#CBR8 Book 92: "The Unexpected Everything" by Morgan Matson

Page count: 528 pages
Rating: 4 stars

Alexandra "Andie" Walker is the daugher of a congressman who just had to go on sabattical because of some irregularities in his campaign funds. For the last five years, since her mother died of cancer, Andie and her father have only really interacted in the public eye and her father has been busy with his political career in Washington D.C. Andie had very specific plans for the summer. They involved a pre-med internship at Johns Hopkins, far away from her father. Due to the minor scandal involving her father, she finds herself stuck without any plans for the summer and having to learn to relate to a dad who's suddenly around constantly.

Andie's best friends, Palmer, Bri (Sabrina) and Toby (Tobyhana) are delighted that she'll be able to spend more of the summer with them. Maybe she'll finally meet a guy that she'll give the time of day for more than three weeks, max? It also means she'll be present for Palmer's epic annual scavenger hunt. Andie tries to adjust to her new, completely unplanned existence, and out of desperation gets a job as a dog walker. While walking other people's pets, she meets the enigmatic Clark, who seems to live alone in a huge mansion, without any idea what to do with the dog in his care. Their first date is an absolute disaster (because Andie follows the same script she always uses, and shares absolutely nothing personal about herself), but after his dog gets badly sick and they spend a night monitoring its vital signs (not a good excuse to bring to your worried father the next morning, having not actually let him know where you were in the first place and letting your phone run out of battery), they start to make a connnection.

Andie discovers that Clark is in fact hugely popular best-selling fantasy novelist C.B. McCallister, who is staying at his publisher's house over the summer in the hopes that he'll finally get over his crippling writer's block and finally deliver the manuscript for the third and final volume in the trilogy. Palmer's boyfriend Zach is a huge fan and geeks out most adorably when he gets introduced to Clark. Andie's loyal friends are delighted to realise that Clark has a huge house at his disposal and no parental supervision. Since he was home schooled, Clark's never really had friends his own age and it doesn't take long before the gang is hanging out at his place all the time. As Andie and Clark spend more time together and grow closer, might Andie finally have found a guy she's developing real feelings for? What's going to happen at the end of the summer, when Clark (hopefully) finishes his book and goes home to attend college?

I've never read anything by Morgan Matson before, but her books are all very higly rated on Goodreads and the fact that this had a college age fantasy author as the love interest intrigued me. Andie's a fun protagonist, if a little bit too emotionally guarded. She's very much a victim of her circumstances, becoming emotionally closed-off after the death of her mother and the virtual abandonment she's suffered from her father. Being a politician's daughter, she has learned never to set a foot wrong and to always appear clean-living, hard-working and virtous. She knows how to spin any situation, because her father's political advisors have spun her whole life since as long as she could remember. She has a very clear idea of what she wants for the future, and when suddenly those plans might be disrupted, she has trouble adjusting and dealing in a good way.

Luckily, she has a loyal group of friends to support her, but as the summer progresses, some dramatic personal developments could cause the unbreakable foursome to fracture irrevocably. Having always dated unobjectionable high school guys who've known her for a long time, Andie has never really had to give much of herself and she's certainly never let the relationships last long enough to even begin to matter. Her longest-lasting relationship, if you can call it that, is with a fellow politician's son, who she meets occasionally at parties. They fool around, then go their separate ways. Nothing meaningful is ever exchanged, only kisses.

With Clark, things are different pretty much from the start, and because he was home-schooled, he doesn't always react the way Andie expects or wants him to. She's prepared to completely write him off after their first, catastrophic date, but after being forced to spend the night at his house, working frantically to save his publisher's dog, she can no longer deny that she really likes him and that the thought of actually connecting more deeply with someone might, in fact, terrify her.

The book is a too long and the final third gets bogged down in a bit too many melodramatic storylines. I liked that not all of the difficulties resolved themselves neatly, without any repercussions for everyone involved. The snippets of Clark's books that are sprinkled throughout are also a nice touch. I'm always a sucker for fiction within fiction, and Andie and her dad bonding further over the cliff-hanger ending of Clark's second novel really amused me. This is a fun book, with a cool cast of teenagers and anyone looking for a light and entertaining read would do well to pick it up.

