Dearly, Departed
Lia Habel
480 pages
Publisher: Del Rey
Release Date: October 18, 2011
Source: NetGalley

Love conquers all, so they say. But can Cupid’s arrow pierce the hearts of the living and the dead—or rather, the undead? Can a proper young Victorian lady find true love in the arms of a dashing zombie?

The year is 2195. The place is New Victoria—a high-tech nation modeled on the manners, mores, and fashions of an antique era. A teenager in high society, Nora Dearly is far more interested in military history and her country’s political unrest than in tea parties and debutante balls. But after her beloved parents die, Nora is left at the mercy of her domineering aunt, a social-climbing spendthrift who has squandered the family fortune and now plans to marry her niece off for money. For Nora, no fate could be more horrible—until she’s nearly kidnapped by an army of walking corpses.

But fate is just getting started with Nora. Catapulted from her world of drawing-room civility, she’s suddenly gunning down ravenous zombies alongside mysterious black-clad commandos and confronting “The Laz,” a fatal virus that raises the dead—and hell along with them. Hardly ideal circumstances. Then Nora meets Bram Griswold, a young soldier who is brave, handsome, noble . . . and dead. But as is the case with the rest of his special undead unit, luck and modern science have enabled Bram to hold on to his mind, his manners, and his body parts. And when his bond of trust with Nora turns to tenderness, there’s no turning back. Eventually, they know, the disease will win, separating the star-crossed lovers forever. But until then, beating or not, their hearts will have what they desire.

In Dearly, Departed, romance meets walking-dead thriller, spawning a madly imaginative novel of rip-roaring adventure, spine-tingling suspense, and macabre comedy that forever redefines the concept of undying love.

I enjoyed this book. I really did. I mean, it had all the ingredients for a book I would truly enjoy: Zombies, action, steampunk. However, as much as I enjoyed it, I felt that it dragged on for a little bit longer than it should have. The writing is superb and the plot is engaging though. Nora is a girl who is alive and has no knowledge of what is going on beyond the walls of the Victorian-esque era city she lives in. All she knows is what she sees on the news which is what the government wants her to know. War is imminent against the Punks, a rebellious group dead-set against the Victorian lifestyle, and death is nearer than Nora realizes.

Even within the dead war is spreading because not all the dead are vicious. Yes, they are all zombies, but there is a group of zombies that has managed to hold on to their faculties and their personality and are able to control themselves around those who are alive. They are led by Nora’s father, Dr. Dearly, who is dead, but not buried as Nora believed him to be. Together they try to keep the Grays in check, the other side of the coin, the zombies that haven’t managed to hold on to themselves and instead hunger for human flesh. Bram Griswold is a soldier at Company Z, the group of zombies that are on the good side.

The dynamic between Nora and Bram is fantastic. These two actually get to know each other before their love story sprouts. Nora is terrified of him at the beginning because he is, you know, dead after all. She doesn’t trust him and Bram has to genuinely earn her trust little by little. The same happens with the rest of the zombies in Company Z. You get to hear about their individual stories, of how they died and reanimated, and who they were before all of that happened. I really liked that about this book, that you really get to know the characters.

Where it fell flat for me was toward the end. I felt that the last scenes with Nora’s best friend, Pam, were kind of long and didn’t make much sense to me. I think overall I just didn’t like Pam as a character. I felt that although she did things that were brave, inside she was a coward. She didn’t believe in herself and it showed, she really just wanted to copy Nora, be just like her, a fact that she attests to at the end of the book. I thought she was pretty boring, but that may be just my personal opinion though. The book is also about a 100 pages longer than most YA books I’ve read lately.

All in all, I enjoyed this book and liked 99% of the characters in it and their stories. I think my favorite character, besides the main characters of course, was Chas. A female zombie, another soldier at Company Z, who I wouldn’t mind being friends with. She was interesting, brave, and was very funny. I gave this book 3 stars because I enjoyed this book, despite my gripe with that one character. The ending is pretty surprising and I do intend to read the next book in the series because I just have to know what happens next.

• This book rekindled my love for books. I hadn’t picked up a book since I finished college and reading Twilight is what made me love reading books again. It was a fast read and eased me back into reading again.
• Gave me something in common to talk about with my teenage daughter. I didn’t pick up Twilight by choice. It was a gift, a Christmas gift from my daughter. She had read the book and kept insisting that I read it too. I kept brushing her off telling her that this was a book for young girls and not something I would be interested in. Since she got it for me as a gift, I couldn’t put it off anymore and finally sat down to read it. The rest is history. I now am a known Twihard, who blogs for the Twilight fan site Twilightish, and runs a book blog. I can also sit down with my daughter and discuss the books she is reading at the moment. We have things in common to talk about now.
• I have made friends all around the world because of Twilight. I have met Twilight fans on Twitter and at Twilight Conventions (yes, I go to those) that live all across the globe. Some of these friends have become some of my BEST friends which I foresee staying that way even after the last Twilight movie comes out.

