Revenge & the Wild by Michelle Modesto

When Westie was a child, her family traveled westward with a caravan. Her younger brother had been ill, so the family lagged behind the rest of the group. They stopped to rest at a cabin where a kind family offered hospitality. Appearances can be deceiving, and the family turned out to be cannibals. Only Westie escaped, leaving the rest of her family behind.

She was rescued and adopted by Nigel, an inventor. He created the machine that replaced the arm she lost to the cannibals. Together, they saved Alistair, who had also been attacked by cannibals. Nigel created the mask that allows him to speak again.

Rogue City is a strange place where magical creatures live alongside humans, though not always happily. The native people created a barrier around the city to protect the people from the creatures, including a stipulation that if they kill a human, they will die. The magic has been slowly fading away as the land is being stripped of resources. The barrier is getting weaker and the creatures are getting sick.

Nigel invented a machine that will produce magic from gold. It has the potential to save everyone. He only needs money to get the gold. The mayor gets Nigel in touch with a wealthy family to invest. Westie is dumbfounded when the Fairfields look exactly like the cannibals who ate her family.

Westie is an interesting character. She is rude and coarse and she used to have a drinking problem. It can sometimes be difficult to like her, but you get the feeling that she wouldn't care either way. Apparently she is pretty, pretty enough to attract Alistair, the Fairfields' cousin James, and vampire Costin, as well as other young men. Yet, she is always a mess, running around in messy clothes and focused on seeking vengeance for her family.

I liked Revenge & the Wild a lot. The wild west mixed with supernatural is unique. There was a twist that I guessed pretty early on, but I dismissed it as improbable. Wouldn't you know that I was right?

I received my copy of Revenge & the Wild from Edelweiss, courtesy of Balzer + Bray. It's available for purchase now.

Three months down...

So, I haven't been great with posting reviews this year. I think about writing reviews, I tell myself that I am going to write reviews, then I end up not writing reviews. I stare at the screen for a bit, then distract myself with internets or I get too tired to function or I hit a wall with writing and give up until tomorrow. It's getting really difficult and I keep falling further behind. Tonight, I wanted to focus on publishing a review before April...but my nephew decided to spend the night and demands my computer. It's always that way, isn't it?

I'm going to try to be better, try to catch up. In the meantime, the only thing I can think to publish right now are pictures of the pretty copy of The Rest of Us Just Live Here.

The pretty under the cover

Autograph!

Owl Crate February 2016 Unboxing

This is my Owlcrate, yet to be opened.

I heard about Owlcrate a while ago. It sounded like something I might like, and I hoped to try it some day. It's a subscription service that sends out a box containing a Young Adult novel plus related goodies.

The February theme was announced as "Sci-Fi Love," and I was VERY interested. The Owlcrate Facebook page gave hints that the box would contain a Doctor Who item and a Lunar Chronicles item, both of which I love. Purely for the sake of science, I decided to try to figure out what the book would be.

The uneducated part is in case I am wrong...I HATE being wrong. That's why that hyphen makes me anxious.

The Love That Split the World

I liked my guess a lot, and it made me really want the box. Part of me was nervous that I was wrong, that the book would be something else, that I wouldn't like the items or that I already had too much stuff as it is. Eventually, I decided to take the plunge and order. The February box actually sold out, so I was lucky to get one. It arrived last week, but I haven't had time to post about it until now.

Calvin by Martine Leavitt

"Now I was seventeen and a tiger was talking to me and I wasn't scared of the monsters under the bed. I was scared of the monster in the bed, which was me..."

Calvin was born on the day that the last Calvin & Hobbes comic was published. He was actually named for John Calvin, but his grandfather gave him a stuffed tiger called Hobbes and essentially renamed him. As a child, Calvin went on adventures with Hobbes and his neighbor Susie. One day, Hobbes went into the washing machine and "died." So, it's all the weirder when Hobbes starts to talk to a teenage Calvin.

After an outburst at school, Calvin is sent to the hospital. The doctor diagnoses him with schizophrenia. Calvin decides that the way to get back to normal is to pay a visit to Bill Watterson, the author of Calvin & Hobbes. He thinks he can convince him to write a new comic, a comic where Calvin is grown up and Hobbes-free.

