City of Glass
Much the same as City of Bones and City of Ashes, but with more incest, City of Glass is compelling and an excellent companion for international travel.
reviewdate:
Jun 15 2012
isn:
978-1-4169-1430-3
Tagged with female
Succubus Blues
The best thing about this first entry in a paranormal fiction series is that the sympathetic characters are evil. The succubus, imp, vampires and demons have one angel in their posse, but the titular character doesn't think much of him. The others like the angel okay, but mostly because he's a drinking buddy.
reviewdate:
Jun 12 2012
isn:
978-0-8217-8077-0
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Lou in the Limelight
Lou and her Soul Brothers hit the road in this sequel to one of my favorite books. They are Black teen singers who are exploited by their manager, amass gambling debts, struggle with drugs, have romantic entanglements, and suffer car trouble.
reviewdate:
Jun 5 2012
isn:
0-684-16880-4
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Big Girl Small
I'm not going to tell you what this novel is about because if I'd known before I read it, I wouldn't have done so. I grabbed the bookjacketless novel off the shelf at Barnard because I loved the author's previous novel.
Quotations:
If that crappy writer had been in American Lit, then Ms. Doman would have written in the margin, "Don't use the passive voice unless there's a compelling reason." I mean, "being pursued"? By whom? I had assumed that such charges would have been pursued by me, and that they still could be. But the paper was acting like I'm not even real, just grammatically implied.
reviewdate:
May 30 2012
isn:
978-0-374-11257-8
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Divergent
In Roth's future dystopia, people are divided into five factions, based on shared aversions to particular evils (selfishness, cowardice, lies, divisiveness, and ignorance). They get to decide at age 16, whether they want to stick with the faction their parents chose or try their luck with a new one. If it were me, I'd pick Erudite, the faction that thinks that ignorance is the world's greatest problem, but it turns out that in Roth's vision, the Erudite are fascistic.
reviewdate:
May 24 2012
isn:
978-0-06-202403-9
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Violence Girl: East L.A. Rage to Hollywood Stage, a Chicana Punk Story
Alice Bag, whose name was Anglicized from Alicia in elementary school, and whose last name is a moniker from her late 70s punk band The Bags, shares her coming-of-age story in short, episodic chapters, that are not unlike punk songs. They're hard and fast and sometimes leave you wanting to slam into something. The essays are not polished, a characteristic that takes nothing away, and adds to their authenticity.
Quotations:
There was a point in our musical development where our live shows were all energy and chaos, and I felt like I'd inadvertently unleashed the wrath of Kali upon the world of punk.
One night while I was onstage, I noticed that the landscape was changing before my eyes. As I looked out into the audience, I could see that the once quirky men and women artists who prized originality above all else were being replaced by a belligerent, male-dominated mob who became anonymous, camouflaged by their homogeneous appearance. I didn't mind the belligerent part; in fact playing for a belligerent group of individuals can be quite satisfying. What I didn't like was the sameness. In the past, audiences were full of men and women in wildly colored plumage; now the black leather jacket was emerging as the uniform of the new regime.
reviewdate:
May 22 2012
isn:
978-1-936239-12-2
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Year of the Gadfly, the
A 14-year-old Edward R. Murrow enthusiast takes on a private school secret society. Iris is a sad person, as are the other two narrators, but reading the book doesn't make you feel totally blue the way some stories about depressed people do.
reviewdate:
May 18 2012
isn:
978-0-547-54859-4
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Are You My Mother? a Comic Drama
I knew Alison Bechdel was brilliant, but I didn't realize she was so smart. Her memoir about her relationship with her mother is multilayered, in that it's about psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy; literature, feminism, and aging & menopause (maybe I'm reading these last two into it a bit), as well about how Ma & Alison Bechdel did or didn't and do or don't get along.
reviewdate:
May 14 2012
isn:
978-0-618-98250-9
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Pandemonium
I mentioned in my review of Delirium, the first book in Oliver's dystopian trilogy, that I was already halfway through Pandemonium when I was writing that review. I didn't mention that in order to procure Pandemonium, I left work about 90 minutes earlier than usual (since the closest branch of NYPL that had it was closing at 7). In other words, I was hooked.
reviewdate:
May 11 2012
isn:
978-0-06-197806-7
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Delirium
As I write this, I'm halfway finished with the second book in the trilogy that begins with Delirium. My sister was right that Delirium is way better than Oliver's first book, Before I Fall.
reviewdate:
May 8 2012
isn:
978-0-06-172683-5