Po(sey) Sessions

Singing the Dogstar Blues by Alison Goodman combines a lot of elements that constitute a great story. It has a terrific, strong, and rebellious female protagonist. She often defies authority but has a passion for music and the ability to explore it through time travel. Although I have criticised books for using slang in the past, Goodman does it perfectly. I always knew what word she was intending to replace or she finds a clever way to explain it. This Australian author gained critical acclaim and world wide recognition through the publication of Singing the Dogstar Blues . It's creative action oriented plot brings reader to a complex world without over explaining the details. She also doesn't leave the reader in a mass of confusion. Joss's world is so similar to our own. It is easy to take the leaps into the future Goodman requires of us. I am eager to read more books by Alison Goodman, including the recently released Eon , which is completely not in my genre prefere...

When I read The Compound I thought it was weird and confusing. Well, let me tell you, Fade to Blue makes The Compound look like a boring day. Yes, just to restate, Fade to Blue is the most confusing book I have EVER read in my whole entire life. Sean Beaudoin infuses a strong sense of style and voice into this average American high school. Sophie is the soccer player turned goth girl; she introduces us to a cast of stereotypical players. Jocks, cheerleaders, wannabees, losers, outcasts, and has beens. Sophie is dark and edgy, reminding me a suicidal Veronica Mars. But the story starts to skip through more perspectives and makes less and less sense. This confusion is part of the point, but it happens so quickly I never really got grounded in anything. The skipping around made it hard to care about what was happening and why. There was often no clear connection with a reality I cared about. The story hops through every inconceivable permutation of reality or non-reality making me wan...

Lord of the Flies (audio) Though I know the story well from seeing various productions of it, I really wanted to have this book under my belt. I am quite depressed because my mp3 player broke so I am listening to Lord of the Flies old school style with a walkman and tapes from the library. The beginning was a bit slow but now that I am towards the middle I am enjoying the story a lot more than I expected. It's great being able to strap the story to my side while I wander around the house cleaning up. A Box of Nothing Peter Dickenson's name shows up on tons of YA sci fi lists but is the first of his book I have gotten around to reading. I am not very far into it but I am LOVING IT. "James was standing on the shore of an iron-gray sea, flecked with patches of rust color, and covered with very regular small round waves. It stretched away and way toward the skyline. From beyond that unreachable horizon his name was being called. He couldn't hear it, but he could feel it...

The Maze Runner begins in pure confusion. Imagine finding yourself sitting in a box with no idea who you are and no memories of your past. You know only your name. People are staring down at you and talking about you using words you can't fully grasp. This is the world Thomas finds himself in. He emerges among boys of similar age. They live in a sort of community in a village at the center of a maze. The boys are tortured by both what they do and don't know of the place that is now their home. They live in a square inside a maze with moving walls and deadly mechanical blobs out to destroy them. every day boys are sent out in an attempt to solve the maze with the understanding that once they do they will be released from this torturous world. Though the elements of this story were interesting and engaging, I found the writing to be filled with too many unneeded words. I was constantly trying to skip forward to the dialog then reading back just to find out the paragraph ...