Kate's Tales of Books and Bands

by Jaclyn Dolamore Thea waits tables by night, and by day, she takes care of her mother, who is plagued with bound-sickness; her mother was magically bound to her husband when they were married, but Thea’s father disappeared in a war.  Those who are bound-sick are taken away to the asylum, and Thea lives in constant fear that someone will notice her mother’s deteriorating mental state and that she will be left entirely alone.  Then Thea meets Freddy at the Telephone Club, where she works, and her friend mysteriously disappears.  Thea is thrust into parts of the city she didn’t know existed and, along with Freddy, discovers the darker aspects of their community. Although there was a lot going on for just about all of the book, there was a severe lack of depth to the world.  There was magic, but it was only mentioned or used in direct relation to the plot.  The magic wasn’t part of the world except as it was used to make the story work.  The charact...

By H. A. Swain . Published this month.        Thalia Apple lives in the not-too-distant future where all food is gone. Wars, famine, and plagues have eradicated all plants and animals save humans. It's only thanks to One World corporation that humans receive Synthamil and inoculations that provide nutrition while balancing hormones and suppressing hunger. Thalia's mother and father are renowned scientists and engineers within One World corp, so they live in relative luxury. However, Thalia thinks differently from the rest. She resists One World's vapid consumerism and likes to learn about the past where farmers grew and ate their own food and made things with their hands. Recently, she has been feeling something strange inside: she feels hungry. Soon she learns that the world is nothing like she knew, and some rumors have more truth than she thinks.        I read this book on a recommendation and I believe it was well placed. T...

By: Jacquelyn Mitchard I decided to review these two books together because the plots were so closely linked.  It would have been hard to review the second one in a separate review from the first one.  First, I just want to say that I think the covers are absolutely beautiful.  I think the silhouettes and the colors are really pretty. I also think that the the number of silhouettes on each cover is interesting to think about after reading the books.  The idea behind these books is that there is a genetic disease called XP, which is basically a fatal allergy to the sun along with other symptoms.  Most people with XP die young.  As a result the three characters in the first book Allie, Juliet, and Rob decide that they don't want to miss out on life and do things that push the limit of existence.  In What We Saw at Night , they learn parkour (this is the first one).  However.  What the book is really about is a serial killer.  Allie, the ma...

by Justin Somper When Anders dies, his younger brother, Jared, who is only sixteen, must take his place as Prince of All Archenfield.  Most of the plot is focused on catching Anders’s assassin, and Jared befriends Asta, the physician’s niece and apprentice, as they attempt to crack the case together.  Jared doesn’t know where to begin, inexperienced as he is, and he is unsure which members of his council he can trust. Despite his constant self-doubt as well as other characters pointing out his youth, I found most of the other characters to be much more naive than Jared.  The Twelve, along with the heir to the throne, make up Jared’s council, and they are heads of various jobs including the palace cook, the guard, the beekeeper, and the executioner.  They swallowed false leads with surprising gusto and seemed perfectly content to sit by as people were murdered around them.  Most of them were barely fleshed out, and there were minor character inconsistencies....

By: Sam Enthoven Imagine a giant bowl of green Jello.  You find it amusing for no other reason than the way it jiggles back and forth after just a slight tap.  This is sort of how I feel about Tim Defender of the Earth .  It was amusing but I not always because of the actual content of the book.  Sometimes just the idea of what was happening was funny. Tim Defender of the Earth was a book about a giant dinosaur who British scientists created beneath London.  He learns that he is and ho to be the Defender of the Earth from a giant 9 million year old kraken.  This dinosaur's name is Tim, hence the name of the book.  He defends the Earth from a swarm of nanobots that can genetically modify anything so that they can turn anything into anything else which includes into more nanobots.  There are also two human characters, Chris and Anna.  I just thought I should mention them because they are also sort of important. This book was very funny and the ...

By Emma Trevayne This is the sequel to Coda , an intriguing futuristic story about a society that is controlled by addictive music until a boy named Anthem creates his own music and leads a revolution.  Chorus is the story of his younger sister, Alpha, who has moved to Los Angeles and is working hard in school so she can discover a cure to strange and powerful flashbacks that have been haunting her and her twin brother, Omega. There was a lot that bothered me about this book.  There was one of the most pointless deaths I have read (which I won’t expound on to avoid spoilers) as well as a character just being able to guess a super important password, which is something that always bothers me in books.  When setting a password on a top-security system, it’s not going to be something that someone can just guess . However, what bothered me most of all was that the author hid relevant information that the main character knew.  For the first few chapters of the book, A...

by Kiersten White (text) and Jim Di Bartolo (art) Charles is sick with a disease that doctors cannot cure, so his father sends him to a boardinghouse for fresh air with his brother, Thom.  There, they meet sisters Cora and Minnie as well as another boarder named Arthur.  Together, they delve into secrets left by Arthur’s father that seem to be following Charles and Thom in the form of a group of mysterious strangers.  It struck me as gothic in tone, complete with hidden pasts and witches. Overall, this book was flat.  It is told in sequences of pictures (done by Jim Di Bartolo) alternated with text chapters (done by Kiersten White), and it seemed as though the authors skimmed over the story like an in-depth summary rather than really digging into it.  The entire time I read it, I felt emotionally detached.  The characters weren’t fleshed out and the depth of plot and world was hinted at rather than explored. This book is a 2.2.  I’m left with very l...