Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

So back in 2005, I read this book because of the movie. I remember back then that I absolutely loved this book because not only did it show a side of Japanese culture, but it was also a well-told love story. I really want to know what the fourteen-year-old me was thinking, because this time around I literally want to claw my eyes out as I was reading this book.

This book tells the story of Chiyo – Sayuri as she is called later in the book – as she struggles through her life and tries to become a geisha. At a young age she is sold to an okiya by her father and separated from her sister. Thrown into this new world, she is shocked to find that one of the mistresses of the house – Hatsumomo – hates her because she thinks that one day she will be her largest rival. In fact, this geisha does everything in her power to make sure that Chiyo never becomes a geisha.

Much to her dismay, Chiyo does in fact become a geisha, a very successful one at that, and kicks Hatsumomo out of the house for everything that she has done. But the reason that Chiyo becomes a geisha is because of a man named the Chairman who she runs into one day when she was down on her luck and set in being a maid for the rest of her life. He shows her a bit of kindness, and as it turns out gets her help from one of the most successful geisha of all time.

It’s a beautiful story, really, but the details and side stories are just overdone. Seriously a chapter that could have ended in five pages went on for fifteen because of either descriptions of unnecessary items or a side story that was just filler. Also Chiyo is quite gullible. At the beginning when she tries to run away and Hatsumomo tries to help her escape she forgets the one lesson that Auntie taught her. Hatsumomo would never help her, ever. Little Miss Stupid indeed.

Final Rating: 3 out of 5 stars. The story is good, but there was just too much detail that wasn’t really needed.

Bookshelf worthy? Anyone want my copy?

The Luxen Series Book #5: Opposition by Jennifer L. Armentrout

The world is going to hell. War of the Worlds? Forget about it. The Luxen have landed and they don’t want to leave anytime soon and they’re destroying everything in their wake. Kat, Archer, Beth, and Luc are tucked away in the cabin not sure what to do. Dee, Dawson, and Daemon are gone, they left when the Luxen landed. Not sure what they’re next move should be Katy is blown away when she learns that Beth is pregnant and Archer and her go out to get supplies. This is where they run into a group of Luxen destroying things and assimilating human bodies. Archer and Katy are about to escape and get the hell out of dodge when she feels Daemon, but instead she runs into Dawson.

The next thing she knows she’s waking up in a mansion surrounded by Luxen who are less than friendly, even her best friend Dee is against her. Turns out that the Luxen are all connected by their thoughts and when the new guys showed up, the leader infiltrated all their thoughts and brainwashed them into thinking that humans were evil and deserved to be subjugated. So what does that mean for Dawson and Daemon? It doesn’t look good when Katy finally sees him again, he treats her like she’s nothing but human trash and their love was nothing. Like Katy, I think my heart broke for a second when he treated her like that, but I knew that the brainwash hadn’t taken him over, he was just acting that way.

As the rest of the book plays out, Katy, Daemon, and Dawson get away and meet up with Archer and Luc at an army base. The army’s grand plan to get rid of these Luxen – who are also revealed to be working with the Origins – is to drop giant EMP bombs over cities they are believed to be lost. Katy and company realize that this isn’t the best plan. By doing this, the army is making refuges of humans and setting civilization back. So they come up with a plan, a really insane plan, to get the Arum to help them out.

As usual, Armentrout combines sci-fi with a touch of romance and drama. The Daemon/Katy moments were just… fluff overload and I just wanted to curl into a ball and bawl my eyes out at how cute they were together. The ending, like most endings, nearly killed me twice. Not only do you have that character’s death – hey I’m all about being spoiler free sometimes – but you also have the attempted killing of that character too. My heart rate jumped a few times in the last fifty pages or so. I loved the ending, especially with Katy’s ‘room of precious babies.’ She’s a true book nerd ‘til the end.

Final Rating: 5 out of 5 stars. Beautiful ending. Everything was tied together beautifully and this little side story that Armentrout wrote was just as aw worthy as a bunch of kittens.

Bookshelf worthy? What’s up with the new covers? My eBooks look odd with this cover and then the original four.

Hush, Hush Saga Book #4: Finale by Becca Fitzpatrick

After everything Nora has been through, she has one last task to complete before she can fly off into the sunset and be happy with Patch. She has to lead the Black Hand’s Nephilim army to war against the fallen angels. If she doesn’t, she and her mother will die. But, if she does, the archangels won’t be so pleased with her and Patch. What happened to normal seventeen-year-old problems?

At least she isn’t alone. She’s got Patch, she’s got Scott, she’s got the Black Hand’s right man Dante and shockingly she even has Marcie. Yeah, that’s right, Marcie is on Nora’s side, or at least, she’s helping Nora so she can find out who killed her father. Okay. Dante is an interesting character. He’s kind of a hard ass as he helps to train Nora so she can lead the army to war if it comes to that. But something about him just isn’t right. That something is revealed when he forces a mysterious drink down her throat.

