Congratulations to Carrie D-L!  She is the winner of the Meg Cabot Prize Pack giveaway I ran this month.

Carrie is now the proud owner of all three books in Meg Cabot’s Airhead series (Airhead, Being Nikki and Runaway) as well as a super awesome Amazon gift card.

Carrie, I’ve emailed you about your prize!  Remember, if I don’t get a response within 48 hours I’ll pick a new winner.

Welcome to a new feature on Galleysmith!  In it I’ll be showcasing books that I just couldn’t get into enough to actually finish.

**cries**

Now, I’m going to admit something here….it pains me to do it.  I loathe not finishing a book, like seriously, I loathe it.  It defeats me.

But, I’ve gotten to the point in my reading where there is just so much in my pile that I really *want* to read that to spend precious time concentrating my efforts on a book that I’m going to struggle to write a review on because it was just that bad for me is pretty much a joy sucker.

Alas, born is “Michelle is From Mars, This Book is From Venus”

From here on out you’ll be seeing this feature when I find the rare book that I bang my head against the wall of incompletion on.  I sure do hope it’ll be few and far between.

So without further ado I bring you the first.  Today my lovely Venus is:

Title: Incarceron
Author: Catherine Fisher
Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Dystopian
Publisher: Dial Books
Source: Purchased

Describing Venus (from publisher):
Incarceron is a prison unlike any other: its inmates live not only in cells, but also in metal forests, dilapidated cities, and unbounded wilderness.  The prison has been sealed for centuries, and only one man, legend says, has ever escaped.

Finn, a seventeen-year-old prisoner, can’t remember his childhood and believes he came from outside Incarceron.  He’s going to escape, even though most inmates don’t believe that Outside even exists.  And then Finn finds a crustal key and through it, a girl named Claudia.

Claudia claims to live Outside — her father is the Warden of Incarceron and she’s doomed to an arranged marriage.  If she helps Finn escape, she will need his help in return.

But they don’t realize that there is more to Incarceon that meets the eye.  Escape will take their greatest courage and cost far more than they know.

Because Incarceron is alive.

How Mars & Venus Don’t Meet:
This is the type of book that should have been right up my alley.  In reading the publisher blurb it had a distinct dystopian vibe. Sadly, it wasn’t anything like I had hoped it would be.

What was my issue?  The alternating stories.  One chapter tells Claudia’s story and the next Finn’s.  In many cases this method works really well because you can see how the two are going to eventually merge together, you get clues and bits and pieces that make you want to wait it out and get to that point.  Unfortunately, even as I was just getting to where the two were finally inching into each other’s lives I just didn’t care enough to see it happen.  It was just too disjointed.

I believe some of that disinterest in their stories merging also comes from me not giving two licks about the characters. Finn was whiny and Claudia, while stronger than most women, was just kind of flat.

I gave Incarceron one-hundred seventy one pages to grab hold of me.  I just needed one glimmer of something, somewhere to pique my interest and push me through the remaining two-hundred seventy one pages but, sadly, I just couldn’t do it.

Maybe your Mars & Venus Align:
My struggle should not be your only factor in determining whether this book is for you.  I don’t want anyone to walk away without getting the whole story.  It could be that this book was the best story ever and I just missed the boat entirely.

Please visit these reviews to get more information and make a more informed choice:

Steph Su Reads
Presenting Lenore
Bookalicious
One Librarian’s Book Reviews
Fantasy Book Critic
Reading Rants

Title: Nothing But Ghosts
Author: Beth Kephart
Genre: Young Adult
Publisher: Harper Teen
Source: Purchased
Parental Warning: death, mischievous behavior

“My mom vanished the day before Christmas, and of course there was no Christmas after that.  There wasn’t m birthday, which was February. There wasn’t Easter.  When I won the high school essay award, Dad took me out to lunch, and that was nice and sweet and all, but Mom?  Mom would have filled the house with peonies, because peonies are the world’s sweetest, dearest fat flower.  They have personalities, Mom said, and feelings — the red ones bold and the peach ones shy and the purple ones adventurous.  That was Mom’s opinion, one of the zillion things about which she was sure.  She’d call her flower news up the stairs for me to hear, then go out to the studio to tell her favorite art restorer.”

