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

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