Again, not a review

Just because I gave Plus One a 3 of 5 stars on goodreads doesn't mean that it isn't a 5 for someone else.  It was just a little too out there for me.  I loved the message here, that love is love and classism is horrible and people should be free to love whom they love!  I mean that is important!  This was one of those Alternate History kind of deals, which I didn't figure out until a bit later. The United States was divided into people who were allowed to work and live in the day time and people who were allowed to work and live in the nighttime. And it was President Wilson who decided this, so yeah, that didn't happen, but I liked that.  That whole "alternate history" thing was new to me, so that was cool.  As an aside, but important to get the word out in case others have been under the same rock I have been under apparently, Wilson was a nasty racist.  So he has fallen off of my list of decent human beings!

Something Special

The Inquisitor's Tale or the Three Magical Children and Their Holy Dog was, indeed, something special.  The group on goodreads that reads a possible Newbery every month, one of ladies, Brenda, commented, "I think Gidwitz did something special here." And wow, she said it so well.
A tale set in the Middle Ages, for the ages.
Towers Falling is still my first choice, but this is a close, close, close second.
Very funny and very poignant.

Every Book

Every book offers its own special something, right? I mean, that's the idea.  Why write a book if it is has all been done and said before, even though some say it all has been said.  The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire is something about which I have read a lot.  But Triangle:  The Fire that Changed America taught me a lot about it that I didn't know.   I read this for my nonfiction book club and I was glad I did even though when the group picked it, I thought, oh man, I know about this.  I didn't know a lot of this stuff!  It made me sick of course, again, when I thought about the owners and how they locked in their workers.  And then how the rotten lawyer got them off.
It made me think, why some people who are abused, either as children or in an abusive relationship end up abusing people and why some who are abused don't.  Blanck and Harris were both poor immigrants.  Their evil lawyer, Steuer was also.  They all had toiled in garment factories like those who died in the fire.
Then on the other side, there were wealthy people who fought for the rights of the poor and labor.  Like Florence Harriman and Anne Morgan and Mary Drier?  So what makes someone like Harriman, without a need for money, ever, care about the poor, while a man like Donald Trump (I won't dignify him by including a link.) does not?  Is it a matter of character?  It seems so.
Anyway, very, very good read.

What was it...

I am just not sure what it was about this book that made me not like it very much.  Every time I don't like a book, I try to find a way to like it.  Chasing Secrets was just...rushed maybe?  Or maybe it was "this could be so good!" or "oh man it is so ALMOST there" that it is a bigger disappointment that it doesn't rise to that possibility and so I end up being harder on it than I would otherwise.

I mean, here is something totally new to me, anyway.  I had no idea about the plague being in San Francisco.  But I just couldn't get into as much as I should have.  The main character, Lizzie, is thirteen and the daughter of a doctor.  He is this super-peaceful dude who doesn't charge people who can't pay him.  Lizzie's mom is dead.  She has an other brother who is a bit of a rebel.  The family lives with her aunt and uncle who are part of high society, her uncle runs a newspaper, the rival of which is owned by Hearst.

There is a lot that is really good in this book.  For some reason, it just didn't move me all that much.  But I would still recommend it.  It probably was just me.  Maybe I just listened to it too quickly.

I mean there was a lot here, the whole idea of yellow journalism, the treatment of Chinese immigrants, classicism, women's rights, you name it, you know?  I just didn't it went deep enough on any one theme or issue.

Another Little Add On...

The Favorite is #2.6 in the Selection series.  I have gone on about these novella .897 before, and I think most of them are just money makers.  This one was okay.   I am more generous with it than I might be, had I not liked the series so very much.  But I listened to this one because I didn't have anything else to listen to last night.  If you love the Selection, go head.  If you are "meh" or just "it's good" about it, it probably isn't worth it.

Feeding on Lies

You remember those songs, Tell Me a Lie and Tender Lie?  Both sad, country songs about wanting to hear a lie instead of the truth, for the benefit of one's heart.  I can see the desire to want to hear a tender lie.  I have asked for a tender lie, many, actually, before, to be honest.  The lies that the Lie Tree likes in the book by the same name are different, but the tree does want lies.  

The Lie Tree in TLT is strengthened, grows from the spread of lies.  And the lies have to be lies that people want to hear.

