I Hope You Find Me

Written By Trish Marie Dawson
Original Publication Date: 2012

Rating: 3 and a Half Stars

Review:

Riley survives, she doesn't know how or why, but she survives the Red Death.  The rest of the world has been wiped out by plague, her two children, her ex-husband.  She and Zoey, her faithful dog, set out for the city when they run out of water, though Riley doesn't actually know what she plans to do.  What she does know is that before the phones went out, she called everyone she knew and told them that if they made it to her house that she'd leave them a trail.  She leaves notes everywhere she stops, telling the people who she hopes will find her where she plans to go next.

In the city, she meets Conner, who had been in town on business when the plague closed the airport and wiped out everything he loved, across the pond.  He brings her back to the hotel that he's been living in, that has a generator and therefore the food hasn't gone bad and there's running water.  She finds herself drawn to him and stays with him, until someone does follow Riley's notes to them at the hotel.  The new couple of people leave the hotel in the night, and not on good terms with Conner and Riley.

Riley and Conner decide to move on after having an experience in the city with the dead that they cannot explain.  They go into the mountains to a "green" resort, figuring that it would be more likely to be sustainable and still have power. (Considering the world has been dead a couple months, a lot of these places seem to still have hot water)  There they meet up with various people, and what follows makes the bulk of the story.

The book was pretty enjoyable, on readability and flow it gets five stars.  On the creepy dead ghosts, it gets five stars.  On the journey it gets five stars.  Where it loses stars is that Riley must have a goddamned golden vagina.  At one point in the novel, the romance becomes a love pentagram, for Godssake.  Every male who meets Riley, wants her.  Fucking ridiculous, and the romance ended up taking up a bulk of the story, the dead things were creepy as fuck and I wanted to hear more about them, have more experiences with them, anything to do with them, really.

Conner and Riley were sort of an oddball matchup.  I enjoyed it, even though she kissed everyone else, but what I realized is that they're something like if Frannie and Larry Underwood were the main characters in The Stand, instead of Frannie and Stu.

The Stand, this book was not...  Entertaining, however, this book definitely was.

Brightest Kind of Darkness

Written By P.T. Michelle
Original Publication Date: 2011

Rating: 3.5 Stars

Book Notes:

As of right now, 7:54pm on 01/03/2013 this book is free for Kindle.

20%

I feel a YA love-interest rant.  I don't think P.T. Michelle deserves it any more than most YA authors, but I've had it up to here with this kind of love interest.

23%

This asshole had better not be a vampire or a werewolf.  I was enjoying this book.

43%

Okay, that's less annoying than being a vampire, but I still don't understand the 'leaping fences in a single bound,' thing.  It's a bit baffling.

Review:

Nara (legally Inara) has had a gift for most of her life.  Well, she seems to consider it a gift, I'm not sure I would - it sounds terribly boring.  Every night she dreams how her day will unfold in the coming hours, from beginning to end.  Due to an event from when she was a child, she doesn't like to change the timeline because she can't see (or always understand) the fallout.  That all changes when she dreams of her high school getting bombed; she cannot just sit back and watch, so she makes an anonymous tip to the police from a Wal-Mart.  This good deed throws her life into chaos.  Her powers seem to have mostly disappeared (except sporadically), and she doesn't know how to live her life in the real world without the precognition that's known for so long.  Even though that was boring to her, this is terrifying.

I think watching Nara trying to adjust to her powers being gone could have been a novel in and of itself.  It's fascinating.  It is really like she lost one of the major senses that she had used to understand her world.  With it gone, she's thrown into utter confusion.  Of course, she'd get used to it, but it's tantamount to someone losing their hearing or their sight; she's at a total loss when it disappears.

While all of this is going on, Nara is also navigating high school.  Her soccer team-mates are less than understanding when she stops blocking every single goal that comes her way.  Her best friend starts dating a douchenozzle and pulls away from her.  On top of this, she's falling for the new kid who is considered dangerous by almost everyone she knows.

Here is my love interest rant:  Ethan is taller than her, muscular, with long dark bangs and blue eyes.  He has a mysterious past.  He's been expelled from his last school.  He doesn't have any friends in this new school.  Her friends warn her about him continuously.  He draws dark things in his notebook and is tattooed.  Of course, you know he's just misunderstood.  He had a reason to do whatever he did at his last school.  And of course he falls madly and quickly for the heroine, doing whatever it takes to protect her.  Because all heroines need protecting, obviously.

Young Adult authors need to come up with a new love interest.  Fucking pronto.  You could transplant Ethan into any number of YA novels and nothing would need to be changed.  He's the generic "bad boy."  The problem is he's not a bad boy.  He's a troubled kid with no distinguishing characteristics from other troubled kids written into YA in the history of the genre.  I'd blame Twilight but really this problem preceded that piece of garbage.  However, I must say that Ethan was so much like every love interest since Twilight that I really was afraid that the guy was a vampire.  I would have stopped reading.

Please, please, please, I beg of you, please start thinking of new male love interests for female heroines in Young Adult Literature!  I'm on my hands and knees here.  I like YA, but I'm sick of reading the same exact love story over and over again.

/love interest rant

What is most interesting about this book is that even though it started a pretty basic YA fantasy, moved into annoying Twilight-zone, it ended in a very interesting Final Destination type of story-line.  Fate plays into it and is less than pleased with Nara and Ethan.  Everything is a domino effect in this novel, starting from the very beginning and it actually caught me off guard a little.  I probably would have picked up on it sooner if I weren't so focused on how much Ethan better not be a fucking vampire, damnit.

I ended up very much enjoying this novel.  I was pleasantly surprised by how it ended, honestly.  While nothing was really wrapped up (it the first in a trilogy) it was a unique sort of ending.  The personification of Fate was really well done, in my opinion.