Books read towards YA Challenge: 9
Books read towards Alpha Challenge: 2

Favorite book this month: Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
Least favorite book this month: Devil’s Breath by David Gilman

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Books read in 2012 YTD: 35
Pages read in 2012 YTD: 12,616
Avg pages per day YTD: 104
Avg rating YTD: 3.42

Books read towards YA Challenge YTD: 33 – Complete!
Books read towards Alpha Challenge YTD : 15

Books read towards YA Challenge: 9
Books read towards Alpha Challenge : 5

Favorite book this month: I guess I can’t say Hunger Games since it was a re-read, so I’ll say Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin
Least favorite book this month: Ten Cents a Dance by Christine Fletcher

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Books read in 2012 YTD: 26
Pages read in 2012 YTD: 9375
Avg pages per day YTD: 103
Avg rating YTD: 3.62

Books read towards YA Challenge YTD: 24
Books read towards Alpha Challenge YTD : 13

Books read in February: 5
Pages read in February: 1,816
Avg pages per day: 63
Avg rating: 4.2

Books read towards YA Challenge: 5
Books read towards Alpha Challenge : 2

Favorite book this month: Froi of the Exiles by Melina Marchetta
Least favorite book this month: Awaken by Katie Kacvinsky

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Books read in 2012 YTD: 15
Pages read in 2012 YTD: 5,147
Avg pages per day YTD: 86
Avg rating YTD: 3.53

Books read towards YA Challenge YTD: 15
Books read towards Alpha Challenge YTD : 8

Books read in January: 10
Pages read in January: 3,331
Avg pages per day: 107
Avg rating: 3.2

Books read towards YA Challenge: 10
Books read towards Alpha Challenge : 6

Favorite book this month: The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
Least favorite book this month: Chain Reaction by Simone Elkeles

I went through a funk this fall where I didn’t really want to read as much as normal.  I did end up finishing most of 2011 challenges, but some where very last minute.  This year I’ve decided to do the PBS YA Challenge again, but that’s it.  We’ll see how far I get on it, but I am not going to push myself.  I need to read because I want to, not because I have to for a challenge or a swap.  Just for fun.

So my little blog here will probably be pretty quiet this year.  Maybe I’ll start blogging again, maybe not.  We’ll see.

When a virus makes everyone over the age of eighteen infertile, would-be parents pay teen girls to conceive and give birth to their children, making teens the most prized members of society. Girls sport fake baby bumps and the school cafeteria stocks folic-acid-infused food.

Sixteen-year-old identical twins Melody and Harmony were separated at birth and have never met until the day Harmony shows up on Melody’s doorstep. Up to now, the twins have followed completely opposite paths. Melody has scored an enviable conception contract with a couple called the Jaydens. While they are searching for the perfect partner for Melody to bump with, she is fighting her attraction to her best friend, Zen, who is way too short for the job.

Harmony has spent her whole life in Goodside, a religious community, preparing to be a wife and mother. She believes her calling is to convince Melody that pregging for profit is a sin. But Harmony has secrets of her own that she is running from.

When Melody is finally matched with the world-famous, genetically flawless Jondoe, both girls’ lives are changed forever. A case of mistaken identity takes them on a journey neither could have ever imagined, one that makes Melody and Harmony realize they have so much more than just DNA in common.

From New York Times bestselling author Megan McCafferty comes a strikingly original look at friendship, love, and sisterhood—in a future that is eerily believable.

This book was interesting.  I liked it okay, but didn’t love it.  The world was really interesting and well built.  There were times that the slang was a little confusing and excessive, but I got used to it.

Harmony was interesting.  At times I thought she wasn’t right in the head, but I guess she was just supposed to be naive.  I wanted to know more of her backstory, but I guess that’s what the rest of the books in the series are for. :)

Melody was pretty judgemental, but I did like her.  I liked that she did seem to change for the better as the book went on and started to think for herself.

This was my first Megan McCafferty book.  I’ll definitely keep reading this series and want to go back and read the Jessica Darling series since everyone seems to love them!

Read as part of the 2011 YA Author Debut Challenge.

A wonderful, coming-of-age love story from a fresh new voice in YA fiction.

‘Miss Amelia Hayes, welcome to The Land of Dreams. I am the staff trainer. I will call you grasshopper and you will call me sensei and I will give you the good oil. Right? And just so you know, I’m open to all kinds of bribery.’

From the moment 15-year-old Amelia begins work on the checkout at Woolworths she is sunk, gone, lost…head-over-heels in love with Chris. Chris is the funny, charming, man-about-Woolies, but he’s 21, and the 6-year difference in their ages may as well be 100. Chris and Amelia talk about everything from Second Wave Feminism to Great Expectations and Alien but will he ever look at her in the way she wants him to? And if he does, will it be everything she hopes?

This book was so good!  I’ve liked most of the Aussie books I’ve read this year, so this isn’t that surprising, but this one was great.

I loved Amelia.  Her voice was so real and she was incredibly relate able.  Maybe that’s because I was so much like her at her age.  It made it fun to read her story.

I actually didn’t know that this book was alternating POV when I started it, so I was really surprised to turn the page and be thrust into his story.  I really liked it, though.  I liked that his writing was very different than Amelia’s.  I loved seeing the situations from his point of view.

