Tahleen reminisces and reviews: "Roomies" by Sara Zarr and Tara Altebrando

Title: Roomies
Authors: Sara Zarr and Tara Altebrando
Publisher: Blackstone Audiobooks, 2013 (print available from Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)
Narrators: Becca Battoe, Emily Eiden

Rating: 3.5 stars

When Elizabeth (EB) gets the email with her roommate assignment for college in the fall, she immediately shoots off an email to introduce herself and ask about logistical things like microwaves and mini fridges. She is excited and very ready to leave her suburban New Jersey town for UC Berkeley in San Francisco, especially since her mother is driving her crazy. Plus, she might be able to finally see her gay father who moved to SF years ago. Lauren, on the other hand, is disappointed when she gets the email, since she had requested a single. She just wants to get some peace and be alone for once, as she is the oldest of six by at least 12 years. So their correspondence does not get off on the right foot, but eventually they start to open up to each other—perhaps too much.

When I started listening to this, I immediately was brought back to when I received my roommate assignment for college. It was a little different, as Facebook had just been released and you still needed a .edu email address to sign up for a page, and I didn't get an email address. I was just given a name and a phone number,  but I didn't have any qualms about calling Vanessa. As it turns out, I ended up talking to her mother for a while since she wasn't home when I first called, but eventually we caught up with each other and luckily we seemed perfect for each other. I still feel really lucky I got to have her as my roommate for two years! (Miss you, Vanessa!)

Anyway, back to the audiobook. Sara Zarr and Tara Altebrando do a great job of creating unique voices for their characters, though I'm not 100% sure of who wrote which. My guess is Zarr wrote Lauren's part, and Altebrando wrote EB's. Each girl had very different situations and drama she had to deal with at home, and they shared a lot of this with each other through email. As we all know, it can be MUCH easier to talk about something in writing with someone you don't necessarily know in real life, especially since they might not know the other people you're talking about. But because each girl actually has her own personality and set of morals, things get hairy.

Honestly I was super annoyed with EB for almost the whole second half of the book. She really seemed to be a brat for a lot of that to me, but then again I have never had to deal with the situations she does. Still, I was glad (relieved?) when she came around.

As for the narration, I thought it was good. Becca Battoe reads Lauren's part, and Emily Eiden reads EB's. Both voices were different enough that I had no trouble distinguishing whose part was whose, and for the most part they were easy to listen to. I especially liked Battoe's narration; her voice is pretty soothing.

All in all, I do recommend this book if you like realistic fiction, dual-voice narrations, and/or are feeling nostalgic about college or are excited for your upcoming college experience. It's a good, easy read with a bit of drama and some nice character development.

Disclaimer: I got this digital audiobook via OverDrive from the library.

Top Ten Of The Most Unique Books We've Read

 

 

To learn more about Top Ten Tuesday or see a list of future topics click here!

 

 Jamie's picks

1. Liar by Justine Labarestier: OMG this book. I didn't really LOVE it but it was definitely one of the most unique (and frustrating for ME) books I've ever read. I don't know that I'll ever read something quite like it again.

2. Every Day by David Levithan: I have his other two books on my own personal TTT for today but I wanted to add this one in as well. I don't know that I've ever read a book where the MC whose gender was ambiguous. The story was amazing and unique but it also challenged me because the whole time I wanted to call the MC a he or a she. I had a hard time talking about the book without trying to attach a he/she to A. Also, hard to pin a genre to it which I love! It was just different and beautiful and a fave!

3. Picture Me Gone by Meg Rosoff: This one isn't unique in a WOW kind of way but it just FELT different? The MC is younger but it's not middle grade but it was just really quiet and reflective and smart. The plot wasn't anything unique but it just felt different to me if that makes sense...

Julia's Picks

4. The Duke of Shadows by Meredith Duran - This is a historical romance (if you couldn't tell by the word Duke in the title), and a lot of those are pretty similar. But Duran sets part of this book in India during the British occupation. The main character (said Duke) is half white half indian and it is so interesting to read about him and his thoughts. The romance is great, too! This book has inspired me to read more unique settings in my historical romances.

5. The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak - This one wins for most unique narrator and story telling method with Death. The reason I read this book (outside of the glowing reviews at the time) was it intrigued me so much that the narrator was Death. It's also used as a story element that ties everything together. Great book. One of my all time favorites. It does bring the feels though. 

6. The Bridge by Rebecca Rogers Maher - This short story I stumbled into. It's a romance in the textbook sense, but it has some pretty deep underlying threads. You see the hero and heroine meet as they are about to commit suicide by jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge. They decide that they cannot kill themselves while the other is there because they could save the other person. They decide to spend the next 24 hrs together where each tries to convince the other what they have to live for. It's a heart wrenching novella but one that fully engrossed me in its unique charm.

