Die for Me

Die for Me

by Amy Plum

After Kate's parents died in a horrific car accident, she and her sister move to Paris, France to live with her grandparents.  While her sister seems determined to ignore her grief by partying every night and flirting with every guys she sees, Kate disappears into her grief and barely leaves her room.

One day, while out in a local café trying to return to the real world, Kate spots Vincent.  He's gorgeous.  He's chivalrous.  And he's undead.

Turns out, if you die while trying to save others, there's a possibility that you can come back to life... in a way.  However, once you are brought back, you have an overwhelming urge to save everyone around you.  Of course, it turns out that if you die while betraying and killing someone, you can come back to kill even more.  So there's a war and now Kate's in the middle of it.

Can she open her heart to love and still survive... literally?

Final thoughts:  Checklist time!  Let's see if we can name all the ways this is Twilight for the zombie crew!

1) Girl who thinks she's only plain-looking meets gorgeous boy, compares him to characters from Greek mythology, and doubts he can ever love her the way she loves him.  All the while, said boy is completely in love and thinks she's the most beautiful person ever born, but is always afraid she'll run screaming from him because of what he is.  CHECK!

2) Immortals.  CHECK!

3) Good immortals vs. bad immortals!  It's really all a choice.  CHECK!

4) Supernatural powers to predict the future and manipulate emotions.  CHECK!

5) Girl in the supernatural group who is drawn to the new human chick and they become best friends instantly.  CHECK!

6) Father figure who leads the group and works to keep it from harm while making mad cash so everyone is rich.  CHECK!

7) When kissing boy, girl sometimes forgets to breathe.  Also loses train of thought when looking into his eyes.  CHECK!

8) Girl saved from certain death by Alice/Edward = Charlotte/Vincent.  CHECK!

9) Girl risks self to save family member and is saved by boy she loves.  CHECK!

10) Three days to convert to supernatural being, can't sleep, sometimes cold/dead looking.  CHECK!

11) Boy leaves girl alone to keep her safe/sane, but can't stay away.  CHECK! (though really from New Moon)

12) Girl somehow awesomely able to handle the truth and can even do things that most humans can't, which makes her a perfect addition to the group.  (Oh, yeah.  And almost everyone in the group loves her and would do anything for her.)  CHECK!

... and oh-so-many more similarities.  This could go on for days.

It's Twilight... but as zombies.  Good zombies.  We don't eat humans; we save them! zombies.  Messy. Confusing.  And an obvious knock-off complete with New Moon aspect.  There are two more planned in this knock-off trilogy by all appearances so I'm willing to bet other supernatural beings show up and there may even be a wedding and/or baby in the future for Kate.

Ugh.

Rating: 2/5

Books and Movies

Maggie Stiefvater, author of Shiver, recently posted a blog asking people to stop sending her headshots and requesting casting information for the movie adaption of her novel.  You can read the whole thing here.

This leads to a few questions:

1) How much say should an author have in the casting of his/her own movie?

2) How much say should the potential audience have in the say of the casting of the movie adaption of their beloved book?

Personally, I think the problem stems from Stephenie Meyer and Twilight.  Yes, there had been plenty of converted books cast before and there had been plenty of speculation about casting choices.  I remember oh-so-long-ago when Daniel Radcliffe was cast as Harry Potter and the fans screamed both in support and anger.  But the real hard push by fans to have a say in casting came when Stephenie Meyer became a regular poster on her own website.  She posted actor headshots early on of people she thought were perfect for the roles.  She commented regularly on Catherine Hardwicke's casting choices.  When Kristen Stewart was cast, people were relatively happy.  But when Robert Pattinson was cast, the fans and fansites became incensed.  Flame wars erupted everywhere.  It was only when Stephenie herself stepped up and posted that she approved of the choice that people calmed down.  (Of course, I personally think that both actors were tremendously mis-cast since I love the books but HATE the actors' choices in their performances.)

Now, as more and more novels are being adapted (Shiver, The Hunger Games, the entire Twilight franchise, etc...) the fans seem to have an expectation that the authors are a part of the movie production.  While Meyer was very hands-on with Twilight and often posted about talking to the directors and the screenwriter, most authors sell the rights and lose control of their work.