This is a big book.  A deep kinda book, I think.  Too deep for me, really.  I didn't like it too much as it really isn't my "go-to" type of book.  It isn't set in America, it is set on an island called Vane, which I am not sure exists, but it is somehow related to England in the book.  Also it is set during the Victorian Era, which I know was a very important time and so forth and I know many people like Victorian stories, but I am not one of them, at all.  So this book had a lot stacked against it, for me.  I say that all in defense of the book.  I say it just to say that I am not the best person to judge a book like this.  For me, it was just too much to overcome.  The author, Frances Hardinge, is very well acclaimed and the book itself won the 2015 Costa Award.  I am so unqualified to judge this book that I didn't know what the Costa Award was!  

Most people really seem to love this book!  And the few people that didn't, at least on goodreads, criticized it for things that I really didn't think were a big problem, like the gal who complained that unlike the females in Pride and Prejudice (which I haven't read either and have no desire to read, again, an example that I am not the one to judge this book) the main character in this book just hid around and seemed to take her position in life for what it was and not stand up to the sexism of the time.  I didn't really see that as a criticism.  

I just really didn't care too much about the main character, whose name I have forgotten, sadly, and I didn't care for her dad, who was a minister and a scientist and I didn't care for the whiny little brother.  At first I didn't like the mom, either.  But then I figured that she was just doing the best that she could, given the position of women in society at that time.  If this wins the Printz, I am sure it is deserved.  It won the Costa Award, right?  But I will personally sad because this book was very hard to suffer through for me.  Although I don't know how it could fit this particular part of the criteria: Inspire wider readership in the genre.  But again, that's just me.  

 

A Diamond in My Crown

Emmylou Harris sang this and has been one of my favorite songs.  Of course, that has nothing to do with The Crown, the final installment in The Selection by Kiera Cass.
I thought that this was a much more satisfying end to the series than The Heir was.  Which makes sense, because The Heir was not the end!  But I don't think I knew that at the time!
No...I just read the blog about it and I did know that it was not the end...huh...well, it sounds like I didn't like The Heir so much...but I did like The Crown more!

Now that

I made that statement about my favorite Secrets book so far, as I think about Innocent, maybe IT is my favorite one!  Can you tell I just really, really like this series!
This one had me guessing for a while.  It has murder and passion and intrigue!  It is set in Kingston, Ontario.

The Second Secret

that I read anyway...Small Bones was just as good as the first one I read.  I don't know if the Secrets series has an order, but it didn't seem like there were any spoilers or anything, reading this one second.
This story is Dot's.  Her journey to find her birth family, given the little bit of information that the orphanage was able to give her after the home burned down.  In Dot's case, all she has is a coat that was left with her when she was left on the doorstep of the Benevolent Home for Necessitous Girls.  Totally liked it!

So that is why...

A novella from The Selection series.  This was kind of disturbing at first.  This is told from the POV of the Queen Amberly, Prince Maxton's mother.  It was hard to take her submission to the one-day-to-be King.  This is her selection story.
But then I read in goodreads, someone say that not all relationships were healthy in real life and this story wasn't meant to be a guide to relationships.
Looking at it from that way, I did find it helpful to see how the King and Queen before Maxton and America came to be the people they are.
If you like the Selection and can understand that this isn't a model of healthy love, then it is interesting to get the Queen's and King's POV.

Since

I have been off of my obsessive reading kick for a while, I didn't even know that Kiera Cass had written another book in the Selection series.  The Heir is number four.  The Queen is a short story that I didn't know existed, either.
I think it is time to surrender and change my goodreads goal. There is no way I will make 300 this year.  I am cutting it in half.
I can't say I liked The Heir all that much.  While I loved the Selection, this one just didn't do it for me.  And the ending was pretty irritating.  I will read the next one though...and yes, there will be next one, for sure.

is this the end?

Twice as Nice is the fourth book in the Almost Identical series by Lin Oliver.  I remember I was in love with the series from the first one and they just got better as they went along.  If this is the end of the series, it was a great way to wrap it up, but I will miss twins, Sammie and Charlie very much.

Heard it All Before...