How will he get there? Don't worry, he has a plan: walking across the frozen Lake Erie. He is joined by Susie, who threatened to tell on him if he didn't let her go. The quest isn't exactly parent or doctor approved. Calvin is never sure what is real and what is his mental illness. The biggest question mark is Susie. They drifted apart a while ago. She is pretty and popular, while Calvin is a weird loner. It doesn't make any sense that she would accompany him, and he is hearing and seeing a dead stuffed tiger...

The premise of the book sounded really appealing to me. I'm not especially into Calvin & Hobbes, I was more interested in the psychological aspects. I was also excited to see how the story ended. It is a tad disappointing, but I liked it all the same.

I received my copy of Calvin from Edelweiss, courtesy of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. It's available for purchase now.

Dumplin' by Julie Murphy

"But that’s me. I’m fat. It’s not a cuss word. It’s not an insult. At least it’s not when I say it. So I always figure why not get it out of the way?"

Willowdean Dickson, Will to her friends, Dumplin' to her mother, has lived her entire life in the shadow of the Miss Clover City pageant. Her mother won when she was younger, and now she runs the show every year. The pageant takes over both of their lives as her mother works with contestants, prepares for the show, and diets to fit into her old pageant dress.

Will isn't like her mother at all. She's fat, but also accepting of herself and her body (At least in theory). Unfortunately, she can tell that other people aren't as accepting, especially her mother. They are already a bit tense after Aunt Lucy died last year. Lucy, her mother's sister, had lived with them. She had been morbidly obese and suffered a heart attack. Will loved her aunt as a second, sometimes only, mother. Will sees her mother's disapproval as a disapproval of Lucy and fear that Will will end up just like her.

At her fast food job, Will bonds with the good-looking Bo. She doesn't tell anyone, not even her best friend Ellen. She is surprised when he seems to like her back, and even more so when they kiss. When Bo ends up transferring to Will's high school, she breaks things off because she fears that other kids will laugh about the fat girl dating the hot basketball player.

Eventually, Will decides to join the pageant. Unwittingly, she inspires fellow misfits Millie (Also fat), Amanda (Has uneven legs), and Hannah (Has "horse teeth"), as well as her traditionally pretty best friend Ellen. Will sees the pageant as a way to get back at her mom through the thing she loves most, but her friends think she is bravely challenging beauty standards.

I liked the message behind Dumplin'. The representation of a fat female protagonist was nice. She didn't constantly eat everything in sight or transform like a butterfly by the end of the book. My biggest complaint is that there wasn't much pageant in the book. It wasn't a big part of the story, but was the main reason I was reading. I wanted to get more costumes and rehearsals, I wanted Will to actually care about it. We don't even get to find out who wins! I can't help feeling a bit disappointed.

I received my copy of Dumplin' from Edelweiss, courtesy of Balzer + Brey. It's available for purchase now.

Extraordinary Means by Robyn Schneider

“Being temporary doesn't make something matter any less, because the point isn't how long, the point is that it happened...”

Years after an effective vaccine was developed for tuberculosis, a new strain has evolved. This version is resistant to drugs and highly contagious. As the book begins, our main character, Lane, is being sent to Latham House, a sanatorium where teenagers with drug-resistant TB are quarantined so they can focus on getting well.

The first kids he meets are friendly and religious. They are obviously the goody goodies and must be shunned. Among the cooler residents of Latham is Sadie. Lane and Sadie attended the same camp when they were younger, though Sadie is angry at Lane for some old affront. Back then, she had been quiet and kept to herself. At Latham, she and her friends are the popular kids, the group that Lane wishes he could join.

At first, Lane spends all of his time keeping up with his AP work. He stays up late doing the extra work and thinks that he will still be able to recover in time for the SATs and early admission to college. The long hours of studying take their toll and he gets sicker and sicker. Eventually, his lung x-rays give him away. His books and studying materials are confiscated, and Lane is forced to focus on getting well.

After he saves them from punishment, Sadie and her friends take Lane under their wing. They do things like dress up for movies night in fancy dresses and tuxedos while everyone else is wearing pajamas. Sadie has a contact in the nearby town who brings contraband food, books, whatever the kids want. They are the ones who know how to sneak out of the dorms, and they sometimes leave to visit Starbucks in the nearby town. It's all about pretending that they are normal, pretending that they aren't all close to death.

