The blurb:

Man that cover sequence is amazing. Okay, here’s the blurb for the second book. Why the second book and not the first? Because it’s been a year since I read the first book, so this review is mostly about the last two, which I just finished.

Escape from the realm of the dead is impossible when someone there wants you back.

Seventeen-year-old Pierce Oliviera isn’t dead.

Not this time.

But she is being held against her will in the dim, twilit world between heaven and hell, where the spirits of the deceased wait before embarking upon their final journey.

Her captor, John Hayden, claims it’s for her own safety. Because not all the departed are dear. Some are so unhappy with where they ended up after leaving the Underworld, they’ve come back as Furies, intent on vengeance…on the one who sent them there and on the one whom he loves.

But while Pierce might be safe from the Furies in the Underworld, far worse dangers could be lurking for her there…and they might have more to do with its ruler than with his enemies.

And unless Pierce is careful, this time there’ll be no escape.

My Review: So full disclosure. I have a bit of bitterness toward this series and The Goddess Test series. It has nothing to do with the authors or the writers. But when I was querying Persephone, I was shot down by a few publishing houses because Abandon and The Goddess Test were coming out later that year and they didn’t want the market saturated.

But then I got published with Musa and decided when I saw Abandon in the library to give it a shot. I like Meg Cabot, I like Persephone, seemed like a win to me.

I hated it, but I don’t know if it actually had anything to do with the book or the fact that I’d been shot down for something that, sure featured a Persephone myth, but was SO fundamentally unlike my book that it seemed crazy it was rejected for fear or saturating the market. Completely different takes.

I can’t separate all that frustration enough to review the first book enough to do it justice. But I kept seeing the books around and I sort of fell in love with the covers so I picked up the next two books.

I really liked them! I don’t know if the book was actually better or if I’m just in a healthier place now, but I really enjoyed this book. Pierce didn’t seem as difficult to access to me. Before I had a hard time “getting” her, but in this book I understood her reactions, and she seemed very three dimensional. I like John, despite the borderline abusive vibe that seems so common to YA these days, but at least in his character it makes sense. His dad was an abusive control freak and these things tend to go in cycles. I like that he seemed to be fighting it, and at times called himself on it.

The plot was unique and interesting, and really other than the fact that the Underworld exists and they keep making references to Hades and Persephone, it’s not what I would consider to be a retelling of the myth. The story is completely separate and stands on its own without the myth. If they removed all references to the Underworld at all and called it something neutral like the After Life, the tone of the story would barely shift. That…wouldn’t work in my book, lol, so this is a much more original plot. The settings all felt like real places, and the secondary characters were engaging enough that I really hope she follows them around in short stories some. I’d love to get in their heads. The only issues that I had with the secondary characters is that they all seemed…REALLY unintelligent if they were good guys. It was kind of like good guy = simple, childlike, innocent reasoning skills which just didn’t jive with the fact that many of these are adults who would be complicated people with multifaceted reactions. I liked that Uncle Chris’s character was simpler than most of the kids in the book. That worked, and it made sense, and it kind of made his whole character tragic. But when the mom, dad, cemetery guy, his boyfriend, helpers in the Underworld, random strangers, bad guys, police officers, and every other character that couldn’t be outright called evil displayed the same good natured innocent simplicity, it took me out of the story.

But those are background characters, so it’s not that big of a deal. The main characters and secondary characters like Alex and Kayla were actually very interesting to me. I don’t know if I’ll pick anything else up by Cabot, her writing style, which to be clear, is fantastic, just doesn’t create the type of book I read. Doesn’t mean it’s not good, and I did end up enjoying these books, but it’s just not my thing. I’m happy in my slightly darker comfort zone.

I’m on the waiting list for the third book and am actually really looking forward to reading it.

Blurb:
Things are getting desperate for Maya and her friends. Hunted by the powerful St. Clouds and now a rival Cabal as well, they’re quickly running out of places to hide. And with the whole world thinking they died in a helicopter crash, it’s not like they can just go to the authorities for help.

All they have is the name and number of someone who might be able to give them a few answers. Answers to why they’re so valuable, and why their supernatural powers are getting more and more out of control.

But Maya is unprepared for the truths that await her. And now, like it or not, she’ll have to face down some demons from her past if she ever hopes to move on with her life. Because Maya can’t keep running forever.

Old secrets are revealed and unexpected characters make a surprising return in this stunning conclusion to Kelley Armstrong’s New York Times bestselling Darkness Rising trilogy.

