In My Mailbox (IMM) #1

In My Mailbox is a weekly meme hosted by The Story Siren where we showcase the books that have made their way into our lives/bookshelves that week.

NetGalley ARCs: 

From author/publisher:

From the Kindle Store:

My review of Halflings  and Spin should be up soon. And I'm halfway through The Future of Us and it's AMAZING! I'm in love with the books I have got this week! What's in your mailbox?

Follow Friday #4

It's Feature and Follow My Blog #2 for me. Follow Friday is a weekly meme hosted by Parajunkee and Alison Can Read!

Question of the Week: Many readers/bloggers are also big music fans. Tell us about a few of your favorite bands/singers that we should listen to in 2012.

I haven't bought any new CDs or checked out new artists for a looong, long time but my all time favourites include...

THE SCRIPT. I cannot describe their fabulousness. They are AMAZING. I like each and every song of theirs! I loved their first album. Breakeven, We Cry and The Man Who Can't Be Moved are all great songs. As for their second album, Science and Faith, I listen to it in my car every single day! NOTHING, FOR THE FIRST TIME and SCIENCE AND FAITH are amazing. I can listen to them all day!

DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE. 'Cause it's Seth Cohen's favourite band. AND it's the best! I liked their album Plans as well as Narrow Stairs. I Will Follow You Into The Dark has got to be the most beautiful song ever.

PANIC! AT THE DISCO. For their first album A Fever You Can't Sweat Out. I loved the mini-stories and clever lyrics.

GLEE CAST. For their fun mash-ups and how most of their covers are even better than the original! They immortalised Journey's already awesome Don't Stop Believin'.

ADELE. She has a great voice and there is just so much more to all her songs. Rolling in The Deep gave me the chills.

TAYLOR SWIFT. She writes her own lyrics and I respect that! Also, her songs make a lot of sense and are from the heart. There is so much of HER in all her songs.

IMOGEN HEAP. For Speeding Cars and Hide 'n Seek. I'm transported to another world when I listen to her songs.

That's all, I think. Have a great weekend!

Fairy Tales: Love, Hate and Hubris by Manoj Kewalramani

From goodreads


If you caught up with the wolf that hounded little Red Riding Hood, can you image what he would tell you? What did the wicked and vain queen really want from Snow White? Is Beauty and the Beast a tale of love or a story on the shackles of idealisation? 

'Fairy Tales: Love, Hate and Hubris' is a poetic recap of 16 such timeless fairy tales. Delving into the lives of the antagonists and other characters that have been forever ignored, each poem is an adaptation that sheds new light on their predicaments and motivations.

The collection dwells on wide-ranging unexplored themes - from age and youth, the trappings of power, God and faith, narcissism, self-loathing, and unbridled desire, arrogance and lust, idealisation and love.

review

I'm not quite the poetry enthusiast. I read and appreciate the occasional poem and have liked novels written in verse but I've never read an entire collection of poems in one go. It's just that most times the crux of the poem eludes me. But I'm so glad I won Fairy Tales: Love, Hate and Hubris by Manoj Kewalramani in a Goodreads First-Reads giveaway. This book is never going to leave my bedside table!

First of all, the cover is amazing! I love how the wolf is looking into the Magic Mirror (The narcissistic wolf is the title given to the poem based on Red Riding Hood) and there are apple trees everywhere! Each page was so prettily decorated with more flowers and apples and the font and spacing made it very easy to read. I never thought these things would enhance or affect my reading experience but it did!

Second, the poems. I LOVED most of them. They were mostly centered on the antagonists of the fairy tales we have grown up reading and listening to. I was such a Disney fan as a kid, so I enjoyed reading the poems on Snow White's stepmother, Sleeping Beauty, Thumbelina and the insights that came along with it.

The poem that I warmed up to instantly was The narcissistic wolf which is from the perspective of the Big Bad Wolf! There were parts that made me laugh out loud. I enjoyed the point of view of the wolf and it made me look at the story of Red Riding Hood in an entirely different light!

Some of my favourite lines: "Baby you knew me, so why the shock/ My eyes, my ears, my teeth/Such a tease" and "You sigh in relief; but I am sure there's grief/For if it wasn't for me; The Big Bad Wolf/You'd be nothing more than another girl in a little red hood".

Though I didn't love it the first time, I gradually found Pea wars to be very poignant and Just a kiss felt like a fun, very modern take on the Princess and the Frog (Honey, sometimes a toad's just a toad). The beast of ideal, on the Beauty and the Beast was the perfect end to a very awesome collection of poems. It was great to hear the Beast say what he had to say!

