Book Review: Ignite Me by Tahereh Mafi

Release Date: February 4th, 2014

Read: March 14- 17th, 2014

Publisher: HarperCollins

Series: Shatter Me #3

Format: Paperback, 408 pages

Source: Bought

Description from GoodReads:

   
   With Omega Point destroyed, Juliette doesn’t know if the rebels, her friends, or even Adam are alive. But that won’t keep her from trying to take down The Reestablishment once and for all. Now she must rely on Warner, the handsome commander of Sector 45. The one person she never thought she could trust. The same person who saved her life. He promises to help Juliette master her powers and save their dying world . . . but that’s not all he wants with her.

Review:

Contains Spoilers:

   It's time, I think, to break free.
   I'm stuck here thinking there could have been a fourth or maybe even a fifth book in this series. I first picked up Shatter Me because I'll admit it, the cover. I loved how Juliette would doubt herself and cross out her original thoughts and rewrite them. I'd never seen it before, it intrigued me and I was even happier when Tahereh put more of them in the book. What authors can do and create will never stop amazing me.  But continuing on, there were so many things Tahereh had to rap up in Ignite  Me. With some things she did it perfectly, but when it came to Warner and Adam being brothers? The way that ended did not justice to the book. One moment of an argument just didn't make sense, to have gone all your life without any siblings then to just give in to someone saying "You have two siblings you didn't know about." That's not how life works. Same went with Adam giving up Juliette, with all of the different outbursts from Adam you would think that either he would have not have gotten over her so easily. What was with that? Love doesn't fade that easily. Thus why I think more books would have been better.
   Even with all the ways I thought could have been changed the book was overall a good read, with Tahereh's writing skills you can truly see her technic in almost every paragraph. As with as much hype as I heard for Chapter 55 it absolutely lived up to its expectations.  I definitely look forward to Tahereh's next book whenever that will be. For now I'll just settle with her fabulous tweets on Twitter.

psst... Team Warner for life.

Rating:

Favourite Quote:

“Aaron Warner Anderson, chief commander and regent of Sector 45, son of the supreme commander of The Reestablishment. He has a soft spot for fashion.” 

Recommend to People Who Enjoy:

Young Adult, Science Fiction, Romance, Paranormal, Fantasy, Dystopia 

Book Review: Unremembered by Jessica Brody

Release Date: March 5th, 2013

Read: March 10-11th, 2014

Publisher: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux (BYR) 

Series: Unremembered #1

Format: Hardcover, 320 pages

Source: Winnipeg Public Library

Description from GoodReads:

   When Freedom Airlines flight 121 went down over the Pacific Ocean, no one ever expected to find survivors. Which is why the sixteen-year-old girl discovered floating among the wreckage—alive—is making headlines across the globe.

   Even more strange is that her body is miraculously unharmed and she has no memories of boarding the plane. She has no memories of her life before the crash. She has no memories period. No one knows how she survived. No one knows why she wasn’t on the passenger manifest. And no one can explain why her DNA and fingerprints can’t be found in a single database in the world.

   Crippled by a world she doesn’t know, plagued by abilities she doesn’t understand, and haunted by a looming threat she can’t remember, Seraphina struggles to piece together her forgotten past and discover who she really is. But with every clue only comes more questions. And she’s running out of time to answer them.

   Her only hope is a strangely alluring boy who claims to know her from before the crash. Who claims they were in love. But can she really trust him? And will he be able to protect her from the people who have been making her forget?

Review:

Contains Spoilers:

S+Z=1609
    Memory loss tends to make for a good read, with no memories the characters have to find themselves again. In Unremembered the main character is faced with this challenge, but with most cases of memory loss patients will only lose a certain part of their memories. With Jane Doe it's a different case. She can't even seem to remember what a Television is.
   The description in this book is fanominal. Because the of the memory lose the Jane Doe must describe in intense detail of what she is seeing otherwise we wouldn't know what the heck she is talking about. If Jane Doe doesn't know what the object is then how can we? With Jessica's descriptions it makes you realize that even with small things so much work is put into the item to make it special. These items have so much work out into them it makes us feel bad that we take them for granted. This book has opened my eyes to all the little things in life.
      As much as I enjoyed the plot for Unremembered I can just never enjoy books that have or focus on time travel. The "rules of time" confuse the heck out of me, so I tend to get headaches. Trying to rap my head around it all is just a pain. This happened to me with Unremembered, but I refused to put it down. Besides the little bit of time travel we did encounter I was just in over my head in love with this book. I can't wait to get a hold of Unforgotten the sequel in the trilogy which released February 25th, 2014. 

