Emoticons

Unfriended grabbed me with the cover and I am glad it did!  Rachel Vail is the author of the Avery Sister Trilogy and I really enjoyed them and had forgotten to check to see what she had written lately!  So this was a very good discovery!  This book gives a really good lesson, but  not preachy or overtly, about bullying, in particular, cyberbullying.  It also just shows how there are really no "all good" or "all bad" people.  I loved the reasons shown behind the actions of Natasha, the "bad, but not all bad" one, that kind of thing.  And of course, Hazel, who probably did things that were more heinous, but yet, it was easy to see how people make bad choices from a place of pain.  Good stuff.

The Last One

Brilliant was the final book in the Avery Sisters Trilogy and while I didn't enjoy it as much as the first two, I am glad I went ahead and finished the series.  This final book focuses on almost-seventeen-year-old Quinn.  She is the oldest sister and the one who has always been knows as the good girl with the perfect judgment.  During this spring/summer of serious confusion, brought on by their mother's shady investments and resulting in the family losing all of their big-time wealth, Quinn experiments with the Wild Side of life.  Good book and a read-worthy series.  The mom is a huge jerk though!

I Feel Lucky

When Mary Chapin Carpenter first came on the scene I really loved her music.  I listened to her State of the Heart cd over and over again.  Likewise with Shooting Straight in the Dark.  I don't know why I stopped listening to her.  I think that I was turned off by what I thought her politics were but I actually don't KNOW what her politics were and so I feel like I was an unfair jerk about it.  And if I still liked her music, who cares what I thought of her politics (even though I didn't know what they were for sure).  So I think I will go back to listening to MCC every once in awhile, maybe. Especially I Feel Lucky.
Anyway....this is the first book in the Avery Sisters Trilogy and blew through it quickly.  There isn't any supernatural stuff in this one, like in Gorgeous, but it is the same timeframe as Gorgeous, just the story told from the youngest daughter's point of view.  Great series!  I'm off to read the third!

The Second Part First

When I found out that I was reading the second book in the Avery Sisters trilogy first, I was tempted to stop and order in the first and go in order, but by the time I made my discovery, I was hooked on Gorgeous.  It has an interesting concept:  middle girl, not the prettiest or the smartest- those titles go to her older and younger sisters, makes a deal with the devil.  She sells her cell phone to him.  In return he makes it so that 7 people find her gorgeous.  She enters a modeling contest, finds herself as a contender.  She lands a great guy.  But is all of this because of the deal with the devil?  Or is Allison Avery just starting to come into her own?  Is it time for her to stop thinking of herself as the lemon-faced, invisible grump?  Is she more than just a average?  A good coming-of-age, self-perception kind of deal, about friendship and the real meaning of beauty.