Please Ignore Vera Dietz, by A.S. King

If you know me, you know why I got interested in this book in the first place. :) And then I started seeing rave reviews of it everywhere, which made me want it even more — but so did a lot of people, clearly, because it took forever for this to get to the library for me! Totally worth it.

So our dear Vera is a high-school kid dealing with the fact that her best friend is dead. No, worse, that her best friend ditched her for losers and then up and died. No, worse... well, that would be spoiling it a bit too much.

That's pretty much the whole plot. Girl loses best friend, deals with it, doles out the backstory in bits and pieces. It's a decently compelling plot. But what I liked most about the book was the writing — King knows her way around an amusing sentence and definitely knows her way around an odd tangent. The book is mostly written from Vera's point of view, but every once in a while her dad breaks in, or her dead friend Charlie, or this building called the Pagoda that really doesn't want you throwing paper airplanes. That's littering. Oh, and Vera's dad tosses in a flow chart here and there and seriously, Ken Dietz's Face Your Shit Flow Chart needs to be enlarged and prominently displayed on my wall. Everyone's wall, really.

Recommendation: For fans of the tangent and imperfect/rebellious teenagers.

Rating: 8/10
(A to Z Challenge)

Will Grayson, Will Grayson, by John Green and David Levithan

Okay, so. We already know that I adore John Green. I laughed and cried through Looking for Alaska, I was delightfully baffled by An Abundance of Katherines and his story in Let it Snow, and Paper Towns had me itching for a road trip.

And then Will Grayson, Will Grayson came out, like, heading toward a YEAR ago, and I didn't read it. I said, "Oh, I should pick that up," but I didn't. Partly it came out right before my YA class so those books took precedence, partly I was worried that I wouldn't like the co-written aspect of the book, but mostly, I was afraid of Tiny Cooper.

See, almost every review I saw of Will Grayson, Will Grayson mentioned this same bit that's right in the beginning of the book: "Tiny Cooper is not the world's gayest person, and he is not the world's largest person, but I believe he may be the world's largest person who is really, really gay, and also the world's gayest person who is really, really large." And I have to give kudos to the awesomeness of the writing there, BUT.

I know Tiny Cooper. I know SEVERAL Tiny Coopers. I have had my fill of Tiny Cooper, he gets annoying after a while. I did not want to have to deal with Tiny Cooper ever again. So I did not pick up this book.

BUT then, I was on the internet and I was reminded of National Alaska Young Day (which is spoilery if you haven't read the book), and I was like, hey, maybe I should re-read Looking for Alaska on NAYD, but I was also at the library and they had a copy of Will Grayson, Will Grayson and so I said, "FINE, fate. I will read this darn book."

And I did. And I LOVED IT. I seriously have not cackled gleefully so many times in such a short span of time, and the book was just perfect and wonderful and definitely what I needed after a holiday season devoid of awesome books.

So forget Tiny Cooper. He's there, certainly, and he's large and homosexual and he has written a large homosexual musical that is all about him and how large and homosexual he is, really. But the book is really actually about the Will Graysons, of which there are two and of which one does not use capitals often and is more accurately a will grayson. Will Grayson is your average high school kid, only slightly more neurotic; will grayson is your average high school kid, only slightly more depressed. Will is actively avoiding relationships, will is in a wonderful online relationship that is about to go all IRL. Neither of these goes quite the way either of them planned it, of course, because that's how life is, and their random meeting at a porn store in Chicago (yes, really) makes things go even slightly crazier.

And so the book is of course about relationships in the romantic sense, but it is also very much about friendships, whether between people who like each other or hate each other or like like each other or tolerate each other. And it's about how those relationships change when circumstances change, and how two people can see the exact same event and interpret it completely differently. And it's also about honesty and how it's an excellent thing when used at the right time and not put off too long, which is the main reason that I want to get everyone I know to read this book.

Also, Tiny Cooper is highly amusing, probably largely (hah) because I don't have to be friends with him. Or pick his nose.

So basically, yes, I still love John Green, and also I may need to go out and get David Levithan's entire backlist because he shares much of Green's writing sensibility, at least in this book. And I know it's premature, but this may be a contender for Best Book I Will Read All Year. True story.

