Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies by Lindsay Ribar

"But I figure, hey, it's magic. It's a magic cliff. It can do what it wants, I guess..."

When we first meet Aspen Quick, he has just stolen the feelings that the girl of his dreams had for his best friend. They break up, which leaves her free to date Aspen. Any time she misses her ex, Aspen steals those feelings. He has absolutely no remorse for this. He's a real gem, obviously.

The Quicks have the ability to steal from people, things like feelings, emotions, even physical characteristics. They perform a ritual where they take something from someone who leaves an item under an ancient tree. Sometimes they take minor things, like a scar or beauty mark, and sometimes big things, such as the ability to see. The ritual is to preserve the giant cliff outside of town. If they don't perform the ritual, the cliff will collapse. Rocks fall, everyone dies. The one rule is that the Quicks don't steal from family.

Aspen encounters a girl, Leah, who used to be friends with his cousin Heather, who died recently. Leah has no idea that Heather died, but she knows about the Quicks' powers. For some reason, Aspen can't steal from her. Soon, Aspen uncovers secrets and lies that make it hard for him to know who to trust.

I was excited to read Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies, and it did not disappoint. Aspen was a giant jerk, but so were the other Quicks. I think it might be a side effect of their magic. There were some pretty good twists to the book, and I liked the unique storyline.

I received my copy of Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies from Edelweiss, courtesy of Kathy Dawson Books. It's available for purchase now.

The Geek's Guide to Unrequited Love by Sarvenaz Tash

"When you live for stories, when you spend so much of your time immersed in careful constructs of three and five acts, it sometimes feels like you're just stumbling through the rest of life, trying to divine meaningful narrative threads from the chaos. Which, as I learned the hard way this weekend, can be painfully fruitless. Fiction is there when real life fails you. But it's not a substitute..."

Graham and Roxy are best friends. They have been best friends since Graham moved in next door when they were eight. She asked him what Hogwarts house he would be in (Ravenclaw) and he loved her ever since. Now, Graham and Roxy are sixteen. They moved from Harry Potter to comics, especially The Chronicles of Althena*. The two also created their own comic, which Graham writes and Roxy draws, called The Misfits of Mage High.

Graham has decided that he will tell Roxy how he feels at the upcoming New York Comic Con. It seems like fate when it is announced that the author of Althena, Robert Zinc, will be on a panel for the movie adaptation of his series. All Graham has to do is camp out overnight with his friend Casey, convince Casey to give him his ticket for Roxy, then get Roxy to skip school on Friday for the panel. So easy, right?

Unfortunately, Graham's plans implode. After spending the night on the street, the ticket line turns into a mad rush when it opens. Graham and Casey leave empty-handed. Thankfully, they still get to spend time at Comic Con with Roxy and her friend Felicia. It's Felicia's idea to take part in speed dating (A teens session, don't worry). Graham makes friends with a fellow Athena fan (Who managed to get into the panel) named Amelia. To Graham's horror, Roxy meets a handsome British guy named Devin, and they are acting a little too friendly for his comfort.

Poor Graham's Robert Zinc plan fell through, and now he has to witness Roxy flirting with another guy. He expects that things will turn around Saturday, when he planned to surprise Roxy with a John Hughes panel (Graham's deceased mother was a huge John Hughes fan, and Roxy and Graham watched her old movies). It's just his luck that Devin is also there on Saturday, and again sticking to Roxy's side. Our boy then decides that the perfect demonstration of his love is to purchase an original page from Althena from the auction for $500. It's at this point where I started to worry about the kid. Oh, honey, no.

Graham was okay, but sometimes ventured over into "nice guy" territory. He and Roxy have a lot in common, they have been friends for years, and he wants to explore something more. The problem is that he never thought that Roxy might not want that, not to spoil anything. He was also kind of grating when he was upset about Devin. I can't imagine that he had any fun at Comic Con with that attitude, and he really did it to himself.

The Geek's Guide to Unrequited Love is mostly nerdy fun. I really wish that The Chronicles of Althena was real, because it sounds awesome. I expected that the book would be cute and sweet, full of geeky love. It's much more complicated than that, but in a good way. There's a happy ending, but maybe not the one that you might expect.

*The Chronicles of Althena is a comic series about an alien named Althena whose only knowledge of Earth is what she saw in 80s science fiction films. She often shapeshifts into characters from the movies, though she can't change her earlobe, which is always green. On their first day at the con, Roxy dresses up as Althena as Pris from Blade Runner, and Graham dresses as Althena as Mad Max. 

I received my copy of The Geek's Guide to Unrequited Love from Sarvenaz Tash as part of the Spring Young Adult Scavenger Hunt. It's available for sale now.