Summary (from publisher):
Ever since her mother passed away, Katie’s been alone in her too-big house with her genius dad, who restores old paintings for a living.  Katie takes a summer job at a garden estate, where, with the help of two brothers and a glamorous librarian, she soon becomes embroiled in decoding a mystery.  There are secrets and shadows at the heart of Nothing but Ghosts: symbols hidden in a time-darkened painting, and surprises behind a locked bedroom door.  But most of all, this is a love story — the story of a girl who learns about love while also learning to live with her own ghosts.

Opinion:
There aren’t words that can properly express how wonderfully poetic this book was.  Anyone who knows me, or reads my reviews, knows that I take the father daughter relationship portrayed in books *very* seriously. It is important to me to see it handled with dignity and understanding and compassion — this doesn’t mean, though, that it can’t be real and that the relationship always has to be one of positivity — so the fact that Kephart has written Katie and her father in the way she has made this a must read book in my eyes right out of the gate.

Add to the above the fact that the story is beautifully written and I’ll say outright that a reader simply can’t go wrong.  From the moment we meet Katie we feel her emotions; she longs for her mother, loves her father, and wants desperately to find that equilibrium she once had before everything changed.  What’s great about the story is that we see her slowly even out.  She’s shaky at first but then inches her way to a place of solid footing.  This is all due to Kephart’s expertly written prose — not too flowery but just flourished enough that the reader navigates through the nuances to feel the stability in Katie’s life increase.

Further, the mystery that she and her friends work through ain’t half bad either!  It’s filled with history and hidden clues and just the right amount of information to keep the reader guessing without giving everything away until just the right moment.  Working the angles with Katie is a wonderfully eclectic group of friends, each of them different and compelling in their own right.  An excellent mix of people who we learn just enough about to want more but not too much to overwhelm the story.

If you’ve not read a Kephart book (and this was my first folks) I strongly encourage you to start here, it is certainly worthy of your time and attention.  I know I’ll be picking up the copy of House of Dance that I have on my shelves sooner rather than later.

Title: This World We Live In
Author: Susan Beth Pfeffer
Genre: Young Adult, Dystopian
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Source: eGalley provided by publisher through NetGalley
Parental Warning: death, criminal activity

“But then I had the worst dream — maybe the worst dream I’ve had in my life.  I was walking to school and everything was normal, the way it had been.  The sun was shining, and I remember how happy I felt seeing the sun again.  I wasn’t sure if everything was back to normal or if none of the bad things had ever happened.  It didn’t matter.  The sun was shining, and I was walking to school.  The closer I got to town, the more people I saw.  Everybody was happy, so I realized the sun had returned.  We were all celebrating because we could see the sun again.”

Summary (from publisher):
It’s been a year since a meteor collided with the moon, catastrophically altering the earth’s climate.  For Miranda Evans, life as she knew it no longer exists.  Her friends and neighbors are dead, the landscape is frozen, and food is increasingly scarce.

The struggle to survive intensifies when Miranda’s father and stepmother arrive with a baby and three strangers in tow.  One of the newcomers is Alex Morales, and as Miranda’s complicated feelings for him turn to love, this plans for his future thwart their relationship.  Then a devastating tornado hits the town of Howell, and Miranda makes a decision that will change their lives forever.

Opinion:
In the last of Pfeffer’s moon series we find ourselves back at Miranda’s house.  She and her family are still struggling to survive as the town that surrounds them finds itself increasingly barren — lower food rations, less people, and little information trickling through the limited channels of communication.  Still, they plow forward grateful for what little they have and excited when the electricity flickers on long enough to allow for laundry.

I have to admit, I was glad to be back “home” with Miranda.  I much preferred book one to book two and was anxiously awaiting revisiting she and her family.  Even more than that I was looking forward to seeing the two worlds of she and Alex collide (no pun intended).  I’m glad to say I wasn’t disappointed in how the lives of the two intersected — it made perfect sense to me how Alex’s presence in Miranda’s home came to pass.  I also like that we got to see her extended family reappear and join in the fight to survive.

