Feature and Follow Friday #3

Feature and Follow is a fun blog hop hosted by Parajunkee's View and Alison Can Read. It's really easy to participate, and it's a great way to meet new blog friends! Go check it out here. 

This week's question: Books are turned into movies all the time! Turn it around. What movie would make a great book?

Hmmm...this is a hard one. I'm a bit of a movie junkie, but I've never really thought about it before. Martin Socrecese's The Departed is one of my favourites, so I'll go with that one. It'd be cool with alternating perspectives, what with all the spying and undercover stuff going on. We'd get a whole different look into the characters' heads.

What do you guys think? Leave a comment so I can go check your posts out!

Stacking the Shelves #1

Stacking the Shelves is a meme hosted by Tynga's Reviews. You can learn more about it here! It features books I've received throughout the week, whether they're physical books or ebooks I bought, borrowed, received, etc.

Without further ado here are the books I've somehow acquired this past week:

Received for Review:

(An eARC from NetGalley)

Won:

 (Thanks to the awesome authors over at The Apocalypsies for their YAmazing Race!)

I've heard a lot about Venom on the web so I'm excited to read that, and Freakling looks awesome! Pantomime looks really cool too. So what books did you all get?

Save a Word Saturday

The lovely bloggers over at The Feather and the Rose have started a cool blog hop! It's dedicated to saving old and archaic words from disappearing into the dust of history. You can sign up and learn more about it here!

Here are the rules:

1.  Pick an old word you want to save from extinction to feature in your blog post. It really must be an old word, not just a big one. We are trying to save lovely archaisms, not ugly giants (for example, "Dihydrogen Monoxide" is not an acceptable choice). Luciferous Logolepsy is a great database of lovely words, if you're having trouble coming up with something on your own.

2. Provide a definition of your word. Use your word in a sentence (or even a short paragraph) vaguely related to the theme we have chosen this week. You may also add visual or musical interpretations of your word or your sentence. In fact, add anything that moves your creative spirit.

3. Use as many of the words as you can on the people in your life. Do leave us a note or add something to your own post to let us all know what wonderful old word you whipped out to befuddle your friends and relations.

 This week's theme is:

Snow

My word is Aurated

          adj. gilded

And here is my wonderful sentence:

Alice woke up early that morning. The cold seeped in from outside and wrapped her in thin tendrils. She jumped up and raced the window, her toes curling up as they touched the cold floor. The front yard had been covered with a blanket of white, aurated with glittering snow and untouched by anything alive.

(Just a random note, my original word was "Tarchanjan", from Old High German. It meant "to hide, to conceal" but I can't speak German, so I was unable to use it in a sentence :(  It's a cool word, though. It's theorized that it's where we get our word "dark" from, which is originally from Old English.)

Feature and Follow Friday

Feature and Follow is a fun blog hop hosted by Parajunkee's View and Alison Can Read. It's really easy to participate, and it's a great way to meet new blog friends! Go check it out here. 

This week's Question: Do you mind books with similar ideas to other books? Similar concepts, backgrounds, retellings or pulled-to-publish fanfic? 

Hmmm, this is a hard one. I'm one of those people that believes that there's not really anything new under the sun. But it's not really the basic idea that's important, it's what you do with it. Basically, I don't mind when an idea is similar to another, as long as it's spun in a different way. There were stories about magical boarding schools long before J.K. Rowling came along, what made her so awesome was that she managed to do something entirely unprecedented with the idea. Do something crazy, and new and completely awesome with an old idea and I won't hate you for it, in fact it might even make me love you all the more! As for retellings-- I love retellings, especially fairy tale ones (however, this may be in part due to my love of fairy tales in general. So bring me ALL THE FAIRY TALE RETELLINGS).