Recommendation: For those who love John Green, and David Levithan, and any of the similar YA writers who are wonderfully sarcastic and biting and amusing but also very spot on about everything.

Rating: 10/10
(A to Z Challenge)

Hold Still, by Nina LaCour

I have to admit that the only reason I picked up this novel is because I had to read one last book for my YA class and the one I had picked was way too long. This one? Much shorter, but still wonderful. I'm very glad I chose this one.

Caitlin’s best friend Ingrid has committed suicide, and Caitlin is walking through life in shock. After a summer away from her hometown, she comes back to school to find that the things and people she expected to be there for her aren’t, but that there are some new friends waiting for her, when she’s ready. Then Caitlin finds Ingrid’s last journal, and her memories of Ingrid, and of her actions toward Ingrid, threaten to take over Caitlin’s life.

Caitlin’s emotions and actions are completely spot-on, as are those of the friends she makes and almost loses, and Ingrid’s handwritten diary entries manage to convey the same amount of feeling.

I love the direction that LaCour took with this premise – she gives the story some intrigue with the found diary and the words directly from Ingrid, but she makes sure that the real story is not the pain of Caitlin’s loss, but the pain of realizing that she can move on.

Rating: 8/10
(Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Janes in Love, by Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg

This book is the sequel to The Plain Janes, which I read for class and thought was very cute. This one is equally as adorable.

It's shortly after the great New Year's Eve shenanigans. The Janes are up to their old art tricks, until they get caught for reals this time and Jane is unsure if this art thing is something she should be doing. But then she finds out that she could be getting a grant for PLAIN to keep going and she makes it her mission to get that grant, even though all those adult types are against her again. Meanwhile, there's a girls-ask-boys dance that I don't really care about that's all fraught with emotion. Blah blah blah.

I liked this book slightly less than I liked the original, mostly because of the relationship business (barf), but I still enjoyed it! The art style is wonderful and the different "art attacks" amuse me. If you want a sweet quick read, grab this book and the one before it.

Rating: 6.5/10
(A to Z Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
Book Nut

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Catalyst, by Laurie Halse Anderson

This was my first Laurie Halse Anderson book, and maybe I chose the wrong one, because all I've been told is that she's awesome and this book was okay. Suggestions?

The story: Kate is a senior who made a huge mistake in only applying to one school — MIT. Oh, boy. So she's freaking out about whether or not she'll get into college, and lying to her friends and family about getting into other schools, and also generally worrying about getting through the school day, as you do in high school. She thinks her problems are pretty bad, but then the house of a girl she doesn't really like catches fire and Kate's dad (a pastor) decides to take that family on as a big project, and now Kate and this girl, Teri, are sharing a room. This makes Kate's life worse, of course, but she also starts to see how maybe her problems aren't quite so bad.

I was all right with the story most of the way through; I thought it was fairly realistic and I could empathize with Kate's "good Kate, bad Kate" inner struggle. But then... then another terrible thing happens and the story just goes completely off the rails and I don't even know what's going on and then BOOM there's a sickly sweet ending, much like in The Last Exit to Normal. Barf.

Please, give me a different one of her books to remove this one from my brain?

Rating: 6/10
(Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
Rhinoa's Ramblings

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things, by Carolyn Mackler

I was totally pulled in by this title. It's pretty much the only reason I wanted to read this book — I didn't know anything about it going in. And I'll tell you this: the book lives up to its title. I read almost all of it in one very quick sitting, and was highly amused when I finished. Good work, book!

She of the Big Round Butt is Virginia Shreves, a tenth grader with, obviously, a few self-esteem issues. She's a bigger girl in a family of tiny people, with a mother who has anorexia athletica (without the diagnosis, but it's obvious) and a father who loooooooves the skinny girls. I think anyone would have self-esteem issues in a family like that! Anyway, the story follows along with Virginia's life as she navigates school with her best friend on the opposite coast, tries to decide if a guy likes her, deals with her revered older brother doing Something Really Really Stupid, and tries to please her parents by shedding a few pounds. Some of these work, some of them don't.

