Book #77: Counting by 7s by Holly Goldberg Sloan

I almost wanted to give up on this book after starting it, because in the first chapter, you find out that the main character's parents both die in a car crash and leave her alone in the world. If that's not a depressing story I don't know what is. The only things that kept me going on it was that it was for my book club--and because the blurb on Goodreads said that it wasn't a tragedy, but a story of triumph. In the end, I agree. And I was glad to have continued on with it because it was an exceptionally cute story about how resilient people can be.

The story is about Willow Chance, an oddball genius twelve-year-old who was adopted by her parents at birth, and who is so awkward and strange and not-normal that she has no friends. But her parents love her intensely and she is a happy kid, even though her middle school experience is starting off with a few mishaps which gets her sent to counseling. But she starts to make a friend or two on accident through counseling, so she is happy--until she comes home to find that her parents have been killed together. But people begin to circle around and take care of her, and over the course of months, she begins to heal and come alive again.

It was so sad to me how Willow had nowhere to go once her parents died. I can't imagine what that must be like--we have such a huge extended network of family members that would all be willing in a heartbeat to take care of us or our children if we needed them to. But I loved how Willow was so weird and charming and how people got wrapped into helping her when she needed it. I really liked the story of this book, and all of the "strange" characters, and how they all grew and changed over the course of the book. I would read this again.

Book #76: Always and Forever, Lara Jean by Jenny Han

Hooray! A third book about Lara Jean and Peter. This book takes place a year after the first two, nearing the end of their senior year of high school. They have been dating for a year and are cute and in love with each other. The plot of this book is mostly about Lara Jean's growing pains about where she should go for college, and what is going to happen to her and Peter when they go to college. Her plans don't happen--she doesn't get in to their planned school together, and they both begin questioning what is really going to happen or what they are going to do together. Also, her dad is seriously dating their neighbor Ms. Rothschild, and near the end of the book, they end up getting married and Lara Jean is planning their wedding. I liked Peter a lot more in this book than in the last one, and how he seems like he's actually nice and not a jerk-y popular kid. They have a cute relationship, watching their favorite movies with each other and him asking her to prom by re-enacting her favorite scene from Sleepless in Seattle. I loved how Lara Jean decides on what she wants to do for college and decides to love it and to love Peter, even if they're not in the same place, and how it somehow seems to work out.

This series was so cute. I felt like the first book started out with a catchy book jacket story--what would happen if a girl's love letters got sent to a bunch of boys at once? But what kept all three stories going was Lara Jean's sweetness and openness and curiosity. Her character kept me interested. I wonder how you can portray sweetness in a character as a writer. It's obvious how to write a character who's tough or brittle or angry at the world--just read any YA dystopian novel out there. But a character who is truly good, but not obnoxiously so, and is still fun to read and relate to--that's what Lara Jean is.

Side note: I liked how Lara Jean thought about the importance of having sex with someone and didn't just start doing it because she had a boyfriend. She isn't religious, but she didn't want to do it until she was really and truly ready and loved and was holding off until she wanted to. I think that's a really important moral that could be useful for many YA readers today--most YA readers are not going to be impressed with the idea of abstinence until marriage, but I'm sure the idea of abstinence until you're truly ready and in a healthy, loving relationship for a long time might be more palatable (and definitely better than doing it with whoever you want). I liked how this series actually addressed that question head on and how Lara Jean thought about it in an open, unembarrassed way (which worked perfectly with who her character was).

Book #75: P.S. I Still Love You by Jenny Han

This book is the sequel to To All the Boys I've Loved Before, which I really enjoyed, and which definitely ended on a cliffhanger without answering whether Lara Jean would get together with the boy she liked or not, so I was glad there was a continuation of her story. The book picks up right where the other left off, and tells the story of about a month when Lara Jean and Peter start dating for real and how they fight with each other and how she deals with feelings of insecurity in dealing with his ex-girlfriend. Then one of the boys who she wrote a letter to in the first book reappears in her life, and she begins to wonder whether she should like him instead. It's a kind of love triangle that doesn't feel too love triangle-y, because Lara Jean is so normal with both of them and although she's torn about who she really likes, it doesn't become overwhelming or annoying or even the main point of the story. I loved the scene when she throws a USO party at the nursing home where she works/volunteers, and how she dresses up in a 40s dress and gets swept off her feet by John dressed in a WWII uniform. I thought it was really cute and a fun story, and I kind of wish she'd chosen differently in which boy she ended up with, but it still worked out in the end.

