REVIEW: Winger by Andrew Smith

            Ryan Dean West is a fourteen-year-old junior at a boarding school for rich kids in the Pacific Northwest. He’s living in Opportunity Hall, the dorm for troublemakers, and rooming with the biggest bully on the rugby team. And he’s madly in love with his best friend Annie, who thinks of him as a little boy.

            With the help of his sense of humor, rugby buddies, and his penchant for doodling comics, Ryan Dean manages to survive life’s complications and even find some happiness along the way. But when the unthinkable happens, he has to figure out how to hold on to what’s important, even when it feels like everything has fallen apart. 

            Winger was one of those books I had to throw across the room in complete anger and take a few days to get over before reviewing. It was a great book with an ending that made me bawl my eyes out I was so furious and anguished. I really did finish the book days ago, but I had to let the dust of my emotions settle before I could write this. Let me start out by saying that I really loved this book.

            The characters (especially Ryan Dean, a.k.a. Winger) were raw and totally real. I could absolutely believe that Ryan Dean was a fourteen-year-old boy and he was hilarious too! He had all these funny, and sometimes perfectly perverted, drawings that really brought his character to life in a new way. I could read about Ryan Dean all day. He was just a very relatable character and there were all these nuances to his voice that made him that much more real. Like how he felt stupid for being worried about Joey being gay. Or how he kept calling himself a loser for various things. Or how he thought Ms. Singer was a witch. It was all hilarious and the little bits of rugby were brilliant as well.

            One thing you should know about me is I love rugby because of Teen Wolf and now also because of Winger. It was rugby that kept the story going. It was the thing that tied Ryan Dean to all the parts of the story of his junior year. All in all, it was an amazing story to read and so very hilarious.

            Now let me move on to the things that bugged me. I never really understood when Ryan Dean and Annie’s relationship shifted from “never-gonna-happen-cause-I’m-fourteen” to “omg-this-is-flirting-this-is-real”. It was an awkward transition that I never actually saw. It kind of took me out of the story because I was confused as to when this relationship became possible. I mean obviously they’re meant for each other, but I wish I could have really seen what Ryan Dean did to change Annie’s view of him.

            Next, I felt that there was an over-usage of the word loser. It was funny, and at times I didn’t notice or care that Ryan Dean called himself a loser at least once every chapter, but it was definitely overkill.  I mean, Ryan Dean writes haikus to his friend, he could at least change up his words a little. At the same time, though, it did make his character consistent and likeable. I just wish it had been done every other chapter.

            And lastly, Joey Cosentino. I’m not going to say anything else on that subject because it will ruin the whole end of the book. Just, when you finish reading, come to me and we shall rant and yell privately.

            Overall, despite the cons, there was still way more good in this book and I would really recommend it to anyone. I would even give it to female writers trying out male voices because this one is spot on and a great starting point for similar characters. So please, read it and let me know what you think because seriously, Joey Cosentino. I’m done. With life.

XOXO Tia

REVIEW: The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer by Michelle Hodkin

            Mara Dyer doesn’t think life can get any stranger than waking up in a hospital with no memory of how she got there. It can.

            She believes there must be more to the accident she can’t remember that killed her friends and left her mysteriously unharmed. There is.

            She doesn’t believe that after everything she’s been through, she can fall in love. She’s wrong.

            That’s it. It’s done. I’m officially on the heart transplant list after this book caused the implosion of my heart in my chest and the explosion of it out my mouth in the form of rainbow vomit all over the floor. I love this book. The book made me realize a couple of tropes I adore, that I’ll be adding to my list.

            In the end, this book is really just what I needed after my last book. One of the biggest issues that bogged me down in the last book I read, was what kept me reading this book during every inch of free time I had just to finish it (seriously, I started a new job today and every single second of free time had me reading this book like water in a desert). The chapters were succinct, and the descriptions were both heartwarming and terrifying at the same time. This book was a perfect mesh of creep-topia and shoot-me-in-the-foot-love.