I loved Virginia. She makes lists! She can't be bad! I totally remember what it was like in tenth grade, trying not just to make sense of everything, but to make up rationalizations for things that were never going to make sense. Like her Fat Girl Code of Conduct — completely unnecessary in actuality, but absolutely needed in Tenth-Grader Low-Self-Esteem Land. Even though I felt like she had an inordinated amount of crap dumped on her all at once, I was okay with it because of the way Virginia dealt with it all (or didn't deal with it, as the case may be) like it was as ridiculous as I thought it was.

Rating: 8/10
(Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
Persnickety Snark
Blogging for a Good Book
an adventure in reading

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Thirteen Reasons Why, by Jay Asher

Hmm. I wanted to like this book, I did. It came with good recommendations, and it's even on one or more of those award lists I'm reading from for my YA lit class. But except for maybe twenty or thirty minutes, I spent the six and a half hours of audiobook rolling my eyes and bitching at Hannah. I'm not thinking I was supposed to do that. I am really getting old before my time.

The story revolves around Clay Jensen, who gets a package of thirteen cassette tapes in the mail. He is intrigued by this strange anachronism and begins listening to them, only to find out that they are essentially the last words of Hannah Baker, a girl who committed suicide a couple weeks back. On each tape Hannah details an event or person who made her life so horrible that she was driven to kill herself, and instructs the listeners to pass on the tapes, lest a second set be released to the general high-school public for everyone to listen to.

So on the one hand, it's an interesting read/listen, because most of the events are teeny-tiny things that no one would think anything of on their own, but you can understand how the combination of all of them might make someone want to just disappear off the face of the earth. However, I had a hard time thinking of these things as being enough to make someone want to stop living completely. There were a couple of events that made me think, "Wow. Those suck. I would probably go into a very deep depression if those happened to me," but those were completely unrelated to the other events and as such I think Hannah's cassette package could have been much smaller.

I imagine that back in high school, when I was even less popular than Hannah Baker (but didn't have any crazy rumors floating around... that I know of...), I might have connected more with this book. As it stands, I was a little too busy thinking about how stupid Hannah was to think about other things, like how her situation might apply to my life or how I might go about being nicer to other people.

Rating: 4/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2007, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
books i done read
The Written World
Maw Books Blog
Hey Lady! Whatcha Readin'?
My Friend Amy

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

The Plain Janes, by Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg

Well, this was a seriously perfect beach read — nice and quick, so I didn't get a sunburn! I must remember these things in the future. :)

The plot: After a bomb goes off in Metro City and lands Jane in the hospital for a little while, her parents move the family off to suburbia to start a new, safer life. Of course, this sucks for Jane, especially since she gets to start school six weeks late. At her first lunch, she's invited to sit with the popular kids, but gravitates instead to a group of girls who share her name — Jayne, Polly Jane, and another Jane. They don't accept her at first, but Jane is determined, so she comes up with a way to bring the foursome together: stealth art attacks. The "attacks" are really just art displays like rock pyramids or a balloon solar system, but the school and the police take them pretty seriously, leading to some delightful civil disobedience.

It's not a terribly deep book, but I loved seeing the art pieces the Janes put together — this is a graphic novel, so you really get to see what's going on! I was never really arty, but I would totally have helped build some of the Janes' structures if someone else had designed them. I also remembered not so fondly that need to be accepted in high school and the way that parents want to take care of you but you just want to do your own thing.

Rating: 7/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2007, A to Z Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Going Bovine, by Libba Bray

Again! Again I thought this was going to be a weird book, and it was, but again, it was pretty darn cool in the end. Luckily (or unluckily?) it looks like my next few reads will be "normal" books... we'll have to see how that goes. :)

Back to the weird book. So there this kid, Cameron, who lives a pretty regular teenage life. He goes to school, he gets his C's, he smokes some weed, he has a lame job, he's distant from his parents and sister... fairly normal. But then one day he starts seeing really weird things, with stuff catching on fire and angels walking around and weird people standing in the street but then not standing in the street. His parents, naturally, think he's totally on the hard drugs, and so does the drug counselor they make him see. But soon they wise up, and Cameron ends up in the hospital with a diagnosis of Creutzfeldt-Jakob and not much time to live.

