

OR

If it turns out that I am not the only person on the entire planet that wasn't fangirling over this then I definitely want to hear your thoughts too. What was it that you didn't enjoy? Did you struggle with the fanfiction? Did you understand Levi & Cath as a couple?

Top Ten Tuesday: Spring TBR List

 

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted at The Broke & The Bookish. Each week they host a different top ten topic.

My Spring TBR List

I've decided to pick only 2014 releases for the list.

Dorothy Must Die makes the list because I love the whole idea of this book. It will show Dorothy as a baddie and I can't wait for that. Ever since reading Wicked, I am more than happy to read anything that portrays Dorothy as evil because I clearly haven't forgiven her for what she did to Elphaba.
The Murder Complex is one that I have as an eARC and will definitely be reading it this spring. I was happy to have auto-approval for this because the cover alone sold this book to me. I've seen some great reviews for it so I am hopeful that I will love it just as much. It's about teenage assassins, how can I not love it?
After the End is another one that I have and know that I will definitely be reading. I have read other books by the author and wasn't the biggest fan but I like the sound of this. It seems a lot like the movie The Village, where they don't realise what is outside of their home.
Open Road Summer is one that I want because I fell in love with the cover and it looks like a sweet read. It's the story of a girl who goes on tour with her best friend, who just happens to be a country superstar. Of course along the way she might just fall in love with the opening act of the tour. This looks like a sweet contemporary and I can't wait to get my hands on it.
Love Letters to the Dead is a book that I can't wait to get my hands on. Ever since reading the blurb I have been eagerly awaiting this book. It's about Laurel, a girl who begins to write letters to people who are already dead. Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin, Heath Ledger, the list goes on and on. She can tell them all the things she can't express to anyone else. I can't wait for this, I feel it's going to make me cry.
 To All The Boys I've Loved Before is one that I want because it is written by Jenny Han and I love her. She gave me the wonderful Summer series and I can't wait to read this next book. It tells the story of Lara Jean who never admitted her crushes out loud and instead wrote each boy a letter - that she never sent. But one day she discovers that her letters have been sent out to each of them and now she has to deal with them. I can't wait for this, it sounds so good and I have high expectations, this better not let me down!
The Truth About Alice looks really intriguing and I haven't seen any reviews yet and I like it that way. I am not sure what to expect from it but I am excited none the less. It's told from the perspective of different characters who all have a reason to spread rumours about Alice. It sounds good and not like anything I have read for a while.
What I Thought Was True is written by Huntley Fitzpatrick who wrote My Life Next Door, which became an instant favourite when I read it last year. I will happily pick up anything she writes from now until the end of time. This is another contemporary romance and I have every confidence that it will be as amazing as My Life Next Door.
We Were Liars was one that I might have screamed a little in delight when I found out I had been accepted for this one. I have seen some really great reviews and can't wait to read this one myself.
The Winner's Curse. That cover! It's absolutely stunning and I have to order this one so it can sit on my bookshelf looking all gorgeous. I also love the sound of the story and the five star reviews I keep seeing are definitely making me want to get my hands on this as soon as possible!

Two chances to win a Kindle Fire HDX or $229 in Paypal Cash/Amazon Gift Card

And my giveaway to celebrate reaching 500 Bloglovin' followers!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Where You'll Find Me by Erin Fletcher: Review

Easy by Tammara Webber: Review

My Weekly Book Haul

Five Friday Favourites: Overall Series

Side Effects May Vary by Julie Murphy: Review

Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell: Review & discussion

Thanks for checking out my post!

Feel free to link up to your TTT post.