            Starting with the creep factors brings me to one of the new tropes I’ve realized I love. Broken, female, protagonists. I love characters that are insane (literally in-the-psych-ward-insane). Michelle Hodkin gave just the right amount of schizophrenia in this book. I believed that Mara had PTSD and I believed the things she saw. It was the little details that brought it all together. Starting and ending with the Ouija board bit was so awesome and just Mara avoiding looking in reflective surfaces was perfectly eerie. I had no idea what to expect, and that was so refreshing and scary!

            The love part brings me to another trope. Opposites attract (cliché, I know). This one was a little different from the usual “opposites attract love story,” however. They clearly liked each other, but they fought it and just the way it was written was very opposites falling for each other. I am just in love with Mara and Noah. They’re perfection-incarnate. The things that Noah said to Mara towards the end of the book when things were getting revealed made me die inside from warm and fuzzy things. I think I could do a whole post on all the things absolutely pristine about their ship and love (but I won’t).

            Another thing that was done amazingly in this book were the plotlines. There were clearly multiple plotlines in the story and they all interlocked, but were clearly separate lines. The love story. The mystery of the asylum. The murder trial. Clearly separate, but oh so interwoven. It was amazing writing that Michelle Hodkin did in The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer. I feel like so often writers put too much focus on one plotline and the overall story ends up flat. This story was 5D it was so deep.

            Of course, every story has its flaws and this one did have some toward the end. The story got very murky when Noah wakes up Mara with the news about Joseph. I wasn’t sure if it was dream or not until after Mara wakes up after the Mr. Lukumi bit. I was reading it and thinking “is this all a dream?” and I think it’s because Noah knocking on the window just came out of nowhere without any good buffer. I wish the murder trial story mingled into the overall story at least one time between that scene and the creepy phone call. It just needed something. Then there’s the Mr. Lukumi part that was just weird. I felt like I tripping or something, and it was just too rushed and weird.

            After that, though, everything started falling into place and truths were revealed and it was crazy! There were just so many brilliant things going on in this book that they all far outweighed the awkward flaws toward the end. I’ve wanted to read this book for a long time and I am so happy I finally have because I absolutely loved it and would recommend it to everyone (I already am).

XOXO Tia

REVIEW: Teardrop by Lauren Kate

Everywhere Eureka goes he is there: Ander, a mysterious blond boy who tells her she’s in danger. Ander knows things about Eureka she doesn’t yet know herself, but not her darkest secret: ever since her mother drowned in a freak accident, Eureka wishes she were dead, too. She has little left that she cares about, just her friend Brooks and some heirlooms—a locket, a letter, a mysterious stone, and an ancient book about a girl who got her heart broken and cried an entire continent into the sea.

But Ander has some secrets of his own. The haunting tale is more than a story. It’s real. And Eureka’s like has far more evil undercurrents than she ever imagined.

I wanted to like this story. I really, really did, but alas, I did not. There are a lot of things that I don’t feel like anyone should ever do when writing stories for teens (or for any ages, actually), and Lauren Kate did a lot of those things in Teardrop. This book actually inspired a post I’ll be writing soon titled The Dos and Don’ts of Writing YA. The first thing that made me hate reading this book was the prologue. It was told through Ander’s point of view, but gave me (the reader) no more information than I could have gotten just from reading the book. It was a useless chapter told from the wrong point of view. The first chapter should always be in the protagonist’s point of view so that readers can immerse themselves into that character’s life and thoughts. Don’t even get me started on the epilogue.

The prologue and epilogue were redundant to say the least. Everything that happened in those two chapters was explained throughout the rest of the book. I get the whole “show, don’t tell,” but do it from the protagonist’s point of view so I don’t have to read everything over and over. This book was already overly lengthy. I have to say that I love a great book with awesome detail (hello Daughter of Smoke and Bone) but this book went way overboard and beyond.

If you love reading descriptions about pointless people and things that never come up again later on in the book, thus making the chapters exuberantly long and kind of boring, then this is the book for you. Another thing you really should do when writing YA is make the chapters short. Readers reading this level of book (plus younger readers trying to pick up these books) shouldn’t feel bogged down by lengthy chapters. These readers are prone to boredom and laziness. I should know. I am one of them. And then when the first chapter isn’t even in the main character’s point of view, and it’s practically 20 pages long? Snore. I don’t care. It made getting into this book incredibly difficult.

