Book Review

OK. So, I have been reading but I haven't done a book review in awhile!

Here goes... I'll start with the good stuff first!

Graceling by Kristin Cashore (5 out of 5 stars)

This is a young adult fiction book.  I loved it in the same way that I loved The Hunger Games series.  It did not grab me quite as quickly but I got to the point that I could not put it down.  Amazing!  Fabulous!

From amazon:

If you had the power to kill with your bare hands, what would you do with it?

Graceling takes readers inside the world of Katsa, a warrior-girl in her late teens with one blue eye and one green eye. This gives her haunting beauty, but also marks her as a Graceling. Gracelings are beings with special talents—swimming, storytelling, dancing. Katsa's Grace is considered more useful: her ability to fight (and kill, if she wanted to) is unequaled in the seven kingdoms. Forced to act as a henchman for a manipulative king, Katsa channels her guilt by forming a secret council of like-minded citizens who carry out secret missions to promote justice over cruelty and abuses of power.

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin (4 out of 5 stars)

Great story, but not a happy story.  It was depressing actually... while captivating at the same time.  There were so many messages in the story.  For me, the message that spoke loudest was a message of seeing what happens when we start to treat people like outsiders just because they are a little bit different than us.

From goodreads.com

Tom Franklin's narrative power and flair for characterization have been compared to the likes of Harper Lee, Flannery O'Connor, Elmore Leonard, and Cormac McCarthy.



Now the Edgar Award-winning author returns with his most accomplished and resonant novel so far—an atmospheric drama set in rural Mississippi. In the late 1970s, Larry Ott and Silas "32" Jones were boyhood pals. Their worlds were as different as night and day: Larry, the child of lower-middle-class white parents, and Silas, the son of a poor, single black mother. Yet for a few months the boys stepped outside of their circumstances and shared a special bond. But then tragedy struck: Larry took a girl on a date to a drive-in movie, and she was never heard from again. She was never found and Larry never confessed, but all eyes rested on him as the culprit. The incident shook the county—and perhaps Silas most of all. His friendship with Larry was broken, and then Silas left town.


More than twenty years have passed. Larry, a mechanic, lives a solitary existence, never able to rise above the whispers of suspicion. Silas has returned as a constable. He and Larry have no reason to cross paths until another girl disappears and Larry is blamed again. And now the two men who once called each other friend are forced to confront the past they've buried and ignored for decades.

Throwaway by Heather Huffman (4 out of 5 stars) FREE for nook users.

Throwaway is touted as a modern-day version of the hit movie Pretty Woman and it is. 

It was extremely good... especially because it was free... it's just hard for me to give it a great rating right now because I am just coming off of reading Graceling.  It did evoke all of the same feelings as Pretty Woman and makes for a good beach read.

From goodreads.com:

When society deemed Jessie a throwaway, she didn't let it stop her from finding the sunshine in her world...


But that world is threatened when she finds herself undeniably drawn to the mischievous glint in the eyes of a man unlike any she's ever met before.

What starts as a simple crush will lead them both on a journey they could never have anticipated. From a vibrant St. Louis neighborhood known as Cherokee Street to a cave in the Ozark Mountains with a 120-year-old mystery to hide, Jessie fights organized crime, corruption and her own fears to reclaim her life and leave her mark on this world.

 




In conclusion - if you liked The Hunger Games then you will also like... ahem love... Graceling.  Give it time.  It will not grab you like The Hunger Games did... but it will eventually grab you -- I promise!!
 

What are you reading?