To that end, the dynamics of the interpersonal relationships were written very well.  It was challenging to fall and be in love, it was difficult to maintain privacy and secrecy amongst family members and it was not easy to be selfish or make genuine attempts at individuality under their current circumstances.   A person was rarely, if ever, alone.  About the only part of the way interpersonal relationships played out that struck me as odd was how quickly the Matt/Syl and Alex/Miranda relationships progressed.  The reader found each couple in love at the speed of light.  Granted, catastrophic events hasten timelines but even still, given how we’d painstakingly watched each and every moment of every other element of the story go by in agonizing detail it was odd to see one of the more significant aspects zip right by.

One of the things I admire most about Pfeffer and this series is that she was not afraid to show the untenable circumstances and situations that accompany this type of catastrophe.  A good portion of this series was not light-hearted yet she maintained an air of hopefulness that encouraged characters to plod through it all. Their purpose was to survive in the hopes that one day it would all take a turn for the better.  Small victories were won and great tragedies were endured but through it all there was always love and hope.

Title: The Dead and the Gone
Author: Susan Beth Pfeffer
Genre: Young Adult, Dystopian
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Source: Purchased
Parental Warning: death, famine, criminal activity

“In spite of himself, he found a piece of paper and a pen and began making a list.  Lists no longer comforted him, but he made them anyway when he couldn’t sleep.  There was no point making a list of what they had, since they didn’t have anything.  There was no point in making a list of what they would need, since they needed everything.  There was no point, but he still made a list.”

Summary (from publisher):
When life as Alex Morales had known it changed forever, he was working behind the counter at Joey’s Pizza.  He was worried about getting elected as senior class president and making the grades to land him in a good college.  He never expected that an asteroid would hit the moon, knocking it closer in orbit to the earth and catastrophically altering the earth’s climate.

He never expected to be fighting just to stay alive.  When Alex’s parents disappear in the aftermath of tidal waves, he must care for his two younger sisters, even as Manhattan becomes a deadly wasteland.

Opinion:
Pfeffer continues her post-apocolyptic moon series with a stark urban counterpart to the rural setting of the first.  The main character, Alex, is a New York City boy with a large family — two younger sisters, an older brother in the service and parents who work hard.  When the moon shifts his family is dispersed enough that Alex assumes temporary responsibility for his sisters.  Now suddenly thrust into the role of primary caretaker his life alters considerably from the future he envisioned.   In this way I thought the book took advantage of it’s greatest strength — the characters.  An ordinary boy his age, with a pizza parlor job, concentrating on school and the future instantly finds himself with a whole different set of responsibilities than envisioned.  That drop of a hat shift in his focus overtook and overwhelmed his life.

The other great strength of this book was that Pfeffer showed us the other side of the coin.  In book one we got to see a family struggle through this catastrophic event from a place where things were so geographically dispersed.  It was extremely difficult to get news or see neighbors or get to provisions because of the distance between homes and town.  In this version it was easier to maintain some level of communication even if the information shared wasn’t anything that would necessarily help those struggling with the situation.

What struck me as odd, though, is that I was expecting far more chaos in the streets in this version.  We got was far more subdued than I had anticipated it would be in such a circumstance.  Don’t get me wrong there was the typical (and some creepy not so typical) looting and there was rationing and food bank lines that seemed to stretch for days so it wasn’t completely out of synch with my overall expectations;  but I suppose I had it in my mind things would be a bit more closer to Stephen King’s The Stand where there is violence and car burning in the streets.  This softer tone didn’t ruin anything for me as a reader it was just different.

This book placed a much greater emphasis on religion and faith than its predecessor.  Book one did touch lightly on the religious aspect of an apocolyptic event but was surprisingly low key about it.  This book, however, felt like it went a bit further to the extreme to make up for it.  Not so much so that it was over the top or unrealistic but it was a noticeable change in tone and was a large part of the story as told.  The way faith and religion infused within the story allowed for the theme to branch out in several directions across several characters.

There was much realism to the story told. We saw famine resulting in starvation, crime, debilitating illness, family squabbles, love and loss.  We even got to see heroism in the face of extenuating circumstances.  Above all there was hope to be had.  Though not my favorite of the series thus far, if you enjoyed book one you’ll likely enjoy book two as well.