So how much say should the original author have in the adapted work?  When does the author have to step back and let changes be made?  And who is the final decider of what works and what doesn't?

These things will bug me for days now.

Divergent

Divergent

by Veronica Roth

In the future, the people are separated into five distinct and different factions.  Candor see the world in black and white and always tell the truth.  Erudite live to learn and prize information above all things.  Amity live to be happy and joyful.  Dauntless respect only the brave and love danger and fighting. Abnegation sacrifice everything for the good of all.

Beatrice has lived in the Abnegation faction her entire life, but she's never felt like she belongs.  She's not nearly as giving as her parents and her brother has always been kinder than she.  But now she's turning 16 and she has a choice to make.  She can choose to stay with Abnegation and spend her life living selflessly for others or she can become Dauntless and learn a more physically demanding life, but one that does not force you to give up comfort... or love.

As she struggles with figuring out who and what she is, she also finds herself having to fight against the world around her... a world that is not as ordered and orderly as it seems.

Final thoughts: I got this as an ARC from the ALA Midwinter Conference and I've got to say that I am sooo glad I didn't have to wait for this book!  While I've worried over the new trend in dystopian YA fiction, this one is totally worth checking out and possibly keeping by your side for always and ever.  I LOVE this book.  Beatrice (Tris) is such a real character.  She's full of conflicting feelings and emotions, but her real personality is always true and constant.  She's a cross between Katniss's badassness (The Hunger Games) and Cassia's honesty and love (Matched). The romance is awesome.  The story is strong.  The only bad thing is that it is the first of a trilogy, so now I have to wait for the next book.  Completely wonderful and fantastic.

Rating: 5/5

Ascend

Ascend

by Amanda Hocking

With Wendy's wedding approaching and war on the horizon, she must now make preparations to keep her people from dying.  The choices she makes now will either guarantee the future of the Trylle or destroy them completely.

Final thoughts:  Ugh.  I am so disappointed by this book.  It was an absolute mess.  Hocking seems to have realized late in the game that she needed to resolve points from her first two books in this trilogy and she kind of just jams those resolutions in without any honest flow.  There's also a Bella Swan element here of Wendy constantly wanting to go out and save the day on her own and having the men who love her constantly tell her they won't lose her like that and "never do that again".  

Hocking also seems to have no idea about the realities of war and she even seems to forget the time period she's in.  A whole city has been attacked and Wendy first sends 10 people out to go help them.  Those 10 people come across the attackers in a forest and surprise them.  But if everyone is driving cars and cities aren't that far away, how come the attackers stopped at all and how did the 10 scouts (who are in cars driving on roads) just happen to come across them in the forest?  Later, Wendy herself goes out to the town, makes one round in the palace ballroom that's being used as a hospice, and then she goes out and cleans the town.  Yup.  She and the others clean.  No rescuing of anyone.  No burying.  Cleaning.

The romance part isn't handled well either.  Wendy has three guys in her life, but the person she seemed to want the most for the first two books is just kind of there in this one and she's suddenly deeply in love with someone else.  

Another similarity to Meyer's work is the seeming need for everyone to have a happy ending.  Breaking Dawn annoyed me because everyone ended up happy.  Ascend is similar.  All things work out for everyone good and nice.  Bad guys are no longer around and/or bad.  Blah blah blah.  I could go on and on for days about the problems in this book.

Hocking needs an editor desperately.  Her FAQ says that she writes each book in about three weeks.  It really shows in this one.  Writing a book and self-publishing it doesn't mean it's necessarily worth reading and this one isn't.

Rating: 2/5

Across the Universe

Across the Universe

by Beth Revis

She only agreed to go because she didn't want to leave her parents.

She didn't know how wrong everything would go.

No one did.

No one could.

And now she's been awakened early and she can't go back to sleep.  She can't sleep through the rest of the 300 year journey across space to the new planet.  She may be dead long before her parents ever wake up...

He's been brought up to be the future leader.

It's his job to keep the people on the ship safe as they travel.