It’s devilcraft. The substance that Hank Millar was using to help fuel his Nephilim powers and that Patch and Nora thought died with him. Apparently not. Hank entrusted the devilcraft to Dante and Blakely, and Blakely has been working on weapon prototypes that will destroy the fallen angels. There’s also the drink that basically supercharges the Nephilim’s powers. Dude.

Okay, so honestly, the only reason I didn’t one hundred percent love this book was because of Nora’s decisions and the ending. After a brief tussle with Blakely, he ends up stabbing her with a devilcraft infused knife. The problem with the stabbing is that there was so much devilcraft on that blade that Nora becomes addicted to it. Reading about her trying to overpower the addiction was painful. I actually liked Nora the last book and part of this one, until she became addicted to the devilcraft. She should have known better. As for the ending…well, if you’re into the whole ‘perfect ending’ thing, then you would have liked this ending. But I didn’t. I love when books end perfectly, really, I do, but it ended too neatly and easily. Seriously. Nora’s final plan backfires, all the fallen angels are sent to hell, and Dante is after her head. How can things end well after that? Well, apparently, Dante is the devilcraft prototypes, so with help from Scott, Nora is able to kill him, which in turn kills the fallen angels who pledged allegiance to him to get out of hell. Patch possessed Rixon to get out of hell, and Nora and him go off into the sunset together, because as a final gift from the archangels – Detective Basso, who knew? – Patch can now feel. Wow.

Final Rating: 4 out of 5 stars. Nora has come a long way from her character in the first book. She’s grown stronger, but she still makes some bad decisions. The ending was great, but it was gift wrapped a little too well.

Bookshelf worthy? After a year of sitting on my shelf, I finally read it. Yay!

Hush, Hush Saga Book #3: Silence by Becca Fitzpatrick

Nora Grey has been through it all in the last few years. Her father was murdered. She had a stalker. She thought she was going insane. She was almost killed a few times. She fell in love for the first time. She found out that her father wasn’t really her father and that there are fallen angels and Nephilim walking around in the real world. So what could possibly happen to top all of that? Well…

It’s been three months since the end of Crescendo and Nora wakes up in the cemetery having no idea how she got there or what day it is. When the groundskeeper finds her, he tells her her worst fear. It’s not April like she thought, but actually September. She’s been missing for three months and she has no memory of the last five. She may not remember anything, but she does get the feeling that something isn’t right with her mom’s new boyfriend – Hank Millar. As she tries to unravel the mystery of what happened to her, she meets old friends and new foes.

So I have to say that I liked this book a whole hell of a lot more than I did the last one. Making Nora forget not only the three months she was being held captive by Hank but also the two months previously that she was with Patch was an evil but fantastic move. I also liked how he was still part of her life, but went by his real name Jev instead of Patch. Was I ever glad when Nora sort of kind of remembered him and what happened between the two of them. The character of Scott, like I predicted, became a major player in this book. Not only does he help jog Nora’s memory of what happened, but he also helps her start to bring down Hank at the risk of his own life, since the Black Hand was still after him. Vee, as usual, was her annoying self, believing that she – and Nora’s mother – knew what was best for Nora. I was sort of able to tolerate her character in the last two books because sometimes her attitude and quips were funny, but in this book. Wow. I didn’t like her at all. She was supposed to be Nora’s best friend and help her connect the dots, not lie to her.

Final Rating: 4 out of 5 stars. I’m still kind of confused with the whole oath thing that Hank made Nora swear upon, but I’m sure that it will resolve itself in the next book.

Bookshelf worthy? What font do they use for the title?!

Love Letters to the Dead by Ava Dellaira

Losing someone is hard. Losing a family member is especially hard. For Laurel, losing her sister was extremely hard because she was there when her sister May died. Add in the fact that she’s not only starting high school, but also a new school all together, and she has hit the extreme angst teenager scale. Her first assignment in English class though, throws things over the top. Write a letter to a dead person

Understandably, Laurel has a little trouble with the assignment, although you wouldn’t know it when she keeps writing letters to get her feelings out. Through these letters, everything that has happened since even before her sister’s death starts to come out, especially that she feels responsible.

I wanted to like this book. Seriously. It was written really well. The characters were fantastic. The story line was just the right amount of depressing and uplifting while still being a coming of age story. But…the whole time I was reading it I had this feeling that I had read this kind of story before. Person writing letters after a tragic event, trying to fit in with new friends, and at a new school…

It was The Perks of Being a Wallflower, just instead of having Charlie writing letters to some unnamed person it was a girl writing letters to dead people.