Judging a book by its cover: So many doggies! As Andie spends a lot of her time walking various dogs in this book, the cover is pretty much spot-on. I think the cover model's hair could have been blonder based on Andie's description, but I could be wrong. The big fluffy white dog could easily be Bertie (his full name is Bertie Woofter - how CUTE is that?) and the bright colours make the cover nice and inviting. Considering how bad some YA covers is, this is a pleasant exception.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR8 Book 91: "Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda" by Becky Albertalli

Page count: 336 pages
Rating: 4 stars

Simon Spier, middle child in a very close-knit family is sixteen years old and gay. Not that anyone but his pen pal Blue knows this, until class clown Martin looks over his shoulder at the library and discovers his secret. Simon suddenly finds himself blackmailed. Help Martin get a chance with his friend Abby, or Martin outs Simon to the whole school. This might also mean that Blue's identity is in some way compromised. Simon doesn't want to help Martin, but feels he doesn't have any other choice.

Simon doesn't really do drama, except in the sense of being part of the school musical. The fact that there are tensions among his life-long friends after Abby was added to the mix, and he's slowly falling more for Blue, who he's falling for, even though he doesn't know which of the boys in school it is, means Simon's life is becoming a lot more eventful and constantly pushes him out of his comfort zone. Will Simon continue to let Martin blackmail him? Will his friends Nick and Leah adjust to the fact that Nick is in love with Abby? Will Simon ever discover the true identity of Blue, and do they have a chance as a couple if he does?

Once again, I'm not the first of the Cannonballers to review this, and I'd also seen it very favourably written-up over on Forever Young Adult. I liked this book a lot, but I didn't absolutely love it, which I've seen some people out there do. The blackmail aspect really did make me uncomfortable, especially after SPOILER! Martin actually goes through with the threat of outing Simon on the high school Tumblr blog after it becomes obvious that Simon is never going to be able to make Abby really notice him (super d*ck move, Martin). I felt so awful for Simon and because I have been lucky enough to grow up cis-gendered, white and heteronormative, if severely geeky and a most definitely on the social outskirts, I never needed to worry about hiding parts of who I am/was. Simon and Blue discuss coming out at some length in their e-mails and the fact that Simon didn't get to choose when and how he told his family, friends and the rest of the world made me so upset.

When I read books like this, I hope that adolescents and teens today are aware of how incredibly lucky they are. I know that lack of representation and diversity is still a big problem in literature in general, but at least there is more of it out there than when I was a teen. There is such a vast variety of genres and so many topics being discussed, nothing like the fairly dour socially lecturing fare I grew up with, where everything written for teens seemed to be warning them off drugs, eating disorders, teenage pregnancy or HIV/AIDS. There wasn't really fantasy and sci-fi written specifically for teens. There certainly wasn't all these great books about contemporary teenagers and the issues they go through, which may seem trivial to many adults (like romance, most favoured genre of my heart, the YA category (it's NOT just one genre) is so often derised by literary snobs.

This was not one of the books in the Cannonball YA poll for the upcoming book club (because too many people had recently reviewed it, I think). It's still highly recommended to anyone who's looking for more contemporary YA to check out, where there isn't a chosen one fighting a dystopian regime or trying to single-handedly conquer a fantasy kingdom or something, but just trying to get by in their hormone-fuelled daily existence and trying to survive until adulthood. As far as I'm aware, this is Becky Albertalli's first novel, but I've already added her next book (out in April 2017) to my TBR list, because she is clearly one to watch.

Judging a book by its cover: I don't entirely know what I think about this cover. I can see why you'd want the headless body, so the reader can more easily insert their image of the character, but it also looks a bit creepy. Red is a nice, bright and noticeable background colour, though, and it would stand out if placed face forward on a shelf.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR7 Book 27: "An Abundance of Katherines" by John Green

Page count: 227 pages
Rating: 3 stars

Colin Singleton is a child prodigy, convinced that as he ages, he becomes less remarkable with each passing day. While able to converse in eleven different languages and capable of memorising the majority of everything he reads (for hours every day), he's not really able to adapt the reading into anything new - like a true genius would be able to. He desperately wants to make some sort of significant contribution to the world, even more so after he's crushed when dumped by his girlfriend on the day of their high school graduation.