Bridget's Pick

7. The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman. I didn't know much about this book before picking it up, but it was thrilling, surreal, enchanting, and humbling all at once. It was, in a word, beautiful. You should read it if you haven't yet.

Tahleen's Picks

8. Midwinterblood by Marcus Sedgwick. This was the Printz winner this year. There really is no telling what you're going to get when you jump in here, unless you've read a lot about it beforehand in reviews. I don't want to say too much for fear of spoiling it, but I will say there are seven tales contained in here, and they all come together beautiufully.

9. Maggot Moon by Sally Gardner. Another Printz book, this time an honor. Set in what seems to be an alternate history in the 1940s, we read about many terrible things. That it's narrated by Standish Treadwell in dialect just adds to the strangeness and surreality of this nightmare world. I would definitely recommend this one to fans of George Orwell.

10. Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan. This might be THE weirdest and most disturbing books I've ever read. Rape, incest, bestiality, magic, and individual heavens all rolled up in a young adult novel. Of course, this is another Printz honor. The writing is beautiful, though.

Julia Reviews Evertrue by Brodi Ashton

Title/Author: Evertrue by Brodi Ashton

Publisher/Year Published:  Jan 2014 by Balzer and Bray

How I got this book: The Library

Why I read this book: I wanted to finish the series.

Rating: 2 stars

Note: There will be spoilers for the other books in the series in this review, but I'll hide the spoilers for this book under a tag.

Well this book sucked the big one. The others in this series had some of the same issues, but they were really exacerbated in this book. Then take away the one thing that I found really interesting in the series (Cole) and it all just goes to shit.

Evertrue is the final book in the Everneath series, which to be honest is pretty mediocre to bad. The one thing that I really loved in this series was the author's ability to make a character that is seriously unforgivable in his asshatery. I adored the writing of Cole in the other books in the series. I wondered how she would try and redeem him, if she even tried to redeem him.

Instead this book took an overused trope and stripped the most interesting character from the story to leave a bland, overly convenient narrative that wasn't even worth the time I spent reading it. God, I don't even like summarizing this. It's so dumb. Cole disappears when the current queen catches wind that he wants to overthrow her (something Nikki does not want at all) and NIkki's all dying now. Blah.

Nikki and Jack are on a quest to destroy the Everneath so that Nikki can be human again and live her perfect live with a white picket fence, 2.5 children and a dog. The only problem is she needs Cole, who literally holds her heart, to stay alive. 

Seriously the first half of this book is pointless Nikki and Jack running around trying to discover things and only having them turn up in their lap. Like there are so many deus ex machina things that I am surprised my eyes didn't permanently roll into the back of my head. 

Everything was too convenient. Things that needed more explanation were never explained, like a lot of the mythos and what the hell was happening. I really like when characters would disappear and no one would bat an eye. Urgh and it isn't even the worst part.

Cole. Cole. Cole. The ONE thing I really liked about this series. The ONE character written amazingly well in a story of cardboard sludge. COLE gets figuratively murdered by an overused easy way out trope... which I won't rant about because it's a pretty heavy spoiler.

The ending is so predicable, but honestly that didn't have to be a bad thing. I read romance novels for God sake, which is like the pinnacle of predictability. It's the journey that makes it interesting. And this journey sucked. It was like the worst game of Clue ever played. 

So yeah I didn't like this book. I powered through and I'll give it two stars for actually keeping me engaged enough to read it and not skim. It is creative. But it's creative in the most boring way possible.

If you want to read my spoiler-filled review, I put it on my Booklikes. The text is pretty much the same so you can skip to the view spoilers tags. 

Did anyone else read this book? What did you all think? Am I alone in my contempt?

Relationships and Books

Image from The New Yorker

I come from a very small family.  At our major holidays, there are just six of us--me, my parents, my grandparents, and my uncle.  Within that group, there's really no one to talk to about the books I read.  I mean, my grandma reads a lot of chick lit.  My dad reads pretty much whatever I tell him and he makes some really good choices on his own, but discussing literature (beyond a kind of basic plot description) is not really his thing.  I could talk about books, but it would be a mostly one-sided conversation.  That's the way it has always been.

Until now.

My uncle is getting married.  I haven't met the person he's marrying yet or her teenage daughter.  In an effort to be happy about this change (I mean, adding two people to a family of six is kind of a big deal), I passed along some questions for my uncle to ask his intended.  One asked which side of the major intrastate rivalry she was on.  One asked which her favorite baseball team was.  These two would tell me a lot about her character and personality.  The last one, the most important one, was what are some of her favorite authors.  This question would tell me if I would ever have anything to say to her beyond a comment about the weather.

