This was an adorable tale about a little girl trying to explain to a playground friend about her family. 

 

The illustrations were cute and I liked that it could be so clear which of her fathers was which simply by their shoes, especially given that is probably most of what a child of this age is likely to see, in practice. 

 

The questions were very much the types of things a child might ask when presented with what seemed to him to be an unusual living situation, and the matter-of-fact way the little girl answered them made it clear that this is very much her normal, and that a homosexual relationship between her parents is nothing of which she has ever been forced to fell shame.

 

I liked that the "Daddy" and "Poppa" were not themselves tied to traditional gender roles--we don't have a situation where, in practice, one of them is doing all the things traditionally associated with the "mother" and one is doing all the things traditionally associated with the "father" in a different kind of family. Both pitch in as it feels appropriate to their personality, which, like most people, is a mix of very different traits.

 

The ending in particular was sweet.

 

 

 

 

 

I still argue that Sara Shepard is practically her own genre among YA books, and I'm okay with that. This book very much fits into that genre.

 

We're looking at a thriller, certainly, and there is some murder and some mayhem and a lot of unanswered questions, many of which are still unanswered at the end of the book. That's kind of Sara Shepard's forte--series that somehow feel like Soap (anyone else remember that?) where the questions that come up get answered only to be replaced by more and more questions as time goes on so the hook is never really lost. You always want to tune back in to see (or read, in this case) more.

 

I had a minor issue where I went through the entire Pretty Little Liars series in about two weeks, which was vaguely horrifying and vaguely impressive. Although I've paused in this series, most of that was due to fear that I would do the same thing here. The novel is intriguing and fun, if you don't mind very fluffy soap opera-like reads.

 

The idea of twin sisters separated at birth has been done many times, certainly, but this puts a bit of a spin on it by having one of them dead, but still narrating.

 

The list of suspects would actually be a list of everyone in the entire novel, so I'll leave that part out. They're an intriguing bunch, though I don't think I like above half of them. That's okay--it makes it feel less problematic to assume they're all out to get the main characters.

 

I'll be picking up the rest of the series for sure at some point, but a lot of that is how compulsive these are. I need to see where things end up, and I kind of love the crazy detours and red herrings that it takes to get there.

 

This was interesting, but once I realized where it was heading, there weren't really any surprises left.

 

The main character's motivation was a little questionable, personally. It is hard to tell, however, how realistic his concern actually was; he seemed a bit of an unreliable narrator to me, and I'm not sure what he was really seeing on the titular playground and what he was imagining in his head or taking extremely out of context. Is this a dystopian future where playgrounds are terrifying or is he an overly-concerned helicopter parent?

 

The ending was odd, though not really out of place with the rest of the story. I'm not quite sure what I'm supposed to make of it. It had a Twilight Zone-esque twist, but I'm not sure I really liked the twist as much as I wanted to.

 

I haven't read any Bradbury in years and years, so this was a nice starting point back into his work. 

 

This just didn't work for me.

 

It was not necessarily badly written, but short stories are so very hard to get just right, and I don't feel like these managed at all. 

 

I'm not sure I can honestly say I liked a single one of them, though I came close with a few of them. And then they ended. Mostly abruptly and without warning, without wrapping anything up, without, I felt, saying anything. Some of them, perhaps even worse, just went on and on, and I found myself hoping they would get to a point, any point, even a depressing point, but they never did. 

 

They were also depressing. Now, there are lots of different reactions to depressing things. I do enjoy a well-written tragic scene, but none of these were tragic, they were just bleak. I don't really enjoy bleak with no point; perhaps it is a failing in my reading, but I want bleakness in a story to mean something, not to exist as though that is the natural state of affairs for everyone. Even if I truly believed it was (I don't), I go to books to give me something I don't see in real life. All of these characters could have been on a corner waiting for a bus somewhere; I might pass them by every day. These are the sorts of stories I would write for them in my head when I was depressed and watching them out the window in the rain on a very dark day, and that is not what I want in my stories. 

 

They seem to get high reviews from many people, and as an author she comes highly recommended, but I think I am going to firmly put this and perhaps other books by her in the "not for me" category and move on. 

I was expecting a more traditional mystery than I actually got here, and I was also expecting a paranormal element for some reason.

 

This is a good story, though, for all that is is much more of a thriller than a traditional mystery. Things are definitely not always what they seem, and although I absolutely saw very early on (due to the multiple viewpoints, primarily) at least part of what must have happened, I was surprised by the full extent of what was going on. It was pretty dark and and awful, though the kind of awful that is comparatively mundane, I suppose, given what I was going in expecting.