But he didn't know the secrets that were being kept.

Almost no one did.

And now he needs to get the answers to his questions and find out the secrets before more are unfrozen and awakened.  

Before more die.

Together, maybe they can find the truth.

Final thoughts:  Wow... This one will be screwing with my head for a while.  This is Revis's debut novel and it's amazing.  This ship world that has been created and all of the controls that are in place are mind-boggling both in complexity and simplicity.  I highly recommend this to both sci-fi lovers and those who like a good edge-of-your-seat thriller.

Rating: 5/5

The Samantha Granger Experiment : Fused

The Samantha Granger Experiment : Fused

by Kari Lee Townsend

Sam's parents had warned her that she was far too dependent on technology and gadgets.  She couldn't go anywhere without the latest tech and she got easily lost without her handy phone GPS.  But they never could have expected things to go down the way they did.

One night, while lost in the woods, Sam turns on her GPS, turns a corner, and finds the discovery of the century.  A blue, glowing meteor is lying in a crater in the forest and Sam gets the sudden urge to touch it.

Big mistake.

After receiving the literal shock of a lifetime, she gets a figurative one.  Her phone is gone, but she can suddenly do everything it could.  Her hand is now a dial pad.  Her eye is a camera.  Her brain can tap the Internet.  And her world has just turned upside-down.

She's only 13 years old.  She's finishing middle school.  She's got a major crush on an awesome guy.  And now her phone's tech is taking over her life.  

Now she must become Hard Wired (or maybe some other hero name that won't get confused with "Harry Weird") and try to track down why 911 calls are not getting through to anyone but her and why there have been so many recent break-ins.

Can she save the town and still get the boy?

Final thoughts:  This is a cute premise, but it's an absolute mess overall.  The story jumps all over the place and some things that really should be explained just never are.  Sometimes Sam is completely in control of her new powers, while other times she's as lost as the reader.  And somehow, everything seems to magically work out at the end, though it does finish off with an obvious "to be continued" type ending.  Upper elementary and middle school girls will probably enjoy it, but it's just not executed well enough to recommend.

Rating: 2/5

ALA Youth Media Award Winners

Congrats to all of the winners of this year's 

American Library Association 

Youth Media Awards!!

John Newbery Award Winner - Moon Over Manifest by Claire Vanderpool

Randolph Caldecott Medal - A Sick Day for Amos McGee, illustrated by Erin E. Stead

Michael L. Printz Award - Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi

Coretta Scott King (Author) Book Award - One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia (also the winner of the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction)

Coretta Scott King (Illustrator) Book Award - Dave the Potter: Artist, Poet, Slave, illustrated by Bryan Collier

Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe New Talent (Author) Award - Zora and Me by Victoria Bond and T. R. Simon

 

Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe New Talent (Illustrator) Award - Seeds of Change, illustrated by Sonia Lynn Sadler

Coretta Scott King – Virginia Hamilton Practitioner Award for Lifetime Achievement - 

Dr. Henrietta Mays Smith

Schneider Family Book Award - The Pirate of Kindergarten by George Ella Lyon, After Ever After by Jordan Sonnenblick, Five Flavors of Dumb by Antony John

Laura Ingalls Wilder Award - Tomie dePaola

  

Margaret A. Edwards Award - Sir Terry Pratchett 

 

May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture Award - Peter Sis

  

Mildred L. Batchelder Award - A Time of Miracles by Anne-Laure Bondoux, translated by Y. Maudet

 

Odyssey Award - The True Meaning of Smekday, produced by Listening Library

Pura Belpre (Author) Award - The Dreamer by Pam Munoz Ryan

 

Pura Belpre (Illustrator) Award - Grandma's Gift, illustrated and written by Eric Velasquez

 

 

Robert F. Sibert Medal - Kakapo Rescue: Saving the World's Strangest Parrot by Sy Montgomery

Stonewall Children's and Young Adult Literature Award - Almost Perfect by Brian Katcher

Theodor Seuss Geisel Award - Bink and Gollie by Kate DiCamillo and Alison McGhee

 

William C. Morris Award - The Freak Observer by Blythe Woolston

YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults - Janis Joplin: Rise Up Singing by Ann Angel    

 

More details and information can be found at the ALA website.