Rating:

Favourite Quote:

"Thirteen is hard. You don't know who you are yet. Who your real friends are. Who you can trust. You don't yet know what you are capable of." ~ Heather

Recommend to People Who Enjoy: 

Young Adult, Science Fiction, Mystery, Time Travel

Book Review: Unbreakable by Kami Gracia

Release Date: October 1st,  2013

Read: March 6- 9th, 2014

Publisher: Little Brown Books for Young Readers

Series: The Legion #1

Format: Hardcover,  305 pages

Source: Winnipeg Public Library

Description on GoodReads:

   I never believed in ghosts. Until one tried to kill me.

   When Kennedy Waters finds her mother dead, her world begins to unravel. She doesn’t know that paranormal forces in a much darker world are the ones pulling the strings. Not until identical twins Jared and Lukas Lockhart break into Kennedy’s room and destroy a dangerous spirit sent to kill her. The brothers reveal that her mother was part of an ancient secret society responsible for protecting the world from a vengeful demon — a society whose five members were all murdered on the same night.

   Now Kennedy has to take her mother’s place in the Legion if she wants to uncover the truth and stay alive. Along with new Legion members Priest and Alara, the teens race to find the only weapon that might be able to destroy the demon — battling the deadly spirits he controls every step of the way.

Review:

Protect Yourself
   My first experience with ghosts was the TV show Ghost Whisperer, the horrific deaths are what pulled me in. Unbreakable is a bone chilling novel which brings back all the ghost stories from your childhood and makes you relive them all. Kennedy and the hunters take you on an adventure of voodoo and devils. What stood out the most in Unbreakable for me was the hauntings, with every new place the hunters traveled to the ghosts became more creepy and waaay more terrifying. I loved how Kami would put so much creativity into each of the stories behind the hauntings. My favourite would have to be the Hearts of Mercy murders, the innocence of the little children just got to me.
   Unmarked the sequel to Unbreakable releases October 7th, 2014. Kami Gracia is also a co-author of the Beautiful Creatures Series. 

Rating:

Favourite Quote:

"May the black dove always carry you."

Recommend to People Who Enjoy:

Young Adult, Fantasy, Paranormal, Horror, Supernatural, Ghosts, Demons

MORTAL GODS by Kendare Blake COVER REVEAL!

Ladies and gentlemen, today I have the honour of revealing to you the cover for Kendare Blake's sequel in her GODDESS WAR series..... MORTAL GODS!! Guy's I have yet to read Antigoddess, the first book in the series but I have read her Anna Dressed in Blood series and I adored them! The series is terrifically creepy, a must read for horror movie fans. Without further adooo the lovely cover..

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TAAAADAAAAA!

Here is the cover and blurb for the first book in the series, Antigoddess. 

Description on GoodReads:

Old gods never die….

Or so Athena thought. But then the feathers started sprouting beneath her skin, invading her lungs like a strange cancer, and Hermes showed up with a fever eating away his flesh. So much for living a quiet eternity in perpetual health.

Desperately seeking the cause of their slow, miserable deaths, Athena and Hermes travel the world, gathering allies and discovering enemies both new and old. Their search leads them to Cassandra—an ordinary girl who was once an extraordinary prophetess, protected and loved by a god. These days, Cassandra doesn’t involve herself in the business of gods—in fact, she doesn’t even know they exist. But she could be the key in a war that is only just beginning. 

Because Hera, the queen of the gods, has aligned herself with other of the ancient Olympians, who are killing off rivals in an attempt to prolong their own lives. But these anti-gods have become corrupted in their desperation to survive, horrific caricatures of their former glory. Athena will need every advantage she can get, because immortals don’t just flicker out. 

Every one of them dies in their own way. Some choke on feathers. Others become monsters. All of them rage against their last breath. 