Like I said, I love me some description, but this book was way too much. There would be three paragraphs describing the way each person looks, including random people that the main character notices in a window once and never sees again. Why? This book could have been half the size it is had I not had to wade through pointless descriptions. There was hardly any dialogue, either. And what was there was a line of dialogue followed by two long paragraphs of description and muck before the next character responded to the first. I was hard to get through, and then there was no goal for the main character.

I guess the goal could have been to figure out the mystery behind Diana, but that goal wasn’t introduced until Eureka got her inheritance, and that was pretty far into the book. The book was a lot of muck, with not a lot of plot, and then when Ander starts explaining things to Eureka it’s all a huge mess of info dump. It was disheartening because I was incredibly excited to read this book, but now I don’t know if I can sit through another one of these.

I know this is a lot of hating for one book, but I can say that I started to like the book toward the end. When things actually started happening. I loved Madame B (Savvy Blavvy was the best character in this book) and Cat. They were well developed, and they actually had decent interactions with Eureka without too much muck. Granted, there was still a lot of muck, but they were great characters. I wasn’t too overly fond of Ander or Brooks. They were vanilla. Ander especially. Brooks was better because he had a cute history with Eureka that involved a lot of inside jokes. I loved those! I wish there’d been more dialogue between them. Actually, more dialogue in general!

There were just so many cons to this book for me. I do think the descriptions were beautiful. Lauren Kate has a way with words. However, there were way too many chunky blocks of description and not enough dialogue. I wanted to read more interactions between Eureka and everyone else. I get that she was mourning and depressed, but still. I got tired of being in Eureka’s head real quick. And that sucks, because there were some fun characters in this story. I just don’t think it was done very well. Nothing happened in the book until Madame B showed up. Ander was barely there, unlike what the synopsis suggests, and I’m sorry but Eureka cares about more than just Brooks and some heirlooms. The synopsis was a big hunk of baloney.

XOXO Tia

REVIEW: Firelight by Sophie Jordan

            A hidden truth.

            Mortal enemies.

            Doomed love.

           

            With her rare ability to breathe fire, Jacinda is special even among the draki—the descendants of dragons who can shift between human and dragon forms. But when Jacinda’s rebelliousness forces her family to flee into the human world, she struggles to adapt, even as her draki spirit fades. The one thing that revives it is the gorgeous, elusive Will, whose family hunts her kind. Jacinda can’t resist getting closer to him, even though she knows she’s risking not only her life but the draki’s most closely guarded secret.

            Where do I begin with this review? This is my second times reading this book (I need to reread it so I can finally read the final two in the series). It’s weird because I remember loving this book the first time around, but this time around just wasn’t as amazing. I think the first read wrapped me up in the premise, and this time around I got more into the plot and characters. If I were to rate this book on my first reading, it would have more stars than it’s getting this time around.

            The premise of this book is really my favorite part. I love shapeshifters (trope alert) and I love the idea of them transforming into dragons. I don’t feel like there are a lot of dragons in YA so that’s very appreciated. I think it was great to make Jacinda a fire-breather and to make that such a coveted and lost gift in their world. This added such conflict, especially since her mom and sister were human. Jacinda’s special, but her twin sister isn’t. Twins. Love it. But the conflict wasn’t done very…nicely I guess is the word I’ll use.

            I hated the dynamic between Jacinda and both her twin sister, Tamra and her mom. It was awful. I should be behind it because it’s very real, but it was just too much. I don’t think Jacinda helped very much, however. Jacinda is the most selfish character I think I have ever read. Firelight is literally a book about a super selfish teenage dragon shapeshifter (“draki”). So I kind of hated Jacinda, but then you see her side and everything she’s given up and you understand her and hate her family with her. It’s very tense on my heartstrings.

            Aside from the sheer selfishness of the three women in this family, they’re also mean to each other. Tamra doesn’t even care about her sister when something happens to her towards the end of the book. She only cares about herself and her new life here. Jacinda’s mom doesn’t care either! She’s only worried about their new lives. While it all makes sense (Tamra’s a teenager, the mother only wants safety for her daughters since their fathers’ death), it was a little too thick. I wish I could have seen more love between the three of them. Just a few scenes of Jacinda bonding with her mom or her sister would have helped a lot.

