Review: Fallen Crest High by Tijan

Fallen Crest High
Tijan
Series: Fallen Crest High #1
Publication date: October 31st 2012
Rating: ★★★★★

Goodreads - Amazon

Mason and Logan Kade are two brothers who did their own thing. They were rich and expected to attend her school, Fallen Crest Academy. They chose public school and now Samantha has to live with them. The problem is that she doesn't care at all: about them, about her friends, about her cheating boyfriend, or even about her parent's divorce. But maybe that's a good thing. Maybe change is a good thing.

This is probably one of the most underrated books I've read in a while.

The summary absolutely does not do justice to how freaking amazing Fallen Crest High is. I have to say I wasn't expecting much when I saw it on my Amazon recommendation list, but I was still intrigued enough to buy it and give it a chance. And oh. My. God.

Fallen Crest High is edgy, dark, and so messed up that you won't even know which side is up when you're done. It'll hook you from beginning until end, and it'll leave you wanting to know more about the lives of the Kade brothers and Samantha.

Logan and Mason live like they're the kings of their own world, which I guess it kind of makes sense. They are gorgeous, rich, the stars to their public school's football team, and they can get any girl they want. But they're also known by their bad temper, the fights they get into, and their general attitude as complete and utter jerks.

Sam meets them after her mother cheats on her father and moves them in with Logan and Mason's dad. But just because they're no step-siblings and live under the same roof, it doesn't mean they acknowledge each other, that is until one of the brothers takes an interest in Sam after seeing how utterly detached from her life and everything that happens in it she is.

What comes after is a story filled with fist fights, casual sex, lots of drinking, even more cheating, and one of the most dysfunctional family dynamics you'll ever have the pleasure of reading about. Every single character in this book is messed up in some way, and they do equal messed up things. The adults are actually more screwed up than all of the teenagers put together, if I'm being honest.

Fallen Crest High was just so freaking good that when I was done all I wanted was to have more of it. Forever. The author did such a wonderful job in developing the characters and their individual stories that when it all came together in the plot just made me want to roll around on the floor and sigh in contentment. It became, hands down, one of my favorite books ever.

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Fallen Crest High has a sequel coming, and its name is...

Fallen Crest Public.

You can read the first four chapters of the story right here.

Review: Golden by Jessi Kirby

This book is part of my 2013 Young Adult Contemporary Challenge.

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Golden
Jessi Kirby
Publication date: May 14th 2013 by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Rating: ★★★★★

Goodreads - Amazon

Seventeen-year-old Parker Frost has never taken the road less traveled. Valedictorian and quintessential good girl, she’s about to graduate high school without ever having kissed her crush or broken the rules. So when fate drops a clue in her lap—one that might be the key to unraveling a town mystery—she decides to take a chance.

Julianna Farnetti and Shane Cruz are remembered as the golden couple of Summit Lakes High—perfect in every way, meant to be together forever. But Julianna’s journal tells a different story—one of doubts about Shane and a forbidden romance with an older, artistic guy. These are the secrets that were swept away with her the night that Shane’s jeep plunged into an icy river, leaving behind a grieving town and no bodies to bury.

Reading Julianna’s journal gives Parker the courage to start to really live—and it also gives her reasons to question what really happened the night of the accident. Armed with clues from the past, Parker enlists the help of her best friend, Kat, and Trevor, her longtime crush, to track down some leads. The mystery ends up taking Parker places that she never could have imagined. And she soon finds that taking the road less traveled makes all the difference.

Tell me, what do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Parker Frost doesn't quite know how to answer that question. She's lived her entire life following the carefully thought out plan her mother has for her: study hard, get good grades, get into Stanford, study some more.

It's when she's doing her TA job and helping her English teacher with a school project that she finds something that's going to change her life forever, something that's going to make her question everything she thought she wanted in life and for herself.

A moment was all it took to change everything.

We don't get just Parker's story while we're reading Golden. It's kind of a two-for-one type of deal: we read about Parker and how she struggles with taking charge of her life, and then we get little snippets of Julianna and Shane's relationship and the mysterious Orion who changed everything.

Jessi Kirby does a great job with combining those two aspects together, what happened with what's happening now and then trying to figure out what happens next. It was really satisfying to me as a reader to put all of the pieces of the puzzle together just as Parker did, and seeing how her figuring out what went by all those years ago made her start changing things in her own life.

Taking a chance can be worth a lot more than you know.

It's taking a chance that puts Parker in this mess, and it's taking a lot of other chances along the way that help her learn the kind of person that she is and the kind of person she strives to be. That's what I loved most about the book. Parker finding herself and going after what she believes in, getting back up on her feet after she fails and trying again.