One day, the whole of Latham House is gathered and receives some big news. A drug called protocillin was developed that will cure drug-resistant TB. It's great news for everyone except Sadie.

Latham was my Hogwarts, and protocillin was the cure for my magic. It would turn me into a Muggle again, one who had to worry about standardized testing and mean girls and tardy slips...

It seems unbelievable that she isn't super happy, but it does make sense when you think about it. She has been at Latham for years. The education isn't fantastic, and since the kids die a lot, there isn't much concern for the future. Sadie will have to repeat several grades and then figure out what to do with the rest of her life. Latham House is life on pause. Sadie and Lane and everyone else could break rules and make trouble and it didn't really count towards real life. Of course, real life eventually catches up.

Extraordinary Means had a lot of good points, but also some annoying parts. It's very selfish of people with a very contagious disease to leave quarantine and risk infecting others. Also, the ending is effective, but when I thought it over a little bit, I felt manipulated. Overall, I liked the book well enough. It's really well written. The premise is interesting, especially with so many diseases coming back from the dead recently, anti-vaxxers and all that awfulness. I just hope that the story stays fictional.

I received my copy of Extraordinary Means from Edelweiss, courtesy of Katherine Tegen Books. It's available for purchase now.

Made You Up by Francesca Zappia

"I don't have the luxury of taking reality for granted. And I wouldn't say I hated people who did, because that's just about everyone. I didn't hate them. They didn't live in my world.
But that never stopped me from wishing I lived in theirs..."

When she was younger, Alex once met a boy at Meijer's. She didn't know his name, but she called him Blue Eyes. He helped her free the lobsters from their tank. Now a senior in high school, Alex knows that the boy wasn't real. She was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and she doesn't always know if what she sees is real. To help tell the difference, she carries a camera to take pictures of anything suspicious. If anything in the photo disappears, Alex knows that it's all in her head.

Because of an incident at her old school, namely spray-painting "Communists" on the gym floor, she ends up transferring for her senior year. Alex really wants to do well and get into college. She knows that if she messes up again, her mother will send her to a mental hospital.

Her therapist, who she calls the Gravedigger, also recommended that she get a job. She works at a restaurant called Finnegan's with the nerdy Tucker. He attends her new school and tells her that everyone there is insane. He also advises her to stay away from Miles, a particularly prickly regular customer. Alex messes up her first interaction with Miles by spilling water on him. In Alex's defense, she was distracted because Miles bears a resemblance to Blue Eyes: freckles, sandy hair, and blue eyes, and anyone would freak out if their imaginary friend appeared out of the blue. 

Being the new girl at school isn't fun, but Alex copes as well as she can. As community service, Alex has to join Miles' club, a group that sets up for sporting events and sells concessions. She has a strange relationship with Miles. She thinks that he hates her, but you can tell that he really, really doesn't.

Miles has a lot of power at the school, even though kids tease him and call him a Nazi for his German accent. Students pay him to do things, get revenge or play pranks. He plays some jokes on Alex, and she plays some jokes on him. Their relationship changes when the girl who has a crush on Miles throws a party, and he refuses to attend unless she invites Alex. Alex ends up having an episode and Miles figures out that she has schizophrenia. In turn, he tells her about his mother, who is locked inside an asylum. They are completely untraditional and very cute.

Unfortunately, and there always has to be an unfortunately, Alex's illness catches up with her. Her classmates find out about it. Miles, desperate for money, starts to take humiliating jobs. Everything spirals out of control. The ending was a little sad, but also not. I don't know how to explain it better, you'd just have to read it.   

I was a huge fan of Made You Up. I completely love Alex, who was flawed but totally awesome and funny. Her mental illness makes her unreliable as a narrator, but also really interesting as a character. She understands when she is being irrational, but she also still has moments where she has to check her food for Communist chips. It was an interesting experience to see the world from Alex's perspective, and very scary to think of having to live like that and not being able to control it. As we find out, not being able to tell the difference between imagination and reality can hurt you. I highly recommend this amazing book.  

I received my copy of Made You Up from Edelweiss, courtesy of Greenwillow Books. It's available for purchase now.