Title: You Wish
Author: Many Hubbard [Website] [Twitter]  [Facebook]
Genre: Young Adult, Middle-Grade, Contemporary
Publisher: Razorbill
Format: Paperback
Source: Provided by Publisher
Parental Advisory: none

“I take the stairs two by two, tripping over the last one and landing hard on my knees.  I scramble to my feet and then make it down the hall and ling my door open.  I head straight into my closet.  I want to find everything from my childhood.  Every stupid, cursed thing and destroy it, before it comes to life too.  I stand on my tippy toes to find the boxes that have been occupying one corner of my closet for years.”

Summary (from the publisher):
Kayla McHenry is having the worst sweet sixteenth!  Just before she blows out her candles, she thinks: I wish all my birthday wishes actually came true.

The next day, Kayla wakes up to a life-sized, bright pink My Little Pony outside her window.  Then, a year’s supply of gumballs arrives.  An oddly plastic-looking boy named Ken shows up in a convertible and starts following her around!  Each day, another childhood wish comes true.  But they MUST STOP.

Because when she was fifteen?  She wished Ben Mackenzie would kiss her.  And Ben is her best friend’s boyfriend.

Opinion:
I really enjoyed this book.  It was a super duper fast read (I finished it in just about two hours which is pretty much unheard of for me) filled with the cutest scenarios.  A fabulous read for tweens and teens this book spans ages all the way up to adults longing to relive some of their fondest childhood memories.

Now, let me tell you, most of the plot of the book is given away in the jacket flap.  There isn’t a whole lot to the plot outside of the wish scenario and there isn’t super in depth character development and analysis.  But you know what?  It doesn’t need it.  It works perfectly just the way it is.

You Wish is seriously just a nice dose of good old fashioned fun.  Don’t get me wrong, there is a fair share of angst — Kayla’s got some pretty heavy family issues and her life-long best friend is starting to move in a different direction socially.  How these are dealt with is where the power of the story resides.  How Kayla works through these issues are focused on through this unique idea where Kayla is suddenly granted all of her birthday wishes.  Every day something new happens — a real life My Little Pony wagging it’s blue and pink tail in the yard, a room full of gumballs, a real life Ken doll to date, and worst of all great big giant knockers that grow from A to D cup over night!  All of these different childhood hopes and dreams just magically appear to her and start wreaking havoc and changing the direction of her life.

Tremendously witty and filled with humor and fun You Wish also has the requisite cute boy crush going on.  Of course said cute boy is the aforementioned distance creating best friend’s boyfriend.  This could be a problem but the way Hubbard has handled it is respectful and mature.  I appreciated that Kayla had respect for her friend’s feelings.  She wasn’t some scheming trampy girl manipulating Ben away at the expense of her relationship with Nicole.  She genuinely wanted to maintain her friendship at all costs.  Watching her struggle with her own desire in an attempt to maintain that proprietary was an excellent part of the story.  One that I think could teach teen girls a thing or two.

This is the perfect book to escape with, it’s not heavy lifting but it’s not without depth.  It’s got a wonderfully quirky and interesting main character and a fun concept.  The best part, by far, was trying to guess what each new day would bring with it.  What wish would be granted and how would it affect Kayla’s life.  It was so much fun and written in a way that a person could actually believe it was happening.  Was it a joke?  Was it a dream?  Was it really happening?  Well you’ll have to read it to find out!

Title: Ship Breaker
Author: Paolo Bacigalupi [Website] [Twitter]  [Facebook Fan Page]
Genre: Young Adult, Dystopian
Publisher: Little Brown Books for Young Readers
Format: Paperback
Source: Provided by Publisher
Parental Advisory: references to sex, prostitution, drugs, alcohol, criminal activity

“As one, he and Pima crawled across the wreckage to the broken body.  The girl’s corpse was buried under furniture.  None of it had even been secured, as if the rich swanks thought a storm wouldn’t dare rearrange their furniture.  As if they were gods, and didn’t just predict the weather with their instruments and satellites, but also told it what to do.”

Summary (from the publisher):
In America’s Gulf Coast region, where grounded oil tankers are being dis-assembled for parts, Nailer, a teenage boy, works the light crew, scavenging for copper wiring just to make quota — and hopefully have enough to eat.  But when, by luck or chance, he discovers an exquisite clipper ship beached during a recent hurricane, Nailer faces the most important decision of his life:  Strip the ship for all it’s worth or rescue its lone survivor, a beautiful and wealthy girl who could lead him to a better life.