Book #74: Fairest by Marissa Meyer

This short novel is a kind of prequel to the Lunar Chronicles, telling how Queen Levana--the ultimate evil villain in this series--became who she is. She is based on the evil queen in the Snow White story, obsessed with being the most beautiful one in the whole land--which she can do because Lunars have the ability to cast a "glamour," or to change their appearance by making others see what they want them to see. The story shows why she is so obsessed with it (she was disfigured in a fire when she was a child, which scarred her face and body, and was taunted for it by her crazy evil sister), and how she was driven somewhat insane, dragging a man along to marry her, being convinced he loved her even though he didn't. I definitely wouldn't have read this if I hadn't read the others, and it was kind of annoying to listen to, because I felt like Levana was almost unbelievable. Even though she was so desperate and sad and had a horrible life inside those palace walls, I think it still didn't quite make me see her as a real character/person. But oh well, an interesting part of the series to listen to while rocking a baby in our cabin on vacation.

Book #73: Cress by Marissa Meyer

So, if it isn't obvious by the cover, Cress is the retelling of Rapunzel for the Lunar Chronicle series. Cress is a data-hacking prisoner for the evil Queen Levana, locked away in a satellite circling earth. She is responsible for hacking into all of earth's communication systems and spying for the queen--but she begins to help Cinder and her team in their quest to overthrow her. When they come to rescue her, her mistress discovers and blinds her rescuer and sends them in her satellite plummeting down to earth, and then they have to cross the Sahara desert and survive somehow together, and somehow rejoin Cinder's team and help them come up with a plan to stop Levana.

I liked Cress's storyline pretty well in this one, and I kind of liked how her more timid character contrasts so strongly with Scarlet's brash and overconfident one from the previous book. Not much happened in Cinder's plans to overthrow Levana in this book, except that they managed to stop her wedding to Kai temporarily. Overall, I liked the first two books in the series more, although that may have been because I listened to them and I read this one.

Book #72: Someday, Someday, Maybe by Lauren Graham

When I listened to Lauren Graham's memoir, she talked about the process of writing her novel, which I'd heard about but never really considered reading. But I loved her personality so much in her memoir that I decided this would be a fun and quick book to download for our trip, and it was.

Graham talks about how people accused her of just ripping from her life story as she wrote this book, but she said it was more the opposite--she tried really hard to write her characters NOT like people she knew, so that it wouldn't hurt anyone's feelings, etc. But this story obviously comes from her life experiences--not that it's just what she did, but that someone like her has done this, for sure. It's about a girl, Franny Banks, who goes to New York after college to try and make it as an actress, and she gives herself a deadline of three years to "make it." And if she doesn't make it by then, she's giving up and moving out and getting married to her college boyfriend. She works as a waitress and has been in one commercial and gotten into a prestigious acting class, but she only has six months left on her timeline and not much else is happening. The book tells the story of what she does in those six months and how she makes decisions and tries to make progress on her goals. I liked this book, liked the mistakes that Franny made and how she got back up from falling down. It was a cute, quick read, just like I thought, but I don't think it's one I'm going to be remembering in a year or coming back to again and again.

Book #71: The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt

This book is not truly YA; it's about a middle schooler, so it's more of a middle-grades novel. But that usually turns me off from a book (I feel like that's going slightly too young for me unless I'm reading it for nostalgic purposes), but that would be a mistake in this book. It really, really works for even an adult. I truly loved this book. It was sweet and serious and funny and sad and meaningful, and about growing up but not too much yet. It's about Holling Hoodhood, growing up on Long Island in 1967-68 during the Vietnam War, with an overbearing dad. He starts off talking about how his English teacher, Mrs. Baker, hates him more than anything, because he is the only student left in her class on Wednesday afternoons while all the Catholic and Jewish students get taken out for religious instruction. So every Wednesday she starts reading Shakespeare's plays with him, and even though he thinks she's doing it to punish him, he begins to internalize it and love it and become a hero in his own story.

I loved Holling's character in this story. If all middle-school-aged boys were as sweet and curious as he is, the world would be a better place. Not that he was overly sweet--he just seemed young and interested in playing baseball and worshipping his baseball idols and teasing his crush instead of trying to get too old too fast. I really enjoyed that the book was written from his perspective and that we got to hear his opinions and thoughts, and how Mrs. Baker started out as this scary villain at the beginning of the book, and morphed into a kind of friend (although he'd never have said that, being a teenage boy). I would and will definitely re-read this book someday--it's even worth buying and putting on my bookshelf. For sure. I wish I'd read this when I was younger, because I would have LOVED it then, although it didn't come out until 2007.

