Why I thought I'd love it:
1. Rainbow Rowell. I've been into her other books recently. I really enjoyed Eleanor & Park and Landline. She has a way with her characters and her dialogue that just holds on to me and doesn't let go. I love it.
2. Rebecca Lowman. I love her as a voice actor. More specifically, I love Lowman as a voice actor for Rowell's work.
3. Cath writes fanfiction. This is definitely something that I can relate to. While I was in middle school and high school, I read a ton of fanfiction. It didn't really matter what it was either. I read Harry Potter fanfiction, band fanfiction, actor fanfiction. I read and loved it all. So, I was super pumped to read a book about an author of fanfic.

A huge reason why I didn't LOVE this book was because of Cath. Why I didn't like Cath, like, at all:
1. She claims to be super conscious of her GPA and her classes and blah blah blah, but when given the chance for an extension - she blows it off. Now, I've already been through college - all four years of it, so I know that when a teacher graces you with an extension - you best be taking it and writing the best you've ever written. For someone who claims to love writing and claims to love that class, she's got a funny way of showing it.
2. Dating. Don't get me wrong, there are definitely times when I still have no idea what I'm doing. All the same, I know that you should at least put a little effort into your appearance when going on an actual date - even if you see them all the time. It sets that a date is different than just hanging out reading fanfic. There's actually a whole slew of things that I really just wanted to slap Cath for when it came to her relationships. Quit being a baby. Maybe I'm just over the whole YA approach to sex or even holding hands. Or maybe I just want to slap Cath. (I'm thinking it's the latter.)
3. She chooses fanfic over everything. I, myself, am an introvert. I have a really hard time talking to people - just ask pretty much anyone. I would rather be sitting at home reading than most things that I need to or have to do. But this one over here (motions to picture of Cath on the cover) is just .. I can't take her. Rather than going down to the cafeteria she's sitting in her room eating protein bars. Good god. Cath. No.

Maybe the storyline had some redeeming parts, but here's why I didn't like the storyline:
1. Humor. I didn't really find it all that funny. Something that I've been able to count on from Rowell is her awesome subtle humor, but it just wasn't really there this time.
2. Mother. The whole mother being gone/not gone thing really drove me crazy. Pick a side.

There are definitely some redeeming aspects!

Regan, Cath's roommate was probably the best character - in my humble opinion:
1. She is an upperclassman (I think a junior), so she knows the ropes of being in the college setting.
2. She's been described as mean to Cath, but I would act the same way. Regan calls Cath out on her stupidness. IE: going down to the lunchroom. After Regan basically told her she's ridiculous, she made Cath go down to get food with her.
3. Regan's reactions to Cath or what's going on aren't that far off from what mine would be.

Levi, Regan's boyfriend is just amazing:
1. He walks Cath around campus after dark. From personal experience, it's not horrible being on campus in the dark, but you can definitely freak yourself out - it's always good to be walking with someone anyway.
2. He doesn't get annoyed with Cath, which is definitely unlike every other character in the book.
3. From the sound of it, he's not half-bad looking either.
4. He does audiobooks! Umm hi, my name is Megan and I love audiobooks. There's a whole thing about whether or not audiobooks counts as reading and it was great to listen to ON MY AUDIOBOOK.

My rating and why: I gave this book three stars. It was just an ok book. It wasn't something that everyone absolutely needs to read. It's not going to be something I remember reading a year from now. It was just ok. I mostly didn't like it, but gave three stars as a benefit of the doubt type of a thing.

There is never anything better than a trip to Lake Woebegon, I found this collection at a used book sale. It contains several favorites including Homecoming, a story of a septic tank, a parade, a man and his daughter, the Homecoming Queen.

 

Nine Billion Names of God contains two of my favorite Clarke stories, Who's There? and A Walk in the Dark. If you like sci-fi this is an excellent collection.

 

Tales from the Bark Side is a wonderful collection of mainly dog stories, the one about the young Australian Shepherd at the dog show is hysterical.

 

 

 

I got this audio book for free via SYNC. I had no clue what it was about, but because I had enjoyed several of Eoin Colfer's books in the past, I figured “why not?”

The two main characters are 17-year-old Chevron (Chevie) Savano and 14-year-old Riley. Chevie was originally part of an FBI program to investigate possible terrorists in schools by recruiting orphans as junior FBI agents. Chevie was one of those orphans and the reason why the program was scrapped – she defended her target from an attacker, and her behavior, although technically heroic, was caught on camera and brought the FBI under embarrassing scrutiny. Riley, also an orphan, is an assassin's apprentice in Victorian England.

Chevie and Riley are brought together by a time machine, part of the FBI's secret Witness Anonymous Relocation Program (W.A.R.P.). WARP involves hiding important witnesses in the past. Unfortunately, Riley accidentally ends up transported to the present, and his master, Garrick, follows him and gains deadly powers.

I'll just say right up front that there were so many things wrong with the premise, and I was never quite able to get past that. Eoin Colfer's FBI has lots of stupid ideas. Yes, let's recruit minors for possibly dangerous jobs and train them as though they were adult agents. Let's use expensive technology to send, at most, a handful of witnesses back in time. Never mind that that technology has a chance of mutating them and giving them gorilla arms or dinosaur heads. They're safe from the criminals that might want to kill them and that's all that matters.

I don't know that I'd have made it through this book if I'd been reading it, rather than listening to it. It was kind of boring, for one thing. Garrick was ridiculously super-powered, with just enough convenient weaknesses not to be completely unbeatable. And Chevie kind of annoyed me, especially in the beginning. She was convinced that she was better than all adult FBI agents, and waiting until she could become an official, real FBI agent would mean wasting the prime years of her life. She reminded me of Holly Short, from Colfer's Artemis Fowl series, but Holly had more real-world experience. It was a relief when Garrick and the time travel stuff took Chevie down a few notches.

The time travel aspect had lots of holes. Garrick was the only character in the entire book who was ever affected by time travel in a useful way – anyone else who had the time machine go wrong on them ended up hideously mutated. Another issue: later in the book, it was revealed that one particular character had been profiting off his modern-day knowledge for years in Victorian England, with no apparent lasting effect on the timeline. That made me wonder if the “time machine” was actually transporting people to an alternate Victorian England. That would have made more sense than the actual explanation, which assumed that hugely popular songs, works of literature, and more could be completely wiped from history simply by someone ordering it so.

All in all, this was not as good as I had hoped it would be, and I have no plans to continue with the series. However, the humor was okay (popular song in Victorian England: "Another Brick in Yonder Wall"), and I did at least like the narrator well enough, although it was hard to remember that Chevie was supposed to be a 17-year-old girl and not a hard-boiled agent in her thirties. Riley also came across as older than he was, so it may have been the writing as much as the narration.

 

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)