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Audiobook Review: Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

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“It’s like being in love, discovering your best friend.” 

― Elizabeth Wein, Code Name Verity

  • Release Date: February 6th 2012
  • Publisher: Egmont Press
  • Genre: Historical Fiction
  • Hours: 10 hours 7 minutes

Synopsis: I have two weeks. You’ll shoot me at the end no matter what I do.
That’s what you do to enemy agents. It’s what we do to enemy agents. But I look at all the dark and twisted roads ahead and cooperation is the easy way out. Possibly the only way out for a girl caught red-handed doing dirty work like mine — and I will do anything, anything, to avoid SS-Hauptsturmführer von Linden interrogating me again.
He has said that I can have as much paper as I need. All I have to do is cough up everything I can remember about the British War Effort. And I’m going to. But the story of how I came to be here starts with my friend Maddie. She is the pilot who flew me into France — an Allied Invasion of Two.
We are a sensational team

Wow. Just Wow. Code Name Verity is one of those books that everyone raves about and you know what? They have good reason to. Code Name Verity is an amazing story and the audiobook version does this novel so much justice, I can’t recommend it enough. Between this and Out of The Easy, I just may have a new thing for historical YAs….

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Skylark by Meagan Spooner

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  • Release Date: August 1, 2012
  • Genre: Fantasy
  • Pages: 344
  • Publisher: Carolrhoda Labs (Lerner Publishing)

Synopsis: Sixteen-year-old Lark Ainsley has never seen the sky.
Her world ends at the edge of the vast domed barrier of energy enclosing all that’s left of humanity. For two hundred years the city has sustained this barrier by harvesting its children’s innate magical energy when they reach adolescence. When it’s Lark’s turn to be harvested, she finds herself trapped in a nightmarish web of experiments and learns she is something out of legend itself: a Renewable, able to regenerate her own power after it’s been stripped.

Steampunk, fantasy and dystopian collide to create the devastatingly unique setting of Skylark by debut author, Meagan Spooner.

In Lark Ainsley’s community everything is powered by the Resource, a type of magic that originates in all the citizens. At a young age, every citizen has their Resource harvested which strips them of any ability and then fully join society as adults.

Lark is getting older and at 15-years-old is frustrated that she has yet to get harvested. Just when she thinks it will never happen Lark discovers she is different.  In a very bad way. Lark finds herself on the run, escaping the only life and civilization she knows into a great and dangerous unknown….

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Things I Can’t Forget by Miranda Keneally (Thousand Oaks #3 )

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  • Publication Date March 1st 2013
  • Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire
  • Pages: 308
  • Genre: Contemporary

Synopsis: Companion to Catching Jordan and Stealing Parker. Kate has always been the good girl. Too good, according to some people at school—although they have no idea the guilty secret she carries. But this summer, everything is different…This summer she’s a counselor at Cumberland Creek summer camp, and she wants to put the past behind her. This summer Matt is back as a counselor too. He’s the first guy she ever kissed, and he’s gone from a geeky songwriter who loved The Hardy Boys to a buff lifeguard who loves to flirt–with her.Kate used to think the world was black and white, right and wrong. Turns out, life isn’t that easy…

Much like Kenneally’s last book, Stealing Parker this book is about a good Christian girl. But unlike Parker in Stealing Parker, our main character Kate wants nothing more to stay that way. She likes being called a  “a good, good girl.” Which is why every day she wrestles with helping with her estranged best friend’s abortion.…

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Days of David Levithan : Boy Meets Boy

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What is Days of David Levithan ?

 

  • Release Date: Sept. 8th 2003
  • Publisher: Knopf 
  • Genre: Contemporary
  • Pages: 185

It’s pretty fitting to start my reading David Levithan with his debut novel Boy Meets Boy. In fact, Boy Meets Boy just released its 10 year anniversary edition which has an excellent Q&A with Levithan in the back and I’ll be referring to a bit.

As I was reading this Q&A I began to think about how this novel is pretty significant to the “YA canon”, if there is one. In a lot of interviews about this book  Levithan talks about how in 2004 there weren’t many books featuring queer teens, and if there were they usually leaned on the Bury Your Gay and the Gayngst tropes–that is a gay teen usually ended up dead or in another equally angsty situation at the end of the day. That’s not to say the intolerance doesn’t exist in the novel, but what Levithan  does is offer a new narrative, a story of hope for those gay  teens who never see positive stories about themselves.

Boy Meets Boy is exactly what it says on the cover. It’s about what happens when boy meets boy, but the plot is about if  boy can keep boy. At the National Book Festival Levithan called this a “dippy happy love story” and I think that is the perfect description.