In a nutshell, this was just the book I needed to read! Fairy tales are very big at the moment, with the TV Series Once Upon A Time (which I really need to watch) and the upcoming release of Snow White and the Huntsman. This poetic recap is smart, funny and totally adapted for today's world. I loved that I got to see a different side of characters I had not thought much about for a long time.

As a kid, things were always black and white. Snow White's stepmother was wicked and Rumpelstiltskin got what he deserved. It was great to sit back and rethink and relive those tales! I loved how in-character most of these antagonists were... I especially appreciated the way Snow White's stepmother was characterised. It was also great how most of the antagonists pointed out a single vice of the traditional protagonists' of these tales!

I'm sure to re-read this collection of poems several times this year. There is so much more I get from it every time I read it and it's such an enjoyable and fun experience every time! I would definitely recommend this and on an unrelated (or related but totally random) note, I really need to watch Once Upon A Time!

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Follow Friday #3

It's Feature and Follow My Blog #2 for me. Follow Friday is a weekly meme hosted by Parajunkee and Alison Can Read!

Question of the Week: Go count the number of unread books sitting on your shelf. How many?

25. Not much considering the numbers I've seen in other blogs but ALL of these unread books have accumulated over the past year. The year before the last, I never had enough books to read. Now I barely have the time to read. I guess it's hard to have it good both ways.

Remembrance by Michelle Madow (Transcend Time #1)

From goodreads

New Hampshire high school junior Lizzie Davenport has been reincarnated from Regency Era, England ... but she doesn't know it yet.

Then Drew Carmichael transfers into Lizzie's school at the beginning of the year, and she feels a connection to him, almost like she knows him. She can't stop thinking about him, but whenever she tries talking with him about the mysteries behind her feelings, he makes it clear that he wants nothing to do with her. Reaching him is even more difficult because she has a boyfriend, Jeremy, who has started to become full of himself after being elected co-captain of the varsity soccer team, and her flirtatious best friend Chelsea starts dating Drew soon after his arrival. So why can't she seem to get him out of her mind?

Even though Lizzie knows she should let go of her fascination with Drew, the pair of them soon find that fighting fate isn't going to be easy.

review

I remember watching Taylor Swift's music video for Love Story a few years back and thinking it was the prettiest music video ever. It was perfect for the song and I loved the thought of a present-day Romeo-Juliet romance gone right! When I heard that Remembrance by Michelle Madow was inspired by the music video of Love Story, I needed to read the book as soon as I could! 

Remembrance is about Lizzie Davenport who is reincarnated from the Regency Era, England. She has no recollection of her past life until she meets Drew at the beginning of the year. She feels like she has met Drew before, even though she has not. Not in this life, anyway. Flashes from her past life follow and it seems like history may be about to repeat...which may not be the best thing, considering how things ended the last time their paths crossed.

It sounds good, doesn't it? And it was. But it was a little too slow paced for my taste. This was both a good and a bad thing. Little things like insights gained from Lizzie's every day activities wouldn't have been possible if it hadn't been this slow paced. 

Lizzie is a fairly normal girl who cares about what grade she gets in school, genuinely cares about her friends and makes it easy for her boyfriend, Jeremy, to push her around. I know people who are a lot like Lizzie. She gets quieter, more involved in other things and at the same time more assertive over the course of the story. I love how gradually she changed. It was only towards the end, when her boyfriend made a remark about how much she had changed that I realised how different she was from the Lizzie we were introduced to at the beginning of the story.

The book also featured one of the most realistic break-up scenes I've ever read.

On the other hand, it was difficult to get what the book was about until the first fifty pages or so. Also, the the idea of reincarnation was dealt with very matter-of-factly- something I found hard to believe. Which is why it took me a long time to get past those fifty pages. I read on because I cared about the main character and had a feeling it would get better. 

Lizzie and Drew's relationship is filled with chemistry and conflict. Lizzie's feelings for Drew, gradual detachment from her boyfriend Jeremy, the flashbacks and her having to deal with the fact that Drew was her best friend's new boyfriend were portrayed very realistically. But I couldn't bring myself to care about Drew. As flawed as Jeremy was, I cared more about what happened to him. Jeremy just felt more real- in spite of how annoying and competitive he could get. With Drew, I just thought 'meh'.

I would still recommend Remembrance because Madow really knows how to write characters! The atmosphere was also very high school. I loved how pretty the cover was, how it was inspired by Love Story, the Pride and Prejudice references (YAY for those!), past life flashes and the themes of change and growing apart. There were many things I didn't like but I will still read the next in the Transcend Time series when it's out because I think the series has potential!