In his disease-fueled dreams, Cameron gets a quest from an angel to go find a Dr. X that will cure his CJD and sets off with his dwarf roommate on an awesome road trip. This trip includes stops at Mardi Gras in New Orleans, at the Church of Everlasting Satisfaction and Snack 'N' Bowl (curiously abbreviated CESSNAB), and eventually at the MTV-equivalent Party House in Florida. It's a little weird, but with all the references to it throughout the book, I'm assuming the story follows along with Don Quixote, one of those books that I never had to read in school but should probably get around to reading someday. A quick glance at that Wikipedia page certainly shows a lot of connections in names of things, at least, so I'm going to run with it.

As soon as it was made clear that the whole quest bit was a fever dream, I was 100 percent behind this book. I loved the way that Bray interwove Cameron's dreams with his real life up to this point and his current hooked-up-to-tubes status. And the way she made ridiculous things like dimension-traveling rock groups seem totally real with the perfect small details. And, of course, I am a sucker for a decent road trip novel, and I think that any road trip that involves a Norse god trapped as a yard gnome is a road trip I want to be on. :)

Rating: 9/10
(A to Z Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
Back to Books
Book Nut
Blogging for a Good Book

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

The Bermudez Triangle, by Maureen Johnson (10 December)

I first heard about Maureen Johnson and this book back when it was all a-being banned over the summer, and I thought to myself, "Banned book? I like reading banned books. Give it here!" and then I requested it from the library and then I got it and then I didn't read it for, like, three months and then I suddenly had a craving and I read it! Good job, self.

And in the first few pages, I was like, "Oh, no. This book is overdescriptive and overexpositive and if this keeps up I am going to just throw its hefty self¹ across the room because I can't deal with that again for a long time.

But it did not keep up, thank goodness, because I might have dislocated my shoulder in trying to heave it, and it was actually a very fun read!

The eponymous "triangle" is three high-school-senior girls who have been bffs(aeae) for some relatively long period of time. The summer before senior year, Nina goes off to a pre-college thing at Stanford, meets a guy, has a great time, and comes back to upstate New York ready to get her party on with Avery and Mel. Except that while Nina was gone, Avery and Mel met... each other, and now it's all sorts of awkward-pants up in this triangle. Nina tries to figure out how to deal with her two best friends dating, Avery tries to figure out why a straight girl like herself is dating a girl, and Mel sort of gets left out in the process.

Obviously, the whole book-banning thing is on account of the < whisper > lesbians < /whisper >, but except for the fact that Avery and Mel are girls, it's pretty much your basic high school story of one or more friends finding significant others and totally ditching Friend One. And even more so the story of two friends hooking up and then trying to figure out how to make the relationship work. And doing these things all while trying to graduate from high school, because that stupid homework never stops coming.

I thought this book was delightful, and I recommend it if you're in the mood for a reality-infused tale of love and friendship.

¹ As you can see from the image of the book cover I've included, the copy I ended up with is a "splashproof beach read!" with 100% waterproof cover and ridiculously stiff pages that must have been printed on, like, sixty-pound paper. It's intense, and I'm not sure that I would be willing to lug this thing to the beach anyway. But someone must have!

Rating: 8/10
(My Year of Reading Dangerously, Countdown Challenge: 2004)

See also:
things mean a lot
Book Nut

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier (1 October — 5 October)

This book took a little while to really get going for me, and then just as soon as it did, it ended! Sadness.

The Chocolate War is a story about power and conformity and how even when you win, you still lose. Depressing, right? So right. The chocolate part comes from a private high school's chocolate sale (oh, memories) for which each student has to sell 50 boxes. The war part comes from Jerry Renault, who is assigned by the school's secret society to refuse to sell the chocolates for ten days, you know, keep the teachers on their toes. He does this, but then after ten days, when he's supposed to start selling again, he doesn't, and some of the other students follow in his path. The teachers don't like this, the secret society doesn't like this... and bad things happen.

I wasn't sure last night whether or not I liked this book, and... I'm still not sure. It was a very honest account of high school and how hard it is to navigate the social dynamics there, but I'm not really sold on the story itself. The story jumps back and forth between points of view and tries to use that to let you learn more about the characters, but I just never felt terribly involved in any of their lives. Perhaps I'll ponder this some more.