Opinion:
Ship Breaker is definitely one of those dystopian novels that scares the pants off you.  You know, the kind of story that’s built around a world the reader could actually see becoming a reality.  Yea, this book is that type of dystopian.

Set in a post apocalyptic Gulf Coast region — New Orleans and surrounding areas have been virtually wiped out by “city killers”.  Described as larger than life hurricanes, these storms decimated whole urban areas and swept them under the sea.  As a result of the devastation beach dwelling colonies arose to perform the task of salvaging what was left.  Most specifically anything and everything that can be removed from old ship wrecks. This is where readers meet Nailer and his crew of scavengers for hire.  In Bright Sands Beach they are one of the resident “light crews” crawling down into a shipwreck’s smallest and tightest places to retrieve valuables for swanky bigwig’s.

I admit, for awhile I found it difficult to follow who really was who.  The introduction of so many characters in a very short period of time had them all sort of bleeding into each other for awhile.  This difficulty arose from the fact that most everyone was described the same way.  They all had the same job and had many of the same characteristics.  Sure, there were some notable differences between each but there wasn’t a lot to distinguish different characters until some of the larger plot started to play out.  I was finally able to wrap my head around it some when they started going their separate ways.  I was able to gain much more focus then.

The bulk of the plot revolved around Nailer, Pima and Lucky Girl’s quest to find their way back to the latter’s family safely.  Family being one of the issues delved into as well.  It was fast-paced, interesting and filled with a fair amount of intrigue.  Don’t worry, though there were some sparks of romance was in the air it wasn’t a large part of the story.  There were subtle hints here and there that feelings were increasing between Nailer and one of the lovely ladies in his company but it wasn’t the prevailing point of the story.  This worked in its favor as this story really wasn’t about love, it was about people.

The strength of Ship Breaker is in the world that Bacigalupi has built.  We can feel the grime and and taste the salt in the water air. I kept envisioning a world that looked like one of those disaster movies where the Statue of Liberty’s head is sticking out of 400 feet of water.  Bright Sands Beach was interesting, one the one hand it was as dark and seedy as the scariest back alley, yet it still had pockets of purity.  Then when on the sea and in the Orleans areas I got a very distinct old world vibe.  It was, without a doubt, the best part of the book.

Ultimately I will say that this wasn’t my most favorite dystopian, however, it’s a pretty dang good one.  An interesting departure from those that tend to focus a bit more on the more futuristic qualities.  It was real (dare I say current), there is no mistaking that.  It was compelling, no mistaking that either.  Know that if you read Ship Breaker you’re in for a very distinct and quality read.

Today’s the day people!  The day that I announce who the winner of the beautiful box set of The Hunger Games Trilogy you see pictured above.  There were an amazing 2,719 entries after I removed all of the duplicates. Really, y’all that’s amazing!  Thank you so much for visiting and participating, it’s been a very gratifying experience.

Drumroll please…..

The winner is:

Hallie Gray

A few things to keep in mind:

1. Hallie has 48 hours to contact me via email with shipping information to claim the prize.
2. The email claiming the prize must come from the email address the winner provided as part of the giveaway entry.
3. Should I not hear from Hallie in that time period I will select an alternate.
4. If Hallie’s happens to live Internationally her claim on the prize will be forfeit and I will select an alternate winner.
5. This prize will be sent directly from the publicity firm Scholastic has charged with putting this tour and giveaway together. As a result it will not ship immediately but rather at some time after the August 24th release date.
6. Once the prize ships I will forward tracking information to the winner so they are able to follow it’s journey.

Congratulations Hallie, you’re getting your hands on an amazing prize! I hope you enjoy them.

Title: Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict
Author: Laurie Viera Rigler [Website] [Twitter]  [Facebook]
Genre: Contemporary
Publisher: Plume
Format: Audio
Source: Purchased
Parental Advisory: language, references to sex, drugs, alcohol

“Even the smell of body odor has lost its usual overpowering quality tonight, heavily laced as it is with the mingled scents of soaps, perfumes, and the wax of a thousand melting candles.  I can almost understand for a second, even in all my twenty-first-century fastidiousness, that one could come to like the scent of a ballroom.  Is that Jane’s sensibility, I wonder, that’s responding to this particular melange of scents?  Or am I, my real self, responding to something else?  Certainly I don’t need a nineteenth-century frame of reference to pic up the erotic charge underlying the formality of the curtseys, bows, and nods of this elaborately stylized mating ritual.”