My Review: Kelley Armstrong is one of my favorite authors, and YA books are my favorite genre (yes, I know there are tons of genres in YA, I like them ALL better than “grown up” books). I was SO excited when she started writing YA. I am again going to point out how much her books are like L.J Smith’s books. Much more fleshed out of course, and better quality, but you have to understand how much the expectations of the genre changed since the 80’s. Anyhow, the first trilogy reminded me of all the good stuff from L.J Smith’s Dark Visions trilogy. Chloe is my favorite female MC ever. I modeled Persephone after her a bit (just a bit, Persephone got her voice pretty quickly and it wasn’t quiet once it made itself known).

This trilogy reminded me of the first one. Great tension, good characters. Maya wasn’t as good as Chloe (to me) but she was still better than most YA narrators. Armstrong allows her characters to think rationally and react to crazy situations realistically. When Maya’s long lost bio family is thrown at her, it is a tense and awkward reunion full of angst and mixed feelings as it would be. I was super happy to see Chloe and group in this book. Overall, very well done.

Really* good book. I only had two problems. The ending was….good but a little too good and happy for what they gave up. I felt like Armstrong was trying to be a bit too realistic. What would a group of teens do against a super powerful corporation? How could they have any hope of succeeding? True, it’s a pretty big obstacle to overcome, but that’s kind of a corner that the Armstrong wrote herself into. I just think another resolution could have been found that FELT better, or at least the characters should have felt worse.

The other problem was that it was a chase novel, which would be good, in fact, for a chase novel it was GREAT. 5 stars. But the second book in the series was a chase novel too. And so was a small chunk of the first book. Actually, if you removed the chase scenes from the second book, the actual progression of plot would fit neatly in book one and three. Or more from the first half of this book could have been introduced in book 2, like one of the new characters, which would have given hum more time to develop. There was a lot in this book that could have been focused on rather than running if some of that could have been shifted to book 2. More time could have been spent on the combination of trilogy one group and trilogy two group. I wanted to see more of their interaction. A lot of that learning about their powers and researching bit could have happened in conjunction with Kit, who would have a very logical reason to know what the experiments were trying to accomplish. And maybe the ending could have progressed without needing an epilogue to tell us what happened over bulks of time.

Don’t let any of those nitpicks deter you from reading this series though. It IS really good, all six books. I really did enjoy them. I love Kelley Armstrong 🙂

The Blurb:

Days before his release from prison, Shadow’s wife, Laura, dies in a mysterious car crash. Numbly, he makes his way back home. On the plane, he encounters the enigmatic Mr Wednesday, who claims to be a refugee from a distant war, a former god and the king of America.

Together they embark on a profoundly strange journey across the heart of the USA, whilst all around them a storm of preternatural and epic proportions threatens to break.

Scary, gripping and deeply unsettling, AMERICAN GODS takes a long, hard look into the soul of America. You’ll be surprised by what and who it finds there…

This is the author’s preferred text, never before published in the UK, and is about 12,000 words longer than the previous UK edition.

The review:

When I brought draft one, chapter one of Persephone to my very first meeting with the Athens Area Writer’s group, I was asked by six different people “Have you read American Gods?”

No, I hadn’t, but because they were asking because it was a similar premise (gods existing in modern day, yet dying for want of worship) I held off until Persephone was published, just to avoid any accidental borrowing.

Then I held off because life got crazy and grad school got crazier.

Then I forgot all about American Gods until a friend picked it for book club, and WOW do I regret waiting. First of all, deeply flattered anyone saw ANY similarities between my little YA novel and ANYTHING Gaimen penned, much less this novel. Seriously, flattered. Other than the premise stated above, I don’t see much resemblance, but if I close my eyes and wish really hard, maybe one day I’ll write something to his caliber.

In this novel, the gods of old are giving a final dying gasp as they try to compete with the worship the new gods, media, technology, ect, get from, well, us. But they aren’t going down without a fight. Cue an awesome road trip with the best written, deeply flawed, least sympathetic characters ever. There are no “good” guys in this book, no team to root for, but no bad guys either. Everyone firmly wallows in the land of grey, including our protagonist Shadow, and my absolute favorite character, Laura.

American Gods reminds me a lot of a Christopher Moore novel. It has the same irreverent humor as Lamb, and the same sad ending you can see from miles away that can still surprise you, be heartbreaking, and funny at the same time. Books like this also have the strange ability to make me feel smarter than I actually am, and inspire REALLY deep conversations at book club. Read it, you’ll enjoy it 🙂

There were no surprises in Gatlin County.
We were pretty much the epicenter of the middle of nowhere.
At least, that’s what I thought.
Turns out, I couldn’t have been more wrong.
There was a curse.
There was a girl.
And in the end, there was a grave.

