Library Thing Tuesday (11)

Today's topic: Recommendations. Do you use LT's recommendations feature? Have you found any good books by using it? Do you use the anti-recommendations, or the "special sauce" recommendations? How do you find out about books you want to read?

I have glanced at the recommendations, but I haven't invested any time in the feature yet. I really should one of these days. The anti-recommendations said I should steer clear of a bunch of christian books - even after I added quite a few to my library. I used to find most of my books through friends or my browsing people's lists on amazon. I also found YA or children's books through the publisher's catalogs that I'd pick up at book fairs. Since about April, I've found most of my books through people's book review blogs. And I have bought a couple of books that were in the Early Review program that I didn't get chosen for. My wishlist keeps growing and growing...


**** Contests ****

The Book Vault is giving away a copy of Francey by Martin Dubow. Enter by July 31st.

Dar is giving away a copy of The Host! Enter by July 24th.

Another chance to win the 14 books from Hachette at bookroomreviews! Enter by August 9th. I AM going to win these one of these days!!

Book Review: Oh. My. Gods. by Tera Lynn Childs

As a talented long distance runner, Phoebe practically worships her Nikes. When her mother marries a Greek after 8 days of courtship and decides to move with her from Southern CA to a secret Greek isle, Phoebe finds out that Nike and all the other Gods are real – and their numerous descendents are her new neighbors and classmates. All Phoebe cares about is making the grade and winning races so she can get a scholarship to USC. But how is she going to do that as a nothos when everyone around her has supernatural powers and most of the school seems to hate her?

I am a big fan of Greek mythology so the concept intrigued me and the “advance praise” on the back cover from the Gods (“This novel will wind up on many keeper shelves – or there will be thunderbolts to pay” – Zeus) made me laugh out loud. I had a hard time with the first chapter though. Everything just happened so fast. One minute she’s winning a race at a USC cross country summer camp and the next her mother tells her they’re moving overseas. Just like that they’ve packed two suitcases and are on a plane. WHAT?! Who does that?! To me that was even more unbelievable than finding out the Greek gods really exist.

But once they’re settled on the island, the novel finds its flow and it’s a super fun read. I thought it was clever that even at god school you have your cliques – the cheerleaders are descendants of Aphrodite, the jocks of Ares, the nerds of Hephaestus and so on. Phoebe has to deal with the machinations of her evil stepsister Stella and her Hera buddy Adara while nursing her crush on bad boy runner Griffin. Fortunately, she is befriended by Nicole and Troy – two characters I would have liked to have read more about.

One of the major themes of the book was that sometimes change happens quickly – and you can embrace it and adapt to it, or you can stay bitter and stuck in the past. In that context, I can sort of see the first chapter in a new light, and have to admit that as a device it fits what the author is trying to convey.

Better get it, lest Zeus smite you!

Joy of Spooking Winners!

Random.org has spoken! Congrats to:

Ruth

allisonmariecat

Sommer

Please contact me (e-mail address in the sidebar) with your mailing address in the next 48 hrs or I will have to award your prize to someone else!!

PJ Bracegirdle would love it if you'd post your review on his Facebook page (or anywhere else) after you've read it!

Reviewer Profile: Me!

Head on over to Reviewer X's blog to read a reviewer profile/interview she did with me. It's such an honor to be featured on her fantastic book reviewing blog. Leave her lots of comments!

Book Review: Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer

Apocalyptic stories like this one always get me thinking about which modern convenience I would miss the most. While Internet access would certainly be up there, I shudder to think about having to live without long, hot showers. How about you? What would you miss the most?

After an asteroid hits the moon, knocking it out of its orbit and causing catastrophic tsunamis and volcano eruptions, Miranda most misses just living a normal teenage life - one in which she’d have swim practice after school, could have a real romance with classmate Dan, and could go to McDonald’s whenever she wanted. As conditions get worse, Miranda sees her world shrink ever smaller until eventually she’s huddled around a wood stove with her mother and two brothers, completely snowed in and slowly running out of supplies.

Survival stories are inherently interesting, but as a seasoned reader of these types of books, I found this to be particularly benign. The only semi-shocking revelation was that a pastor was letting his congregation starve to death by telling them that God wanted them to give their food supplies to him. It would be a excellent book to ease into the genre – a sort of apocalyptic 101 if you will – especially since it ends on a note of hope. Rabid fans might want to look elsewhere.

I’d be interested to see how the sequel “The Dead and the Gone” deals with the same subject from the point of view of someone in one of the more drastically affected regions. From the title, it looks like there might in fact be a bit more at stake.