Final Rating: 3 out of 5 stars. This book was good, I just felt like it was too much a duplicate of The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

Bookshelf worthy? Support your local library!

Now & Forever by Susane Colasanti

Like Sarah Dessen and Meg Cabot, I have a soft spot in my heart for Susane Colasanti’s books. So when she announced that she was coming out with a new book this year, I was so excited, especially when I read the summary of the book. Sterling has the perfect boyfriend. Ethan is the lead singer in a band whose about to hit it big and he only has eyes for her. But sometimes fame can change a person, and Sterling has to decide if being a rock star’s boyfriend is worth it.

Okay, so like I said when I first heard about this book I was really excited to read it. A girl dating a rock star that just got discovered? Sounds fantastic and in some ways it was. But in other ways… Yikes. Sterling is a very insecure character, and when she’s put under the microscope by the media those insecurities are multiplied. I get where Sterling is coming from, compared to those other girls and celebrities that are out there, how is she supposed to compete? But on the other hand, Ethan has said many times how she’s the only one for him, and yeah, he’s changed since the band was discovered but he still loves her.

Until he changes for the worse. Fame starts to get to his head and it shows. He becomes more self-involved and I totally agreed with Sterling when she realized that he was more about his dreams then about hers. Like when she revealed to him her idea about the cooking videos, he was so down on them, like how are these cooking videos supposed to help my career? Self-obsessed much? Even in the beginning, before he got signed, I didn’t really care for him. What was the harm of adding someone else’s song to the mix?

Final Rating: 3 out of 5 stars. Although I didn’t care for Sterling and Ethan, it wasn’t too bad of a read. I liked the ending the best, when she realizes that she’s better off without Ethan – granted it’s after she finds out that he cheated on her – and she does her own thing.

Bookshelf worthy? Colasanti is another one of those author’s who if I had more bookshelf space I’d own everything.

Hush, Hush Saga Book #2: Crescendo by Becca Fitzpatrick

Recently, Becca Fitzpatrick revealed on Twitter that Crescendo was not her favorite book to write out of the Hush, Hush Saga, and I can tell. When this book first came out, I read it in one day and was supremely confused and angered by the events that transpired. How is it that a sequel to a book that I loved could turn in to such…well, crap? Now, that I’ve read it again, I still don’t have an answer, but I kind of understand things better than that first reading.

Nora is used to her life being turned upside down. Her father was murdered almost two years ago, she’s learned that she is descended from a race called Nephilim, and that her lab partner from biology was a fallen angel until he saved her life two months ago. Now, Patch is a guardian angel her guardian angel and she couldn’t be happier. But as the book begins, Nora isn’t on the path to normal just yet. Feeling overwhelmed by her feelings for Patch, she declares her love for him and he doesn’t say it back.

The next morning in summer school she learns from Marcie Miller – her arch nemesis for years – that Patch went to her house right afterwards and stood watching. Nora asks Patch about it, but he doesn’t give her an answer. Feeling hurt and betrayed she breaks up with him causing a rift. Add in a new character named Scott with a dark past of his own, and the fact that Nora is seeing her father around town and you’ve got one interesting sequel.

So, like I said before when I first read this book I thought it was a bunch of crap. Here was another second book of a series that breaks up the main characters for really stupid reasons. True, I get that Nora didn’t want Patch to rebel on the archangels, and that she was still kind of miffed about Patch not telling her why he was hanging with Marcie – although I kind of had a feeling why he was – but still… Nora is very quick to assume the worst of people and that’s kind of one of things that I really hate about her. She knows that Patch is a guardian angel now, and once he explains that the archangels are just looking for a reason to cast him back to hell, shouldn’t she guess that the reason he’s hanging with Marcie is because he’s protecting her now?

Scott was an interesting character to throw into the mix. He seemed like such a jerk at the beginning – kind of like Patch – but at the end when it’s revealed what is really going on with him, I was kind of intrigued to see him come back in the next book. And can we talk about Marcie’s dad actually being Nora’s dad too?! What was Blythe thinking? And holy crap, holy crap! The ending! Just when you think there’s going to be some much-anticipated Patch/Nora make up making out, Mr. Miller shows up and confronts Nora about the death of Jules aka Chauncey. The end. WHAT?!

Final Rating: 4 out of 5 stars. So the ending still kind of confused me. Nora’s dad – Harrison – was told to marry Blythe and claim Nora as his own child even though it was really Mr. Miller’s kid? And Mr. Miller is the Black Hand, but he didn’t kill Harrison, that was actually Patch’s friend Rixon? And Rixon was after Nora because not only does she have the blood of Chauncey in her veins but the blood of Barnabas, who was Rixon’s blood oath host? Ouch. My brain hurts.

Bookshelf worthy? Gray scale cover art is gorgeous. I still want to know what font they use for the title.