Great Book!

Just finished reading Sara Raasch's SNOW LIKE ASHES (out 10/14) and am nearly dead from the amazingness that it was for me. I haven't read a book like that in a while. The ending? Epic. Be sure to check it out come October!

Book Review: Lauren Oliver's Delirium, Pandemonium, and Requiem

WARNING: SPOILERS BELOW.

In Delirium love is found.

In Pandemonium love is lost, and found again.

In Requiem we see the depth of the world Lauren Oliver created. This: a love song that sometimes is nothing more than a whisper of what you think it should be until you realize the entire time you’ve been listening to love screaming at you so loud it was only pretending to be quiet. We see love between friends, between strangers. Between people who think they are in love but aren’t. Between lovers and parents. Different kinds of loves layer Requiem, so deeply woven together the pieces are sometimes difficult to spot. As it is for so many of Oliver’s characters, sometimes we don’t even see what love is until it’s too late. 

But it’s there. Waiting for the walls to fall, love is there. 

This trilogy has always been about love. In Delirium Lena finds love. In Pandemonium she finds it again, though a different love is lost. In Requiem she resists. Oliver creates a quiet kind of war built on the platform of a louder one - love upon hate, cured upon uncured. She takes the political and very real aspect of a resistance and layers on love until we are left with a war between those who love and those who don’t. Though we get tastes of loudness in Pandemonium and Requiem, Oliver’s is a quiet kind of war where the casualties number even more - because they forget. They love and leave and are gone. And underneath this war Oliver has created between the loveless and the lovers, there is this: Lena and Alex and Julian. First loves, second loves, all tied together as one because love is rarely a simple thing. It’s never so black and white as we make it. And this trilogy focuses on that, how love is not made up of firsts or seconds or even thirds, but just is. 

Love stirs jealousy, envy. Happiness and faith and greatness. Love seems unstoppable, and yet it stops from time to time just to breathe, to change. To mold into something different than what it was. And then it’s back to this: Love is a force of nature, and in this trilogy it is a character just as real as Lena or Alex. Perhaps even more real. 

Still, we must remember that this is Lena’s story. It is about war, but a different kind of fight. At times, like in Pandemonium, we get the feeling that circumstances and other characters are much bigger than they seem, that we are only seeing a tiny picture in this harsh world of forbidden love. But really, isn’t that the point? This is Lena’s story. Her loves, her hates. Her eyes seeing her world. And although we hear Hana’s voice in the end, it still comes down to this: Lena and the loves she has and doesn’t. Her love for Hana and Julian. Her mother. Alex. 

Her beginning. Her end. 

But maybe the beginning isn’t a place where things just start, but a place where things end and begin again differently than before. Like time, love is deprived of boundaries and borders. It is endless in so many ways. Oliver knows this. She writes this. Which is why Delirium begins in Portland and Requiem ends in Portland. 

“Direction, like time, is a general thing, deprived of boundaries and borders. It is an endless process of interpretation and reinterpretation, doubling back and adjusting.”-Requiem 

Some things never change, some always do. Some even change like whispers on the wind so they’re different without even meaning to be. That whisper is what moves the Delirium trilogy along. 

This: a whisper of the hope of love. 

This: a requiem of love. 

This ending is just the beginning. Of life. Of freedom. Of love. 

Of life beyond the walls.

Raven Me This.

After reading THE RAVEN BOYS by Maggie Stiefvater, I am at a loss of words to describe how I feel about this book. At first, it felt like I was diving in to another Harry Potter book - a world that felt familiar but very, very different. And then, it was like reading the next volume in Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising Sequence. That series, I would say, is probably the closest comparison one will find for The Raven Cycle. Truly, though, THE RAVEN BOYS was brilliant. And the entire time I could picture Stiefvater typing at her computer, hand over her mouth, giggling with secrets - because that's the way this book feels. It is a slow-building story. One to be savored. And the reader knows that this is not the end, or even perhaps, the beginning. Although we might not know the whole story, we are certainly given satisfying bits and pieces of it. We might not understand all the clues exactly, but we know a lot of them are there just waiting to be found and understood. 

In fact, the story and the writing are much like the character's quest itself. Both are filled with slow-building mystery. Both are riddled with clues not solved easily. And both are based on the emotional connect of characters - what they want, need, and how they feel. In a word: Timeless.

READ THIS BOOK

What?

What.

What!

What.

This book is a book that will change your life, no matter who you are. It will stick with you, in a way that maybe you wish it wouldn't. But it will anyway, because that's just the kind of book this is. It doesn't care that you might be squeemish, or sad, or afraid, or happy, or kind, or mean, or even alive. This book holds your hand. It makes you feel secure in the story. Afraid, but secure just the same.

And then it lets go. And you're alone. And people die. And the story is terrifying.

And then it holds your hand again. And you want people to live.

And then it happens again. Alone. Afraid.

And you realize that maybe, just maybe, this book isn't about living or dying at all.

Maybe it's about surviving.

And maybe that's something completely different.

READ THIS BOOK.

We Are Savage.

We are savages.

All of us.

______________________________________________________

I saw the movie SAVAGES today and loved it.  The movie, in my opinion, was a brutal portrayal of love and the desire of family. It was heartbreaking. It was graphic. It was sickening. It was warm and cold and achy and completely savage. If I'm being completely honest, however, what I loved most about the movie wasn't the plot - it was a bit predictable. It wasn't the artistic style of the film - there was hardly any new shooting styles except a slightly skewed camera angle here and there. And it wasn't the brutal nature of the film, the way the blood spilled so freely, so closely to the camera. Nope.

I loved the brutal and savage way the characters loved. I loved their romance, their need to be a family. I'm talking about all the characters here, because every single one of them - every single motive in the plot, the script, the film itself - was propelled by the desire for family. In a way, that is what made this movie so savage, and so beautiful. So compelling. I fell in love with the three main characters in the movie, equally. I couldn't imagine one without the other, and the idea of any one of them leaving the group seemed crazy. There's is a threesome, and it's an awfully good one at that.

I also loved the bad guys in this film. Why? They were horrible. They were mean and nasty and violent. They were cruel. But they were not evil. They were, simply, savage in the way they approached life. In what they wanted. Here, we are back to family. To the desire for one, or for people that make up what we think a family should be. Here, the bad guys are simple good guys in masks. Horrible, cruel masks.

But still, for me, it all comes back to the three main characters. I fell in love. Each of these three characters found a place in my heart. I felt like I understood them, like I could believe in them. They were flawed and brutal and sweet and horrible in their love. I got it. I got them. And I can't ask much more than that.

They are savages in love, and savage in the way they do.

And, maybe, so are we.

For Darkness. For Love.

I fell in love, just as Elliot North did. At the same times she did. In fact, at the very moment she realized she was in love, I realized it too, and thought "Why haven't I felt this way my whole life?" I felt heartsick when she did, and hopeless when she did. I felt empathy for other characters as she did, and hatred toward her enemies.

This book made me fall in love.

Made me feel.

At the end - made me want to run outside and look up at the sky just to know I was alive.

I can't ask much more than that.

Well played, SHADOW AND BONE. Well played.

Those of you who, like me, follow Maggie Stiefvater's blog know she has a rule where she only blurbs about books she loves. LOVES. All caps. Books that move her. Make her cry. Sob. Give her chills. Stay with her long after the last page has been read. Books that are so amazing that they are five stars all the way and nothing less.

Well played, Stiefvater. Well played.

So, I'm doing this. I'll only be blurbing books that are, to me, five stars all the way.


Side note: I've also rediscovered "well played. well played" so I'll be using that a lot. Everything is very 90's to me right now for whatever reason, and I have a huge urge to watch Space Jam and Power Rangers.


Well played, Netflix. Well played.

Down to business. I just finished reading (just = one month ago) an ARC of a book that Veronica Roth says is "unlike anything I've ever read." BAM:

I agree, Veronica! Although I also felt like there was something about SHADOW AND BONE that was very familiar, and I enjoyed the fact that it felt, in places, like it was a story I knew already. This, I think, is because the characters and the world were both so well written that it just felt like home. SHADOW AND BONE is not a love story, but there is love. There is love between family, love between friends, love between strangers, and love that really maybe isn't love just yet. I love that nothing was black and white in this book, but various shades of dark. There was mystery. There was suspense. There were characters I began to care about, and characters I hated. But my favorite part was the world. Bardugo created a world that was filled with shadows and characters that moved them. She created a world so unique and creative and dangerous and different that I wanted to live in it. More importantly, Bardugo's world in SHADOW AND BONE felt so vast that it was almost incomplete. She created it so well that you, as the reader, know there is more to come. You know there are places in this world just waiting for you. You know there are characters you have yet to be introduced to. You know there will be love and heartbreak and danger. And you can't wait to be pulled back in.

The good news? This is Book 1.