Shatter Me
Tahereh Mafi
352 pages
Publisher: HarperCollins Children’s Books
Release Date: November 15, 2011
Source: ARC from publisher

“You can’t touch me,” I whisper.

I’m lying, is what I don’t tell him.

He can touch me, is what I’ll never tell him.

But things happen when people touch me.

Strange things. Bad things.

No one knows why Juliette’s touch is fatal, but The Reestablishment has plans for her. Plans to use her as a weapon.

But Juliette has plans on her own.

After a lifetime without freedom, she’s finally discovering a strength to fight back for the very first time—and to find a future with the one boy she thought she’d lost forever.

Wow! This book was just…wow…I can’t even form a complete sentence here. It’s been a while since I’ve read a book that completely consumed me, to the point that I skipped meals and completely disregarded what I had to do over an entire weekend just because I COULD NOT STOP READING. It was that good.

Juliette is a girl that has been locked away for a very long time, 264 days at the time the book starts. Put away by her own family because of a fatal ability she has, the ability to hurt, and even kill, someone with her touch. Because of this, Juliette was always pushed aside by her peers and her family. She always kept to herself and avoided human contact as much as possible. The only person who ever showed her kindness was a boy named Adam, a boy who one day is put in her cell as her new roommate. It is sometime in the future in what used to be the United States, a land ravaged by humanity’s mistakes where birds do not fly and the sun doesn’t shine the same and that is now is ruled by an International movement called The Reestablishment.

Juliette doesn’t realize it at first, but suspects, that this boy who is now her roommate is the same boy who showed her kindness once upon a time. He arrives pretending to be a bully but she can see right through him and shows him kindness. This kindness causes a change in him and a feeling of shame for acting like a jerk when he first arrived leading up to an easygoing friendship between the two. This friendship is short-lived as Adam and Juliette are taken away by force and right into the headquarters of The Reestablishment, where Juliette learns that Adam is in fact e boy from her past, but also a soldier in The Reestablishment, and where she also encounters the head of the movement in that region, Warner.

Warner is an unlikely villain. He is the villain we all love to hate and hate to love at the same time. He’s handsome on the outside, has dreams, aspirations, and believes what he’s doing is right, which makes him the worst kind of villain in my eyes. He also develops an obsession with Juliette. He intends to keep her and use her as a weapon to torture rebels with her lethal touch. Juliette refuses to cooperate with him but instead of forcing her, he intends to win her over by giving her everything she could ever want, to woo her, not knowing that the only thing she has ever wanted is his soldier, Adam.

There’s Mafi’s storytelling is unique. Her use of strikeout text to depict Juliette’s deeper thoughts, the ones she is ashamed to admit even to herself, is ingenious. It allowed me as the reader to really get into the character’s head and know on a deeper level what she was thinking or feeling at the time. As Juliette becomes more comfortable around people throughout the story, the use of strikeout diminishes, which I understood as Juliette coming out of her shell. As I read the story I couldn’t help but picture Juliette as Rogue from X-Men, a young girl with an unusual curse gift that can kill others if not controlled but with a very good heart. This book was pure WIN and it’s definitely going to be a re-read, over and over again. Shatter Me will be released on November 15th. Please do yourself a favor and per-order it HERE. You won’t be sorry.

Crossed
Ally Condie
384 pages
Publisher: Dutton Juvenile
Release Date: November 1, 2011
Source: ARC from Penguin Teen

In search of a future that may not exist and faced with the decision of who to share it with, Cassia journeys to the Outer Provinces in pursuit of Ky – taken by the Society to his certain death – only to find that he has escaped, leaving a series of clues in his wake.

Cassia’s quest leads her to question much of what she holds dear, even as she finds glimmers of a different life across the border. But as Cassia nears resolve and certainty about her future with Ky, an invitation for rebellion, an unexpected betrayal, and a surprise visit from Xander – who may hold the key to the uprising and, still, to Cassia’s heart – change the game once again. Nothing is as expected on the edge of Society, where crosses and double crosses make the path more twisted than ever.