I'll Have What She's Having by Rebecca Harrington

"So, are you what you eat? Well, it's hard to say. I think you can gain tremendous understanding and almost an odd compassion for someone when you eat like them. You learn their vulnerabilities and little oddities and obsessions. You fully enter their world and you don't judge it. So, no but yes, as with most things..."

Go Fug Yourself often included Rebecca Harrington's articles on trying celebrity diets in their Friday links. They were always interesting and amusing to me, so I was excited to read her whole book. They are a mix of previously published articles, which made me a little sad, but also new chapters.

The celebrity diets in the book range from Elizabeth Taylor to Marilyn Monroe to Gwyneth Paltrow. I am always interested in reading descriptions of food, which is probably why this was so fascinating to me. There is also some level of schadenfreude in that I sort of want these diets to be weird and difficult. This is why the success of Gwyneth Paltrow's diet disappoints me, although I do get some satisfaction from how unreasonably expensive it is. On some petty level, I want to think that the only difference between current me and fabulous, movie star me is a depriving diet that makes me feel like I'm starving.

Throughout the book, Harrington ends up eating many odd things, from quail eggs to sea vegetables to a hunk of liver. She tries to drink ten Diet Cokes in a day to emulate Karl Lagerfeld, does bust-firming exercise to emulate Marilyn Monroe, and becomes condescending to emulate Paltrow. In the end, it's an entertaining book about how celebrities sometimes ate/eat weird stuff and us normal people probably shouldn't try to be too much like them.

Great by Sara Benincasa

"That place at the beach with all your mother's fancy friends- it's another world. I'm not saying it's a bad one. It's just different. But whether you're in this world or that one, you still have to live with yourself. Remember that you can't be one person one place and a totally different person in another place. Right is right and wrong is wrong, no matter where you are..."

Thus begins Great. Let's compare it to Nick Carraway's father's advice:

"Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone...just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

I first read The Great Gatsby in my 11th Grade Honors English class. Actually, I read it twice (Which is about one and a half more times than I read The Scarlet Letter, but that is irrelevant). I finished the book on my own, then we ended up reading it in class. I've always liked Gatsby, the green light, can't repeat the past, and boats against the current.

Great sounded really interesting. It takes The Great Gatsby and sets it in present day Hamptons, the vacation destination for the old and nouveau rich alike. Naomi, our Nick Carraway, is spending the summer in the Hamptons with her mother. Her mother is a TV chef who has become a household name, so she is busy with marketing and all that good stuff. They are the new rich, so Naomi is usually ignored by the children of the people her mother wants to know.

One exception to this is Delilah. Delilah is tall, blonde, beautiful, and perpetually stoned. She also works as a model and dates Teddy (Tom), who was a child actor on a popular sitcom. He never stops talking about the show. It's very sad. Delilah and Teddy are an awful couple. Most of their friends even know that he is cheating on her with Misti (Myrtle), a New Jersey waitress.

The talk of the Hamptons this year is Jacinda. She runs a popular fashion blog and is very focused on Delilah. Jacinda is renting the house next door to Naomi's, and she wants Naomi to help her get close to Delilah. It turns out that the two were very close as children, and soon they are best friends, and maybe more? Meanwhile, Naomi is getting close with the male version of Jordan Baker.

We all know how The Great Gatsby ends, or at least we should by now. Myrtle dies, Gatsby dies, the Jazz Age sucks, and we all live depressingly ever after. Great does have the same ending, with some odd differences. I really enjoy the writing in this book. It made reading a treat. Updating the story to the Hamptons works well, because there's plenty to be cynical about there.

What doesn't work is making the characters teenagers. It's hard to get invested in the relationships. Tom and Daisy were married with a baby, and they lived in the 1920s. Teddy and Delilah could actually just break up, because they are teenagers, and that's what teenagers do. It's hard to believe any real connection between Jacinda and Delilah because their entire history occurred when they were in elementary school.  The female Gatsby angle is different, but a same sex couple isn't especially scandalous these days.

Overall, I still enjoyed Great. It really is easy to get lost in the writing. I am a little skeptical if teenagers will want to read a retelling of their English assignments, but you never know what kids these days are into. 

I received my copy of Great from Edelweiss, courtesy of HarperTeen. It's available for purchase now.

Burned by Sara Shepard

In the twelfth installment of Pretty Little Liars, the girls are hitting the high seas for an eco cruise, which is apparently a thing. We open the book with some insight into Hanna's terrible secret. She played designated driver for a girl named Madison. The car was run off the road, and Hanna had the other Liars come and help move Madison to the driver's seat and flee the scene. They possibly killed or grievously injured the poor girl, all so Hanna didn't get in trouble or ruin her father's campaign. It's getting hard to side with these girls when they keep doing these things! It's almost like a hipper version of Aesop's Fables.