            But Jacinda was selfish, so she only really cared about herself. Therein lies the dilemma of this entire book. I loved Will, though. I really love something about the hunter/prey love trope. To fall in love with that which you hunt is something special indeed. I like that Jacinda and Will had this crazy bond between them that kept them from staying away from each other. I just wish I could have seen the attraction and love grow between them instead of the cliché automatic soulmate bond, and then them pushing each other away the whole book.

            So in the end, I can whole-heartedly say that I adore the premise of this book but not much else. There was an empty threat to Xander (there was more from Brooklyn!) and I wish there’d been more to the sheep in the wolf’s den dinner scene between Jacinda and Will and his family. There were just a lot of things that could have been done a lot better but I have high hopes still for Vanish because of the big reveal at the end of this one. More twin trope! The book did have a lot of good things going, of course, otherwise I wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much both times I read it. But a girl’s gotta review honestly.

XOXO Tia

THOUGHTS: Tropes VS Cliches

A literary trope is the use of figurative language – via word, phrase, or even an image – for artistic effect such as using a figure of speech. The word trope has also come to be used for describing commonly recurring literary and rhetorical devices, motifs or clichés in creative words. – Thank you Wikipedia

Most everyone already knows what a trope is even if they’ve never heard that word associated with the definition. These people just classify everything under the word cliché. There are things that were consistent in different stories that you could just see coming. Female protagonist has hot, straight best friend and there’s a cute new boy in town: love triangle much? It’s easy to confuse tropes as mere clichés seeing as how clichés fall under the definition of a trope. Hopefully this post will clear up some confusion.

First off, I was exactly the kind of person that made this confusion before I went to college. I knew I wanted to be a writer because it was the only thing I enjoyed besides reading really (and there’s no good reading majors in college). College was kind of necessary for me. I know a lot of people are naturally brilliant at writing (coughlindsaycough), but college taught me a lot of things that would have taken me a lot longer to pick up on my own. Tropes are one of those things.

I knew what tropes were of course, I just hadn’t heard the word used before. I mean come on, I was a major TV addict before going to college and losing every second of time I ever had. But tropes are just clichés, right? Why would they be important other than to learn to avoid them? Well they’re way more than that. Readers expect certain things from a forbidden romance trope story that they wouldn’t expect from a twins trope story (aside from the romance bit which is a given). While it’s great to break from tropes and write original works, there are just some things that will always stick with a trope. It’s why it is a trope and not just a cliché.

Clichés are things that are never really going to change. They’re a singular moment in the story where the reader or viewer is like, “yawn! Been there, done that!” Tropes are more overarching though. Like the twins trope. When one says they’re writing a book about twins, it’s easy to come up with all the ways in which they could write about that topic. These are clichés, and they’ve obviously been done a lot. But the story isn’t about that one storyline where the twins switch places which is a little cliché; it’s about everything it could be. Tropes kind of encompass that. They’re all the ways in which you can adapt the twins into the story. There are many ways to do it. Not just one way, a.k.a. a cliché way.

I had a teacher a couple of years ago (the amazing Dr. Jennifer Lynn Barnes), who actually keeps a list of all the tropes she loves, and I think that’s amazing. Tropes tell you what you love to read, and thus what you inherently love to write. Tropes are so important because they will help you write your book if you know what trope you’re going for. It will guide you toward your major plot points. “Guide” is the operative word. Write original pieces of work by all means, but tropes will make the first draft process that much easier because they show you what is needed for that trope and where exactly you can deviate to wow readers and make your book that much more original.

Being that I’m an avid reader and writer, I’ve decided to follow in the footsteps of one of my most beloved teachers and writers, and create my own list of favorite tropes during all of my reading and reviewing for this blog. I’m pretty excited to start this little side project and I can’t wait to figure out all the tropes I adore that I never really knew about! You can check out my tropes list above in my navigation bar, or here’s the LINK if you’re a little lazy like me.

XOXO Tia