New Meme: Must Read Monday (#1)

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Welcome to a new meme I'm launching on Mondays. The goal of this meme is to find those books others are excited about to add to your To Be Read list. (Those chicks on the button must be reading a really good book, or fighting over whose is the best.)

Instead of answering a question, you are basically creating intrigue for other hoppers. What makes your book so swoon-worthy? What do you absolutely have to mention so they'll read it?

On your post, you'll make an acrostic puzzle (think of it as an overview/book blurb type of thing). 

This week's category: a favorite dystopian pick. If you can't think of one, choose a book set in the future. 

Honestly, I had a ton to choose from. Here's an example I previously posted for Matched. Just finished reading it for the second time. If you haven't read it and you are a big fan of The Giver, it's right up your alley!

There are three different ways I could make my acrostic (make sure you bold the letters that spell out your full title):

                     arranged Marriages

                                  fAmily to keep safe

                                 sTatistics rule their world

                              no Choice exists

                     Officials Harbor suspicion

                love is chosEn for them

                   but she finDs her own love

~OR~

Match Banquet at 17

All is controlled by Society

Two boys, one girl

Conflicted love

Her family's jeopardized

Equality is a trick

Dystopian

For a bit of a challenge, you could also create an entire sentence with only one word after each letter of your title.

When you leave comments on other's post, be sure to mention whether you're adding that book to your TBR pile, and what part convinced you to do so.

It's all about powers of persuasion, people:) You might have to think a little, but channel that inner-creative goddess (or god).

I will feature two bloggers who had the most creative posts the following week, and those will be required follows if you wish to participate again.

*You can help me judge by leaving a comment on my post with the most creative/convincing one you've seen after hopping around.

I think my first acrostic is better, so that's my first post. 

Guidelines: 

• Please become a follower to participate.
• Grab my button to place in your post.
• Make sure you have a backlink in your post to each weekly post I put up, not just to my website.
• Where it says your name please include name @ blog name and your main genre in parentheses.  Ex: Jenna @ Fans of Fiction (YA)
• Your exact post URL is the one that goes in the linky box, not your website.
• This meme is for BOOK BLOGGERS ONLY.
• Don't just hop around; leave comments! We all love reading what others have to say.
• Enjoy!

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In My Mailbox (#5)

In My Mailbox is a weekly meme hosted by Kristi at The Story Siren. It's a chance for bloggers to showcase what books they've checked out/purchased/won this week.

Giveaway win from Word Spelunker:

I've seen some great reviews on this, the cover is GORGEOUS, and it's about a girl who doesn't know she's been reincarnated. Crossing my fingers that the romance will blow me away.

For review from publisher: 

These two are part of a time travel trilogy set in the future. When I saw that they had teens who worked in History Camps to prove to society what can never happen again, I was drawn in. Plus, in the first book, they travel to Verona, Italy, and get stuck there. Remember the last huge play set in Verona? (hint: has to do with a kid by the name of Will Shakespeare who showed the world two star-crossed lovers)

From the library:

I don't read much adult, but the school librarian said this was the most amazing psychological thriller she's read, and it left her with so many unanswered questions. A social worker who has survived a near-rape becomes obsessed with uncovering the meaning of a homeless man's photos. I hope I get time to read it!

What's in your mailbox?

Don't forget to come back tomorrow for the launch of my new meme: Must Read Monday.

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New Meme Coming Soon: Must Read Monday

Stay tuned for the launch of my brand new (and only) meme in just two days. I guess you could say the chicks are kind of like the two versions of myself butting heads: the "I should go to bed so I'm not tired for work tomorrow" side and the "Just five more minutes of reading" side.

Must Read Monday helps you spread the word about your all-time favorites. The books you read over and over and find little ways to slip into conversations so you'll have someone else to talk about them with.

Even though we all have huge to be read piles (TBR), the goal of this meme is to make the bloggers who stop by your post add another book to their list. You must entice them by giving them clues about your pick.