Book Review: Millicent Min: Girl Genius by Lisa Yee

Ok, this middle grade book came out in 2004, but I am just getting around to it now. Just wanted to mention that I love the concept, love the humor and love Millicent as a character. She's an 11 year old genius about to start her senior year of high school, but she's pretty clueless when it comes to social situations and doesn't have any friends besides her grandmother. When her mother makes her join a summer volleyball league, she meets Emily and finally gets her first friend by neglecting to mention any of the genius stuff. How long will she be able to keep up the charade?

Here's one of my favorite quotes:

"Oh, sure Emily has a few flaws. But don't we all. For example, I am lax about cleaning out my three-hole punch."

I'll have to remember that at my next interview instead of using the standard "I am a perfectionist" line when they ask you where your weaknesses lie.

Anyway, great book!

Book Review: The Specialists: Down to the Wire and Author Interview Shannon Greenland

In today’s consolidated post, you can find out the winner of Book 1 in the Specialists series, enjoy an interview with author Shannon Greenland that focuses on Book 2: Down to the Wire, and read my mini-review of it.

And the winner of Model Spy is …
Writer’s Block Reviews! Congrats! Send me your address so I can pass it on to Shannon. Didn’t win this week? No worries, you are still entered to win the grand prize of all 4 books. Enter today’s contest for a signed copy of Down to the Wire to improve your chances of winning!

Interview with Shannon

Can you give us a quick summary of book 2, Down to the Wire?

Wirenut has an uncanny knack for breaking into the most elaborate security systems. When a wealthy entrepreneur hires the Specialists to recover a stolen neurotoxin, Wirenut is perfect for the job. But there's a catch. The computer-coded hints that will lead to the neurotoxin are hidden in a few precious museum artifacts. Enter GiGi and her computer-code genius ability. But when GiGi and Wirenut begin their mission, they find themselves up against life threatening obstacles....

The security systems Wirenut breaks into sound really complex. How did you go about writing those scenes? What kind of research did you do?

I did research on security and electronics. I mixed and matched and threw in my own imagination to make up the unique systems in the book.

Why did you choose to use fake foreign countries and languages instead of real ones?

For complete creative fun and freedom.

Is all of GiGi's coding made up too?

Same as my answer above. I researched, mixed and matched, and threw in my own imagination.

This time, Wirenut and GiGi pose as tourists. Do you have any exciting upcoming trips planned?

Let’s see... I’m going camping on the Gulf of Mexico in August. But my highlight for the year will be my Christmas trip to Hawaii!


Review of Down to the Wire

(see summary above – interview question 1) GiGi (also known as Kelly, our model spy) and Wirenut make a great team for this latest exciting mission to a gorgeous Mediterranean country. This time around, they face even more danger and the villain is even more cunning – which makes for an exciting, twisty read. Wirenut’s background is tragic but fascinating and has a surprising link to how the mission plays out. And although the main action of the story is resolved by book’s end, we are left with a whopper of a cliffhanger regarding the connection between GiGi and her romantic interest David.

A great addition to the series that could also conceivably be read as a standalone spy novel.

Now get commenting for a chance to win this week's signed book and be entered (or get an extra entry if you commented last week) for the grand prize drawing of all 4 books!

Library Thing Tuesday (10)

This was the question for our 10th Tuesday:





Book-swapping. Do you do it? What site(s) do you use? How did you find out about them? What do you think of them? Do you use LT's book-swapping column feature for information on what to swap? Do you participate in any of the LT communities that discuss bookswapping, like the Bookmooch group for example?



My answer:


I don't swap books in any official capacity. If I love a book or it's on a topic I think I might want to revisit later, I keep it on my shelf and loan it own often. If I liked a book, but not enough to keep it, I will offer it to my friends. If I don't know of anyone who would like it, then I donate it or sell it. I suppose I could swap some of these, but since I somehow have to get the books back to Germany eventually, it seems like more hassle than it's worth. I think if I lived full-time in the states it might be of more interest to me.



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I haven't had an Emmy picture in a while, so here's one D caught of her yawning. What a little monster.

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Want to hear about a couple more contests going on?

The Story Siren is having a Twilight Series contest. There are a bunch of different prizes including all 4 books in the series. Enter by August 2. She also mentions that you can read Savvy by Ingrid Law as an e-book this week by clicking here. This is Penguin children's lead title this season, so check it out.

IB Teens is offering a signed copy of The Summoning by Kelley Armstrong if you comment here by July 31st. Looks like the start of an exciting teen series!

Two more chances to win those 14 books from Hachette - over at Bookshipper's blog (leave a comment by July 31st) or at Musing of a literary feline's blog.

Enter Boston Bibliophile's contest by July 22nd to win an ARC of Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen.

Rachel is letting you pick any two books to win in her contest. Enter by July 30th.

Tripping towards Lucidity is giving away Blood Roses by Francesca Lia Block. She'll draw a winner on July 25th.