Golden turned out to be just as great as I thought it would, and it's not really a surprise it made its way to my list of favorites books ever. I definitely recommend it to anyone who likes an amazing story with a rich plot and well-developed characters. You won't regret it.

[...] sometimes life gives us those rare moments where we do see a chance as it's happening. And in those moments, we have a choice. And sometimes we have to take a risk. And it's scary. It makes us vulnerable. But I know now that it's worth it.

Review: This Girl by Colleen Hoover

This Girl
Colleen Hoover
Series: Slammed #3
Publication date: April 30th 2013 by Atria Books
Rating: ★★★★★

Goodreads - Amazon

Layken and Will’s love has managed to withstand the toughest of circumstances and the young lovers, now married, are beginning to feel safe and secure in their union. As much as Layken relishes their new life together, she finds herself wanting to know everything there is to know about her husband, even though Will makes it clear he prefers to keep the painful memories of the past where they belong. Still, he can’t resist his wife’s pleas and so he begins to untangle his side of the story, revealing for the first time his most intimate feelings and thoughts, retelling both the good and bad moments, and sharing a few shocking confessions of his own from the time when they first met.

In This Girl, Will tells the story of their complicated relationship from his point of view. Their future rests on how well they deal with the past in this final installment of the beloved Slammed series.

I was really nervous about reading this, to be honest, because from the blurb it just sounded like I was going to get the same story as Slammed, only told differently. I didn't want the repetition of it, reading about the same situations all over again when I already knew how things were going to go. And that's where Colleen's brilliancy came to play and proved me so butterflying wrong.

This Girl gives us Will and Lake reminiscing about their relationship right from where Point of Retreat left off, and it's written in a way that makes it all so much more than a simple retelling of the books. We get new information and little snippets of things we didn't know were going on during the story, all the while reading about Lake's reactions to all of it and about Will's perspective of situations and their relationship.

And just like the two previous books, this one will make you feel all the things.

Right from the beginning, it just gives you this sense of nostalgia as you read about Will and Lake's journey, with the added bonus of knowing things will be okay, and then with the best epilogue and slam poetry piece you've ever dreamed of.

It was such a sweet and amazing read that it left me a little bit heart broken at the end, because it meant leaving these incredible characters behind. Colleen Hoover owns every little tiny piece of my soul, and this book just shows me how much she deserves it.

Review: Cinder by Marissa Meyer

Cinder
Marissa Meyer
Series: Lunar Chronicles #1
Publication date: January 3rd 2012 by Feiwel & Friends
Rating: 5 stars

Goodreads - Amazon

Humans and androids crowd the raucous streets of New Beijing. A deadly plague ravages the population. From space, a ruthless lunar people watch, waiting to make their move. No one knows that Earth’s fate hinges on one girl. . . . 

Cinder, a gifted mechanic, is a cyborg. She’s a second-class citizen with a mysterious past, reviled by her stepmother and blamed for her stepsister’s illness. But when her life becomes intertwined with the handsome Prince Kai’s, she suddenly finds herself at the center of an intergalactic struggle, and a forbidden attraction. Caught between duty and freedom, loyalty and betrayal, she must uncover secrets about her past in order to protect her world’s future.

ALL THE AWARDS!!

All of them.

Seriously, who thought a book about Robot Cinderella would be so good?

This is probably the best fairy tale retelling I have ever read. Ever. And I'm extremely angry at myself for not having read this before now, because this is brilliant.

Cinder is a cyborg who works as a mechanic to support her (evil) stepmother and two stepsisters. It's while she's at her booth in the market place one day that she meets the Prince, Kai, who comes looking for her due to her amazing skills at mechanics and asks her to fix his droid. As if meeting the Prince wasn't enough excitement for a day, one of the bakers there shows signs of having letumosis, a plague that has been terrorizing the world.

It's no surprise that after all of that happens, Cinder's life turns upside down.

One of Cinder's stepsisters, the one she actually loves, catches the plague while helping her scavenge the junkyard. Prince Kai shows some interest in her, but he has no idea she's a cyborg. And Cinder, after her stepmother lives up to everyone's expectations of being evil, finds out that her past is even more mysterious and tragic than she first thought.

I'm still a little bit in awe of how freaking amazing Cinder is. Even thought the story is a new take on Cinderella and you can probably figure out most of the key plot points, it is, hands down, one of the most original and amazingly written books I've ever had the pleasure of reading. In just a few chapters I could already tell it would turn out to be one of my favorite books, and I'm hoping the second installment of the series, Scarlet, will be just as good, if not better, than Cinder.