Virtuosity
Jessica Martinez
304 pages
Publisher: Simon Pulse
Release Date: October 18, 2011
Source: Simon & Schuster Galley Grab

Now is not the time for Carmen to fall in love. And Jeremy is hands-down the wrong guy for her to fall for. He is infuriating, arrogant, and the only person who can stand in the way of Carmen getting the one thing she wants most: to win the prestigious Guarneri competition. Carmen’s whole life is violin, and until she met Jeremy, her whole focus was winning. But what if Jeremy isn’t just hot…what if Jeremy is better?

Carmen knows that kissing Jeremy can’t end well, but she just can’t stay away. Nobody else understands her—and riles her up—like he does. Still, she can’t trust him with her biggest secret: She is so desperate to win she takes antianxiety drugs to perform, and what started as an easy fix has become a hungry addiction. Carmen is sick of not feeling anything on stage and even more sick of always doing what she’s told, doing what’s expected.

Sometimes, being on top just means you have a long way to fall….

Virtuosity is one of those books you seldom come across that you are not expecting much from, but that totally take you for a spin and surprise you at the end. Carmen is a Grammy-winning violinist at only 17 years old. She is a child prodigy who has been sheltered all her life, has been home-schooled and told what to do by her Mother/Manager Diana, down to who she can and cannot have as friends. Jeremy is Carmen’s only serious competition for the prestigious Guarneri award, considered an honor to win and that comes with generous prize, a high quality violin, money, and contracts. The Guarneri is everything Carmen has spent her life preparing for as well as the scholarship to Julliard she has already secured.

At the beginning of the book you really want to hate Jeremy because he is a jerk and pretentious and gives Carmen a hard time, but then you get to know him better and then you realize that he does have a sensitive side and that maybe, just maybe, he really does have feelings for Carmen. Carmen falls for him, hard, but has the looming shadow of doubt upon her. Her mother tells her that he is wooing her to derail her from the competition, and she starts to doubt Jeremy. Even I, as the reader, was doubting Jeremy, expecting him to mess up on every page and show his true colors. Does he really love her, or is it all an act?

I give this book 4 stars for being a love story that is more than just a love story. It is different than anything I’ve read in a long time. As a music lover I can appreciate Carmen and Jeremy’s reality and the pressure they are both under to perform and be the best, especially in the realm of classical music. I don’t think I have read a YA book in a while that deals with violinists. The closest I’ve gotten is If I Stay/Where She Went by Gayle Forman where the main characters are also musicians but play different instruments. This is a very tender book where you will fall in love with the main characters (not to mention a certain Step-Dad) and will have you rooting for their romance to work out.

This book will be released on October 18th, 2011. Pre-Order HERE.

Inspired by The Story Siren’s “In My Mailbox”. Every week I will be posting all the books I’ve acquired either by purchasing at a bookstore, sent to me for review via mail, sent to me via email, etc., and will be showcasing them here.

Carrier of the Mark by Leigh Fallon [Amazon] [Goodreads]

Ashes by Ilsa J. Bick [Amazon] [Goodreads]

A Beautiful Dark by Jocelyn Davies [Amazon] [Goodreads]

The Near Witch by Victoria Schwab [Amazon] [Goodreads]

Indelible by Lani Woodland [Amazon] [Goodreads]

The Faerie Ring by Kiki Hamilton [Amazon] [Goodreads]

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah E. Harkness [Amazon] [Goodreads]

Heroes of Olympus 2 – The Son of Neptune by Rick Riordan [Amazon] [Goodreads]

Heroes of Olympus 1 – The Lost Hero by Rick Riordan [Amazon] [Goodreads]

The Summer I Turned Pretty by Jenny Han [Amazon] [Goodreads]

Wither by Lauren DeStefano [Amazon] [Goodreads]

Ten Things We Did (and Probably Shouldn’t Have) by Sarah Mlynowki [Amazon] [Goodreads]

Shut Out by Jody Keplinger [Amazon] [Goodreads]

Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver [Amazon] [Goodreads]

Crossroads by Mary Ting [Amazon] [Goodreads]

Sweet Venom by Tera Lynn Childs [Amazon] [Goodreads]

Witch Eyes by Scott Tracey [Amazon] [Goodreads]

The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson [Amazon] [Goodreads]

Won in Contest

Thanks to The Readiacs for running the contest where I won this. It was such a good book and I reviewed it HERE.

Eve by Anna Carey [Amazon] [Goodreads]

From Netgalley

Geek Girl by Cindy C. Bennett [Pre-Order on Amazon] [Goodreads]

The Summer I Lost It by Natalie Kath [Amazon] [Goodreads]

The Sweetest Thing by Christina Mandelski [Amazon] [Goodreads]

From GalleyGrab