Bookish Ruth is giving away a copy of First Daughter by Eric Van Lustbader. She'll pick a winner on July 30th.

And don't forget to enter my contests for Joy of Spooking and the Specialist Series!

Book Review: No One You Know by Michelle Richmond

Over at the Barnes & Noble First Look Book Club discussion of Stewart O’Nan’s Songs for the Missing, quite a few people, including me, said they would have liked to have seen the book written from the first person perspective of the younger daughter Lindsay. I had that in mind when I read No One You Know because both books deal with a family coming to terms with the loss of an elder daughter. In the case of No One You Know, the elder daughter is Lila, a math genius, and the story is told by her sister Ellie 20 years after the tragic event.

“A story has no beginning or end. Arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead,” Author Richmond writes. Ellie’s life has been shaped by her sister’s unsolved murder, and the “true crime” account of it written by a professor, Andrew Thorpe, she once intimately trusted. That book revealed Lila’s math professor and secret married lover as the perp. But Ellie begins to question everything she thought was true when a chance meeting in an unlikely place yields Lila’s notebook that she used to jot down mathematical equations, leading her on a search to discover what really happened that fateful night.

I read an ARC of this novel which describes the book like this: “A riveting family drama about the stories we tell – a novel of astonishing depth and beauty, at once heartbreaking, provocative, and impossible to put down.” Jacket copy often exaggerates, but in this case I wholeheartedly agree with it. I will go out and buy a copy of this for my “keeper” bookshelf and I fully expect that this will appear on my year-end best list. Let me tell you why.

The narrative is very much about how little twists of fate can alter our life stories. For example, if Ellie had let Lila take the car that Wednesday, she might still be alive, Ellie’s parents might still be together, Ellie might be married and have kids by now. Stories and the endless variations of storytelling are themes in counterpoint with the very strict and exact nature of mathematics. I loved how all the pieces of the story fit together in the end like a perfect mathematical proof.

Thorpe once said in one of the classes Ellie attended that “in order for a book to be really good, it’s not enough to develop the major characters. The minor ones, too, have to be distinct. When readers close the book, they should remember everyone who walks across the page.” I do.

There is a smattering of mathematical talk that went way over my head, but I still found it fascinating. Ellie also has a very interesting job. Due to her great sense of smell, she works as a coffee cupper, looking for great coffee beans all over the world. Having learned a lot about fruit (thanks to a job I did for Passina) and pistachios (thanks to a lobbyist I met at a party on Capitol Hill last week), I really enjoyed learning more about coffee.

Extremely highly recommended!

"A story does not only belong to the person who was telling it. It belongs, in equal measure, to the one who was listening."

Book Review: Unwind by Neal Shusterman

I think I have made it pretty clear that I enjoy reading a good dystopia novel, so when I read Reader Rabbit’s review of Unwind, I got very excited. It is similar in theme to one of my all time favorite books - Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go - though the characters in Unwind refuse to simply accept their fate.

For different reasons, Connor, Risa, and Lev are all set to be “unwound” – meaning their organs will be harvested and passed on, allowing them to continue to “live” in a “divided state” and contribute something more valuable to society than they ever would be able to in their "undivided state". The idea of unwinding is something that grew out of the Heartland War – brutally fought between Pro-lifers and Pro-choicers (it seems then that it only exists in the US, though its geographical extension is not explicitly addressed). The two sides compromise in The Bill of Life which declares that a person’s life cannot be legally terminated from conception to age thirteen. If you don’t prove your worth by age 13 (or if you mess up before you hit 18), your parent or guardian can sign an unwind order.

Conner’s parents want him unwound because he’s a troublemaking teen with a temper – the type that might get sent to military camp in our society and come out of it a respected leader.

Risa is an orphan living in a state home, and though she’s a gifted pianist, she becomes the victim of a tight budget and a system all too eager to capitalize on organ donation.

Lev is a tithe, the 10th child of a religious family, and he’s been raised knowing he’s been singled out for the honor of “serving God”.

When the three collide, they set off on an adventure that takes them to a neighborhood where a baby has just been “storked” (unfit mothers denied abortions now just dump their unwanted babies on strangers’ doorsteps), through an “underground railroad” made up of Bill of Life dissenters, to the “Graveyard” (a place run by an enigmatic former general for unwinds to lay low until their 18th birthday rolls around) and ultimately to a “harvest camp”.

This is a novel where the frenetic pace only lets up long enough to offer up a thought provoking tidbit. I liked how well-rounded the characters were – there were no stock villains (except perhaps for the juvey cops – though you could argue they just had a job to do) – and even “bad” characters like the volatile and power-hungry fellow Unwind Roland, are painted with some sympathetic shades. “Good” characters do “bad” things. No one gets off lightly.

Often shocking and for the most part compelling, this one will keep you guessing and get you thinking.