    

Switched and Torn

Switched

by Amanda Hocking

Wendy was only six when her own mother tried to kill her with a knife at her birthday party.  Since then, she's lived with her older brother, Matt, and her aunt, Maggie.  They are really all the family she's ever known, especially after her father died and her mother attempted filicide.

And while she's felt loved her entire life, she's never really fit in.  Because of her own temper issues and inability to focus, she's had to change schools repeatedly over the years, forcing her brother and aunt to move from place to place.

Seventeen and fully resolved to make sure she never forces her family into moving again, Wendy finally seems to be getting her act together.  She's doing better in school and has even met a cute guy: Finn.  Of course, he's always watching her, which is a little creepy, but it's also a little hot.

Unfortunately, it turns out that Finn has a secret and that secret is really about Wendy.  It seems that Wendy isn't really her mother's child.  She's a changeling.  A troll.  A Trylle, actually.  And her powers (yup, powers!) have started developing a little early, forcing her real mother to call her back early before members of an opposite and dangerous group get ahold of her.

Now all Wendy has to do is figure out who she really is and learn to embrace it. 

Torn

by Amanda Hocking

Just weeks after running away from home to fulfill her destiny to be queen of the Trylle, Wendy has run away again with her brother's brother to return home.  Unfortunately, the homecoming is short-lived and, before she can even settle in, she's kidnapped.

What she learns from her captor, her rescuers, her mother, and the man she wants to be her lover turns everything she knew on its head.

Can she be the Princess that the Trylle need and prevent the Vittra from ending the lives of more innocents?

Final thoughts:  These books were recommended to me on my Kindle by Amazon.  At first, I ignored the recommendations, but I'm glad I finally gave them a chance.  Amanda Hocking is a self-published author who has a real talent.  While there are some difficulties with flow and some of the relationships don't seem to be how they are described, the story is compelling.  I was hoping to review all three in one post, but, alas, the final book, Ascend, seems to be delayed until next week.  Good, solid read with a little supernatural and a lot of chemistry/friction/romance.

Rating for both books: 4/5

The DUFF: Designated Ugly Fat Friend

The DUFF: Designated Ugly Fat Friend

by Kody Keplinger

After a horrendous break-up with her "boyfriend" when she was only a freshman, Bianca's pretty much sworn off love.  It really only causes problems and everyone suffers in the end.  Love really takes years to get to, anyway, so why waste trying to find it in high school?

So she's settled on just being best friends with two of the prettiest girls in school and watching them have fun.  Now all she has to do is finish her senior year and she'll be off to college.

Unfortunately, she has a bad night with her friends when they all go to a club and leave her at the "bar" to drink Cherry Cokes and watch them dance the night away.  That's when Wesley Austin, known player and man-whore, sits down to talk to her.  He explains that she's the Duff (Designated Ugly Fat Friend).  If he makes nice to her and makes her happy, he may be able to sleep with one of her pretty friends, since he'll have scored points with them by talking to her.

This becomes too much to deal with for Bianca, who's never thought of herself as anything so negative before.  She's always been herself (even sometimes rudely so), but always true, real, and a real friend.

She gets more bad news when her family falls apart in front of her very eyes and the only time she ever feels like the world doesn't suck is when she's in the arms of the very same man-whore who started it all: Wesley.

Can she find her way back to herself and maybe even to love?  And will Toby Tucker ever finally give her the time of day?

Final thoughts:  We've all felt like the Duff before.  It's natural.  But knowing that we ARE the Duff and being able to turn that into a positive can be very difficult.  Keplinger also references The Scarlet Letter and Wuthering Heights to great affect, hopefully inspiring others to read those, too.  Overall, it was a good read and very self-affirming.  Bianca's story is fairly realistic and honest.

WARNING: this is a YA book, but it is definitely for more mature readers.  There is sex and foul language, which, while honest for many 17-year-olds, may be inappropriate for younger teens.