Rating: 6/10
(My Year of Reading Dangerously Challenge)

See also:
an adventure in reading

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky (27 September — 1 October)

How did I manage not to read this book any time in the last ten years? Jeez, self. Get with it.

This is another book without a discernible plot, and another book without a discernible plot that I liked. Something is wrong with me. I need to go read some Grisham or Patterson or something (no! false!). This book is also a freakin' epistolary novel, which would normally irk me but good but this book did not! Chbosky is a genius or something.

Um. Right. Topic: this book is about a kid called Charlie, who is entering high school and is a little worried about getting through freshman year okay. Charlie's got some issues (a few more than the usual), but he's working hard to make them okay and make some new friends. He totally nails that last part and starts hanging out with some senior kids who are really cool (but not the popular kind of cool) and help Charlie figure out who he is and what he wants from life.

I liked it. Charlie's life is nothing like mine, but his emotions associated with going to school and doing well and "participating" and making friends are totally dead on to mine. When things went wrong in his life, especially where girls were involved, I was totally rooting for him all the way. Even when some really odd things happened (um, picking up guys in the park, anyone?), I was still totally on board with Charlie's life being normal, which I think says something. :)

This is also one of them "banned books" the parents are talking about (still) these days, and I totally understand why. There's sex, and pregnancy, and dudes liking dudes, and recreational drug use by a fourteen-year-old, and people going to college at Sarah Lawrence. No good can come of these things! And yet all of these things are good in some way or another throughout the novel, so whatever, book banners. I don't know what high school you went to, but it was probably just like this one.

Rating: 8/10
(My Year of Reading Dangerously Challenge)
(Also, this is the first book read for my personal Donors Choose Challenge! $2 for literacy!)

See also:
Thoughts of Joy
things mean a lot
books i done read

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, by E. Lockhart (22 September — 23 September)

Aaah I love this book!

That's what I wrote as a placeholder for this entry before I started it, but it's so true. This is one of those books that is thoroughly entertaining but sneakily makes you think about societal status quos and your own personal set of norms and it's all sociological and anthropological and fun. Well, if you're into that sort of thing, anyway.

Plot: Frankie Landau-Banks is an average teenager, starting her sophomore year at her not-so-average boarding school in Massachusetts. Things are going really well — she's taking fun classes, she's rooming with a good friend, and the boy she's been crushing on forever (well, teenage forever) totally asked her out! Yay! But she soon realizes that Matthew and his gang aren't really as into her as she is into them. Also they are part of an all-male secret society that Frankie's father was in, and Frankie's not too thrilled about that. She decides to start thwarting some of those aforementioned status quos, and it's pretty awesome.

The book is full of sociological- and psychological-type talk about feminism and classism and ageism and fitting into the society inherent in a New England boarding school. Frankie's not exactly a sympathetic character; she plays the same games that Matthew does and isn't the nicest person. But you can definitely understand why she does what she does, and I at least was totally rooting for her and wishing I had the ovaries (because balls is a masculine construction, as Frankie's sister points out) to pull off some of the pranks she does.

Oh, and there's some bonus Wodehouse love, and you can't beat that.

Rating: 10/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2008)

See also:
The Bluestocking Society
Persnickety Snark
Book Nut
Library Queue

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Looking for Alaska, by John Green (13 December — 16 December)

I'd been pondering purchasing a John Green novel for a certain friend of a certain name, but I didn't want to do that if the book turned out to suck. So I was going to read the book first, but then I found out that it was Green's second book, and you know how much I dislike reading things out of order (lest I read the best things first, Jodi Picoult, cough).

So, even though Looking for Alaska has sod-all to do with that certain other book (okay, whatever, it's called An Abundance of Katherines, like you didn't Google it already), I popped in a request to the library and found out that it's somehow quicker to get books from places two counties to the west of me than from my own friggin' library. A complaint for another time.