Not that he should be unused to being dumped. While Colin is fairly actively unpopular in school, he has nonetheless dated (however briefly) and been dumped by eighteen different girls called Katherine. Katherine 19, his most recent girlfriend, is in fact also Katherine 1, who asked him to be her boyfriend when they were children, and then promptly broke up with him not long after. Since they'd been going out for nearly a year by the time she dumped him again as a teenager (by far his longest relationship), I don't think Colin should complain. He's devastated, causing his only friend, Hassan, to decide they need to go on a summer road trip to make Colin happy again. The fact that Hassan is willing to take time out of his busy life slacking off, watching Judge Judy, is clearly a great sacrifice on his part.

The boys end up in the little town of Gutshot, Tennessee, where apparently the Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand of Austria is buried (his body having been bought and brought over in the 1930s). They meet Lindsey Lee Wells (as well has her boyfriend, the Other Colin and his friends) and are hired by her mother, who owns and runs the local factory (where they make tampon strings!) to compile an oral history of Gutshot. She'll pay them 500 dollars a week as well as room and board. Colin is determined that his great contribution to the world will be The Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability, which will successfully predict the future and outcome of any romantic relationship, a mathematical formula worked out based on his history with Katherines 1 through 19. He's also convinced that if he can just get the theorem to work, he'll be able to persuade Katherine 19 to take him back. Colin may have an IQ of over 200, but he's really not very good at figuring out human nature.

Having decided that I needed to read ALL the John Green YA novels after completing Will Grayson, Will Grayson, I decided to start with the one that had the lowest Goodreads rating. I kept waiting for this book to stop exasperating me and entertain me in the way the other John Green books I'd read did. In the end, there was more I liked than disliked, but I'm glad this is a book I borrowed from the library rather than own myself.

What I liked:
- Hassan (except for that unfortunate brief while when he decided he wanted to refer to himself as Daddy constantly). Colin's best (and only) friend. A chubby Muslim who occasionally attempts to convert Colin to Islam, Hassan appears to have no major life goals, except slack off and watch Judge Judy all day. He has made it his mission to notify Colin every time he gets carried away with spouting trivia, so that his friend can at least attempt to fit in with his teenage peers. He's also quite unamused with Colin's hang-up on Katherines and wants to help his buddy move on, perhaps meet and like a girl NOT named Katherine.

- Lindsey Lee Wells. Lindsey was fun, and her bad taste in boyfriends withstanding (spoiler - the Other Colin, the most popular guy in school isn't all that nice). She, like the majority of the inhabitants in Gutshot, seems to have no real desire to ever leave the town, despite her mother's dreams for her to go off to college. She's incredibly well-liked by pretty much everyone in town, but has many of the self-esteem issues that seem to plague so many teenage girls.

One of the criticisms I've read of John Green is that he always writes Manic Pixie Dream Girls in his books. Based on the books I've read so far, that seems deeply unfair. Neither Jane in Will Grayson, Will Grayson, nor Lindsey in this seemed very MPDG. I think the only character I can think that applies, to a certain extent, is Augustus Waters in The Fault in Our Stars, who can be said to have quite a bit of the Manic Pixie Dream Boy about him. But I digress, back to my list:

- The footnotes. Yup, this book has a number of footnotes. Sometimes they are there to give a translation of the Arabic, French or German occasionally spoken by the characters, but most of the time, they seem to just be there to interject things cleverly into the story.

What I didn't like:
- The constant flash backs to Colin's dating history, such as it was. First of all, I don't consider spending less than an hour with a girl who then decides that she doesn't care about you dating or being dumped, but Colin clearly does. He wallows far too much in the memories of the many Katherines, especially Katherine 19, who seems to have broken his heart. I get that he needs to find "the missing piece of himself", but the umpteenth time it's mentioned, I lose interest

- The constant reminders that Hassan is in fact overweight and that Colin has a Jew-fro. I don't think Colin's hair is EVER referred to as just hair - it's always his Jew-fro. I just ran a search for the term and was surprised when it only seems to occur eight times in the whole book. It feels like a LOT more!

Most of the book was perfectly inoffensive, but it also didn't grab my interest all that much. If I hadn't been determined that I was going to finish it by the end of February, it would have taken me a lot longer to read than two days, despite the fact that it's not all that long. It had some cute bits, but the supporting cast and some of the nerdy trivia I learned over the course of reading it was better than the general story.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR7 Book 14: "First Frost" by Sarah Addison Allen

Page count: 304 pages
Rating: 4 stars

Disclaimer! St. Martin's Press gave me an ARC of this through NetGalley in return for a fair and honest review.