My uncle said he knew that she read.  A lot.  Sometimes several books at a time.  But he really didn't know any specific authors, so he'd get back to me.  I was hopeful, but not willing to count my chickens before they hatched.  I figured she read a lot of biographies and non-fiction, but that maybe we'd have some common historical interests and could talk about that.

I. Struck. Gold.

When my uncle reported back, I couldn't get over my elation!  We read the same kinds of books!  She likes literature!  Really good literature!  Austen, Bronte, Wharton, Parker, and several others that I am familiar with, even if I haven't read anything by them.  She also likes some modern classics authors that I've been meaning to get to, like Amy Tan.

I am not sure when I will finally meet her.  The wedding is in July, so I know it will be some time before then.  Regardless, I want to make sure we have something to talk about, so I quickly came up with three books I want to read beforehand--The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker, Persuasion by Jane Austen, and House of Mirth by Edith Wharton.  These are all books I've been wanting to read for a while, so I'm not being a total poser, but knowing that my uncle's future wife likes them helped bump them up higher on my list.

So...my question to you guys is:  Have you ever read certain books in order to further your relationship with someone (not necessarily romantic)?  How did it work out for you?

Bridget Reviews Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened by Allie Brosh

Title: Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened

Author: Allie Brosh

Published: 2013

Rating: 3 stars

I am a huge fan of Hyperbole and a Half. So much so, in fact, that a friend of mine once made me a set of coasters based on the “This Is Why I’ll Never Be An Adult” post (which, if you didn't know, is also where the "[Verb] ALL the [nouns]!!" meme comes from). She’s so casual in her writing but at the same time, so skilled at storytelling that I don’t know how anyone could not enjoy her blog.

This is the first book I’ve ever bought that’s based on a blog. I’ve seen the FML book, the Stuff White People Like book, the NotAlways Right book—but I was never interested in buying them, because I mean, the websites are being constantly updated so what do I need a book for when I can read it online for free? But Allie of Hyperbole and a Half hasn’t been updating much in the past few years, due to bouts of depression, so both my fiancé and I get ridiculously excited when we see she’s added something new. While we knew the book had come out, though, we weren’t going to go out of our way to buy it.

Last weekend, we were in New York City to see Billy Joel (side note: BEST CONCERT EVER). The next day, we met up with a few friends to wander the city, and ended up at Strand Books, the biggest bookstore I have ever been in and a place I have literally had dreams about. (18 miles of books—wouldn’t YOU have dreams about it??) On our way to the cash register, our arms full of books, Andrew and I saw the Hyperbole and a Half book on a table and decided we might as well buy it.

I was a little skeptical about reading a book based on a blog—the styles are just so different! And I will say that the pictures-and-text format was definitely a little odd in a book when you’re so used to consuming it through a screen. Other than that, though, I definitely enjoyed the book. She put in a bunch of my favorite stories (I love the ones about her dogs) and the new material was good as well, if a little dark—a lot of it seemed to be about how terrible of a person she was, but how she was able to hide it from herself through a variety of coping mechanisms (one of which, no doubt, is drawing silly comics about how terrible of a person she is). But they were relatable in that everybody knows what it’s like to restrain oneself from saying what’s really on our minds, or to pat oneself on the back for the mere thought of doing something nice/heroic. Brosh’s example was that she wants to think she’d be the type of person to donate a kidney to a family member, but in reality, she would try to think of literally anything else she could do other than donating a kidney—just like the rest of us would.

In the end, I wouldn’t say the Hyperbole and a Half book was a bad purchase, but I don’t think my life would have been significantly impacted had we decided not to buy it. That’s not to say you shouldn’t, though, if you want to read some stories you haven’t seen online, and it’s always good to support people you feel deserve it (and I believe Brosh deserves all the support she can get, considering the light she’s been able to shed—in a humorous but also deadly serious way—on the issue of clinical depression). Also keep in mind that this book is 300+ pages long, but it took me probably only 2ish cumulative hours to read, due to all the pictures. Just don’t expect it to keep you occupied for very long, because it won’t. But you'll still have fun :)

With Our Last $20: April 2014 Edition

With Our Last $20 is a feature here at The Broke & The Bookish wherein we answer the prompt of which book we'd purchase with the last $20 left in our pocket for each month -- be it new releases or older books...basically which ever book we'd be so excited to read that we'd be willing to spend the last $20 in our pockets on. I mean, we are The Broke and the Bookish after all. We'd no doubt live up to our name and forgo other things for a new book!

Jamie's Pick:

Dorothy Must Die by Danielle Page -- oh YES I would be spending the last $20 in my pocket on a Wizard of Oz retelling where Dorothy appears to be a bit cray cray! I've heard some excellent things about it already so ABSOLUTELY this is my pick.