Book #70: Scarlet by Marissa Meyer

This book is the second in the Lunar Chronicles series, the sequel to Cinder. Since Cinder was the futuristic retelling of Cinderella, Scarlet is the retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, in the same world and intertwining with Cinder's storyline. Scarlet lives in a small French town and works on her grandmother's vegetable farm, but her grandmother has been missing for weeks, and the police have decided she just went missing and have stopped looking for her. Scarlet doesn't know what to do or how to find her, until she gets the help of a mysterious and kind of scary street-fighter named Wolf. Dun dun dunnnnn...

I honestly was (and still am) a little creeped out and confused by Wolf, even after getting the explanation of who/what he is (by the end of the book). I don't quite get how Scarlet falls for him (not a huge spoiler, right? When the main character gets paired up with a guy for the rest of the book you expect that to happen). I liked how Scarlet was a super determined and strong-willed main character, although it honestly went a little too far for me and became almost obnoxious, like how she insisted on tracking down her grandmother and trying to save her even though it was COMPLETELY OBVIOUS that it was not just dangerous, but suicidal, and that there was no way a teenage girl could actually manage to do anything. I mean, come on. Nobody is that stupid, right? But I liked getting a little more detail about Cinder's background and learning about her, and I liked Cinder's new sidekick in this book, even though he did come on a little strong and cliche-y. It was definitely a solid book, and both storylines were interesting and fast-paced.

Book #69: Cinder by Marissa Meyer

OH MAN. We were out of town for two weeks in Utah and I actually read/listened to a bunch of books while we were gone and I have so many books to write about on here now. Yikes. I actually finished listening to this one before we left, but I didn't have a chance to write about it with all the packing and craziness of leaving town with three small children. (Seriously, it seems like a lot of children when you're trying to pack up all the things you need to bring with them.) But I remember it pretty well since I have been listening to all the other books in this series since then--which shows that I enjoyed it enough to follow through on the rest of the series.

I feel like Marissa Meyer was sitting one day and had the thought--what if Cinderella didn't lose her shoe when she was running away from the prince, but instead--her foot? That seems like the whole idea behind this retelling of Cinderella. Cinder is a cyborg, in a futuristic New Beijing (the old Beijing was destroyed during WWIV), and her arm and leg are totally made out of machinery. In this world, cyborgs are second-class citizens, and Cinder is a super-skilled mechanic who one day gets an exciting famous customer: Prince Kai, who has a very important broken droid who he needs help getting repaired. And the story goes on from there. Of course, since it's a dystopian futuristic story, Cinder can't just be a girl who falls in love with the prince, but also the beginning of a rebellion against an evil queen as well. But I really liked some of the details of this story--like the cyborg/android aspects of the world, the letumosis plague sweeping the world, and Cinder's hilarious flawed-personality-chip android Iko. The big plot twist came on pretty obvious to me (I won't spoil it), but that didn't really bother me too much.

Some other things did bother me though. Like, okay. There's an evil queen who rules the moon, and the moon people are like a totally different species than earthens because they have magical powers. (Why are there queens in the future? Nobody is going to have queens in a thousand years!) And the moon queen wants to take over earth, but she can't do that without MARRYING THE EMPORER? So she has to marry Kai? Ummmmm. What? And I'm sorry, but there is no way on earth that Kai would talk like an insolent teenager in these important diplomatic conversations with all the other earth leaders and the evil queen of the moon. His obnoxious attitude really got annoying and was totally unbelievable. There's no way he was that poorly trained when he was next in line for the throne. I was also really confused about why Prince Kai would be interested in Cinder in the first place. What on earth did she do to attract his attention? She fixed his droid, but it's not like they ever had any interesting conversations... It didn't make sense to me. BUT those annoying parts were smaller than the overall story, which I enjoyed--I just wanted to rant about them somewhere.

**Note: I listened to this on audiobook and I highly recommend it in that fashion. The narrator was fantastic and did excellent voices for each of the characters that really helped me to get the story. I think that helped me to get over some of the more annoying plot points that would have been overly obnoxious if I had been reading it.