Back to the book! The titular Alaska is a girl called Alaska Young, who befriends our hero, Miles Halter (whose name I had to look up because he is called "Pudge" pretty much everywhere else in the novel), who has just arrived at boarding school to seek his "Great Perhaps." Pudge falls in love with this girl, who is kind of bipolar but also super awesome. SOMETHING BIG HAPPENS in the middle of the novel, which you know is coming because the little chapter sections are all labelled, like, "one hundred thirty-six days before" and "the last day" and "one hundred thirty-six days after" (see the symmetry!), but you have (or I, at least, had) no idea what that's going to be until it does happen.

This is definitely one of those bildungsroman novels, and it has one of those overarching morals based on death and dying (Pudge is obsessed with people's last words), and it is really quite good. The book is funny at times, sad at times, and definitely reminded me of coming to college and having to meet all new people and fit in. I just wished I'd pulled a prank or two like these guys. :)

Also, there's a preview of that other book at the end of this one, and I totally have to read that, too.

Also also, John Green has worked for mental_floss and NPR, so really, you know he can't be all bad.

Rating: 8/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2005)

The Tenth Circle, by Jodi Picoult (29 November — 1 December)

You know, I really don't know why I keep reading Jodi Picoult. I mean, My Sister's Keeper was awesome, and so were a couple other of her novels, but after reading something like six or seven of them those fancy plot twists are getting a little predictable and also contrived and annoying.

And yet I still enjoy them. I think it's the same love I have for watching Law and Order on Sunday nights... I know that I'm probably not going to learn anything in the end, but it's just so nice to let the story flow over me.

This one, though, I don't know. It's about a 14-year-old girl called Trixie (no, really) who gets dumped by her boyfriend, Jason, and then has some breakup sex with him at her friend Zephyr's (no, REALLY) party, after not playing a game of "let's be whores and give everyone blowjobs."

That's where the bad started, I think. The book was written in 2006, so this girl and her schoolmates would be around my brother's age, and unless things really changed in three years or that's just how they do it up in Maine, I can't really be convinced that giving blowjobs is a party game. I guess maybe my brother and I just weren't popular enough to be whores. Crying shame, that.

But! Taking that as fact, we then have Trixie coming home and declaring that Jason raped her. Okay, that sucks. And since Jason is the star of the hockey team, everyone (including 13 anonymous teachers at their high school) supports Jason over Trixie. That's also bad news.

Oh, and at the same time, Trixie's dad, Daniel, is coming to terms with the fact that his wife had an affair and also penning a comic book/graphic novel (not really clear which) called The Tenth Circle about a dad who loses his daughter to hell and has to find her with the help of Virgil. Did I mention that his wife is teaching a class on Dante? And, of course, Daniel is also worried that his wild, ass-kicking past is going to come back in full force if he ever has to see Jason.

There's just... there's a lot here. And while the story is definitely engrossing, as are all of Picoult's stories, it's just not satisfying in the end.

Well. Anyway. To be honest, I really should have stopped reading when Picoult claimed there were yellow Pixy Stix. Let's get some fact-checking up in here, people.

Rating: 5/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2006)

Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl (18 August − 3 September)

Ugh. This book. I can't really decide whether I liked it or not, because I'm not entirely clear on what actually happened in the book.

Basically, you've got your protagonist, Blue Van Meer, an extremely smart and overly educated 16-year-old who travels around the country with her professor father, never living anywhere for more than a semester at a time as he moves on to bigger and better professorships. For her senior year, her dad gives her a gift − they settle down in Stockton, North Carolina for the whole year. She gets reluctantly adopted into a group of friends by request of the teacher they hang out with, Hannah Schneider, and she proceeds to have a really really weird year culminating in the death of Hannah and Blue's investigation into it.

I can tell you that with no reservation because Blue tells us on the first page that Hannah dies... but the woman doesn't actually croak until page 335 out of 514. Lovely. There's certainly some interesting character development in those three hundred pages, and a lot of really good clues that build up for when we get to the mystery part, but oh. my. god. I really was just waiting for Hannah to die the entire time.

The story really drags up to page 335, and then all of a sudden it's riveting, and then as soon as Blue figures out the mystery we jump ahead a couple of months and learn about those months through poorly exposited backstory. Sigh.

I'm not upset about having read the book, but I'm not thrilled about it either.

Rating: 5/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2006)