The Blurb:

Blood can both wound and heal . . .

Willa is lucky: She has a loving blended family that gets along. Not all families are so fortunate. But when a bloody crime takes place hundreds of miles away, it has an explosive effect on Willa’s peaceful life. The estranged father she hardly remembers has murdered his new wife and children, and is headed east toward Willa and her mother. Under police protection, Willa discovers that her mother has harbored secrets that are threatening to boil over. Has everything Willa believed about herself been a lie? But as Willa sets out to untangle the mysteries of her past, she also keeps her own secret—one that has the potential to tear apart all she holds dear.

My Review: I love Susan Beth Pfeiffer. I still think “Life as We Knew it” was one of the best middle grade books I’ve ever read. This book wasn’t on level with that, but it was still good and still intense and also really creepy. Pfeiffer does a wonderful job at making adult characters who have understandable motives into people you can *really* hate. Seriously. I hated every adult in this book and most of the kids. I hate how insensitive everyone in the story is. I hate how high and mighty everyone is. I completely get Willa’s mental state in this book because if I was stuck in her life and couldn’t lash out at the people who deserved it, I’d go crazy too.

There’s a scene at the end that sort of explains everything that was well written, and very chilliing, but was also kind of a cop-out tell for the author. Willa imagines what happened from the POV of her father. She sees the murders. But not in a like “I’m having nightmares and imagining these horrible murders because it’s all I’ve thought about lately” but in a very “this IS what happened. And I know this IS what happened because his blood flows through my veins.” It was a neat scene, but as a writer it pulled me right out of the story because it was such a blatant authorial intrusion that I think could have been included in a more natural way, OR if we’re going for supernatural abilities experienced by Willa as a series of nightmares that she doesn’t understand the meaning of that get much creepier when she realizes that’s what really happened.

The plot was tense and kept moving, the characters, while hatable, were fully developed, and I really enjoyed the book despite the sick feeling it left me at. Pfeiffer is *really* good at gritty realism.

The Blurb:

Legacy Kore is an average seventeen year old with your basic insane crush on the hottest guy in school… rather Adin Shepard was the hottest guy in school before he graduated a couple of weeks ago. Now it’s summer vacation and she’s not sure when she’ll get to see him again. Until he shows up at her surprise seventeenth birthday party. Cue saliva glands–it’s time to drool.

But her giddiness is cut short when her guardian delivers an emotional blow, telling Legacy her mother hadn’t died when she was baby, but that she’d left for Legacy’s protection all those years ago. After the initial shock, she expects some story about how her mother was in the Witness Protection Program or something else just as crazy, but when she’s told that her mother is a Greek Goddess and that Legacy is changing into one too, she thinks her guardian needs a trip to a mental hospital. Legacy a goddess? Um, yeah. Right. And her BFF is the Easter Bunny.

While trying to make sense out of something that was impossible to believe, Adin asks Legacy out on a date. She is thrilled that her fantasy might become a reality, but when she meets the new guy in town, River, she discovers everything isn’t always as it seems, and the legacy she wants just might not be the legacy she is destined to have.

My review:

We heard from Mrs. Muse last Monday for a guest Mythology Monday, and I wanted to take the opportunity to follow up with a review for this fun, free read.

This is absolutely the most unique take I’ve read on a Greek myth. Instead of being the actual gods, or reincarnations of gods, these gods clone themselves, and their little clones are given the opportunity to ascend to full divinity. I also liked that there were monsters in the story. This author is also very good at extracting every possible iota of sexual tension from a situation and getting it all down on the page. There’s this one scene where Adin hugs Legacy, just hugs, and I swear those three pages could give any harlequin sex scene a run for its money. And that’s what your first love is like! I remember when holding my husband’s hand was a big deal. I think it’s easy to look back at those mini-milestones and feel like they aren’t significant, but they were at the time.

Interesting book, and bonus, it’s free on amazon kindle! It’s always really entertaining to see what other writers have done with “my” myths. It’s crazy to me (in a good way) how we can all look at the same source material (most likely) and get all the same information, and come out with such wildly different takes on it. Isn’t creativity fascinating?

The Blurb

With the tale of Seeds, M.M. Kin explores the myth of Hades and Persephone, drawing upon elements of the original myth, while giving new life to an ages-old story… romance, drama, action, and spice, it’s all here!