Book #68: The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner

It is not possible for me to exaggerate how much I loved this book as a child, and how much it influenced my imagination for at least five years of my life. I ABSOLUTELY LOVED IT. I spent so many years writing stories and making up plots in my head, and they all involved kids going into the woods and finding a magic/hidden lair where they hid out and lived. For years, I remembered certain details of the book so well, like how they put their milk in a "refrigerator" behind the waterfall and how they built a dam out of rocks in the stream so they could swim. Oh, I LOVED IT. And I just read it with Dane, and it made me so happy to see him love it too. It's funny reading it now, because you can totally see how it was written a long time ago with the wording and the events, and how some things don't really add up. Like, how did Jessie know how to make a stew? I feel like I wouldn't even know how to make a stew out of random ingredients someone brought me, but that maybe is just a difference of the era. But other ones are bigger questions, like: How come they didn't bring any of their old things with them when they ran away from home, not even Benny's old teddy bear or a change of clothes, but they did think to bring soap and a sewing bag? How were they always so well-behaved and perfect, even when they were up all night running away? Benny is too young to read but he never throws tantrums? But most of all, I am dying to know: how did their parents die, and if their grandfather is so nice, why did they not see him their whole lives? Were their parents keeping him away for some reason? What was the problem? I feel like this could have been answered with one small throw-away sentence in the book, but it definitely wasn't. I wonder if any of the later books address this, because I don't remember. Anyways, I bought a few of these online at Amazon and I am going to read some of the mysteries with Dane and see if he loves them too.

Book #67: To All the Boys I've Loved Before by Jenny Han

I have heard about this book for YEARS, even checked it out from the library before but never cracked the cover, but I was finally convinced when I kept hearing rave reviews about this trilogy. And I am so so glad I read it. It was so cute and really sweet. I think I was put off by the premise of the novel, because it seems so cliche: Lara Jean writes love letters to the boys she has ever loved and they accidentally get mailed out, and she has to deal with the fallout (especially since one of the boys who got one was her sister's boyfriend). However, those letters getting mailed out were not really the main point of the story, and didn't cause as much drama as they seemed like they should. They kind of become the impetus for Lara Jean to start getting out of herself and stop being afraid of things, which is the real point of the story, I felt. I liked how it was more focused on her and her family and also the boy she likes all together.

I feel like so many YA romance novels have these headstrong, quirky heroines with drama they're dealing with, and I really liked how Lara Jean WAS quirky but was very self-aware of it and owned it. I loved the family dynamics in her family too--she was very close with her sisters and dad (after her mom died years ago) and how they were very responsible and trying to help out a lot. I didn't always love her love interest, but I think that's pretty reasonable, because neither does Lara Jean--as she makes it clear to him, there are lots of reasons why she doesn't like him. He's a typical popular teenage boy, very concerned about how things make him look, and it sometimes comes back to bite Lara Jean (particularly in the dramatic climax of the story). But I liked the cliffhanger ending (knowing that there are two books left to answer what happens) and I am excited to finish off the trilogy, although it will have to be after our trip because there are only hard copies at the library.

Book #66: Dracula by Bram Stoker

This is one of those books that you think you're so familiar with that you assume that you've read it, until you sit down and realize you have no idea what the story is about. Kind of like Frankenstein (which I did read in college but I don't remember the particulars of the story at all now... maybe I'll try to read it around Halloween this year). It's funny that we ALL know who Dracula is, but I had no idea what the book Dracula was about. I decided to read this because Tommy read it a few months ago (he was reading it in the hospital while I was in labor with Lucy, which is ironic because there is a woman who turns vampire named Lucy in the book), and he really enjoyed it.

The story of Dracula starts with a young lawyer who gets sent to Transylvania to help a certain Count Dracula get ready to move to England. He becomes aware that weird things are going on and that he is a prisoner in the castle. He eventually escapes, and the action moves to England, where Count Dracula comes and begins to wreak havoc on the people there, turning people into vampires and sucking their blood. A band of brave men (and a woman) works together to fight against him and try to destroy him, despite all the odds being stacked against them. I was really interested in a lot of the story, but there was a lot of build-up in the story too (very Victorian, Dickensian, etc.). There were fifteen pages left and they still hadn't found Dracula yet, although there were at least 50 pages of build-up and journeying to find him that we'd just gone through. It seemed like a bad balance of lead-up and climax--there should have been more climax, and more denouement. It literally ended on the same page as the fight with Dracula--there was no more story to it at all. But some of that was probably the literary style of the time. Overall, though, I was super interested in the story and pleased by how creepy it was at the same time--the age of the book hasn't lessened its creepiness factor at all. The imagery of Dracula forcing Mina to drink his blood is so scary that it totally still works. I'm glad I finally got around to reading this.