Lena Duchannes is unlike anyone the small Southern town of Gatlin has ever seen, and she’s struggling to conceal her power and a curse that has haunted her family for generations. But even within the overgrown gardens, murky swamps and crumbling graveyards of the forgotten South, a secret cannot stay hidden forever.

Ethan Wate, who has been counting the months until he can escape from Gatlin, is haunted by dreams of a beautiful girl he has never met. When Lena moves into the town’s oldest and most infamous plantation, Ethan is inexplicably drawn to her and determined to uncover the connection between them.

In a town with no surprises, one secret could change everything.

My Review:

I couldn’t get into this book. I tried, I kept reading it, then I’d put it down for awhile, and then I’d read it again. There were things I liked. The story was narrated by a normal human boy who was mooning over a supernatural teenage girl instead of the other way around, but I was kind of wondering why it wasn’t just narrated by Lena.

The thing I couldn’t get past, and this is a silly thing that is no reflection on the author and the writing, but I am so tired of the depiction of THAT south. I’ve lived in the South almost all my life. Heck, I went to school in Phenix City, Alabama, a city so southern that it’s spelled wrong. (Don’t tell me it’s not, their whole reason for choosing the name was to grab hold of that “out of the ashes metaphor. I took Alabama State History. I know). There was definitely some Civil War fascination, and now that I think about it, in history that was pretty much all we focused on. But that’s not the attitude of the whole south. That’s not even the attitude of a whole southern town. The kids are tired of it there too. My husband lived in a city so small that he is literally related to over half the town. They can be closed minded, sure, but not every single person. What does this add to Southern Literature? I’m not saying to ignore the bigotry, but don’t make is SO one dimensional. There is more to us.

This story, to me, seemed like it grabbed on to every negative southern stereotype in every direction. We have a black maid/cook/wise woman of the swamp who dabbles in Voodoo type magic. Rabid Southern church-goers, gossiping judgmental Daughters of the Revolution. Mysterious shut ins who get referred to as Boo-Radley. Bitchy cheerleaders. Annoying jocks. I mean really, there couldn’t have been a single other positive female role Lena’s age? Our protagonist has known these kids his entire life. Wouldn’t he know there was more to them? The only good people in the entire city are either out of towners or magic users or the MC? I couldn’t get over how offended this made me on behalf of my whole region to get into the story. I had to put the story down every time I got to a line that started like “In the South, we…” And that happened a lot.

And can we talk about the fact that one of the “evil” female characters defining characteristics was that she acted slutty? Can we sending girls the message that their sexuality is evil and can overpower an otherwise good boys judgement and make them do things they otherwise wouldn’t? Intimacy with Lena literally hurts/can kill the MC.

Lena has to be saved. This is Ethan’s mission from his very first dream. That kind of redeems itself since she is the one who saves him and she’s got powers, but there’s kind of an undertone that Lena wasn’t strong enough without him.

I loved the message of claim yourself, that there is good and evil in all of us, but I wish for once, “evil” for a woman didn’t have to be expressed by how promiscuous they act. How is THAT attitude any different than the attitude of those evil, close-minded southerners that get jabbed at so much in this book?

Blurb: What if you only had one day to live? What would you do? Who would you kiss? And how far would you go to save your own life?

Samantha Kingston has it all: looks, popularity, the perfect boyfriend. Friday, February 12, should be just another day in her charmed life. Instead, it turns out to be her last.

The catch: Samantha still wakes up the next morning. Living the last day of her life seven times during one miraculous week, she will untangle the mystery surrounding her death—and discover the true value of everything she is in danger of losing.

Review: I love Groundhog Day. I love Christmas Every Day and all those other movies that have used the Groundhog Day trope. This book was amazing, and heartbreaking. I thought Oliver did a fantastic job of showing character growth. In terms of character development, it was actually better than the Delirium series. These were real people. They felt like people I knew.

It was also heartbreaking. I thought about this book for a long time after I put it down. That’s always a good sign. The only complaint I had is I did not know when the character figured out the days were only going to repeat 7 times. It says so in the blurb, and the character moves through a stage of grief a day (cleverly done) ending on acceptance.

But and spoilers ahead ***** her acceptance made no sense given that there were days that she didn’t die. To be clear, I liked the acceptance. I loved the ending. I just felt like a scene was missing where the character figured out the rules.

You should read this book if you need a good cry. It was amazing.