Seeds: Volume One

Longing. Need. Desire. Hades, the Lord of the Underworld, has never felt any of these in his long life until a chance encounter with the Goddess of Spring. For as long as she can remember, Persephone has always been told what to do, her life dictated by people who believe they know what is best for her without taking the time to understand or listen to her. However, the opportunity to truly be herself awaits her in the most unlikely of places, sparking one of the most famous and enduring relationships that history has ever known…

A quick disclaimer:

This is NOT a YA book. Let me repeat that loud and clear since this blog belongs to a YA author. This is NOT a YA book. It is a very good book, but there are some very graphic scenes involving sexual content. If you’re a young adult reader, wait a few years before checking this one out.

We good? Okay. 🙂

My review: I was impressed by the level of research that went into this book. As a writer who has thoroughly researched Greek mythology, it was really cool to see how someone took the same information and made it theirs. But M.M Kin took her research to a whole different level by actually setting her story in Ancient Greece.

Her setting was very well done, very real. I had a solid sense of where we were, and somehow, despite the story being set way,way long ago, the characters were still accessible. That’s a tough balance. You can’t drop super modern characters into a setting like that ands expect it to work, but you can’t make your ancient characters too ancient without risking your modern audience. M.M Kin struck a wonderful balance between modern sensibilities, and characters that felt like they belonged in an ancient setting.

I was pleased to see Demeter’s story so fleshed out. The first third of the book focused on Demeter’s life and the birth of her daughter. The second third focused on Persephone’s life growing up, and the last third takes place in the Underworld. I felt the story balanced well, though once we hit the Underworld the book takes a pretty significant shift to erotica land. There was still story and very well developed characters, so it wasn’t like just sex scene after sex scene. M.M Kin took the time to develop the characters and the world thoroughly.

When I emailed M.M Kin she said “There’s several important differences between my book and the original myth. I wanted Persephone to be less of a victim, and Hades to be less of a villain. I notice in the original myth that Zeus and Demeter are never scolded for their part in the disaster, and that people always point at Hades and say ‘bad boy’ for his part in the myth even though he wasn’t the one who sent a famine upon Greece or gave Persephone away without her mother’s knowledge or permission, so I try to address this in Seeds. I do have to warn, Seeds has some steamy scenes, so it’s not for kids!”

Zeus and Demeter are definitely held accountable (or I foresee they will be in the sequels) for their parts in the Persephone myth, though I’m curious how that’s going to be handled in Demeter’s case. But I hope Hades isn’t let off the hook either. While her Hades is less of a villain than in the original myth, he’s still not a good guy. Which is why she said “less of a villain” not that he isn’t one. This is still the Persephone myth, while dialed down there is still an element of bad to Hades’ actions. He stalks Persephone and watches her with his helmet of invisibility. True, he doesn’t DO anything to her, or watch her change or anything, but his rationale for stalking is that Demeter wouldn’t have let him court Persephone. One wrong doesn’t answer another. Stalking is still a major violation. And while he doesn’t rape her and drag her down to the Underworld, he does still **spoiler alert**

drag her down to the Underworld, refuse to let her leave, and consistently disregards her requests for him to stop touching her all the while saying he won’t do anything to her that she doesn’t want him to do. If he stood by that, I would have better feelings for his character, but what he actually means is I won’t do anything I don’t think you don’t want to do. He doesn’t cross the line to sex, but he does pretty much everything else, even after being told repeatedly to stop.

Now we’re in Persephone’s head, so we get the fact that she doesn’t actually want him to stop, and eventually she tells him so, but it’s not like he backed off until she told him so. Maybe it wasn’t rape, but it was still sexual assault. The reason I wouldn’t recommend this book to young adults isn’t the content of the sex scenes, but the message they send that really when a girl says no, she means yes, and continuing to violate her will eventually lead to consent.

That being said, while I’m not a fan of Hades in this book, I’m a huge fan of Persephone. Despite being manipulated all her life by her mother, and now by Hades, there’s still a strength in this character that makes me think maybe Hades will be answering for his actions in the next book along with Demeter and Zeus.

And maybe the person they’ll be answering to, is her.