Rating: 4/5

Anna and the French Kiss

Anna and the French Kiss

by Stephanie Perkins

Anna had everything planned.  Her senior year was going to be amazing.  She had an awesome best friend and a guy who was heading towards being her boyfriend.  Everything was looking good.

Then her dad decided to use his daughter to increase his status.  A famous writer of schlock about-to-die books (you know the ones where the woman finds romance, discovers she has cancer, spends her last days in love, and croaks at the end), he wants to send his daughter to a boarding school in Paris in order to help bump up his reputation in the states.

Unable to fight him, Anna is shipped off and now must figure out how to live and study in France even though she's only ever taken Spanish in school and she's absolutely horrible at learning new languages.

Fortunately, Anna has a great new friend in the girl next door who gives her a built-in group of friends.  And with those friends comes Étienne St. Claire.  He's gorgeous.  He's smart. And he has a great accent.  There seems to be great chemistry.  If only he didn't have that pesky long-term girlfriend with him.

Can Anna learn to live and love in the city that is built for that kind of thing?

Final thoughts:  Great teen romance.  Anna is realistic and funny.  She has a great voice and her problems are real.  Most people would be ecstatic to spend a year in France, but Anna's reasons for being unhappy are honest and unforced.  Perkins has done a great job making the story real.  My only issue has to do with Étienne's problems and his handling of the whole girlfriend vs. the love of his life issues.

Rating: 4/5

Harper Connelly Books 2-4

Grave Surprise

by Charlaine Harris

While providing a demonstration for a professor and his class, Harper runs across the grave of a girl she had searched for years before and had not found.  What follows is a dangerous journey to find the killer and figure out why that killer lured Harper to that grave.

Ice Cold Grave

by Charlaine Harris

For the past few years, boys have been mysteriously disappearing.  Initially shrugged off as having run away, the new sheriff thinks something more sinister is going on and calls on Harper Connelly and her special "talent" to find the truth.  What Harper finds is a mass grave filled with the remains of tortured boys.  She also finds out that the killer is not too happy to have had his burial ground found, and now he wants Harper dead.

Grave Secret

by Charlaine Harris

Brought in to simply tell a family whether or not the now-dead patriarch was murdered, Harper comes across the body of assistant who had died around the same time and makes a pronouncement: the girl had died in childbirth and not appendicitis.  Now the family of that patriarch needs to find the child and discover if she is the heir to a fortune, or just the daughter of some random guy.  During her search, she also finds clues to solve the crime of her sister's disappearance eight years before.  But can Harper figure out all the clues before it's too late?

Final thoughts:  The first two books in this series were pretty good.  They had a mystery, drama, and a pinch of the supernatural.  However, the third book (Ice Cold Grave) was when Charlaine Harris seemed to get writer's Tourette's.  Where the first books had been tame enough to recommend to older teens, this third book suddenly became curse central with f-bombs dropped left and right.  Harris also seems to find it necessary to go into great detail about the torture and rape of the dead boys.  Finally, she decided to drop in a semi-incestuous, and very graphically described sexual relationship between Harper and her stepbrother.  The last book felt like Harris was giving up the series (possibly after complaints about the third book) and just wanted to tie up the loose ends.  It was a hasty, messy way to conclude Harper's story and the last few pages were a throwaway to give some closure.

Rating: 3/5 for the series as a whole.  Grave Surprise: 4/5.  Ice Cold Grave: 2/5.  Grave Secret: 3/5

Grave Sight

Grave Sight

by Charlaine Harris

Harper Connelly makes a living finding bodies and figuring out how they died, but she's not a cop.  When she was young, she was struck by lightning, which gave her the ability to sense the dead.

Yup.  That's right.  She can sense the dead.  They buzz in her brain until she's right over them and then she sees their last moments.

Cemeteries can give her a peaceful buzz or a major headache.  The more recent the death, the louder the noise.  The more violent the death, the scarier the picture.

And while she can see a murder victim's final moments, she can never see the killer.  But that's ok with her.  She doesn't want to solve cases (except for that of her younger sister's disappearance and probable murder); she just wants to find the body, declare the cause of death, get paid, and get out of town.