Summary (from the publisher):
After nursing a broken engagement with Jane Austen novels and Absolut, Courtney Stone wakes up and finds herself not in her Los Angeles bedroom or even in her own body, but inside the bedchamber of a woman in Regency England.  Who but an Austen addict like herself could concoct such a fantasy?

Not only is Courtney stuck in another woman’s life, she is forced to pretend she actually is that woman; and despite knowing nothing about her, she manages to fool even the most astute observer.  But not even her level of Austen mania has prepared Courtney for the chamber pots and filthy coaching inns of nineteenth-century England, let alone the realities of being a single woman who must fend off suffocating chaperoned, condomless seducers, and marriages of convenience.  This looking-glass Austen world is not without its charms, however.  There are journeys to Bath and London, balls in the Assembly Rooms, and the enigmatic Mr. Edgeworth, who may not be a familiar species of philanderer after all.  But when Courtney’s borrowed brain serves up memories that are not her own, the ultimate identity crisis ensues.  Will she ever get her real life back and does she even want to?

Opinion:
I don’t rightly no where to start.  It’s hard to put into words the kind of there-ness this book had for me.  Being a girl who isn’t a fan of shades of great I don’t like stating that I’m ambivalent about a book, but honestly, I kinda am in this case.  I didn’t love it, didn’t hate it.  Like I said, it was just kinda…..there.

The story is great in concept, though not entirely new, where a young twenty-first-century woman wakes up in nineteenth-century England.  Some of what you would expect was present — comparisons to the different worlds, freaking out about why she was there, and stuff like that.  But what there wasn’t a lot of was exploration of how she got there.  I know that isn’t the point of the story.  The point was to have that fish out of water become more comfortable in her surroundings and in that way the story did what it set out to do.  But I still wanted to know.

I also wanted to know more about Courtney.  In fact, the most interesting chapters were those that showcased her life back in LA.   I found the two(ish) chapters of her back-story far more compelling than the bulk of chapters that were set in the time of Jane.  I understand that this was a conscious choice on the part of the author, mainly because Courtney’s story is offered up in a second book, but without knowing that on the front end a reader could definitely walk away with this feeling of much being untold here.

Courtney as a character was alright.  There was little told about her life but that’s not surprising given the fact that she was living Jane’s.  She had wit and her internal dialogue was an interesting and entertaining way to learn more about the story.  But the story itself was a bit meh.  I did like that it seemed realistic, that the pitfalls of living in Regency England weren’t romanticized a great deal.  It was smelly, hygene was not on the forefront of people’s mind, and the clothes weren’t comfortable.

Despite the story being somewhat blase for me, I find myself wondering if my ambivalence towards this book is the direct result of having listened to the audio version.  Would I have liked it better if I’d been able to use my imagination more through the pages?

The narrator volleyed between whiny and what sounded like breathless angst.  There was no real change in tonal inflection of voice between Jane/Courtney and some other characters.  This isn’t a prerequisite of a narrator but I found her rendition to be tedious.  As a result, I think it might have unduly influenced my overall feeling towards the book.  There is a follow-up, Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict, which I already have.  I’m going to give it a try to see if reading it on paper will make a difference in the tone of the story.

In the end, as I said I didn’t love this book and I didn’t hate it.  I think if you are a fan of Jane Austen or of stories that revolve in some way around Regency England you’ll enjoy this story.  It had a unique twist to it and had some fun and funny passages.

Title: The Magicians
Author: Lev Grossman [Website] [Twitter]
Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy
Publisher: Viking Press
Format: Audio
Source: Purchased
Parental Advisory: language, sex, drugs, alcohol

“She didn’t answer, just stared up angrily at the hazy moon.  There were tears on her cheeks.  He realized that he had just casually put into words what was probably the overwhelming question of Alice’s entire existence at Brakebills.  It occurred to him, long after it should have, that he wasn’t the only person here who had problems and felt like an outsider.  Alice wasn’t just the competition, someone whose only purpose in life was to succeed and by doing so subtract from his happiness.  She was a person with her own hopes and feelings and history and nightmares.  In her own way she was as lost as he was.”

