lower east side librarian

As I mentioned in my previous review, I was saved from the unimaginable discomfort of having nothing to read on the 8-hour overnight bus ride home from Pittsburgh. My savior was Kelly McElroy, who as I tweeted via BarnLib has a reading life I'm jealous of--serving on ALA/GLBT round table's gay bibliography posse and being in a celebrity memoir book club. She gave me first A Year Straight and the next day Jennifer Baumgardner's new book. (Kelly must be a mad-fast reader, something I think would be more of a blessing than a curse, unless you had, like Kelly, and endless supply of gay books to read.) Azzoni's confessions are a pretty quick read, so maybe Kelly is neither blessed nor cursed by speedreading.

The title character is half-vampire and half-mage, who was trained to be an assassin by the former and told nothing of her mage side.

Before I get into my review I need to whine about a weird glitch in NYPL's hold request system. I had a copy of Clockwork Prince checked out from Seward Park, which has a great teen section, btw, and sadly it came due before I was finished. The library system holds 67 copies of the book and is currently listing 27 available, which is probably similar to the number that were available when I attempted to renew the copy I had checked out. I say "attempted" to renew, because the system wouldn't let me. Since there were two or so holds on the book at the time, I was unable to renew the copy I had in hand, even though there were at least twenty copies on shelves in NYPL's circulating collection, including another copy at Seward Park. In order to continue reading the book, I returned the copy I couldn't renew to Seward Park and picked up their other copy, which was right on the shelf where it was supposed to be. Wtf, NYPL?

It might be time for me to stop reading so much romancey paranormal fiction. I'm becoming impatient with the bad writing. I just tried to get into a literary novel, and I couldn't, so I guess I just have to be choosier about the genre fiction I pick up. So yeah, The Vampire Shrink, while not terrible, tempted me to put it down on several occasions.

This book is weird. It's by an important writer, but it's got a do-nothing cover, a klutzy title and a more typos than usually get past editors. And it's not like it's a small publisher. Simon & Schuster should be able to afford good art and copy editing, right? But also, the novel itself is strangely lightweight. I think Garcia hasn't found her teen audience groove. And maybe Simon & Schuster hasn't found their teen imprint groove yet either.

Part 4 in the Mortal Instruments series is compelling like the rest of them, but the ending annoyed me, and that the whole thing seems more focused on the romance than the paranormal bugs me, too. That's not to say you shouldn't read it.

"Alpha and Omega" is the first in this collection of paranormal romance novellas, and the only one I cared for. I could get into "Inhuman" and "Mona Lisa Betwining" at all, but I did read about half of "Buying Trouble" before giving up. A & O, while yeah, a romance, has more going for it than just kissery. The protagonist is a semi-recent wolf whose pack hasn't done right by her, and as it turns out has been behaving badly enough to attract the attention of the head werewolf in charge, who sends his hunky Flathead tribe son to bust some heads.

Insurgent starts off immediately where Divergent ended, so if for some reason you read Divergent first, you're kind of hosed. Even having read Divergent fairly recently, I couldn't always remember who everyone was in the first half of the book, and then in the second half I didn't always follow the action so easily. Sometimes authors get so caught up in their characters and stories that they forget that you don't know and love their children as much as you do. Don't get me wrong; Insurgent is a great read, but it does have that middle-of-a-trilogy thing going on, where even at 525 pages, it's really just a vehicle to get you from the beginning to the end.

I'm claiming credit for this one even though I didn't finish it. I got more than halfway through it before deciding it wasn't worth investing any more time in. I suspect Reichs's writing gets better as she progresses through the 20+ book series, but in the first installment of the inspiration for TV's Bones the author is trying too hard--to be funny and clever. My favorite aspect of the novel and character is the clear feminism and gender consciousness.

It's weird how writers can be both original and pedestrian at the same time, isn't it? The idea for Hate List, the story of the surviving girlfriend of a school shooter, is the original part. Probably in real life a lot of people would have a hard time forgiving her or wanting to know what's going on in her head, and would really not want to know how she still loves her dead boyfriend. But that's really good, true, confounding, conflicted stuff. The pedestrian, or maybe just annoying part is how she names people: a principal named Angerson, a bully named Bruter, and the worst, a shrink named Hieler. Ugh! She even talks about the names in the Q & A at the end, how she loves them. Whatever, they didn't totally destroy the reading experience for me. :)