The writing was just fantastic.  I was sucked in and couldn’t put the book down.  I wanted to read all night.  This is definitely an author I will revisit in the future.

Read as part of the Aussie YA Challenge. I received this book through the Go Aussie Book Tours over on The Unread Reader.  Thank you, Missie!

What if you knew exactly when you would die?
Thanks to modern science, every human being has become a ticking genetic time bomb — males only live to age twenty-five, and females only live to age twenty. In this bleak landscape, young girls are kidnapped and forced into polygamous marriages to keep the population from dying out.
When sixteen-year-old Rhine Ellery is taken by the Gatherers to become a bride, she enters a world of wealth and privilege. Despite her husband Linden’s genuine love for her, and a tenuous trust among her sister wives, Rhine has one purpose: to escape — to find her twin brother and go home.
But Rhine has more to contend with than losing her freedom. Linden’s eccentric father is bent on finding an antidote to the genetic virus that is getting closer to taking his son, even if it means collecting corpses in order to test his experiments. With the help of Gabriel, a servant Rhine is growing dangerously attracted to, Rhine attempts to break free, in the limited time she has left.

I really wanted to like this book more than I did.  I never really connected with the world in the story and I had a hard time feeling anything for the characters.  I was occasionally confused by exactly what had happened to cause everyone to get the virus at a certain age and why some people didn’t get it.

I found Linden interesting.  I wanted him to be good, and he was sometimes, but he also wasn’t good sometimes.  It made him an interesting character.

I didn’t like any of the girls that much.  Cecily seemed to be about 8 instead of 13.  Jenna just wasn’t likeable.  I never connected with Rhine.  I can’t put my finger on exactly why, but she just seemed too whiny, I guess.

I think my biggest problem with this book is that it was slow.  I’m used to dystopia coming with a lot of adventure and action.  This book didn’t have that for most of the book and I think it suffered because of it.

Wither is well reviewed on Goodreads, so maybe it was just me, but I don’t see myself continuing this series.

Read as part of the 2011 YA Debut Author Challenge.

“Let me make it in time. Let me meet Shadow. The guy who paints in the dark. Paints birds trapped on brick walls and people lost in ghost forests. Paints guys with grass growing from their hearts and girls with buzzing lawn mowers.”

It’s the end of Year 12. Lucy’s looking for Shadow, the graffiti artist everyone talks about.

His work is all over the city, but he is nowhere.

Ed, the last guy she wants to see at the moment, says he knows where to find him. He takes Lucy on an all-night search to places where Shadow’s thoughts about heartbreak and escape echo around the city walls.

But the one thing Lucy can’t see is the one thing that’s right before her eyes.

Oh my gosh I loved this book!  When I finished it, I didn’t want to send it back to Missie.  I will eventually acquire my own copy for my keeper shelf.

I really liked all the characters in the book.  The main characters were fantastic, but the secondary characters rocked just as much.  Lucy was funny, smart, and tough.  I loved that she punched a boy on her first date.  That was a great place to start from for her character.  I liked Ed a lot too.  I always go for the bad boy that ends up having a heart of gold. ;)  I liked the alternating POVs and how funny both of them were.  The friends were great too.   I liked Jazz and Leo so much.  The Daisy/Dylan relationship kept me laughing, but seemed sincere all the same.

The descriptions of the art were amazing.  I could totally see the graffiti and the glass in my head.  I loved the meanings that the graffiti had to Lucy, Ed, and Leo and the poetry was fantastic.  Very well written and engaging.

I read the Australian version of this book, but it comes out in the US next February.  I’ll definitely have to read it again then, so I can see what changed and relive the brilliance.

Read as part of the Aussie YA Challenge. I received this book through the Go Aussie Book Tours over on The Unread Reader.  Thank you, Missie!

In the beginning it seems so simple. A poem in the mail. A weekend invitation to the coast. But when Sun says yes to a midnight walk, her life becomes suddenly complicated. Saltwater Moons tells the story of Sun Langley during her final months of Year Twelve. There’s the intensity of her first relationship, complicated by the fact she continues to exchange poems with her boyfriend’s best mate. It’s a story about love and betrayal, about constantly longing for the things we can’t have.

I really wanted to like this book, but I struggled with it a bit.  On one hand, it was beautifully written – super easy to get immersed in.  I liked that a lot.  On the other hand, the characters kind of drove me crazy.  :)

I liked Sun, but I was so mad at her for staying in the wrong relationship when clearly her heart was somewhere else.  I did feel like she was a very authentic character and most of what she did made sense in a teenage brain, but I just wanted to shake her and tell her there was something better out there for her.

I loathed Mark.  Seriously loathed him.  He was just not a good person and he didn’t treat Sun well.  See last paragraph about shaking Sun and telling her there was something better out there.

Tycho I did like for the most part, though I didn’t understand why he continued to exchange poetry with Sun if he wasn’t going to do anything more.  I really liked the poetry in the book and how well it fit in with what Tycho and Sun were going through at the time.

Overall, it was good and a real story of Sun making mistakes and figuring out who she was.

Read as part of the Aussie YA Challenge. I received this book through the Go Aussie Book Tours over on The Unread Reader.  Thank you, Missie!