Book Review: The Replacement

Brenna Yovanoff

★★★★★

Reading level: Ages 12 and up
Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: Razorbill
Mackie Doyle is The Replacement - left in the crib of a human baby sixteen years ago. He has been raised among us. But he is not one of us. Now, he must face the dark creatures of the slag heaps from which he came and find his rightful place - in our world or theirs.

This story made me smile, laugh, and at some point, I wanted to cry. Mackie is such a beautiful character, it made my heart hurt to see his predicament. (But then there would be no story). I loved this story of dark story with its unusual characters.

Unlike other books, this one reminded me of how teenagers actually acted. Mackie and is friends are funny and creative. This story teaches us that friends are not your friends by accident, but because they choose to be. I felt like Mackie kept whining about not fitting in, but it was worth it when he realized that he does and that his friends and family are true.

There is true meaning and love between the characters. Nothing false and out of the blue about it. This was a really sweet and strange story.

Book Review: Divergent

Veronica Roth

★★★★★

Reading level: Ages 14 and up

Hardcover: 496 pages

Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books

　

In Beatrice Prior's dystopian Chicago, society is divided into five factions, each dedicated to the cultivation of a particular virtue—Candor (the honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), and Erudite (the intelligent). On an appointed day of every year, all sixteen-year-olds must select the faction to which they will devote the rest of their lives. For Beatrice, the decision is between staying with her family and being who she really is—she can't have both. So she makes a choice that surprises everyone, including herself.          During the highly competitive initiation that follows, Beatrice renames herself Tris and struggles to determine who her friends really are—and where, exactly, a romance with a sometimes fascinating, sometimes infuriating boy fits into the life she's chosen. But Tris also has a secret, one she's kept hidden from everyone because she's been warned it can mean death. And as she discovers a growing conflict that threatens to unravel her seemingly perfect society, she also learns that her secret might help her save those she loves… or it might destroy her.

  I really enjoyed this novel! After all the hype about it, I bought the book, but I really did not expect all the book had to offer. I had my doubts about it being a thrilling dystopian, but I was proven wrong. With 2011 being the year for YA dystopian novels, some have fallen short. The book lagged in places and I felt at times that I knew what was going to happen (which turned out I was right about the things I guessed on) but Ms. Roth never failed in her writing.

The characters were fun and defiantly beyond the norm in YA fiction. I loved the concept the author portrayed and it showed how afraid people can be and how power is a ruling “drug” in a sense. The was fast pace and almost impossible to put down at times. I loved the heroic and brave qualities of Tris and just all in all the fact that she was no damsel in distress. Facing one’s fears has never been more enjoyable!

Ms. Roth created a world that made it so that I was not reading a story, but living and experience. I loved this story and I can’t wait for the next installment. Let’s hope the movie is just as great!

Before Changes: BIG NOVEL PROJECT

Ok, so here is an excerpt from the original version to my "BIG NOVEL PROJECT" (I'm going to call it that because I've been working really hard on this project, I've gotten so much done, and yet still so much to do). The plot and most of the characters are new and different, but I was looking this over and it made me realize how much your writing can change over time. This really won't give you much about the story, but I hope you like it =D

I really was dreaming. Flying out of my bed, I stood in front of my full length mirror and stared at myself. My auburn brown hair was tousled chaotically about me; my fair skin was flushed; my autumn, honey dark eyes were slightly red from the lack of sleep and I had dark shadows beneath them. My breasts pressed against my t-shirt and I was sure other things were still in place.
Satisfied that everything was were it should be and that my dream really was a dream, I shock my head at my silly checkup. Doves cooed outside my window and peeking out, I saw that the sun was just rising. Perfect, the first day of summer and I get up at the crack of dawn.
I decided to take a shower and head down to breakfast. The sun had risen just enough to cast a deep red glaze over the ocean and it was all mine, for the time being. The best part about living on the beach in Florida, was that I could look at the sun rise and set everyday. It was all mine: the piles of sand, the buried shells, the fading messages in the sand; all mine. All mine until beachgoers arrived and I had to share the serene seascape.
Higher the sun rose and life began to move once again. The red changed into orange, then gold. The sun cast a runway across the ocean, a haloed doorway to heaven. Birds soared along the rich background, peppering the sky in triangular formations. The sun shimmered along the water, baking it rich as butterscotch. The sand lay flat and untouched; a golden tan of wet grains. The wind blew the water softly, spraying the air with a salty mist.
The sun seekers began to swarm the beach and my family also found the ability to hurl themselves out of bed to feed their rumbling stomachs. One by one, they walked sleepily into the sun drenched kitchen. I had just finished my breakfast on the back porch that over looked the beach, when I walked into the kitchen to find bowls of cereal being eaten.
“What are you doing up so early,” Elizabeth, my eldest sister, sneered the words at me. She wasn’t much of a morning person.
“Bad dream,” I said simply, walking over to sit in the stool next to hers. It was the same stool that I had silently claimed as my own since we moved into this house with Peter, our new step dad.
Peter and my mother, Molly, recently got married and were off on their week long honeymoon, which was now three days in. Lizzie, now eighteen, was to take care of my two younger sisters and myself. I was second in line at sixteen, Roxana and Violet were fraternal twins at thirteen.
We all sat on the high stools, descending in age, staring out the glass door to the beach when the strangest feeling rippled through me. It fizzled in my fingertips and tugged at my stomach. A pounding sound hammered in my ear, blotches of black impaired my vision, and it felt like the sun was inside my house. My hands clutched the counter, my body swaying back and forth. A feeling like metal sending vibrations rippling through water, pulsed through my body. Then it stopped; just like that.
The blotches cleared and the pounding stopped. My hands still gripped thecounter, my breathing rushing in and out, making me lightheaded. No one seemed to
notice my minor episode. They each sat there, shoving spoonfuls of cereal into their
mouths, no one even slightly aware that I was hyperventilating.I jumped when my cell phone began to buzz in my pocket. Roxana looked at me like I was crazy. To play off my anxious reaction, I stuck my tongue out at her and reached into my pocket. The screen flashed that I had a text message.
Hey, meet me at the pier? - Nate
Yeah, I’ll be there in a sec. - Addie

