Title: Before I Wake (Soul Screamers #6)
Author: Rachel Vincent
Published: June, 2012 by Harlequin Teen
Thanks: Harlequin Teen, AU
Pages: 339
Rating:  
Purchase: The Book Depository

I died on a Thursday-killed by a monster intent on stealing my soul. The good news? He didn’t get it. The bad news? Turns out not even death will get you out of high school…

Covering up her own murder was one thing, but faking life is much harder than Kaylee Cavanaugh expected. After weeks spent “recovering,” she’s back in school, fighting to stay visible to the human world, struggling to fit in with her friends and planning time alone with her new reaper boyfriend. But to earn her keep in the human world, Kaylee must reclaim stolen souls, and when her first assignment brings her face-to-face with an old foe, she knows the game has changed. Her immortal status won’t keep her safe. And this time Kaylee isn’t just gambling with her own life….

Final Thoughts:
After the book that basically remade the series, I was wondering what to expect. While not packing as heavy a punch, Before I Wake still kept me enthralled with the day-to-day demon-infused lives of the characters I’ve come to enjoy. While almost all them are supernaturally charged in one way or another, it’s a wonder that when I think of these guys, I think of their personal struggles, the drama, and not the Netherworld crisis currently befalling them. Becoming less self-contained, the plots have grown across the six books, playing more on the human qualities, yet managing to do so in a way that doesn’t let the book fall into the dreaded ‘paranormal with no paranormal’ territory.

Title: Looking For Alaska
Author: John Green
Published: January, 2005 by HarperCollins
Pages: 262
Rating:  
Purchase: The Book Depository

Miles Halter is fascinated by famous last words and tired of his safe life at home. He leaves for boarding school to seek what the dying poet Francois Rabelais called the “Great Perhaps.” Much awaits Miles at Culver Creek, including Alaska Young. Clever, funny, screwed-up, and dead sexy, Alaska will pull Miles into her labyrinth and catapult him into the Great Perhaps.

Final Thoughts:
How does one review a John Green book? Seriously, what kind of addictively illicit substance is he sprinkling the pages with? After being randomly sent a copy of The Fault In Our Stars and finding myself obsessively pawing through it in a matter of hours, I went off to my library and tracked down his debut. It didn’t disappoint. He just has a way with characterization—they don’t feel like characters—they are real. Staring through Miles/Pudge’s eyes, I found similarities in myself—lots of them, actually—and immediately connected with the book. The ploy used throughout the formatting of the chapters made the twist fairly obvious, taking away most of the impact, but in spite of that, I still enjoyed it greatly. If anything, it brought a new layer to the already established dynamic, making it feel somehow more.

Title: Croak (Croak #1)
Author: Gina Damico
Published: March, 2012 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Thanks: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt via NetGalley
Pages: 311
Rating:  
Purchase: The Book Depository

Sixteen-year-old Lex Bartleby has sucker-punched her last classmate. Fed up with her punkish, wild behavior, her parents ship her off to upstate New York to live with her Uncle Mort for the summer, hoping that a few months of dirty farm work will whip her back into shape. But Uncle Mort’s true occupation is much dirtier than that of shoveling manure.

He’s a Grim Reaper. And he’s going to teach her the family business.

Final Thoughts:
This one ended up being surprisingly addictive. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting—something along the lines of a Dead Like Me clone—still, it turned out to be a little gem, just in a different way. Lex quickly progressed from her initial delinquent state featuring quite a lot of physical violence and a general defiance of reason into someone that seemed somewhat pliable. I enjoyed her antics in the beginning, but found it a relief that the book didn’t rely on her punching people for 300 pages. It goes off on a mystery solving tangent instead, backed by a town full of death and reaping, laced with plenty of humour, teen bonding—the occasion bout of underage drinking—and a mashup of board games.

Title: Hair Of The Dog
Author: Ashlyn Kane & Morgan James
Published: January, 2012 by Dreamspinner Press
Thanks: Dreamspinner Press via NetGalley
Pages: 250
Rating:  
Purchase: The Book Depository

It’s nine o’clock the morning after his father’s funeral, and Ezra Jones already knows it’s going to be a bad day. He wakes up hungover, sore, and covered in blood. Then it gets worse: the handsome and compelling Callum Dawson shows up on his doorstep claiming Ezra’s been turned into a werewolf. Ezra wants to be skeptical, but the evidence is hard to ignore.

Ezra doesn’t have a lot of time to get used to the rules Alpha Callum imposes—or the way his body responds to Callum’s dominance—as he’s busily working for the CDC to help uncover the origins of a lycan epidemic. When the sexual tension finally breaks, Ezra barely has time to enjoy it, because a new danger threatens. Someone wants Ezra for their own unscrupulous purposes and will do anything to get him.