Jen's Pick:

To All the Boys I've Loved Before by Jenny Han - this book comes out this month and I am so excited to read it! If I wrote letters to past crushes and the letters were actually mailed I would probably have an anxiety attack.  But the great thing about books is we can vicariously live through the characters!

Jana's Pick:

A Mad, Wicked Folly by Sharon Biggs Waller - I've been on a historical romance kick lately, and I love that this one is YA! And this has the whole art class scandal of a girl posing nude and then getting expelled from her French finishing school. There's love and balls and pretty dresses and boys. Count me in! I really want to buy this one!

 

 

Bridget's Pick:

The Shining, signed limited edition…I got an email about this baby today. Unfortunately, it would cost a lot more than just my last $20…seeing as it's $900…sigh. Maybe one day.

Tahleen's Pick:

Usually the books I buy nowadays are cookbooks. Today at the library, I saw a brand new cookbook called Olives, Lemons, and Za'atar by Rawia Bishara. I have all of those (za'atar is a Middle Eastern spice blend) in my Armenian-American kitchen, so I would totally spend $20 on a cookbook that has them all together.





Julia's Pick:

Heart of Steel by Meljean Brook - I read the first book in this series ages ago, and I've wanted to continue on with it for quite some time. I think if I had the second one in my hand I would just slam through this series. Steampunk is like my favorite thing at the current moment :)

 

What book would you spend YOUR last $20 on in April-- new release, something you just found out about that was pubbed awhile ago, etc. 

Top Ten "Gateway" Books/Authors in Our Reading Journey

All of us readers have those books that really started us on our way to becoming book lovers. It could be something we read as young children, or it could be a book we picked up in adulthood after years of a reading drought. Or, it could be an author or book that introduced us to a new favorite genre. This week's Top Ten Tuesday puts a spotlight on those books and authors that we credit with our bookishness.

Tahleen's Picks:

1. The Boxcar Children series by Gertrude Chandler Warner. I remember buying the first book of this series for a friend's birthday when I was little, and thinking it sounded so good that I asked my dad if I could have a copy for myself. This started off my late-night reading by the light of the hallway, trying to sneak in a few more chapters before going to sleep.

2. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. Specifically, the one with the awesome scary '80s cover. I really have to give this credit to my friend's younger sister, who was (probably still is) a big fan of L'Engle. I kept seeing this book and others by L'Engle around their house, and after buying another L'Engle book for my friend's sister's birthday (I'm just realizing there is a pattern here), I finally figured I'd try the classic Newbery winner. I've since read every book in the Time Quintet, and many other books by L'Engle, including one of her adult titles.

3. A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson. I remember seeing this book in my high school library and being intrigued by the cover, and the description. After passing it by a few times, I picked it up and started reading the first few pages. Bryson had me at "I wanted a little of that swagger that comes with being able to gaze at a far horizon through eyes of chipped granite and say with a slow, manly sniff, 'Yeah, I've shit in the woods'" (p. 4). I've read almost every book of his, listening to a fair few, since, and it started off my love of humorous travel writing.

Bridget's Picks:

4. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. This was my first real introduction to sci-fi/dystopia; my cousin, who was 15 or 16 at the time, recommended it to me when I was about 12. He's one of only two older cousins I have, and since I'm the oldest child in my family, he's really the one person in my generation that I've really been able to look up to for most of my life. So of course I read a book that he recommended, and I've never looked back!

5. Emma by Jane Austen. Emma is probably the book that really got me into reading classics. I had read Pride and Prejudice in high school and enjoyed it, but wasn't overly excited about it. Later in college, after my fiance took a Jane Austen class, I borrowed all the books from him and fell completely in love with her. Emma was the first one I read, and it made me really want to learn more about the classics!

6. The Stand by Stephen King. This is the book that actually got me in to Stephen King! I had wanted to read It, but my dad thought it would be too scary for me (I was 13) so he had me read The Stand first. Needless to say, I loved both, and have loved Stephen King ever since!

Daisy's Picks:

7. Sarah MacLean: this woman got me into reading historical romances with Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake a couple years ago and it's been true love ever since!

8. Tolkien: Lord of the Rings was my gateway into a love of fantasy novels!

Jen's Pick:

9. Code Name Verity got me out of my reading slump last spring. It drew me in quick and as soon as I finished the book I wanted to immediately reread it to see everything I missed! I'm starting to think every January to March I go through a terrible period of not being able to get into any book I pick up.

Julia's Pick:

10. Kathleen Woodiwiss is the reason 50% of my reading material is historical romance/romance in general. That and my cousin for giving me three romance novels and pretty much commanding me to read them when I was around 12. I feel in love with the romance and haven't stopped since... though my reading tastes have changed over the 15 years that I've been reading them. I've enjoyed every bit of it.

What about you all? What are your gateway books or authors that lead you into a new path on your reading journey? Link up your lists below!