The Blurb: Ninety-five days, and then I’ll be safe. I wonder whether the procedure will hurt. I want to get it over with. It’s hard to be patient. It’s hard not to be afraid while I’m still uncured, though so far the deliria hasn’t touched me yet. Still, I worry. They say that in the old days, love drove people to madness. The deadliest of all deadly things: It kills you both when you have it and when you don’t.(less)

My review:
So the more I read dystopian fiction, the more I find myself having to divide my reviews into two major sections. Whether or not I buy the society, and whether or not I liked the story. Most of the time those two line up, but with Delirium they didn’t.

I didn’t buy the society of Delirium. Oh I can buy a society choosing to lobotomize itself in order to cut down on destructive emotions, after all, Uglies features a society that intentionally gives itself brain damage in order to be compliant. The difference with Uglies though is the trade off, the near perfect society, made me wonder if it would be worth the cost.

To me, that’s what a good dystopian novel does. It behaves like a Utopian society in every way until you realize the price. The hidden horror lurking just beneath the surface, and your dystopian protagonist has to decide, is it worth it? Do I become complicit in these horrible happenings to reap the reward of comfort, society, and equality? Is THIS what it takes to have it all?

Now obviously, many famous dystopian novels don’t go the Utopian route. 1984, Anthem, Brave New World, not a single one of those societies featured a place I’d want to live. And more and more, YA dystopian stories are modeling themselves after those stories. The Hunger Games, Matched, Divergent. Class struggles and poverty still exist. It makes me a little sad to see this theme becoming predominant in YA.We paid the awful price, and what to we have to show for it? Nothing. No one from the outside looking in would think they’ve landed in Utopia. Everything is so bad we don’t even bother with the illusion of prosperity. The trend of dystopian novels in YA already reflected an uncertainty about our future, the shift to bleak dystopias indicate sheer hopelessness.

Another thing that a dystopian novels has to do, to me, is make me buy into the dystopia. There has to be logic, no matter how twisted. I can see love becoming a horror story, but the actual procedure doesn’t behave in consistent way. If you lobotomize the brain, it’s not just love you get rid of. It’s personality, hate, fear. You become a zombie. And the adults sometimes acted like that. Sometimes they were aggressive, and judgmental, and violent. Now no procedure on the brain is going to impact everyone the exact same way, so I was willing to accept the sheer number of people in the society that seemed to enjoy being violent. But not within the same person. So one of two things was happening in this society. Either the author wasn’t consistent with the procedure (no one should have felt extremes, thus you shouldn’t have enraged child abusers and over aggressive soldiers) Or the author didn’t do a good enough job explaining that it is not in fact a lobotomy the characters are getting, just a diminished capacity for love. In which case, her descriptions were inconsistent, and the cure would not have “cured” an urge to exercise, a sexual preference on a base level, the urge to reproduce, ect. The people in this society stilled cared what others thought of them, still exhibited pride and judgement, they still got angry. It just wasn’t consistent so I could not buy the society.

That being said though, I still liked the books. The story was good, even if the society wasn’t. The writing was beautiful! Poetic! Flowing. Honestly, it was fantastic writing. The descriptions!!! The nursery rhymes, the book of Shhh. While not believable to me, the world building that went into this was still amazing. I didn’t really like any of the characters that much but I didn’t like them because I wouldn’t like them in person, if that makes sense? They were 3 dimensional, well developed, whole characters. I just happen to dislike most of their personalties. I never really bought into the romance, but for a book series about love, I have to applaud that Oliver never actually made the story ALL about love. The world, the characters, and everything EXIST. The love story doesn’t drive the plot of the series, it could stand without it, the world didn’t stop and revolve around the two characters. Yay for having an identity Lena outside of lovestruck teen! Good for you 🙂 I did love the friendships formed in this series, and I love that those friendships didn’t revolve around the romance either. The girls talked to each other about things OTHER than boys. As in they had a life. Identities outside of their crush’s. I’m super impressed by that, and very happy to see it in a book that could have SO easily slipped way too far in the other direction without being called on it, because of the whole love is literally forbidden angle of this story. Like, in this context, and this context alone, disappearing into the romance would have been an act of rebellion and the romance could have actually been its own character and everything could have been all codependent and reliant on the love story, and for book 1, I was a bit worried it would do that but it didn’t!

I did feel that the ending of the series was rushed. I like that everything wasn’t neatly tied up with a bow, but despite not resolving much, the ending just felt gleaned over. And Oliver can DO endings. I read “Before I Fall.” Endings, are her fricken forte. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn there’s one more book for this series. There’s enough there for one.

Overall, I’d read it. I enjoyed it. You probably will to.