Ratings

[eleanne]

Title:The Forest of Hands and Teeth
Author:Carrie Ryan
Series:Sequel, The Dead-Tossed Waves, is now out, but no series title as of yet

Rating:69
Summary:A fence surrounds Mary's totalitarian village to protect it from the zombies that seem to have taken over the world. When the fence is breached, she and a small group of survivors set out for the mythical 'ocean'.
Critique: Although this book is well written with engaging characters and a nice plot, it's just too dark to finish, with a disappointing ending. There's a little something called comic relief that would have kept me from feeling so grumpy and depressed for the excruciating TWO WEEKS it took me to read it. I'm a fast reader but I had to keep stopping to keep my heart from freezing over. I can't imagine how it's possible to write such a book without going crazy.
Oh well, back to Terry Pratchett...  

[Derpy Chocobo]

Title: American Gods
Author: Neil Gaiman
Series: None
Rating:
Summary: "After three years in prison, Shadow has done his time. But as the days, then the hours, then the minutes, then the seconds until his release tick away, he can feel a storm building. Two days before he gets out, his wife Laura dies in a mysterious car crash, in apparently adulterous circumstances. Dazed, Shadow travels home, only to encounter the bizarre Mr. Wednesday claiming to be a refugee from a distant war, a former god and the king of America. Together they embark on a very strange journey across the States, along the way solving the murders which have occurred every winter in one small American town. But they are being pursued by someone with whom Shadow must make his peace... Disturbing, gripping and profoundly strange, Neil Gaiman's epic new novel sees him on the road to finding the soul of America."
Critique: You'll have to forgive my inability to rate on a scale of 100.

American Gods had a good premise with poor execution. It was a little predictable and it dragged on and on. Every chapter felt like a millennium and this book was a very slow read for me.

This book does not allow you to get attached to any of its characters, most of which we see several times, but only for brief periods. In some instances the detail is painful and unnecessary, then during the times you expect a lot of detail and explanation there simply is none.

It doesn't give you the chance to care about what happens. And when all does conspire, it'll still manage to disappoint you. Neil Gaiman was probably better off sticking with graphic novels. This book just did not deliver.  

[Derpy Chocobo]

Title: Shameless: How I Ditched the Diet, Got Naked, Found True Pleasure...and Somehow Got Home in Time To Cook Dinner
Author: Pamela Madsen
Series: N/A
Rating:
Summary: "A funny, sexy, and wildly entertaining look at the rewards of fully realized desire in the life of one ordinary woman.

At 43 years old, Pamela Madsen was happily married to the man she fell in love with at 17. She was the mother of two sons and had a successful career as a nationally known advocate for fertility issues. But she felt a growing sexual restlessness and yearning that wouldn’t let up. And though Pamela loved her husband and didn’t want to have an affair, she knew deep down that she needed more, much more. In Shameless, she tells the story of how she found it—and not only kept her marriage intact but made it stronger than ever.

In this fearless memoir, Pamela tells the story of her search for sexual, personal, and spiritual wholeness. She explores, in riveting detail, what she experienced at the hands of sexual healers, men who brought her untold pleasure (and became her close friends in the process).

But this is not just another sex book: Shameless is also an account of how Pamela’s journey healed her issues with food and body image and most important, helped her weave the many roles that she played—daughter, friend, partner, mother—into one fully integrated person. It is a story about a woman falling in love with herself and a call to other women to do the same."
Critique: I'm going to be brutally honest, I loved this book.

This book is a memoir of Pamela Madsen, a woman who married her first love and has been in her vanilla marriage for twenty years. Her girlfriends are having affairs and exchanging raunchy sex stories all the time, while all poor Pamela can do is listen and boil beneath her own skin.

Shameless is a witty, funny, exciting and eye-opening trek into the life of a woman who needed to explore her own sexuality and found a working way to do it without breaking down her own boundaries. It's really great to have a book like this at my fingertips, a reminder that everyone is flawed and everyone is beautiful and everyone deserves to express their raw sexuality without being told it's taboo or inappropriate. Female sexuality is constantly snuffed out by society and Pam reminds us that it isn't fair or honest. Women are just as sexual as men and they are much better at expressing it when given the proper tools to harness their desires.

I loved reading about Pam's journey to self-love and appreciation. As women, we seem to be conditioned by society to hate our bodies. Pam takes this fact of life and shoves it up society's big fat a**. Pam reminds us that big or small, we will never be perfect and yet we will always be perfect. We can be happy with ourselves just the way we are and we can do away with our own self-hate for good. We can open up completely and feel more free than we ever thought possible.  

[Paradoxismminant]

Title:Larklight
Author:Phillip Reeve
Series: Larklight Trilogy
Rating: 98
Summary:Summary from Wikipedia
Critique: I found this story extremely enjoyable. The plot had some unexpected twists, but they were unexpected without being ridiculous. The artwork worked matched the mood of the story very well, and the style was very detailed and you almost felt as if maybe the story could be real. There were many hilarious moments within it, and the supposed time period of this "alternate universe" was shown clearly in the manner that the story was written. It's easy to feel the curiosity and boyishness of Art Mumby, as well as the insistence of his sister Myrtle to be proper and ladylike.

The main things I didn't like about the story were mostly just scientific inaccuracies. For instance, they can breathe for a short time in the "thin aether"--that is, space. They can also sort of swim around in it. This is inaccurate due to the fact that space is a vacuum with no air in it, so there would be no way for them to breathe and just swim around with no protection, short time or no short time.  

[Derpy Chocobo]

Title: Running with Scissors
Author: Augusten Burroughs
Series: N/A
Rating:
Summary: "A harrowing and hilarious memoir about a boy raised by his mother's psychiatrist (who was more insane than anyone he treated) in 1970s Massachusetts."
Critique: This book was insane, entertaining and sometimes heart-stopping.

This is a memoir and memories are subjective depending on which brain they come from. Whether or not this is completely accurate doesn't really matter to me, though. This book touched on many emotions and it was a very mind-boggling and intriguing read.

This book will definitely make you thankful for your own life and its immense closeness to normalcy compared to the life of this author. This book is well-written, fantastically detailed and full of filthy things that a lot of people try to pretend don't really exist. You're going to need an open mind and a tough stomach for some of the scenes in this book.

If you just accept the book for what it is, a memoir, a recollection of someone's incredibly disturbed past and you leave your judgments at the door, you'll love this novel. You might even love each character like I do for their own little part in shaping the tide of this story.

The book came together well at the end and I feel more whole for having read it.

In response to everyone hating on this book and calling it exaggerated or having their little fits about some of the dirtier aspects of Augusten's young life, I'd like to remind you that if it wasn't a crazy ride then it wouldn't be worthy of a book, now would it?