“I’m going to the pier.” I said, grabbing my side bag off the couch and slinging it over my shoulder. I checked myself in the hall mirror before I walked back into the kitchen.
“Why?” Lizzie asked, “Meeting someone?” She wiggled her neatly plucked eyebrows, moving it like a wave across her forehead.
“ Yeah,” I said, grabbing a few granola bars and shoved it into my bag, “ Nate.”
“Are you guys dating,” Violet asked, swirling around in her stool.
“No, we’re just friends,” I said
“You’re totally dating,” Roxana said, mimicking Vi by swirling in the same direction until their legs collided and they started to laugh.
“Addie and Nathan sitting in a tree, k-I-s-s-I-n-g . First comes love, then come marriage, then comes a baby in a baby’s carriage,” They sang and danced around, Lizzie laughing at their childish rhymes.
“You know, I’d really like to sit around and have you sing about my nonexistence love life with my best friend, but I gotta go,” I pointed to the glass door and headed in that direction. I could still hear them singing and laughing as I walked down the beach.
My bare feet sunk into the sand and it took some effort to maneuver around all the tanning bodies. The sun was beating down, bathing me in a sheet of perspiration. Hands over my eyes, looking down, I didn’t notice the heavyset woman walking toward me. I had bent down to pick up a shell and when I straightened, her large bust was directly in my face.
“Well, hello, Miss Lysette,” Mrs. Roswell, my old art teacher, was a tall, large, busty old woman with a blond wig that sat on her head in an odd position. She’d fallen in love with my art work in the our resent class and had been trying to get me to join her “Future Artiest of America” club, which I chose to respectfully decline because all the other kids she pulled in were majority talented and looked at me like I drew stick figures instead of the work I really created.
“ Good morning, Mrs. Roswell,” I said looking at her fleshy face.
“Kevin,” she said, looking down at a scrawny boy with bad acne and large glasses who stood beside her, “ This is Anrisella Adeline Lysette, an old student of mine. Talented, this one.” I hated when she pronounced my full name. She looked down at me, then to the boy. I assume an indication to say “hi”.
“ Hello, Kevin,” I said, putting out my hand to him.
“Hello,” Kevin said. He had a nasally voice, something like the dorks sound in cartoons. He took my hand but didn’t know what to do with it. He just held it and I had to bite my lip before I stared to laugh.
“ I have to go,” I took back my hand and stepped back, “ It was nice to meet you Kevin. Mrs. Roswell,” I said, nodding like in an old western movie, and walked off.
The pier was just ahead. People were set all around it, sunbathing, and some were on top, fishing, as far as the pier went. No one was underneath and I knew that was where I’d find Nate. Being best friends since I came to Florida when I was five, now eleven years later, we had a bond that usually forms with close friends. Habitually we could sense when something was wrong and lately I felt like something was wrong. He had left with his parents for a cruise after my parents’ wedding. He wasn’t thrilled by the idea of spending time with them and neither was I.
I found him hiding behind a pillar, covered in darkness. He heard me coming, I made no secret of my approach, and turned around. The bruise around his eye was the visible indication of why both he and I didn’t want him to be around his parents. I’d met them and they seemed perfectly fine to me, but when I leave, they’re not the same. Nathan’s step mom didn’t want him around, so she’d complain and Nate’s dad would hit him.
“ Hey,” he said. He walked toward me hanging his head and tilting it away so I didn’t see the blue and black monstrosity that painted his face.
“ When did you get back,” I asked simply. I didn’t know how I could form the words to ask what his dad did.
“ Last night,” he said, walking next to me and reaching into my bag. I lifted off my shoulder so he could look better. “What did you bring?”
“Granola bars. Peter’s sister, Mary, is coming over later and she says she’ll bring food,” I said. He took out the bar, ripped the green package like a hungry bear, and began to scarf it down. “ Why didn’t you call me? You could have stayed at my house.”
He looked at me while opening another granola bar. “ You would have been asleep,” he said
“So?” I questioned.
“So, I didn’t want to wake you,” he looked down at the sand, decided he’d sit, and plopped on the damp grains. He pat the space next to him without looking at me, consuming another granola bar. “The beach was nice though,” he mused, leaning back on the palms of his hands, “Now I know why you like the beach all to yourself. I used to think you were selfish for saying that it was yours, but now I know why you felt like that. The crashing waves, the serene seascape. It was like heaven. I felt like it was all mine. It was just that beautiful for me. Only me. Then people came.” He looked out onto the sun drenched beach and I looked at him.
I’d never say it to him, but I thought he looked handsome. Except for the bruise he’d filled out and he no longer looked like the dorky kid he once was. At seventeen, he was 5’7”, had a medium build, black eyes, black hair, that was short and tousled, and a light tan that glistened, even in the poor lighting.
He looked strong. His muscled arms and stomach flexed slightly as he breathed, the air expanding his chest. Yet, he wasn’t strong enough; he still had the bruises. He noticed me looking at him and tilted his head to the side. I saw the ugly discoloration and I felt a pang of hurt in my stomach.
“Does it hurt,” I blurted out.
“Not anymore,” he said, looking away again. There was complete silence between us. I looked out through the pillars at the crashing waters. Even though we were silent, the masses sure wasn’t. Kids laughed and threw sand at each other, girls flaunted around in skimpy bikinis with their boyfriends trailing behind. The sun blazed down on the exposed flesh of sun tanners and fisherman on the pier tried to avoid capturing silly beachgoers who wandered to close. It was, all in all, a perfect day to start off the summer.
I looked in the direction of my house and saw my sisters walking around, trying to find a place to settle down to sunbathe. I wanted to go and join them, to take in the summer sun into my skin, but I wasn’t going to leave Nate.
“Let’s go into the sun,” he said, standing up and putting out his hand to help me up.
“But your…” , I trailed off, pointing my finger to my eye and made an invisible circle around it to show that I meant his eye.