Summary (from the publisher):
Intellectually precocious high school senior Quentin Coldwater escapes the boredom of his daily life by reading and re-reading a series of beloved fantasy novels set in an enchanted land called Fillory.  Like everybody else, he assumes that magic isn’t real — until he finds himself unexpectedly admitted to a very secret, very exclusive college of magic in Upstate New York.

After stumbling through a Brooklyn alley in winter, Quentin finds himself on the grounds of the idyllic Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy in late summer.  There, after passing a gruesomely difficult entrance examination, he begins a thorough and rigorous education in the craft of modern sorcery, while also discovering the joys of college: friendship, love, sex and booze.  But something is missing.  Even though Quentin learns to cast spells and transform into animals, and gains power he never dreamed of, magic doesn’t bring him the happiness and adventure he thought it would.

After graduation, he and his friends embark on an aimless, hedonistic life in Manattan, struggling with the existential crises that plague pampered and idle young sorcerers.   Until they make a stunning discovery that propels them on a remarkable jouney, one that promises to finally fulfill Quentin’s yearning.  But their journey turns out to be darker and more dangerous than Quentin could have imagined.  His childhood dream is a nightmare with a shocking truth at its heart.

Opinion:
This ain’t you’re teenager’s magical wizard!  There’s drugs and sex (of the orgy variety in some places) and all sorts of nefarious activity. While it will certainly appeal to a young adult market it is decidedly geared toward the adults as well.

To start, the pace of this story was leisurely to say the least.  Not a quick read by any stretch of the imagination.  At 16 cd’s I knew it was going to be one long listen.  I’ll add, it started out so slowly that I had thoughts of abandoning it.  Had I not been listening to it on audio I suspect I may actually have put it aside.  Thankfully, Quentin got to Breakbills just as I was getting bored and the story began to move a bit more swiftly.

But still, it was long.  Too long in my opinion.  There was too much time spent in Breakbills, a good portion of it idle time with very little action.

Now, I haven’t read many books centralizing around this magic wizard theme but I have to imagine that The Magicians falls pretty closely in line with the others in some ways.  There is a normal boy who learns he has magical abilities, he goes off to school with other mystical types to learn about said powers, he gets embroiled in some sort of other-worldly situation and they all work together to overcome adversity.   Not hugely original in the grand scheme of things I think.  But, it worked, mainly because even though there were similarities I imagine there were an equal number of (if not more) differences that set it apart.

The crux of the story is about Quentin’s journey from boyhood dreams to adult realizations and everything in between.  I was surprised that it was far more character based than plot driven.  Don’t get me wrong, there’s definitely a story here, but man did Grossman explore the crap out of the characters.  Particularly Quentin.  Ordinarily I’m not a girl who enjoys a story that is so overwhelmingly about character exploration but I’ll say that it worked here.  Knowing Quentin’s inner workings, the tickety-tock of it all, made the story that surrounded it much more worthwhile.

Oh and the secondary characters.  Totally made the story.  There were loads of people milling around both at home and at Breakbills.  Then, add in all the different elements of Fillory and boy oh boy there was no shortage of people (or things) to follow around the pages.  The core group of Magicians worked very well.  They were nerdish, quirky and each one of them individual.  Quite the gang they were and they totally brought a good light-hearted break to some of the heavier parts of the story.  My particular favorite was Josh, he seemed to be the bumbling idiot of the group but was so endearing and added a really funny voice to the story.

Because I listened to the audio version I would be remiss if I didn’t speak to the narration.  Thank god for Mark Bramhall. Had this book had a lackluster narrator it would have definitely been a loser.  There were so many characters and voices to preside over that it required someone with the ability to create distinct tonal differences.  Sure, there were some characters that sounded very similar — so much so I sometimes lost who was talking — and here and there the voice of a character slipped from one accent to another (most notably Anais who sounded French one minute and Russian the next) but all in all Bramhall did a spectacular job with a HUGE book.  I hope when the follow-up is made they bring him back in to read again.

Speaking of the follow up, the end of The Magicians definitely left the door open to revisiting Quentin again.  I hear that Grossman is indeed working on just that.  I suspect I’ll endeavor to read it, though I also suspect I’ll do so in audio again.  It’s wordy fare that just moves better that way.

I say, if you like in-depth character analysis and some mystical and magical plot lines give The Magicians a go.  If you tend to like something a bit more simple this may not be your bag.