Moving on to the nautical nonsense, there were two subplots involving possible A's, and two that didn't really have anything to do with A. I'm going to talk about some of the events in the previous books, so be warned if spoilers matter to you.

Emily told her parents about her baby, and they reacted badly. This isn't really surprising given the time that they sent her away to her religious cousins to pray the gay out. Emily meets a beautiful stowaway. It turns out that she is a fugitive known as the Posh Bandit. That might seem like a spoiler, but it's very obvious. Other than that, Emily keeps thinking that she sees Alison everywhere, and she admits to everyone how she left the door open before that house exploded that one time, so Ali might have escaped.

Spencer is still in touch with Reefer, the lovable stoner she met while trying to get in that Stanford Eating Club. She is hoping to get some smooches and hand holding and all that smooshy stuff, but she has some difficulties. Naomi (Former member of Ali's clique, enemy of the PLLs) is also into Reefer. After a series of unfortunate events, Spencer starts to suspect that Naomi may be deliberately sabotaging her. The girls even suspect that she may be A.

This theory has some merit because Hanna is rooming with Naomi. The former enemies get along quite well. Then, she finds out that Naomi is Madison's cousin! It seems as though Naomi is trying to find out who hurt her cousin, and enacting revenge upon them.

Aria is a little bummed to spend most of the cruise apart from Noel. She meets a nice guy named Graham while doing an eco scavenger hunt. It turns out that Graham was Tabitha's boyfriend. Tabitha being the girl that Aria accidentally pushed off a roof while they were in Jamaica. It's a small world, after all! Obviously, Graham sounds like a likely suspect for A. Thankfully, Aria is tired of A and all the threats and secrets. She wants to confess about her part in pushing Tabitha as soon as they return home. I was impressed that one of these girls finally did something reasonable, but it never plays out (Obviously).

We get more reasons why these girls should stay in and watch TV more. Seriously, is A going to text you and threaten to reveal that you like Two and a Half Men? (Although that would be a terrible thing for ANYONE to think of you.) Two more As are brought up, then quickly found not guilty. We end on the revelation that someone else may have killed Tabitha, possibly the very A that is stalking our Liars. Since these books are my literary crack, I will be tuning in to see what new messes are made in the 13th installment. Hopefully we will find out what the deal was with Aria and Iceland.

Twisted by Sara Shepard

Remember that bad Pretty Little Liars binge that I went on last Cannonball Read? How I just couldn't stop reading even though they are trashy books full of people doing deplorable things? Oh, I was so excited when I finished the eighth book and I could read things I was actually proud to be seen with in public. Then before I knew it, Sara Shepard, that demonic book pied piper, released two more Pretty Little Liars books. Here we go again.

Twisted takes place after the events of all the other books, and I am liberal with the spoilers. After a big fire that killed Alison, who had actually been her twin sister Courtney when they knew her, until she had been killed by Alison, the PLLs are understandably in need of some R&R, so they head to Jamaica. Since they are who they are, something unspeakably awful takes place and the girls aren't even friends anymore after it all goes down.

Spencer's mom is dating a super-rich man with a cute son. She's super into him, but he's kind of hot and cold, then he reveals that he's gay. Which is pretty confusing when he starts to kiss her in a dressing room. There's a hint that Spencer did something horrible to get early admission to Princeton, which is something to look forward to in later books.

Hanna's dad is running for state senator, but she's still a spoiled brat. I really can't stand her childishness. She throws a fit over everything and her dad constantly gives in to her. Some photographer convinces Hanna that she should be a model, one photo shoot where her boob falls out of her dress later, and the guy is blackmailing her.

Aria is still dating Noel, but she's starting to feel the differences between them, the differences that usually make her run after the nearest English teacher. He's got a foreign exchange student staying at his house, and it turns out to be a hot girl. Aria is jealous at first, then she starts to relate with Klaudia over their shared outsider status. Then Aria reads a text message that lets her know Klaudia is after Noel.

Finally, Emily took an unexplained hiatus from swimming. She is desperately trying to get a swimming scholarship. New girl Chloe has Emily meet her dad about the scholarship, but he ends up coming on to Emily. The poor girl is just trying to make a new friend and get a college education, but now she has to deal with a gross old man. Also, we find out that the reason Emily quit swimming was because she had a baby from when she had sex with Issac.

Now to the juicy Jamaica stuff. A keeps texting all the PLLs with taunting messages about Jamaica, you know that usual stalker stuff. We find out that they met a girl named Tabitha, a young lady who bears a resemblance to Alison, but covered with burn marks and scars, like the kind you'd get from a fire set to kill your best friends that trapped you instead. The PLLs meet her on the roof-top deck at the hotel, she gets aggressive, they push her off the deck. Nobody found the body, and they just kept it a secret. In the end, a teenage girl's body is found in Jamaica. They expect the body to be identified as Alison DiLaurentis, but it turns out that the girl really was Tabitha. The Pretty Little Liars are now Pretty Little Murderers (Though it was self defense!).