Ten years have passed since the events of Garden Spells. Claire Waverly has put her catering business on hold and branched out with boiled candy. The lemon verbena can soothe any throat or heartache, the rose candies can make you recall lost love and the lavender makes you calm and happy. After a feature article in a high-profile magazine made demand for her candy explode, Claire has had to hire in external help, as well as purchasing ready-made essences as the production needs far more than she can make from her own garden. While she used to love cooking and baking for her family, now she serves them take out, and she barely has time for her husband and daughter. Always uncertain about how deserving she was of the Waverley legacy, she keeps searching for answers in her grandmother's old journals and trying to figure out how she's going to manage her future. 

Her sister Sidney is happily married and running her own salon, wildly popular, because a haircut from Sidney Waverley is not only extremely flattering, but seems to bring luck and success. Yet Sidney is longing for a baby, a son for her husband Henry, who can help him run the farm, like he used to help his now dead grandfather. She puts up with the extreme unreliability of the newly hired receptionist Violet because with Violet in the salon, she more often than not tends to bring her toddler, Charlie, and if Sidney can't have a child of her own, at least she can spoil this scatter-brained young woman's when she has opportunity.

Sidney's daughter Bey, now in high school, has always known exactly where things belong. She could go into a completely new house and help put away dishes or bed linens, which tends to scare people as often as it impresses them. She knows, with every fibre of her being, that she belongs right there in Bascom, North Carolina, in the Waverley house, and that Josh Matteson, youngest son of her mother's high school sweetheart belongs with her. She foolishly wrote him a note to this effect some months ago, which has made her the laughing stock of her school, but she knows that if she patiently waits, he will realise the truth soon enough. While she waits, she helps her aunt Claire make sweets and hopes her mother will stop nagging her about the identity of the boy she likes.

It's October, and the Waverley women, as well as their men, are awaiting the first frost of the season, when the peculiar apple tree in the back garden will blossom. The weeks before this event always leads to some kind of craziness, and this year there is a mysterious stranger in town, with ties to Claire and Sidney's mother and stories to tell that could change all their lives forever.

I re-read Garden Spells for the first time in four years before I read this book, to remind myself of the story of the Waverley sisters. I don't doubt that you could read First Frost without having read the former, but as it's probably my favourite of all of Sarah Addison Allen's excellent and magical books, I'm not entirely sure why you'd want to. This book will be so much more satisfying if you have the back story of the characters, and it's a lovely book. So if you haven't already, go read it first. This book can wait until you're done.

I must admit, I was a bit worried when I heard this was a sequel. The first book ended on such a hopeful and happy note, and sequels rarely involve only sunshine and puppies for the characters. The blurb suggested that all was not right with the Waverley women who I'd come to love, and I was deeply concerned that this book was going to mess things up badly. Of course, I shouldn't have been. While both sisters are less than happy at the start of First Frost, and there are events in the book that could spell further misery and disaster, the strong relationship that has formed between the two women, not to mention the support of their families and friends is powerful enough that no external threat can faze them for long. Sarah Addison Allen, for all that she tackles dark themes in her books on occasion, is ultimately about the happy ending, and I'm sorry if you feel that I'm spoiling when I say by the end of this book I had a goofy grin on my face.

As well as showing us what has happened with the Waverley sisters and their families in the ten years since the last book, First Frost also sheds further light on their grandmother Mary and their unfortunate mother Lorelei. This book will be a very satisfying read for anyone who has enjoyed Sarah Addison Allen's previous books. She's a writer whose characters I want to be friends with and she writes places I wish were real, so I could visit or even live in them.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR7 Book 13: "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" by Ann Brashares

Page count: 303 pages
Rating: 4 stars

 Four fifteen-year-old girls, life-long best friends, are about to spend their first summer apart. On the night before three of them go away, they discover a pair of second-hand jeans that Carmen, the original owner, was planning on getting rid of. They discover that despite their varying heights and body types, the jeans look awesome and super flattering on all four of them, and decide to use the jeans as a device to keep in contact throughout the summer. They make a pact that they need to make the jeans count for something, and have to send them on within one week of receiving them from the previous girl in line. Over the course of eight weeks, the girls will have all had the pants twice.

