Review: Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

Against all odds, Katniss Everdeen has survived the Hunger Games twice. But now that she’s made it out of the bloody arena alive, she’s still not ...more  Title: Mockingjay
Author: Suzanne Collins
Publisher: Scholastic
Publication Date: August 24, 2010
Series: Hunger Games #3
Links:  Amazon | Goodreads
Source: Purchased

Against all odds, Katniss Everdeen has survived the Hunger Games twice.  But now that she’s made it out of the bloody arena alive, she’s still not safe.  The Capitol is angry.  The Capitol wants revenge.  Who do they think should pay for the unrest?  Katniss.  And what’s worse, President Snow has made it clear that no one else is safe either.  Not Katniss’s family, not her friends, not the people of District 12.  Powerful and haunting, this thrilling final installment of Suzanne Collins’s groundbreaking The Hunger Games trilogy promises to be one of the most talked about books of the year.

I loved it.  I felt the tension throughout the book.  It was pain and numbness, and deep sorrows accompanied by small and scattered joys.  I read it all in one sitting and, when I was finished, I was exhausted.  It is not one of those cheerful reads, so do not expect to experience an abundance of happiness during your time reading this book.  It is emotional, and the characters are broken.  The end leaves the reader sorrowful, but also gives small strings of hope and healing on which to cling. 

I admire what Collins did with Mockingjay.  Some people may not like this book as much as the others in the trilogy, because it feels significantly weightier than the previous two.  The focus is shifted from surviving the Games to long-term survival on a much larger scale, and thus to the rebellion, which brings to the book all of the troubles of war.  I found it to be tragically beautiful and thought provoking.

Review: Infinite Days by Rebecca Maizel

Title: Infinite Days
Author: Rebecca Maizel
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Publication Date: August 3, 2010
Series: Vampire Queen #1
Links: Amazon | Goodreads
Source: Goodreads First Reads

Lenah Beaudonte is, in many ways, your average teen: the new girl at Wickham Boarding School, she struggles to fit in enough to survive and stand out enough to catch the eye of the golden-boy lacrosse captain. But Lenah also just happens to be a recovering five-hundred-year-old vampire queen. After centuries of terrorizing Europe, Lenah is able to realize the dream all vampires have -- to be human again. After performing a dangerous ritual to restore her humanity, Lenah entered a century-long hibernation, leaving behind the wicked coven she ruled over and the eternal love who has helped grant her deep-seated wish.

Until, that is, Lenah draws her first natural breath in centuries at Wickham and rediscovers a human life that bears little resemblance to the one she had known. As if suddenly becoming a teenager weren’t stressful enough, each passing hour brings Lenah closer to the moment when her abandoned coven will open the crypt where she should be sleeping and find her gone. As her borrowed days slip by, Lenah resolves to live her newfound life as fully as she can. But, to do so, she must answer ominous questions:  Can an ex-vampire survive in an alien time and place? What can Lenah do to protect her new friends from the bloodthirsty menace about to descend upon them? And how is she ever going to pass her biology midterm?

Being a little over the whole mass of vampire books that seem to have spewed forth recently, I was skeptical about what this one would be like and did not have high expectations or hopes. 

I was pleasantly surprised once I started reading it. I like Lenah. She isn't the standard frail, naive female protagonist that has been showing up in paranormal. She has experiences and regrets and sorrows which made her quite the opposite of naive, and she is smart. Yet she'd never experienced being a normal teenager. I find her character to be intriguing - a ruthless vampire trying to regain her humanity. 

The writing is not bad, and the dialogue is believable for the most part. There is one scene in particular, though, in which the conversation is too presumptuous and cliché for me, but other than making me roll my eyes it didn't take too much away from my interest in the story. Infinite Days is written in first person past, so it is though Lenah is telling the reader her story. The style feels consistent with what I would expect to hear if Lenah were actually sitting here telling it to me.

There are some choices that the author makes in the last parts of the book that I like because they are difficult. Some people may not like them, but I do (the end in particular). There is one, though, that I thought was a little convenient (in the form of a "gift") and was too deus ex machina for me, but in this I am perhaps being overly picky, because I don't feel like it ruined anything necessarily, only that it was too easy for me to like as much as I would have if it had been more complicated. This book is the first in a trilogy, and it did leave me interested in reading the second one, curious to see what is coming. After the way that this one ends I don't have much of an idea as to what could possibly come next.

Review: All Unquiet Things by Anna Jarzab

Title: All Unquiet Things
Author: Anna Jarzab
Publisher: Delacorte Books for Young Readers
Publication Date: January 12, 2010
Links: Amazon | Goodreads
Source: Goodreads First Reads

Carly:  She was sweet. Smart. Self-destructive. She knew the secrets of Brighton Day School’s most privileged students. Secrets that got her killed.

Neily:  Dumped by Carly for a notorious bad boy. Neily didn’t answer the phone call she made before she died. If he had, maybe he could have helped her. Now he can’t get the image of her lifeless body out of his mind.

Audrey:  She’s the reason Carly got tangled up with Brighton’s fast crowd in the first place, and now she regrets it—especially since she’s convinced the police have put the wrong person in jail. Audrey thinks the murderer is someone at Brighton, and she wants Neily to help her find out who it is.

As reluctant allies Neily and Audrey dig into their shared past with Carly, her involvement with Brighton’s dark goings-on comes to light. But figuring out how Carly and her killer fit into the twisted drama will force Audrey and Neily to face hard truths about themselves and the girl they couldn’t save. 

I liked reading this book. I did have a theory about who the killer was, and ended up being right. I could never be certain about it, though, so that kept things interesting.

Throughout the story, the perspective switches back and forth between the characters of Neily and Audrey. I felt like it worked for the purpose of looking at the story from two different angles. But the two characters, even though they were from different social circles, had similar personalities that made the switch between perspective less obvious. If the parts had not been labeled with "Neily" and "Audrey", then I might not have noticed right away that the change had taken place. I wish that their personalities would have been a bit more distinctive from one another.

The story moves along pretty quickly, so it is an easy and enjoyable read. When I finished it, I was not left disappointed, but I was left wishing that the story had been more in-depth and less simplified. I wanted there to be more. I wanted the mystery plot to be more complex than it turned out to be. It was worth the read, but had room for improvement of complexity and depth.