Quick Reviews of Five Amazing Recent Reads!

One of my resolutions for the new year is to READ MORE BOOKS! It's crazy that as a writer, you can fall out of old reading habits, and I totally did last year. But I've been slowly getting back into it, and it's been especially exciting to read my fellow Apocalypsies books!!! I've been wanting to review them all, but figure I'll never get around to it, so here's my two cents on each one (in no particular order).

Cinder by Marissa Meyer. Yay, our first Apocalypsie to bust the NYT bestsellers list!! Huzzah! And yep, this one is deserving of any all and all hype. The world Marissa Meyer creates is so fully complex and thought out, but not in that overt way we do as authors sometimes. I'm a giant fan of good fairytale retellings, so I loved the Cinderella elements, that each part of the story was clearly present, but also clearly re-imagined in some seriously awesome ways. Cinderella in Meyer's story is, after all, a cyborg! This book felt giant in scope and delivers on every front.


Fracture by Megan Miranda.

Zomg, zomg, zomg, the writing in this book will blow you away. So well crafted and lyrical. The story carried for sure, but it was the writing that had my heart. I still find myself rereading sections and wondering from a writerly standpoint, hmm, just how did she DO that??? I bow down.

Hemlock by Kathleen Peacock - Loved this book, so freaking HARD. I got to read an ARC of this, it will be out in about 4 months. With this book, it's all about the characters. They are so well drawn, they immediately draw you into the personal entanglements of a smaller town, and the prejudices and loyalties that can lead to violence. And lots and lots of secrets. You cannot come away from this without a feeling of : damn, some huge sh** just went down! And: I cannot WAIT to find out what happens next!!



Under the Never Sky - Love, love, love this book! We're finally getting to this year's crop of dystopias, and Veronica's is another that lives up to its hype, and more. I really enjoyed the way the relationship between Aria and Peregrine slowly develops. At first they consider each other enemies and it was so much fun to watch antagonism slowly grow to a grudging friendship and... maybe more ;) You'll have to read to find out. Oh, and the action in this book!!!!!! Seriously killer, and perfectly executed.



Bloodrose by Andrea Cremer - First book I've read this year not by a fellow Apocalypsie, by an author who I'm sure needs no introduction. This book is just insane. It's the ending of the Nightshade trilogy, and if I had just two words to describe it, they'd be: passionate and epic. Seriously, the characters go all over the world facing all kinds of crazy dangers, but it's the passionate central story and the characters that keep you on the edge of your seat. One thing I love about Andrea is that she never writes safely. There is always Big Epic Sh** going down, every other chapter. You can't stop reading until the end, and that too will blow you away.