…

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Book Review: Living Violet by Jamie Reed

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“Love indulged the masochist”

 -Jaime Reed, Living Violet

  • Publication Date: December 27, 2011
  •  Genre: Paranormal Romance
  • Pages: 304
  • Publisher: Kensington

He’s persuasive, charming, and way too mysterious. And for Samara Marshall, her co-worker is everything she wants most–and everything she most fears. . .Samara Marshall is determined to make the summer before her senior year the best ever. Her plan: enjoy downtime with friends and work to save up cash for her dream car. Summer romance is not on her to-do list, but uncovering the truth about her flirtatious co-worker, Caleb Baker, is. From the peculiar glow to his eyes to the unfortunate events that befall the girls who pine after him, Samara is the only one to sense danger behind his smile.But Caleb’s secrets are drawing Samara into a world where the laws of attraction are a means of survival. And as a sinister power closes in on those she loves, Samara must take a risk that will change her life forever. . .or consume it

 

 




Samara Marshall has never understood the attraction women seem to have to her co-worker Caleb Baker, besides his violet eyes, Caleb is pretty average. Yet all of the women who enter Buncha Books can’t keep their hands of him and when people start dropping dead in Samara’s hometown of Williamsburg, VA she learns that Caleb has his own secret; he is being possessed.

…

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Audiobook Review : Burn For Burn by Jenny Han and Siobhan Vivian

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  • Publisher : Simon & Schuster
  • Audio Book Length : 7 hours 1 min
  • Release Date : September 18th 2012

 Synopsis : Postcard-perfect Jar Island is home to charming tourist shops, pristine beaches, amazing oceanfront homes—and three girls secretly plotting revenge. KAT is sick and tired of being bullied by her former best friend. LILLIA has always looked out for her little sister, so when she discovers that one of her guy friends has been secretly hooking up with her, she’s going to put a stop to it.MARY is perpetually haunted by a traumatic event from years past, and the boy who’s responsible has yet to get what’s coming to him.None of the girls can act on their revenge fantasies alone without being suspected. But together…anything is possible.With an unlikely alliance in place, there will be no more “I wish I’d said…” or “If I could go back and do things differently…” These girls will show Jar Island that revenge is a dish best enjoyed together

The Gist : On the small New England island of Jar Island, secrets, drama and betrayal are running rampant and at its center are three girls; Kat, Lillia and Mary. These unlikely friends are out for revenge, but what starts out as a way to get even soon becomes more than they can handle. All is not what it seems on Jar Island.

Jess’ Takeaway

“Well that took a turn.” is the one way I would describe this book, and I don’t just mean the plot twists. Nothing is ever what it seems in this book. Han and Vivian ever so slightly take tropes associated with high school  and turning them around.

What really makes this book stand out for me is that this story isn’t overtly focused on a romance. Finally a YA novel where the girls characters work together and take center stage over a typical boy meets girl romance.

As for the writing there wasn’t a large attempt at trying to “sound like teenagers”, instead it felt  nostalgic. They captured the everyday down and lows of being a teenager (picking prom dresses, winning high school football games, the over dramatics of being in a teen etc.)

What makes this novel a must read is  pitch perfect setting of Jar Island The mix of local color and lifestyle of the residents down to the local coffee shops and tourism made it seem so real. I literally Googled Jar Island just to see if it was a real place. (BTW it’s not). I’m not a big contemporary (or is this comtep . . . ?)  reader but this book was exciting and devious. I couldn’t wait to see what kind of trouble these girls were going to cause next.

Unfortunately the audiobook was kind of hit or miss. I loved how they used 3 different voices over but the recording sounded off. Mary’s voice actor’s recording sounded faraway and Kat’s voice took a little getting used to.

Kat’s Takeaway

Reminiscent of Pretty Little Liars and Mean Girls,  Burn for Burn is what happens when girls stop playing victim and start getting even. This is a different type of story.  As someone who reads a lot of contemporary and for me Burn for Burn was just okay. So much of the book was fueled on getting to the end, that there was no real sense of complete story. Like certain plot points were brought up, but never really resolved or discussed through the book.

I liked listening to this in audiobook form, and unlike Jess I actually like the narrator of Kat the best. I thought from the very beginning her voice had the perfect mix of attitude and snark with a dash of vulnerability

 All three narrators also did a great job of mimicking the other narrator’s voices. One of my pet peeves is when a characters tone is so vastly different when a different narrator is speaking as them, so I think they handled this well. I’m  not sure why the audiobook sounded so strange at times, like Mary’s narrator was far away or something, but now I’m beginning to think this was on purpose.

Overall, I thought the writing was good and Han and Vivian created a great sense of place in their writing. You can really feel the claustrophobia of having to live on a small island town and the kind of social issues it creates.

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