Published fanfic *sigh*. This is a complicated topic. I, quite adamantly, find nothing wrong with fanfiction. The fanfic writer isn't making any profit of another author's work, and so it doesn't negatively impact anyone in any way. And for that matter, there is a lot of beautifully written fanfiction out there (sometimes it's just a little hard to find). Now, when a fanfiction story is re-vamped and slated for publication, things get a little bit tricky. If the story is a completely different one, where there are similar themes or origins (like Cassandra Clare's Immortal Instrument series) that's fine. But when you get a story where basically only the names and some slight aesthetic details have been changed (like another story I won't name here), that's when you get into dangerous territory.

So, in short (even though this wasn't short at all), similar ideas are fine with me. As long as the authors do something cool with them.

What are your thoughts on the question? Leave a comment so I can go check out all your awesome posts!

The Year I Turned 18 Blogfest!

Cally Jackson is celebrating the release of her YA novel The Big Smoke! Hooray for her writerly wonderness!

She decided that to celebrate the release she was going to host a really neat blogfest. Since the two main characters of her book both turn 18 during the book, all participating bloggers are writing about the year they turned 18! (Or, if they haven't reached 18 yet, what they hope it will be like.)

You can find out more about the blogfest here, and add the book to Goodreads here.

So without further ado, here is my post:


When I was 14 years old, my family packed up our house in Virginia, hopped on a 24-hour plane ride and moved to Singapore.

By about the first week, I knew what I wanted to do for my birthday: eat at Morton's steak house, the nicest and most delicious steakhouse on the island. Unfortunately, the food there costs a small fortune.

My parents adamantly refused.  "Maybe next year," they said, "for your 16th birthday."

Well 16 came and went, and so did 17. By the time my 18th birthday approached, I had turned into a Morton's steak-craving zombie monster.

"But moooom! I just want a steak! It's all that I want in the whooole worrrllddddd."

Somewhere along the way, I managed to convince them that this would be a wonderful coming of age present. My parents decided that we would go out to eat on Saturday night, even though my birthday wasn't actually until Monday. They planned it all out-- my dad would take me to the restaurant bar before dinner started,and buy me my first-ever legal alcoholic drink. (In Singapore, the legal drinking age is 18. However, this does nothing to stop the crazy partying that goes on. Not that I was ever a participant of said parties...)

So, dressed in beautiful clothes, we walked through the fancy hotel lobby, over the fancy bridge of the fancy koi pond, and ascended the hotel in the fancy elevator.

Morton's bar was closed. They weren't open on Saturdays.

Feeling a tiny bit dejected (and at least for me, a tiny bit nervous, as I had never ordered an alcoholic drink before) we walked across to another bar where I nervously ate a bunch of snack mix and my dad ordered me my first ever "legal" Cosmopolitan.

The bartender didn't even look at me with a single ounce of suspicion on his face. (I came to the conclusion that this was because I was a master of deception. Clearly this meant I should become a spy.)  I felt so freaking sophisticated there are no words to describe it. I was in a bar, with a real Cosmo in a super fancy-sophisticated Cosmo glass, and I only tripped over my heels once and also there was A KOI POND IN THE LOBBY and the Cosmo was surprisingly good and the bartender was cute and I turned 18 in two days and everything was awesome.

And that is the story of my first ever kind-of-maybe-sort-of-not-really-legal alcoholic drink on my almost-18th birthday. It was a good birthday.

So happy book-birthday to Cally! And happy (belated) Halloween, everyone!

Do you guys have any cool 18th birthday stories to share?

Feature and Follow Friday

Feature and Follow is a fun blog hop hosted by Parajunkee's View and Alison Can Read. It's really easy to participate, and it's a great way to meet new blog friends! Go check it out here. This week they're featuring two lovely blogs: Carmen Jenner and The YA Bookworm Blogger. Go follow them!

This week's Question: What writing device or trick most irritates you when reading a book? For example, if an author employs an omnipotent narrator that is sometimes considered bad form.

In my review of Blackwood I mention how I hate insta-love (thankfully that book was mercifully free of it). And I have come to a conclusion: It's not necessarily fast-moving relationships that bother me; it's when the love story is presented as the Truest Love That Ever Was. No one else comes close, these two characters are freaking Romeo and Juliet reborn, that's how magnificent their love is.

