Blog Discovery and Book Review

Children of the 80s, rejoice! Whitney is a blogger who reads a bunch of YA fiction, especially R.L.Stine, V.C. Andrews, and other literary greats. Then she writes hilarious recaps on her blog!

Awesome Blog of Awesomeness: Unleashing My Inner Geek

How did I find this gem, you may ask? I was trying to remember a creepy horror book I read at my friend's lake house when I was in middle school. I grabbed the book one day and just couldn't stop reading. Not because it was good so much as creepy. I googled this exact phrase, because it's all I could remember about the book: "YA horror+girl with tri colored hair_ islander"

Lo and behold, Whitney recapped this book! It's called The Fog by Caroline B. Cooney.Now not only is my obsessive need to remember that book satisfied, but I found a new, fun blog to read and share with you.

In other news, I just finished Seanan McGuire's Rosemary and Rue.It's Urban Fantasy and about faeries AND it's actually for adults (yay!), so I had to read it. Let me give you a brief review using LISTS!

What I Liked:

1. It's Urban Fantasy for adults. I do enjoy YA urban fantasy buuut sometimes I want to read something meatier. This was about Toby, a changeling (in this world, meaning half fae half human) private detective with baggage. While there is some romance in it, it's not about her romance with any one guy (a guy who somehow represents the metaphorical path the rest of her life will take if she decides to go steady with him. ZOMG).

2. The Main character is flawed but in a likable way. She's also a woman but I feel like that's incidental--for the most part, which is nice.

3. The fae world McGuire creates is really interesting. I was occasionally annoyed that every single fae Toby encounters in some unique mix of this or that but that's just me.

Now, What I Didn't Like:

1. The book suffers a bit from what I like to call Felicity Syndrome.
That being, seemingly every male character introduced, falls in love with the main character. However, I would call this book the girl's version of Harry Dresden--in other words, a fantasy/detective story. And in a typical male protagonist noir/detective story, the detective is surrounded by women who want to sleep with him. In this book, the female protagonist is surrounded by men who want to love her (also have sex with her, obviously).

So then I thought, well maybe that's what most women want. Sex with someone who also wants to protect them, and brush their hair off their face when they sleep. Is that so wrong? So we'll consider this a tentative con of the book.

2. She needs rescuing. Like, a lot. And there's often fainting involved and being carried by one of the aforementioned burly men who love her. Yes, she is a tough character. But if you force the tough girl into scenarios where she is constantly relying on a guy and fainting in his arms, then it feels like fake feminism. (Kind of like a certain *clumsy* wannabe teen vamp who just wants to be Independent but really is a danger to herself without a man to rescue her, *cough*Bella*cough*)

Bottomline: Will I Read The Next Book? Yes, yes I will.

To wrap up the news for tonight, I want to share that during a brief, violent storm, the sky turned a sickly shade of greenish yellow. Yes, it was awesome. Yes, I took photos. No, they did not do the eerie sky justice.