“Eh, don’t worry about it,” he waved his hand as if to push away the thought, “It’s summer, let’s go and enjoy it.”

Excerpt from my Novel...Care to Read?

This is a short part in the novel I am currently writing.

This is copyrighted to me. If you would like to reblog etc. please ask my permission FIRST! Email me at butterflydreams1114@gmail.com I will hunt you down if you don't. Ok, enjoy.

Maybe it was my imagination, maybe it wasn’t. No, I’m definitely dreaming. It really is the only explanation for what I was seeing. For surely if I were awake I would not be seeing that of which I were seeing, because if what I was seeing was not a dream, then dreams are what I always see and not what is undreamed for my dreaming eyes to see.

The disfigured clown walked toward me. Its deteriorated naked body was solid white, sexless, and bleeding from its eyes, mouth, ears, and back. There were two arrow shaped cuts on the shoulder blades where it bled profoundly. Its arms were bent in impossible positions; both hands had fingers pointing toward me. Its right arm was wounded several times at the elbow and wrist, the bones jutting out; it rested it on its right hip that was pushing through the skin and look like an armrest. The left arm was raised till the elbow was leveled to the shoulder, it too was severely twisted at the elbow and wrist.
Anchoring just feet from me, it dropped to the ground. One leg spread out right to the side of it, the other held the body from touching the ground. Its bald head had two faces. On one side, on the back of the head, was a face of a happy clown, it makeup in clownish perfection, laughing psychotically . The other, that I had originally been staring at, was a face of a wide mouthed creature that barley looked like a clown. It had hollow black eyes and a mouth that gaped open into a dark abyss. It was crying.
The head best down till its chin touched the bony chest. The laughing clown stopped, and it’s face twisted into itself till it disappeared leaving a blank white head. The crying clown threw back it head and began to scream. My ears burned and I tried to cover them. My eyes shut and I fell to the ground screaming along with the clown. When it stopped, I opened my eyes and it was gone. I sat up and looked around me only to see myself staring back.
Mirrors, that were not there before, were set in a circle around me. My reflection flashed lethal smiles at me. It was not my emotions they reflected. I stood up and stared at each of the faces that looked like mine. Each shook its head when my eyes flitted over them and nodded at the one next to it.
Round and round my head turned. Tears began to stream down my face. My arms started to twist at the elbows and wrist, my hair began to fall to the now bloody floor. My clothing fell to the floor and I saw my flesh began to shrink till you could plainly see my bones.
My eyes hollowed out and my mouth dropped open into a gaping black hole. My skin lost it color and I was paper white. I looked into the mirrors and saw what I knew I would see. I was now the disfigured clown. Naked, paper white, sexless, and bleeding from my hollow eyes, ears, and gaping mouth. I could feel my blood running hot down my back. It leaked from my shoulders, flooding down my back. My arms were twisted in strange positions, pointing at the image that looked at me but was not me. Strange, overwhelming emotions surged inside me and my head bent till it touched my deteriorating chest. A laughing face was attached to the back of my head. Something pulled at my stomach, sucking me into sever pain; the laughing clown stopped. I threw back my head and began to scream.

