Books in July

UNTAMED and HUNTED
These books are simultaneously hard to read and hard not to read. Untamed introduces the big villain of the series Kalona, who is topless and has wings. Hunted is about Zoey et al. hiding in the tunnels of Tulsa from the aforementioned Kalona and his army of giant crows. Zoey has nuns on her side. Let me explain to you that I will try anything when it comes to series of teen books in the hopes of re-creating good experiences from the past, specifically Cate Tiernan's Sweep series which is something that I picked up at random one day at Borders in Leeds (R.I.P.) and turned out to be the zenith of all literature. So that's why I started reading House of Night. Now I just can't stop. I have to know what happens. Who will die? Who will Zoey's next "consort" be? What will the dubiously named Kramisha's next prophetic poem foretell? I must know!



THAT SUMMER, SOMEONE LIKE YOU, KEEPING THE MOON, THIS LULLABY and LOCK AND KEY
I do so enjoy these Sarah Dessen books. I even have a playlist on my ipod that I like to listen to while reading in order to complete the experience(it's mostly Pains of Being Pure at Heart songs and a bit of Allo Darlin'). The best of the bunch was That Summer which one of the cover blurbs compares to The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers. They're alike in subject matter, but it's like comparing a bowl of batter to a big fancy wedding cake. That Summer is ham-handed (I mean this in the most affectionate way possible) but it's got a lot of heart and the lead character doesn't have a love interest-refreshing! The other four novels are pretty similar. Absent fathers, ditzy moms, the waffle house, Spinnerbait, some perfect dude showing up to make life worth living. They're formulaic, but it works.


DEAD IN THE FAMILY
This series used to be about a psychic waitress solving mysteries. Her realtionships and vampire doings were secondary to this. Now the books are all about her blah relationships with her family and her vampire friends as well as a lot of bollocks about Vampire/Fairy/Werewolf politics. It's embarrassing! And as Sookie herself rightly points out, "Human politics [are] tedious enough" Enough nonsense already. Take heed, psychos of fictional Louisiana! I want a bloody corpse to show up.


CRACKED UP TO BE and SOME GIRLS ARE
One of the first things I want to address about these books are how pleasing they are to behold. They're a good size, the cover art is vividly coloured and the feel of the covers is rough but not stiff; so they're basically perfect to hold and to look at. Cracked Up To Be is pretty good. I wasn't wild about it but it was a serviceable teen novel. The best thing about it was the characters, they were realistically annoying and bratty but not in an unlikeable way. Some Girls Are on the other hand I was wild about. It was very tense and had me reading long into the night, desperate to see how it all pans out. The book concerns a girl who is bullied by her former friends. She's just as bloodthirsty as the bullies so for every time they fill her locker with hamburger meat (this also happens at the beginning of L.J. Smith's Secret Circle. Is this something that happens in schools or could the author be paying homage to Smith's seminal trilogy?) she pushes one of them down the stairs. It's bloody brilliant. There are plenty of tense moments and a nice love story which is all you need.


THE SHORT SECOND LIFE OF BREE TANNER
I guess Stephenie Meyer churned this out after milking the Eclipse cash-cow. It was completely lame but thanks to the buy-one-get-one-free book offer at Tesco I didn't pay for it. I am a sucker for reading it, though. It's a short, dull story about a newborn vampire wondering why she's been created. Who am I? Why am I? Deep. She develops a crush on one of her fellow newborns who promptly disappears. I guess she's supposed to be that unpleasant little urchin that Twilight-Dad and Twilight-Mum try to protect at the end of Eclipse. A weak fart of a book.