Unfortunately, while the residents of Sarne need her services, she's very unwelcome while she's there.  And when she finds the body of a dead teenage girl whose mother is murdered soon after the discovery, she now becomes a key person in an investigation where no one wants her around, and someone really seems to want her dead.

With the help of her friend/coworker/stepbrother, can Harper solve a town's mystery when the town doesn't want her around?

Final thoughts:  Nice change of pace from the Sookie Stackhouse novels.  This book is aimed more at older readers (think college and beyond), so it's off my normal YA review path, but it's still decently written.  Now that the basic premise has been set, I'm sure the next books in the series will have less exposition and more plot.  Decent read all around.

Rating: 4/5

Matched

Matched

by Ally Condie

In the Oria Province, everything is planned.  The moment you are born, you are tracked.  From your first day on Earth to the day you die, your life is mapped out for you.

The Officials track everything you do and plan your day for you.  They send food trays to each person at mealtimes with the exact amount of nutrition necessary and then check the trays when you dispose them to make sure you ate everything.  They watch your sleep and follow you on outings.  They build a physical and psychological profile of you to help them predict your attractions, friendships, and reactions to events.  They know what you're going to do before you do.

Nothing you do is truly private. 

Nothing.

Cassia has always believed in the system.  She was raised with it and has always been a good follower.  On the day of her Match to her future mate, she is eager, happy, and proud.

And when the screen that is supposed to show the image of her Match in another province stays blank, leading to the realization that she's been matched to her best friend, Xander, things couldn't be more perfect.  She gets to marry the one person who knows her better than any other and she gets to continue living in the same province as her family.

But when she goes to view Xander's profile on the microcard, another face appears.  It's the face of another boy she's known most of her life and now Cassia faces the difficult choice: to follow the rules and stay with her Match, or follow her heart and be with Ky.

She has to choose carefully because every misstep is punished and the Officials have no tolerance for changes in the plan.

Final thoughts:  I love this book!  BUT!  I think the dystopian novel is taking over vampire novels as the next "big thing", and I worry that the market will get flooded with bad copies.  Not as violent as The Hunger Games series (Cassia is more of a thinker than a doer, unlike Katniss), the stakes are just as high.  Everything Cassia does affects everyone around her.  Of course, my big pet peeve with this is that it appears to be a trilogy.  I hadn't realized that when I started and now have to wait for the next book to continue the story.  Can no one write one, solid novel anymore?

Rating: 5/5

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1

(movie review)

I don't usually review movies anywhere, but as this is the most highly anticipated movie of the season on so many levels AND it's based on the final book of a hugely popular series; it just screamed for a review.

I won't say much about this, but I do think it's definitely one of the best in the movie franchise.  It hits all the right notes when dealing with the fact that Harry, Ron, and Hermione, for the first time ever, are really, truly alone.  There are no adults as back-up here.  They have no one to help them or give advice, and the one person they trusted throughout the rest of the series is not only gone, but they are finding out that he was too human in many ways.

It's an absorbing film that drags you in.  I'm glad I had re-read the series and the final book just before I saw the movie because it really helped me to understand what was going on and what was coming.  I had thought I knew where the break would be between the first and second parts, but I was wrong.  It went much farther than I thought, which means that there will be a LOT of fighting in long sequences in the final movie.  It should be very good.

One thing to mention: this is NOT a movie for kids.  Really.  Truly.  Not.

This movie is violent, crushingly sad at time, filled with deaths, and has long sequences where the wizards are on the run and just trying to figure out what they are going to do next.  The film opens with Snape and, within the first five minutes, a witch, who has been tortured, is bleeding, and is begging for mercy, is murdered and then eaten by a giant snake.  This is IN the book, but it's so much more disturbing on screen.

The one fault I find with this is that it's cramming in characters who had been ignored in previous films.  Mundungus Fletcher, who was in both the fifth and sixth novels, but had never previously been in the movies, was suddenly in this one because he is essential to a plot point.  Bill Weasley had been ignored since the fourth book, but he was suddenly here, being introduced and his scars explained in a couple of throwaway lines.  In a franchise that had otherwise been very well planned, these sudden corrections stood out.  I remember reading that Rowling had had to work hard to keep Dobby in the second movie, because the screenwriter and director wanted to cut him for time.  If they had succeeded, this film would not have.  I wish they'd been able to do the same for other characters who just popped up all of a sudden.