The Goddess War is about to begin. 

And the cover and blurb from the first book in Kendare's other series, Anna Dressed in Blood.

Description on GoodReads:


Cas Lowood has inherited an unusual vocation: He kills the dead.


So did his father before him, until he was gruesomely murdered by a ghost he sought to kill. Now, armed with his father's mysterious and deadly athame, Cas travels the country with his kitchen-witch mother and their spirit-sniffing cat. They follow legends and local lore, destroy the murderous dead, and keep pesky things like the future and friends at bay.

Searching for a ghost the locals call Anna Dressed in Blood, Cas expects the usual: track, hunt, kill. What he finds instead is a girl entangled in curses and rage, a ghost like he's never faced before. She still wears the dress she wore on the day of her brutal murder in 1958: once white, now stained red and dripping with blood. Since her death, Anna has killed any and every person who has dared to step into the deserted Victorian she used to call home.


Yet she spares Cas's life.

Don't these sound awesome? I can't wait for you guys to check them out!!

Kendare Blake is an import from South Korea who was raised in the United States by caucasian parents. You know, that old chestnut. She received a Bachelor's degree in Business from Ithaca College and a Master's degree in Writing from Middlesex University in London. She brakes for animals, the largest of which was a deer, which sadly didn't make it, and the smallest of which was a mouse, which did, but it took forever. Amongst her likes are Greek Mythology, rare red meat and veganism. She also enjoys girls who can think with the boys like Ayn Rand, and boys who scare the morality into people, like Bret Easton Ellis.

If you would like the author to participate in a Q&A, or a writer's workshop, or anything else writing related, contact her via email: kendareblake(at)yahoo.com

Book Review: Waterfell by Amalie Howard

Release date: October 29th, 2013
Read: March 3-6th, 2014
Publisher: Harlequin Teen
Series: The Aquarathi #1
Format: Paperback, 350 pages
Source: Winnipeg Public Library

Description from GoodReads:

THE GIRL WHO WOULD BE QUEEN

Nerissa Marin hides among teens in her human form, waiting for the day she can claim her birthright—the undersea kingdom stolen from her the day her father was murdered. Blending in is her best weapon—until her father's betrayer confronts Nerissa and challenges her to a battle to the death on Nerissa's upcoming birthday—the day she comes of age. 

Amid danger and the heartbreak of her missing mother, falling for a human boy is the last thing Nerissa should do. But Lo Seavon breaches her defenses and somehow becomes the only person she can count on to help her desperate search for her mother, a prisoner of Nerissa's mortal enemy. Is Lo the linchpin that might win Nerissa back her crown? Or will this mortal boy become the weakness that destroys her?

Review:

Contains Spoliers:

The sea is about reveal its most beautiful and deadly secret...

  Waterfell totally caught me by surprise! Mostly because I first went into the book thinking it'd be a mermaid novel, Woah huge surprise there. Waterfell is a new unique twist on mermaids and if you can believe it, aliens! And that's not even the best part, Amalie totally steps it up with the characters actually taking a form rather then human. Most books containing aliens now a days seem to always have the aliens looking the same as us, but with a few extra perks, shapeshifting, teleporting abilities, etc. Amalie's aliens do indeed have shifting abilities but they are unique to the species, when they don't look like humans there take their natural form which is quite terrifying. I think this is one of the parts that has intrigued me the most in the book, the aliens other form and the how their scale colours are the same as their human forms hair colour. I think it's just so incredible to just picture a creature and to have it's every detail written out onto paper creating a new life. 

  Another thing I noticed was that the main character Nerissa(Niss) was just plain rude, my goodness but immediately took a liking to her. Main characters tend to be selfless or quite little things in this case Niss had the 'high school girl everyone despises but has to love' attitude. I don't think I've ever read a book where the main character naturally has this attitude rather then just pretending. So props to Amalie!
  I am definitely excited for the next book in the Aquarathi series, Oceanborn, which releases July 29th, 2014.

Rating:

Favourite Quote:

"Even though I feel heavy as a stone, I'm weightless." ~ Riss

Recommend to People Who Enjoy:

Young Adult, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Romance, Paranormal, Aliens, Mermaids