Every Monday, you'll have the chance to create an acrostic puzzle about an amazing book in the posted category. Week one, this coming Monday, will feature dystopian choices, so start thinking!

Here are two different examples that I could put on my post. I'll do the book that I just finished reading called Matched.

              arranged Marriages

                           fAmily to keep safe

                          sTatistics rule their world

                       no Choice exists

              Officials Harbor suspicion

         love is chosEn for them 

            but she finDs her own love

                  

                ~OR~

Match Banquet at 17

All is controlled by Society

Two boys, one girl

Conflicted love

Her family's jeopardized

Equality is a trick

Dystopian

For a bit of a challenge, you could create an entire sentence with only one word after each letter of your title.

I will feature two bloggers who had the most creative posts the following week, and those will be required follows to participate again. You can help me judge by leaving a comment on my post with the most creative/convincing one you've seen after hopping around.

Let me know if I can count on you to participate and/or spread the word! 

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Giveaway Winner Chosen

Congratulations to:

Brittany H.

 for winning our 100 Followers Giveaway.

Brittany, if you can respond within 48 hours, we'll send you an authographed copy of The Revenant and an ebook of The Space Between.

Thank you to everyone who entered.

Now go have a fabulous weekend. Run through the grass. Swing from trees. You get the picture.

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Last Day for Giveaway!

One lucky winner will be selected at random to receive both a SIGNED copy of The Revenant from author Sonia Gensler and Alexandra Sokoloff's ebook The Space Between.

You have until midnight to enter. Good luck:) Steps to enter are posted here.

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Review: Matched

"Cassia has always trusted the Society to make the right choices for her: what to read, what to watch, what to believe. So when Xander's face appears on-screen at her Matching ceremony, Cassia knows with complete certainty that he is her ideal mate... until she sees Ky Markham's face flash for an instant before the screen fades to black.

The Society tells her it's a glitch, a rare malfunction, and that she should focus on the happy life she's destined to lead with Xander. But Cassia can't stop thinking about Ky, and as they slowly fall in love, Cassia begins to doubt the Society's infallibility and is faced with an impossible choice: between Xander and Ky, between the only life she's known and a path that no one else has dared to follow."
-Goodreads


Stats:

• Publisher: Dutton Juvenile
• Date of release: Nov. 30, 2010 
• Page count: 366
• Would appeal to: The Giver fans, The Hunger Games trilogy fans, Divergent fans

Favorite Quotes:

"If our Society changes and things are different, who am I to tell the girl who would have enjoyed the safe protected life that now she has to have choice and danger because of me?"

"I'll tell her and everyone else that I know: they are giving us pieces of a real life instead of the whole thing. And I'll tell her that I don't want my life to be samples and scraps. A taste of everything but a meal of nothing. They have perfected the art of giving us just enough freedom; just enough that when we are ready to snap, a little bone is offered and we roll over, belly up, comfortable and placated like a dog I saw once when we visited my grandparents in the Farmlands."

"Did the poet know how lucky he was, to have such beautiful words and a place to put them and keep them?"

 "I think of how perhaps the best way to fly would be with hands full of earth so you always remember where you came from, how hard walking could sometimes be."

I have experienced love the second time around.

I'm not a repeat reader by any means. I reread this book before my first classroom book club discussion (it went so well!) and I finished in two days.

Let me count the ways that this book and I were meant to be reunited:
1. Ally Condie's writing style fits Cassia to a T; an innocent, all-trusting citizen who follows the rules. It's actually refreshing to read a YA book without cussing.
2. The common storyline--girl chooses between two boys--was somehow unique and exciting in its own right.
3. Poetry was valued by the protagonist and morphed into a theme of resistance, especially when Cassia recalled Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night."
4. The physical act of writing is not taught for these characters because the Society knows the type of power it might give its citizens, but Cassia understands the freedom it makes her feel.
5. Running a society on statistics and probability should work out in theory, but logic alone cannot rule a race of humans.