Killer by Sara Shepard

Wicked left off with a party at Spencer's house. The PLLs found Ian's dead body in the woods. By the time they find Officer Wilden at the party and drag him outside, Ian has vanished. The police look for him, but eventually call off searching and say that the girls were making the whole thing up. Nobody is sure if Ian is actually dead. Spencer uses her sister's laptop and gets IMs from someone claiming to be Ian, but we're not actually sure what's what.

The big event in Killer is the opening of a hotel called the Radley. It used to be a sanitarium for troubled children. Remember that, because it's important for later. Aria is invited by her mom, who still doesn't know that her skeevy boyfriend hit on Aria. Aria spends the book getting closer to Jason DiLaurentis, Alison's brother. Jason is a little off, flying into rages for seemingly no reason. He freaks out at Aria when she mentions the name of the hotel, and later on, Emily finds an old guest log from the sanitarium- Radley, and it has Jason's name in it over and over.

Speaking of Emily, she gets way close with new boyfriend Issac, in the carnal sense. Unfortunately, his mother starts to hint that she knows and verbally attacks Emily in an Applebee's bathroom. When Emily reasonably tells Issac all of this, he thinks she's being an attention whore like his last girlfriend who claimed the same things. Oh, Issac. In the end, Issac finds a picture of Emily that his mother mutilated, he confronts her, and she freaks out. Emily still won't take him back, for now, because he didn't trust her.

Hanna is still a total entitled princess and my least favorite character. Stepsister Kate decides that she wants to go out with Mike Montgomery, Aria's little brother and lacrosse boy. Hanna decides that she must have him, besides he once groped her years ago, so she has dibs. Mike goes around juggling both girls, but Hanna gets him to be exclusive by agreeing to take him to the prom. At the hotel party, Kate admits that she only ever pretended to like Mike to fool around with Hanna. Just a little revenge for telling everyone that she had herpes. Mike was also using her to win a bet with his friends, but they decide that they are even because she was using him in the first place. I hate them both. So. Much.

Poor little Spencer meets with her biological mother and she's all fancy and rich. They have such a wonderful time that Spencer is determined to move to New York to be with her. It doesn't help that Spencer's parents are total a-holes. Seriously, I have no idea what their issue is- that she told the truth about her dumb Golden Orchid essay? They spend the book sending her car back to the dealer and mocking her when her computer crashes. The only explanation I can think of is that they are secretly going broke. Spencer uses her college fund to purchase a loft from her mother's realtor, but it turns out not so much. She got scammed, the loft doesn't exist, that's not really her mom, and her college fund is all gone.

A shows up in this book, but she's more helpful than threatening. All A does is urge everyone to solve Ali's murder. This makes me wonder if there may be a different A now. The PLLs gather at the end to go over all their clues so far, when the woods behind Spencer's house are set on fire. They rescue someone from the blaze, someone who looks just like Alison.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

This may be incredibly pathetic and just a smidgen anti-feminist, but if there was one thing I could choose to be right now, it would be the Doctor's Companion. The possibility of this was the only thing that made me okay with applying for retail jobs during my long post-college employment drought. I had a vision of a nice British man in a duster whisking me off to the stars in his spaceship. Of course, the problem with being the companion is how replaceable you are. The Universe opens up to you, but only for a little while. Then you are left behind and everything else is so utterly ordinary.

The Magicians reminds me of being the Doctor's Companion. In it, an ordinary overachiever set for the Ivy League and a corporate career is recruited by Brakebills, a college to train magicians. The majority of the book occurs while Quentin Clearwater is in school. Once he graduates, he is flung back to earth as ungracefully as any Companion. He gets lazy, drinks, puts off plans and the future. Fortunately, though, the magic comes back into play in the form of a quest. Quentin thinks this is the thing that will change his life forever, fix everything and put it back on track.

The character of Quentin is obviously one of those who will never be happy. He thinks Brakebills will make him happier than Brooklyn, he thinks his relationship with Alice will make him happier, he thinks the quest will make him happier. Ultimately, you're still you wherever you go. You can't choose to be happy, but you can choose to be miserable.

I thought this book would be Harry Potter in college. In a lot of ways, it was that. There were adult situations all over the place. The students had sex and drank like fishies. Harry Potter also never had so much angst. They never showed the time between when the kids left Hogwarts and the prologue where they were all grown up. Maybe The Magicians is what we would have seen.