 

Lucy is a decent main character, and the alternating viewpoint with her (long-missing) mother makes for a good central narrative. Both women are just naive enough that you genuinely believe they could end up in some of the situations in which they end up, but not so naive that they don't handle them in a relatively rational way.

 

Sorry, attempting to avoid spoilers sometimes requires awkward phrasing.

 

The setting was an important part of the atmosphere of the story; important enough that there are few places this could have happened left in the U.S. (not sure about elsewhere, admittedly): small, insular communities where outsiders are treated like aliens (in all senses of the word, I suppose); communities full of secrets that are not spoken of and bad things that aren't shared with the outside world. Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft both wrote novels that shared this basic setting, and it lets this story take the step it needs from forgettable novel into a slightly eerie thriller.

 

In the end, I enjoyed it, and might pick up another novel by the author, but I'm not immediately going out and grabbing a bunch of them--if you're more into thrillers in general than I am, though, this might very much be your cup of tea. 

 

This was a great backstory for the rest of the Dorothy Must Die series.

 

This was more of a direct sequel than the original novel in this series. It handles Dorothy, and how she gets from what we see at the end of the original source material to what we see at the beginning of this series.

 

Watching her go through her transformation was fascinating. It was much easier to hate her outright before reading this (admittedly, she is still not someone I really like), and I felt like it did a good idea handling the changes in her.

 

The plot was relatively light, but this was absolutely a character novella--the idea was "how did this happen" more than anything else, so handling her getting into Oz again and how she reacts to everything going on around her was, in actuality, the plot.

 

It's a fun, quick read if you like the series already. If you don't, definitely pick up the first book and take a look if the idea of an Oz gone wrong sounds interesting. I'll be reading the rest of the novellas for sure and I can't wait for the third book in the series to come out! 

I was enjoying this quite a bit throughout. It had a level of nostalgia about it, given how many of this type of thing I read as a child, and I my expectations were not even remotely high. I just wanted a ghost-filled romp with a bit of mystery that wrapped up well.

 

I got everything except that last bit.

 

The general outline of the story is reminiscent of The Secret Garden in a few ways--we have a sickly child and his cousin, who comes from elsewhere and is unaware of the odd dynamics of the house. The main character is significantly more sympathetic than in that particular novel (thankfully!), but weird house and hidden cousin (though we are aware of him throughout) feels similar.

 

In addition to that, we have a new Mrs. Danvers (yet another literary reference, yes) in the aunt, who is creepy from the beginning and also a huge pain throughout. Blindness to flaws in all but the main character is a particularly annoying trait for a children's book character to have, and she has it in spades.

 

The uncle was a breath of fresh air and quite a sympathetic and reliable character himself, and the others in the house were at least aware that something was very wrong. I enjoyed sorting out the plot and it was creepy at times, so I was looking at a solid three star rating until the end, which pretty much doesn't wrap anything up.

 

I was left faintly bemused, honestly, and it wasn't a good enough read that "bemused" was at all a good thing. I've read a few books by the author and generally she does a better job wrapping up than this, so I'll certainly be trying more of hers in the future, but this one did not quite hit me right. 

 

I can't explain why I finished this except that I was hoping it would at some point turn into a Rick Riordan novel. (And it was quite quite short.)

 

It did not.

 

Maybe I was expecting too much from it, given how much I loved the entirety of the Percy Jackson series, but this was just not a whole lot of fun. It tried to be. It really did. I could tell every time they said something silly or Hades made some overly-modern reference or something unexpectedly ridiculous happened.

 

It just did not work for me at all. I didn't find it funny, I didn't find it compelling, and I didn't like what they did to the mythology. This wasn't just about making certain characters more or less sympathetic than I have previously read, but several of the mythological figures seemed kind of "out of character" in that they did things I had trouble really rationalizing. It might have been an issue of the characters not being fleshed out enough--I might have understood some of these things better had I known more (and thus cared more) about the characters and their motivations.

 

It's possibly reading it "out of order" (this is technically the fourth in a series, apparently, though I didn't realize when I picked it up.) caused some of that problem, but I'm not sure I would have enjoyed it much more had I had more background, simply because I felt like the characters that seemed to be introduced in this story were not well-developed either.

 

I might just have been requiring way too much from the book, but it really grated on my nerves and the love story was kind of awful (I know, Greek myths, but this was quite bad by the end) and I won't be picking up another one in the series to check.