In this new Society, people die at age 80 after their Final Banquet; teens are officially Matched at age 17, normally with a person they've met; messages are delivered via computer port; and meals are dropped off daily with the appropriate amount of nutrients and portions for each individual. Cancer does not exist. But neither does the freedom of choice.

The idea of a Matched banquet is absolutely magical-- fancy foods, gorgeous dresses, teens eagerly anticipating promising outcomes. Sort of like right before prom, only this determination affects the rest of your life. It's kind of like online dating, since the first interaction you get is just a realtime image, then you have conversations over a port, and eventually supervised outings. Okay, I doubt e-Harmony users have chaperoned dates, unless you count a group date for safety purposes.

Unlike our reality, every moment of these people's time is divided: recreation time, work time, school time. Their choices for rec. time include going to a music hall to hear the 100 songs, playing games at the youth center, or watching a viewing. No one complains. Everyone follows the rules for fear of being reclassified as an Aberation or an Anomaly.

I love the relationship between Cassia's parents; one breaks rules to protect the family, but the other keeps rules for the same reason. Bram, Cassia's younger brother, is also a little brother I wouldn't mind claiming. He's late to school nearly every day. He likes to jump in rain puddles. He runs around with messy hair. Everyone has to worry about him. But he's strong when he needs to be, just like Grandfather.

The scene that breaks my heart is when Cassia's dad has to incinerate all the books (reminds me of Fahrenheit 451). She watches as the Officials break the books down their spines and suck up pieces of pages. I shudder at the thought that a group of people would destroy the writings of past peoples.

The concept of every citizen carrying around a pill container intrigued me from the start. If you look at the cover of the first and second books, they tie in with the pills!

Condie might be onto something. In the story, the old world failed because of its dependence on technology and then the Warming happened. That's just about all we find out.
One thing that makes everyone feel special is that they can own one artifact from the past. These things are always special and curious to their owners. It's almost like Ariel discovering the fork--I mean, dinglehopper with Scuttle (I'm heavy on The Little Mermaid references this week). Cassia learns to treasure someone else's artifact even more than her own.

I found myself rooting for one guy over the other, I admit, but I also felt sympatheic toward the other one. I think the big picture was less about the romance and more about right vs. wrong.

I don't want to say much more because I'll give away all the Society's secrets. I will say that I absolutely cannot wait for Crossed to come out. Right now, I'm waiting on a Crossed tour ARC to be mailed to me. The second book is told in alternating points of view between Cassia and Ky. Yay! I'm always a sucker for male POVs.

If you want to be swept away by a dystopian, this is your book (imagine me jumping up and down and waving it in your face, pretty much like I did with my sophomores)!

Final verdict:
Matched grasps each reader by the heart and never lets go; the right combination of plot twists, romance, and defiance.
Read it close to November 1st because you will be itching to grab the sequel!

P.S. There are quite a few reviews that were impacted because the story holds numerous similarities to The Giver. To that I say: all ideas in literature are borrowed from some place or another.

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Review: Saving June

"'If she’d waited less than two weeks, she’d be June who died in June. But I guess my sister didn’t consider that.’

Harper Scott’s older sister has always been the perfect one so when June takes her own life a week before her high school graduation, sixteen-year-old Harper is devastated. Everyone’s sorry, but no one can explain why.

When her divorcing parents decide to split her sister’s ashes into his-and-her urns, Harper takes matters into her own hands. She’ll steal the ashes and drive cross-country with her best friend, Laney, to the one place June always dreamed of going California.

Enter Jake Tolan. He’s a boy with a bad attitude, a classic-rock obsession and nothing in common with Harper’s sister. But Jake had a connection with June, and when he insists on joining them, Harper’s just desperate enough to let him. With his alternately charming and infuriating demeanour and his belief that music can see you through anything, he might be exactly what she needs.