Ok, let me know what you think :)

Book Review: Blood Red Road

Moira Young

★★★★★★/5

(The Extra star for being the best book I've ever read)

Reading level: Young Adult

Hardcover: 464 pages

Publisher:Margaret K. McElderry (June 7, 2011)

At first, I did not think I would enjoy this book like I enjoyed The Hunger Games, which at the time was my leading book. The writing was defiantly not like other books with perfect grammar and quotation marks. It was a turn off for me at first. But it took only the first few pages before I was hooked. It turns out that the way it was written added to the glamour on the book. All I could think about were these characters and their journey.

Blood Red Road tells the story of Saba as she tries to get her brother back after he was kidnapped by strange men. I was a bit intrigued with the fact that this story wasn’t about forbidden love or whatever else the YA brand has been selling lately.

I’ve said this before, that some characters seem real to me. But it was unlike any I’ve ever read about before. Moira Young’s characters are smart, cunning, funny, and just plain awesome. Usually the main female lead is all love struck and a damsel in distress type. But Saba was a strong and fierce fighter who had one thing on her mind: getting back her brother. Some people would say that she went overboard with her obsession to finding him, but I felt that it gave her a sense of purpose and throughout the novel, that was her aim. She never let that stray. Jack was just delicious. He was funny and cocky and just plain sexy! (He actually reminded me of one of my characters in the novel I’m writing.) The Free Hawks were the bravest and most thrilling fighters. Ike was just hilarious and intriguing. Emmi was bold and daring. These characters were like real people. Each were dynamic and rounded characters that I instantly fell in love with.

The plot of the story was always held in front. This I especially like, because I hate when the main purpose of the story is pushed aside and then the character goes off on their little adventure to find themselves and then finish off the book in the last few pages with a bit of action and a happily ever after. This novel was not like that. The main purpose was always first and the characters grew from that. There was a bit of romance in here as well, but is didn’t get all twilight on us, which is just what I like.

Moira Young has defiantly written an amazing book! My favorite book. If I was ever so lucky to meet her I would bow at her feet. This books is just…perfect. A MUST MUST read!Now, all my life, I’ve never really found a book that was my favorite. There were defiantly those I treasure most and would read over and over, but never could I find one that was THE best. Until now. Blood Red Road is my perfect novel. It is a dystopian dream!

Top Three Books I Hate

I read a lot of books. If I'm lucky, I come close to a hundred on summer vacation. In my travels to the book store, amazon.com, the library or what have you, I've come across books that have stolen my heart and inspired me to write a multitude of subjects. But, then there are those books that make me wonder, "Why the hell was this published?".

This is the top 3 books that I have (hate is too strong of a word) really really really hate:

3. House of Night serise- Don't get me wrong, this story had lots of potential, but I hated that it was the same damn problem just streched out into hundreds of books. I read to the 4th of 5th book and gave up. It's a book, not a t.v. show!

2. Beautiful Creatures- I got close to half way through the book and gave up. I loved the authors, but the characters sucked! I couldn't get into the story.

And now the book that I just can't stand and I wish it never existed:

1. Halo- Alexandra Adornetto This was a NYTimes bestseller and I've read and seen tons of people say they love this novel, but I HATED it. This story was inconsistant, the character were all stupid and flat, an angel who looked over humans knew nothing about them, pratically no researc done on the author's part-all around I hated it.

I have nothing aganist the authors and I congratulate each one on their success. This is my opinion and I love to read what others have to say about any and every book. Again, this is my opinion. I do not truly "hate" these book, just that I did not find it as amazing as other books that I have read before.