Final Thoughts:
I raced through this one, picking it up whenever I had a spare ten or fifteen minutes—I just really got into it. It’s been a while since I’ve read a predominantly werewolf-focussed book, so that could have been part of it too. Being co-authored, I expected glaringly obvious breaks whenever the point of views shifted, but thankfully, the writing flowed together seamlessly. I did have a problem with the ease by which Ezra came to accept everything lycan. It was the sort of thing that took you out of the story, because any sane person would have been far more sceptical. Beyond a gash, there was no proof, at least nothing that the human mind wouldn’t have been able to come up with an alternate explanation for. Aside from that (and a few other things), I found the book enjoyable, and relatively easy to get into—it fits well as a solid 3-star read.

Title: City Of Lost Souls (Mortal Instruments #5)
Author: Cassandra Clare
Published: May, 2012 by Simon & Schuster
Pages: 534
Rating:  
Purchase: The Book Depository

The demon Lilith has been destroyed and Jace has been freed from her captivity. But when the Shadowhunters arrive to rescue him, they find only blood and broken glass. Not only is the boy Clary loves missing–but so is the boy she hates, Sebastian, the son of her father Valentine: a son determined to succeed where their father failed, and bring the Shadowhunters to their knees.

No magic the Clave can summon can locate either boy, but Jace cannot stay away—not from Clary. When they meet again Clary discovers the horror Lilith’s dying magic has wrought—Jace is no longer the boy she loved. He and Sebastian are now bound to each other, and Jace has become what he most feared: a true servant of Valentine’s evil. The Clave is determined to destroy Sebastian, but there is no way to harm one boy without destroying the other. Will the Shadowhunters hesitate to kill one of their own?

Final Thoughts:
This book just went on and on. Don’t get me wrong—it was definitely a solid four stars, but it did have me constantly checking if I was getting any closer to the end. I think a nice, thin book is in order to cleanse the palette after the ten plus hours I spent lying on the couch today, clutching my hardcover of City Of Lost Souls. I found improvements in this instalment over the previous incarnate, the second half of the series finally forming a distinctive plot with some actual tension. However, I found the overuse of alternating point of views detracted from my enjoyment. With over ten different perspectives, they seemed to be used more to create suspense by jarring us out of situations just as they were getting interesting, rather than to give extra insight into these other characters.

Title: December (Conspiracy 365 #12)
Author: Gabrielle Lord
Published: December, 2010 by Scholastic
Pages: 181
Rating:  
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On New Year’s Eve, Callum Ormond is chased down the street by a crazed man with a deadly warning: They killed your father. They’ll kill you. You must survive the next 365 days! Cal has one month to go, but the secrets are mounting higher and time is not on his side. The answers lie hidden thousands of miles away, but with friends and family at his side, Cal’s determined to reveal the truth or die trying …

Final Thoughts:
I finally made it to the end of this twelve-book series. There’s still Revenge, the epilogue book, but as for the main plotline of the series, everything has been pretty much wrapped up. Being so short, I whipped my way through these last three instalments at the same time, hence the lack of a review for the previous two months. October had some cool spy tricks as they attempted a bank heist, and also gave us some more info on Winter’s story, but again, didn’t move the plot a whole lot for Callum. November was just as bad at progressing things—the only thing memorable in that book was the revelation behind Callum’s double—and again, that wasn’t much of a shocker. December made up for its predecessors’ shortcomings, packing the gang up and sending them off towards a twist-riddled, action-full finale.

Title: Red Glove (Curse Workers #2)
Author: Holly Black
Published: April, 2011 by Margaret K. McElderry
Pages: 263
Rating:  
Purchase: The Book Depository

The cons get craftier and the stakes rise ever higher in the riveting sequel to White Cat. After rescuing his brothers from Zacharov’s retribution and finding out that Lila, the girl he has loved his whole life, will never, ever be his, Cassel is trying to reestablish some kind of normalcy in his life. That was never going to be easy for someone from a worker family that’s tied to one of the big crime families–and whose mother’s cons get more reckless by the day.

But Cassel is coming to terms with what it means to be a transformation worker, and he’s figuring out how to have friends.Except normal doesn’t last very long. Soon Cassel is being courted by both sides of the law and is forced to confront his past–a past he remembers only in scattered fragments, and one that could destroy his family and his future. Cassel will have to decide whose side he wants to be on, because neutrality is not an option. And then he will have to pull off his biggest con ever to survive….

Final Thoughts:
Over a month. I spent over a month picking up and putting this one back down. It just didn’t hook me the same way that White Cat did. While continuing directly on from the previous cliffhanger, a lot of the intrigue had deflated from the plot. I couldn’t find myself interested enough to really want to read this one. I enjoyed all of the characters, Cassel’s sneaky ways, and especially getting to learn more about the side characters—but in a way, that was also what brought things down for me. The mystery, the mob, and the paranormal aspects of the curse working became ancillary to the Lila/Cassel, Sam/Deneca drama.