Except June wasn’t the only one hiding something. Jake’s keeping a secret that has the power to turn Harper’s life upside down again."
-Good Reads

Stats:

• Publisher: Harlequin Teen
• Release date:  Nov. 29, 2011
• Page count:  336
• Would appeal to: Fans of A Map of the Known World, Sarah Ockler fans

Favorite Quotes:

"All I can do is look at him. Up close, I get a better view; there's no denying the fact he is really, really goodlooking, in this rakish, edgy, badass, I-just-rolled-out-of-bed-and-screw-you-I-don't-need-a-mirror kind of way."

"'God, you're like a douche-baggy hipster music snob with the tastes of a forty-year-old white guy.'"

"Gwen has that affected, high-pitched baby voice that some girls at my high school like to adopt, thinking it's cutesy and endearing when it of course has the opposite effect. It makes me want to staby my eardrums."

"But maybe that's better. You can only cover a bullet hole with a Band-Aid for so long. Maybe I need to bleed out. Maybe I need to stop with the lame metaphors."

"'By then everyone will have the fiftieth edition of iPods--or maybe they'll just have music downloaded directly into their brains...I'll be the old lady in the corner going, 'Back when I was a kid, we had mix tapes, and floppy disks, and gas didn't cost twenty bucks a gallon, and oh, yeah, MTV actually played music videos...' And they'll probably say, 'Oh, Mom, you and your stories, we're jetting to the oxygen bar...' and take off in their flying cars.'"

Another one of those books where the narrator, Harper, has an awesome sense of humor-- sarcastic and witty despite the awful tragedy she's going through. She's the one who found her sister dead in the garage, and the reader doesn't see the actual flashback until the middle of the book. Harrington does a great job or portraying teens with realistic dialogue.

First of all, Jake Tolan is an incredibly awesome male lead. He's confusing. He's obsessed with music. He was friends with June, but Harper has a suspicion they were more than that. Of course, Harper can't help but fall for him. Her brain is constantly arguing with itself over why he's not swoon-worthy. The last thing she needs is to crush on the guy who infuriates her. So the author has taken the classic "they-hate-each-other" approach, but it definitely works. After several scenes of Jake shirtless, I really wanted to be in Harper's place. Besides his piercing green eyes, his always-messy hair was my favorite feature.

I went into the reading expecting to bawl my eyes out, and though I did get a little emotional, that never happened. For some reason I was able to put down this book in several places when all I really wanted to want was to read it from start to finish. There was a long stretch in the middle that lagged in pace.

There is the right amount of disbelief, sadness, and action in the story. Harper does a great job of trying to move on with her life. Laney, her best friend (I absolutely wanted her as my own beautiful best friend who is dramatic, loves rap, and can take charge when the situation calls for it!) tries to pick up all the pieces and succeeds in making a mess of her own life. So Harper ends up being just as big a rock to Laney as Laney is to her. I wish Laney and Seth had gotten more serious before the story ended.

My favorite two stops on the road trip were Fridge Henge and Carmen's apartment. The rally the teens go to was well described, and there's even an underground music club scene going on. A little bit of everything for everyone. I don't think I would have had the guts to run away from home and not call for as long as Harper did. When Harper and Laney get back, their punishment is pretty minimal. I would want to honor my dead sister's memory, but not at the expense of leaving my crushed divorced mother. Maybe that's why I admire her bravery and determination. It also helps that she has feelings of guilt on the roadtrip.

There were a few times too many (three, I think) that Harper mentioned something about being a jigsaw puzzle piece fitting into place (or missing).

The ending was wonderful, but I felt myself wishing the middle had made me feel just as satisfied as I felt at the end.

The writing is lovely. I laughed out loud during some descriptions of Gwen, Jake's ex. Even though the subject matter was serious, there were lots of fun moments and some strong sexual tension.

Final verdict:
A contemporary read about surviving loss, friendship, and finding love in unusual places. Harrington paints a realistic picture for the reader through imagery and highlights the healing power of music.

*Thank you to Harlequin Teen for providing me with an e-copy of the book for an advanced review. 

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