Beautiful, but very shy Lena is going with her younger sister to visit their grandparents in Greece for the first time. She's annoyed to discover that her grandmother is trying to set her up with Kostos, a very handsome young man from the village, and determines to avoid him just because her grandmother is so adamant that they are perfect for each other. She just wants to work on her painting and brood about being so far away from her friends. After a big misunderstanding, the Kostos' grandparents and her own have a massive falling out, and she spends much of the summer trying to work up the courage to tell everyone the truth and sort everything out again.

Carmen, whose mother is from Costa Rica, is spending the summer with her dad, who she's only had sporadic contact with since her parents got divorced years earlier. She's imagined a relaxed and carefree summer, where she will help her dad shop for bedlinens and kitchen items for his no-doubt sparse bachelor pad, while they eat take-out and discuss movies. Instead she discovers that her father is living with his new fiancee, who has two teenagers of her own, and that they are planning to get married by the end of the summer. Carmen is crushed that her father didn't so much as give her a hint at what to expect, and feels terribly out of place with her new step-family, where everyone is tall and blond and seem more like her father's biological kids than she is. Carmen deals very badly with her new situation and keeps acting more and more like a spoiled brat, until the disastrous visit culminates with her breaking a window and hopping on a bus back to her mother.

Bridget is spending the summer at a soccer camp in Baja, Mexico, where she makes a lot of new friends while still desperately missing her old ones. She falls in love with one of the assistant coaches, and despite extremely strict rules about the players and coaches fraternising in any way, throws herself into an attempt to win his affection. She also has to come to terms with the fact that the coaches won't always let her be the stand-out player on the field, frequently disappointed that the coaches order her to play in positions that limit her abilities.

Finally, Libby isn't going anywhere, facing the prospect of working a retail job at Wallman's pharmacy, jealous of her friends who are off experiencing things. She decides to make a documentary basically showing the sad existence of people around her, but the film making and her summer takes an unexpected turn when she unwittingly befriends twelve-year-old Bailey, who's sick with leukaemia, but refuses to let Libby treat her with any kind of pity. Bailey keeps meeting her at Wallman's after work and insists on helping her with the documentary. Also, since she has had to face up to the possibility of dying, she's a lot less self-pitying and annoying than Libby and her friends.

To begin with, I rolled my eyes a lot when reading this. All four of the girls really are such quintessential teenagers, with their narcissism and their complete lack of perspective, so focused on their own wants and feelings, with very little though for anyone else or the world in general. I work with teenage girls every day, they felt very real, but not necessarily in the most likable of ways. Each of the girls has her own issues and worries though, which tempers the annoyance I felt for them. Lena has always been judged by her looks, and no one really sees past her stunning beauty. Carmen refuses to admit how much her parents' divorce actually affected her. Bridget still mourns the loss of her mother, and is prone to the same depression that led her mother to eventually kill herself. Libby barely ever sees her dad because he's working all the time, while her mother is constantly busy raising her tiny and demanding siblings. Reading this book made me so intensely glad I never have to be a teenager again.

My favourite character was totally Bailey, the snarky twelve-year-old who because of her horrible illness has become wise beyond her years. Thanks to her, Libby is forced to snap out of her own self-pity and grow up a bit, and the wisdom she slowly gains slowly trickles on to her three other friends as well. Also, annoying as I found the four protagonists on occasion, they are teenagers, and teenagers are awful. It would have been more unrealistic if they were all great all the time. Their friendships were also a thing of beauty. Most of the time, there are too many Mean Girls in YA fiction. Here none of the girl is the bitchy friend, they're just all supportive and there for each other. For much of the book, I was pretty sure this was a three star read, but towards the last third of the book, especially after it made me cry, I had to upgrade it. Once a book makes me cry actual tears, it deserves a four star rating. I have not watched the movie, and suspect I don't want to. Just looking up the casting afterwards to remind myself of who Hollywood felt were good facsimiles of the protagonists convinced me that the movie is probably not for me. I'm also not sure I have a burning need to read the many sequels (where I'm assuming the jeans must get pretty threadbare), but I don't at all regret buying this book in an e-book sale.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.