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

"Waiting On" Wednesday #1: The Fine Art of Truth or Dare

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Breaking The Spine that spotlights upcoming releases that seem like guaranteed awesomeness!

The Fine Art of Truth or Dare
by Melissa Jensen
Expected publication: February 16th 2012 by Speak

From goodreads:

Pretty in Pink meets Anna and the French Kiss in this charming romantic comedy

Ella is nearly invisible at the Willing School, and that's just fine by her. She's got her friends - the fabulous Frankie and their sweet cohort Sadie. She's got her art - and her idol, the unappreciated 19th-century painter Edward Willing. Still, it's hard being a nobody and having a crush on the biggest somebody in the school: Alex Bainbridge. Especially when he is your French tutor, and lessons have started becoming, well, certainly more interesting than French ever has been before. But can the invisible girl actually end up with a happily ever after with the golden boy, when no one even knows they're dating? And is Ella going to dare to be that girl?

Pretty in Pink meets Anna and the French Kiss? Count me in! And did you see the cover? What a fun cover! I'd like to own this book just for the cover! I literally cannot wait to read The Fine Art of Truth or Dare. :)

What are you waiting on?

Wither by Lauren DeStefano (The Chemical Garden #1)

from goodreads.com

What if you knew exactly when you would die?

Thanks to modern science, every human being has become a ticking genetic time bomb — males only live to age twenty-five, and females only live to age twenty. In this bleak landscape, young girls are kidnapped and forced into polygamous marriages to keep the population from dying out.

When sixteen-year-old Rhine Ellery is taken by the Gatherers to become a bride, she enters a world of wealth and privilege. Despite her husband Linden's genuine love for her, and a tenuous trust among her sister wives, Rhine has one purpose: to escape — to find her twin brother and go home.

But Rhine has more to contend with than losing her freedom. Linden's eccentric father is bent on finding an antidote to the genetic virus that is getting closer to taking his son, even if it means collecting corpses in order to test his experiments. With the help of Gabriel, a servant Rhine is growing dangerously attracted to, Rhine attempts to break free, in the limited time she has left.

review

In Wither, Lauren DeStefano introduces us to a horrifyingly morbid post-apocalyptic America. It's one of the most disturbing scenarios in dystopian fiction: when the science that was used to create the perfect generation that was devoid of cancer, AIDS and every other disease causes the next generation to go horribly wrong. Men of the later generation have only till twenty five. Women die at the age of twenty. The older "perfect" generation who caused this lives until the ripe age of 80-100 years old and they are forced to witness what they have unleashed.

The book opens with sixteen-year old Rhine Ellery being trapped in a van along with several other girls by the Gatherers. She, along with two others, Cecily who is barely fourteen and eighteen-year old Jenna are then made the brides of Linden, who lives in a large mansion with his father. Rhine could've perhaps gotten used to this life of privilege if it weren't for the twin brother left behind. She is determined to search for a way to escape the heavily guarded mansion and find her brother.

It is impossible to describe how much I enjoyed reading this book. It was one of the few books that I managed to finish in less than twenty four hours! I didn't even notice time pass as I was HOOKED. It is a disturbing world that you wouldn't want to live in but Lauren DeStefano's writing makes it morbidly beautiful. Even in the hopelessness and bleakness, the author infuses beauty and something close to hope.

But more than anything, one thing I LOVED about Wither was how complex yet real each character was. It wasn't just the central character. Every character had motives, dreams, hopes and back story. While I was rooting for Rhine to escape with Gabriel, the servant boy she falls for... There was also Linden, Rhine's husband, who tugged at my heartstrings from the very beginning.

When the plan for Rhine to escape the mansion was set in motion, I wanted to yell STAY! Because Linden needs her!

Even with Housemaster Vaughn, the manipulative father and creepy scientist, it is obvious that he cares for his son more than anything.

Another thing that unexpectedly gripped me was the bond between the sister wives- Jenna, Rhine and Cecily. They have no control over the secrets and happenings in the mansion and so they gradually turn to each other. While each had their own shortcomings, they (for the most part) had each others' back and grew close.

Despite certain cracks when it came to the world Wither is set in (everyone dying at the EXACT same age?! How?), the book felt complete. I haven't got that feeling in a long time. With most books, even when it is a great read, it seems to lack a certain something. Wither felt complete- with the attention to detail, complexities and beautifully developed characters.

I also liked the way Wither ended. There was no big cliffhanger and it didn't need a cliffhanger. It was kind of nice and fitting for the book to have an ending that was contrary to the claustrophic hopelessness that prevailed throughout the novel. And it's obvious that there is much more in store. I am already counting down the days left for Fever (The Chemical Garden #2) to release!!

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars