The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
by Holly Black
Published September 3rd 2013 by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
419 pages

Summary: (from Goodreads.com)

Tana lives in a world where walled cities called Coldtowns exist. In them, quarantined monsters and humans mingle in a decadently bloody mix of predator and prey. The only problem is, once you pass through Coldtown’s gates, you can never leave.

One morning, after a perfectly ordinary party, Tana wakes up surrounded by corpses. The only other survivors of this massacre are her exasperatingly endearing ex-boyfriend, infected and on the edge, and a mysterious boy burdened with a terrible secret. Shaken and determined, Tana enters a race against the clock to save the three of them the only way she knows how: by going straight to the wicked, opulent heart of Coldtown itself.

Review:
I thought it was interesting that the book started out with a "wow factor"; a girl is one of three people left alive at the party. The weird thing about this to me is, this book is about vampires. They can smell blood. They can hear heartbeats. Why would they just happen to skip a girl who fell asleep in a bathtub? Despite that one thing that irked me through the entire book, I thought it was pretty interesting as far as vampire fiction for teens goes. The main thing I liked about it was Tana was a strong lead female. I also liked that romance was NOT the main theme of the story, only a fragment of a side theme (and even then it wasn't really interesting). 

I pretty much felt blah about this whole book. The plot of the story was rather boring. It got good for maybe the last 5 chapters(?) and then it was just sort of up and down from that. I'd actually be more interested in a sequel if there was one since Ms. Black already has the characters and the setting already fleshed out so she could spend more time on a better story line and I would like to see how the character relationships turn out.

SCORE: 3/5

Maid for Me

Maid for Me
by Kat Lieu
Published November 18, 2009 by NummyzProd

Summary (from goodreads.com):

Feisty Mina Lin waltzes on glass shards when she lands a job as billionaire Jaiden Daniels's maid. What happens when Jaiden hires her to become his pretend girlfriend? Pretending to be in love with the hot Rich Boy is hard, when Mina's heart only beats for her boy next door, Kiterin Forrests. What happens when Mina doesn't know what her heart wants and a crazy Stalker is after Jaiden's life, and the only person who can save him is Mina?

Find out in Maid for Me, starring Mina Lin, an ambitious, silly, funny, and talented Asian-American heroine who has even developed her own fighting styled called Mina-Jitsu. A fast-paced debut novel for young adults, by Kat Lieu. Filled with hilarious dialogue, suspense, sparkling wit and imagination-- a romance novel packed with action and humor!

Review:
I read this as a free e-book download through my Amazon Prime membership. While I applaud the author for self-publishing and writing a novel, this book was a little bit of a disappointment. While Maid for Me isn't the worst book that I have ever read, it definitely needed a lot of work. The point of view between characters sometimes changed within the next paragraph or even to a different set of characters who were not even in the current setting. Near the climax of the story, the point of view changed so frequently that it ruined the whole pacing and took me away from the suspense. While I thought it was a cute, spunky read that would definitely appeal to fans of Japanese dramas and Korean dramas, or even anime and manga; it has little going for it outside of that. There could have been a little more character development with all the characters of the book, as I often felt I was just reading the story instead of 'being there'.

2/5

Maggot Moon

Maggot Moon
by Sally Gardner
Published February 12, 2013 by Candlewick

Summary:
(from goodreads.com)

What if the football hadn’t gone over the wall? On the other side of the wall there is a dark secret. And the devil. And the Moon Man. And the Motherland doesn’t want anyone to know. But Standish Treadwell — who has different-colored eyes, who can’t read, can’t write, Standish Treadwell isn’t bright — sees things differently than the rest of the "train-track thinkers." So when Standish and his only friend and neighbor, Hector, make their way to the other side of the wall, they see what the Motherland has been hiding. And it’s big...One hundred very short chapters, told in an utterly original first-person voice, propel readers through a narrative that is by turns gripping and darkly humorous, bleak and chilling, tender and transporting.

Review:

Maggot Moon is really written beautifully; sentences flow off of each other with ease and add to the continuous flow of the story. However, I felt like this book was very confusing! The summary states that it is set in a Regime, and using context clues, one concludes that it is a Russian one due to the use of the word "Motherland" in reference to the country. I've read in other reviews that it is a "what-if" novel, concluding what the world would be like if Germany had won WWII. Either way, the book is eerie: a post-apocolyptic-esque setting with a Big Brother type governement ruling with an iron fist. While I enjoy books that thrust you right into the story with little explanation, this book didn't make much sense to me until about the last 30 chapters. The ending was not what I was expecting, but to be honest, none of the book is really what I expected it to be. I think one of the best things this book has is small chapters. It would be great for a reluctant reader to feel accomplished and keep reading on.

2.5/5

Ketchup Clouds

Ketchup Clouds
by Annabel Pitcher
Published November 12, 2013 by Little Brown Books for Young Readers

Summary:
(from goodreads.com)

Dear Mr. S. Harris, 
Ignore the blob of red in the top left corner. It's jam, not blood, though I don't think I need to tell you the difference. It wasn't your wife's jam the police found on your shoe. . . . 
I know what it's like. 
Mine wasn't a woman. Mine was a boy. And I killed him exactly three months ago. 
Zoe has an unconventional pen pal--Mr. Stuart Harris, a Texas Death Row inmate and convicted murderer. But then again, Zoe has an unconventional story to tell. A story about how she fell for two boys, betrayed one of them, and killed the other. 
Hidden away in her backyard shed in the middle of the night with a jam sandwich in one hand and a pen in the other, Zoe gives a voice to her heart and her fears after months of silence. Mr. Harris may never respond to Zoe's letters, but at least somebody will know her story--somebody who knows what it's like to kill a person you love. Only through her unusual confession can Zoe hope to atone for her mistakes that have torn lives apart, and work to put her own life back together again.

Review
Ketchup Clouds is a book about "Zoe", a resident of the UK who reaches out to a inmate on death row in Texas, USA because they have something in common: they both killed someone.

The story is told through letters that Zoe has written to inmate Stuart Harris, regarding the events leading up to how she supposedly killed someone. While the book deals with the immense guilt and remorse that Zoe feels about this incident, it isn't the only focus of the book. Zoe's family problems are also brought to light as well as the story of two boys.

I enjoyed reading Ketchup Clouds because of the well written prose of Zoe's letters and the even pacing. It was fast when Zoe's emotions were intense, and slow when she was down. You get caught up in the book so quickly because you're only getting snippets of what happens, and as the story progresses you start reading a bit obsessively to figure out who it is that she killed.


I feel like the book ended well, but when I read the last page, I hate to admit that I didn't feel strongly that I liked or disliked this book. I thought it was well written and that I quickly related to the characters.  I found myself less interested in the story that Zoe had to tell and more interested in the problems of her family, as the characteristics of her other family members seemed to outshine her own. 

While I think this was a good read, I feel like it was also missing something and what it is I can't put my finger on.

3/5