Gag me.

I think the problem is it's often used as an excuse to not write a real relationship. It's like the author thinks that if they tell me this is Deep Love, I'll believe it, and they won't need to spend the time developing a believable connection between the characters. But that plan always backfires. It makes me want to release a rabid ninja unicorn who will then stomp on the supposed True Love with its magic hooves until the True Love disappears and stops making me mad. Okay, rant is over.

So what's your FF? What annoys you in a book? Tell me in the comments so I can follow all of you totally awesome people! (Way to sound like a stalker, Hannah...)

  

Book Review: BLACKWOOD

It's time for a book review! Today's review is on Gwenda Bond's Blackwood. (I'm sorry it took so long to finish this book. I got on a huge knitting kick and let's face it, it's practically impossible to knit while also trying to turn the pages of a book.)

(I love the snake. And the actual cover feels all silky and soft. Just saying.)

Here's the summary from Goodreads:

On Roanoke Island, the legend of the 114 people who mysteriously vanished from the Lost Colony hundreds of years ago is just an outdoor drama for the tourists, a story people tell. But when the island faces the sudden disappearance of 114 people now, an unlikely pair of 17-year-olds may be the only hope of bringing them back.

Miranda, a misfit girl from the island’s most infamous family, and Phillips, an exiled teen criminal who hears the voices of the dead, must dodge everyone from federal agents to long-dead alchemists as they work to uncover the secrets of the new Lost Colony. The one thing they can’t dodge is each other.

Blackwood is a dark, witty coming of age story that combines America’s oldest mystery with a thoroughly contemporary romance.

  

I really enjoyed Blackwood. It was a lot of fun to read and I thought the concept was neat and original. The story follows Miranda Blackwood and Phillips Rawling-- two teenagers forced to deal with crazy undead alchemists and ancient curses when 114 people go missing on modern-day Roanoke Island.

Miranda was a great main character. Her life kind of sucked, but she never fell into self-pity. Instead of whining about how awful everything was, she moved on with her life and dealt with her problems. (Often with the help of nerdy television shows). She was a very likeable, geeky teenage girl-- the kind of person I'd like to be friends with.

As for the other main character, what can I say about Phillips Rawling besides HE'S WONDERFUL AND I LOVE HIM AND YOU SHOULD LOVE HIM TOO. He and Miranda were both weird in all the best ways, and I think YA needs some more love interests like him-- guys who know who Elena Gilbert is but who can also break out of jail.

I've seen a couple of people talking about how the insta-love between Miranda and Phillips annoyed them. But honestly, as someone who wants to claw her eyes out at the thought of insta-love, I didn't see much of it. I think it's because even though their relationship developed quite quickly, it was never presented as true love. They were simply two compatible people with a connection who end up crushing on each other. And sometimes that kind of thing happens pretty fast in real life. I thought it was kind of refreshing that I wasn't reading about a couple who's true love was better than all true loves that came before it.

The plot moves along at a very quick pace. Bond keeps the action going, but never lets it feel episodic. However, my one complaint is that I think the plot could have been a little more well-developed. The book, while coming in at 325 pages, feels a little short. I know this will sound weird, but I think it could have used a little more info-dumping. (Whoa...I can't believe I just said that.) I don't mean Bond needs to throw tons of information at the reader, I just think the story never slowed down enough to offer a solid explanation. While I liked the book, and the storyline, I still can't tell you why everything happened.

So, in short, Blackwood was a fun and fast read (well, fast if you aren't trying to knit at the same time). The main characters were quirky and interesting to read about. Their relationship has become one of my favourites in YA (I'm telling you, Miranda and Phillips are frakking adorable.) And plus, the book is filled to the brim with nerdy pop-culture references! What more could you ask for! So go pick up a copy!

Verdict: 3 Stars