In the end, though, this is a great film, and well worth watching.  I can't wait to see the finale.  It should be completely amazing and awesome, especially if they DON'T succeed in transferring it to 3D.  Those 2D to 3D transfers have never worked in the past (see: The Last Airbender and Clash of the Titans), so ruining the last episode of the franchise on bad coloring and lighting because of horrid transfers would be a shame.

Can't wait until July 15, 2011!

Delayed

Busy re-reading all of the Harry Potter books in preparation for Part 1 of Deathly Hallows coming out this month.  Will be back with new books soon (currently on Book 4).

UPDATE: Halfway through the last book, so I've probably read everything in the first movie.  I haven't re-read the series since Deathly Hallows came out in 2007.  It's like finding an old friend on Facebook and remembering the good times, but also remembering why you stopped talking in the first place.

My Soul to Save and My Soul to Keep

My Soul to Save

by Rachel Vincent

While attending a concert with her hotter-than-average boyfriend, Kaylee is able to sneak backstage and watch the action from the wings.  What she didn't count on was watching the teen pop star die on stage in front of everyone.  

Even more confusing is that Kaylee never felt the need to scream.  She's a banshee and her fate is to scream the souls of the dead as they cross over.  So why didn't she scream when this pop princess died?

It turns out, someone's been making deals with devils and trading their souls for fame and fortune.  Now time is running out for the next teen sensation and Kaylee must find a way to get her soul back before the week is out or another soulless pop star will die.

Rating: 4/5

My Soul to Keep

by Rachel Vincent

Kaylee knows all about addiction.  After all, she's completely addicted to her boyfriend.  Every second she spends with him has been blissful up til now.  But things change when a dangerous substance, one that's only supposed to be available in the demon Netherworld, makes it into her reality, and it becomes the hottest "fix" in town.

Now Kaylee has to stop the supply before people literally go insane trying to get ahold of this "drug", and she has to do it quick, because people she knows are becoming affected, in ways she never imagined possible.

Rating: 4/5

Final thoughts on both:  Again, these are great YA supernatural urban lit books.  They're easy to read, fast-paced, and really get the reader sucked in.  The biggest negative is having to try to patiently wait for the next one.

My Soul to Take

My Soul to Take 

by Rachel Vincent

Kaylee's not insane.  Really!  She isn't!  She just sometimes thinks she is.  And many of the people around her, including her aunt, uncle, and cousin, treat her like she may be.

Screaming bloody murder in the middle of a mall and not stopping until you're committed to a mental health hospital and drugged out of your mind will get you funny looks.

But she's not crazy.

What she IS is a bean sidhe, otherwise known as a banshee.  She knows when people near her are about to die and she's overcome by a fierce compulsion to scream when their time on this earth is up.  Her screams are a siren call to the souls of the dead, whether she wants them to be or not.

It's normally not a problem for her since death around a teenage girl is rare, but suddenly girls are dying all around her.  Each day she's faced with another compulsion to scream a young, pretty, teenage girl to her death.  But these girls weren't meant to die and now Kaylee, and her new, hot, understanding boyfriend, Nash, must figure out what's going on before the next victim dies, especially when that victim is someone Kaylee knows very well.

Final thoughts:  I have finally found something to tide me over until the next Chloe Neill Chicagoland Vampires novel!!  This series has been out a couple of years, but I'd never heard of it until reading about it on a fellow blogger's site (sorry I can't remember which one!!!).  Kaylee's voice is clear and fun to read.  Her relationship with Nash is sizzling, but not overly sexy.  And it's just good to finally read a supernatural YA lit book that doesn't feature vampires or werewolves (though it looks like Vincent does have a shapeshifter series that I'll have to look into, as well).  I would definitely recommend this one for teens and, if I was still  in the library, I'd buy multiple copies and pitch it like mad.

Rating: 4/5 (should be a 4.5 or 4.75)