Joyce Carol Oates maybe has just been writing too long.  Maybe she just doesn't have anything more to say.  I have liked some of her stuff, I think.  I can't remember anything that I read, but I know there was a short story that I liked, but man, High Crime Area was just so so so preachy.  Oates is an evangelist for non-believers and that is fine, but to be a good evangelist you have to have something to say.  Oates just says the same thing over and over and over and over and well, you get the idea.  I love that the cover is super cheesy!  At first when I saw it I thought, "This is kind of a cheesy cover for such a Woman of Letters!" but having read it, I find it perfect.  Nothing new here.  

How I waited and waited

for The One.  The Selection was a great series.  I have read some criticism that this final book was too rushed and I see where folks are coming from, but truly, I can't complain about this series at all.  I am glad it ended with three books instead of being dragged on into a fourth book.  And I feel like it was much better than say, the Matched series, which really could have been done in one book, two at the most.   It also wasn't too short, like Bumped!  But I loved Bumped, I did.  So this was kind of like Baby Bear's porridge, chair and bed, in Goldilocks' opinion.  It was just right!

You Learning Something New...

every day, so the saying goes.
I have an aunt who hates to read fiction because she says that she wants a good she can learn something from reading.  We get into debates about this all of the time!  I have learned so much from fiction.  I read some non-fiction, sure, but I am much more heavy on the fiction.
It is rare that I read any book and don't find myself going on, researching more information by something that struck me as new or interesting or horrifying or unbelievable.
Frances O'Roark Dowell's books are always, always teaching me. Life lessons, like kindness and discovery and forgiveness and also a lot of "fact" lessons, too.  Shooting the Moon, for example, sent me off into exploring more about Vietnam War, Chicken Boy taught me about, well, obviously, chickens!
Anybody Shining was a look into the life of those who lived in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina  in the 1920s.  More specifically, I had never heard of settlement schools.  There is a lot to learn and think about in Anybody Shining.  As usual, Dowell does an incredible job of getting right into the head of a tween, with the worries of friendship and acceptance that are universal and timeless.  But this book also deals with bigger issues, like the helpful outsiders who come to save those who are "less fortunate" while not realizing how much they can learn from those whom they are trying to help.  This is neat book, different and yet comfortably familiar in that it features a mountain girl from almost one hundred years ago and makes her instantly relatable to us in the here and now.
I really loved it, but I had a hard time with the Appalachian dialect, though that is my ignorance, not a fault of the author.

To Hold Us Over...

As I have said before, little mini-books like The Guard are great ways to hold yourself older until the sequel comes!  Team Maxon all the way, baby!  This novella made me feel that way even more so.  Aspen is okay...but just okay.

Nail-Biting!

The Elite was so suspenseful that I had to skip to the end to see what happened, but I went back and read the parts I skipped and, even though I knew the end already- I STILL found myself in suspense!  It was crazy good!  I admit that mostly I am so drawn to this book because I love Prince Maxon and I wish that I could marry him.  I want America and he to be together forever!  I can't wait until the final one! 

The Bachelor- Dystopian Style!

The Selection was recommended to me by my very dear friend and amazing librarian and reader and human, Kara.  And man, man I loved it!  I've never been able to watch The Bachelor or The Bachelorette because of work, but I've caught bits and pieces and have found it to be great guilty-pleasure tv and so this idea of a future US, which isn't the US anymore, but a country that is made up of parts North America.  It is the kingdom of Illea and the crown prince, Maxon is to find his wife in The Selection- thirty-five girls from the kingdom come and compete for his love.  There is drama and intrigue!  The story is told from the POV of America, a girl from one of the lower classes, Class Five, who isn't really in the game with her whole heart because she loves a Class Six from her neighborhood.  Great stuff and I can't wait to read the next! 

Double Crossed in the third Almost Identical book and I think it is best one ever!  At first I had no idea how I missed the March released of this one, but then I remembered I was in the hospital then.  That would be the only reason I can see behind me missing this third book.  I love this series.  It is so perfect for tweens.  Lin Oliver really has a great thing going here!  This one is told from the POV of Sammie, the Truth Teller twin.  In this one, Sammie's friend, Alicia, has two cousins visiting from El Salvador.  Reaction from the SF2s is about what you would expect and really addresses some serious issues.  This series is perfect!