christianreader | Books for September

Gone
by Michael Grant

Very good YA stuff. On the first page of the book everyone in a small California town 15 years or older disappears. But it's not just a modern Lord of the Flies; there's also a mysterious impenetrable bubble around the whole town, as well as some kids who are developing supernatural powers. There's a lot going on, but the pace is very fast and it's a good read. Nice recommendation by

kiwiria! 4/5

Garlic and Sapphires
by Ruth Reichl

Another

kiwiria recommendation, Reichl is a food critic and this is about her taking the job as restaurant critic for the New York Times and her subsequent adventures. Because her reviews are so important to the restaurants they know who she is so she has to come up with various disguises and aliases to eat unnoticed. It's a pretty good read, although because she is a food critic (and thus a bit “artsy”) she can't help but be a little melodramatic with her descriptions and storytelling. There were times where I thought “Yeah right” as I was reading various stories, and in the afterword she admitted some of the stories were exaggerated or conglomerates of several events. So it's a bit of fiction mixed with some real life, mixed with some biography. I'm not a foodie and I still enjoyed it, so if you are it would be that much better. 3.5/5

Hungry
by Michael Grant

Second book in the Gone series, it starts to deal with some of the ramifications of what happened in the first book. As you can guess by the title, primarily ravaging hunger. Apparently a group of 350 kids under the age of 15 aren't great at rationing food. All the candy and chips are gone and now things are getting grim. There's a lot more going on than starvation, but it's a constant cloud hanging over the entire novel. This is over a 500 page book and I read it in a couple days, so it's definitely a page turner. 4/5

Lies
by Michael Grant

Third book in the series, and not that the first two books were light and cheery, but the darkness gets cranked up even more in this one (haha, no pun intended if you've read the series). This is definitely not a feel-good uplifting kind of series, but I'm really enjoying it. In this one there's a lot of religious allegory stuff going on (I wonder if the author named one character Mary because he had this book planned or if it's the other way around...). The end had one of those “Holy cow!” moments, and it was another quick read. Some of the kids were sick with something that seemed like the flu in this book; it was never really emphasized much, just kind of a background thing, but the next book is titled Plague. Hmm, I wonder what's going to happen next! 4/5

Sapphique [audio book]
by Catherine Fisher

This book (pronounced Suh-feek) is the sequel to Incarceon, a book I read last month and really enjoyed. Unfortunately this book didn't stack up at all. One major problem was the reader; it's not that she was “bad”, it's more like she wasn't a good fit for this book. The author is British so the characters are British, and the reader was trying to give them all a bit of an accent. So you end up with a female reader trying to do a male British voice and it didn't sound good. Plus every one of the male characters sounded exactly the same. I would sometimes get lost when two male characters were having a conversation. So that whole thing was a major distraction, and the book itself wasn't nearly as good as its predecessor. The whole thing revolved around a holy artifact and none of it made a ton of sense. By the end I didn't know what was going on and didn't really care. But once you're on the last disc you might as well finish. 2/5

Cinder
by Marissa Meyer

Do I even have to review it after everyone else on LJ has read it? :p

Fun take on a classic fairy tale, I've got the next book waiting for me at the library and I'm looking forward to reading it. 4/5

Books for September: 6
Books for 2013: 42