It’s time for some mini book reviews! These aren’t as long and deeply detailed as some of my full-length reviews where I basically just rave (orrr sometimes rant), but I still have things to say! Let’s think of these as the puppy version of reviews whereas the individuals are the full grown dogs.
I don’t always get to review every book I read, but these are just a few I recieved ARCs of or really wanted to share my personal experiences with! If you see anything else I’ve mentioned on bookstagram or Goodreads and want to know my thoughts, don’t be afraid to reach out! I’m always happy to talk books. Of course.
A Graveyard Visible by Steve Conoboy
*An e-ARC of this book was sent to me for free in exchange for an honest review.*
A Graveyard Visible is a YA fantasy novel with a pretty cool premise: main character Caleb lives next to a graveyard which is growing each day, seemingly with the same mourners at every grave and no new deaths occurring in the community. Caleb, who watches these happenings through his windows, spends his time almost obsessively measuring and exploring the graveyard. He runs into a young girl named Misha who lives in the graveyard with her grandfather, and who he believes is being forced into rituals by the “mourners” in the graveyard.
Y’all know I love anything and everything spooky and am a sucker for the supernatural, so this book had me super intrigued and I was really excited to read it. Even that cover art—I mean, dang, this seemed right up my alley. Unfortunately, this book just didn’t work out for me. It just didn’t interest me. It was really difficult for the storyline to keep my interest, and the characters didn’t feel like people I could really get to know beyond the surface level and almost stereotypical qualities they possessed. (For example, the “token weird girl” vibe, or the bullies which seemed almost like caricatures of bullies rather than true villains with motivations behind their actions, whatever they may be.) There was never a time when I felt compelled to come back to this book because I had to find out what happens next and in fact I didn’t have a very good time reading it at all. The writing, while it didn’t stand out to me in any particular way, was fine. It was just the story and the characters that were not compelling for me personally. Reading the description of the book, I almost got The Graveyard Book vibes—or maybe hoped for Graveyard Book vibes. Of course, we can’t all be Neil Gaiman, and I’m sure we’re all painfully aware of that, but I thought it might have a similar vibe or appeal to me in a similar way. I was disappointed to find out that it didn’t.
Additionally, though this is marketed as YA, to me, it read more like middle grade. It certainly explores some common YA themes of coming of age or finding oneself, but it felt very juvenile to me. I don’t know, something about the way the characters spoke to each other and interacted—in what could perhaps be considered an overly simplistic way—felt like they were younger than they were meant to be. It didn’t read like most YA and I really feel like it might better suit a middle grade classification, but that’s just me.
On the upside, it does have an overall spooky vibe and takes place mostly in a graveyard, if that appeals to you (which for me, of course it does). There are some nice moments and a few good quotes scattered throughout, particularly some of the advice from Caleb’s grandma, like when he tells him not to announce himself by saying “it’s just me”.
“Why do you say that every time? Just. It’s just me. Like you’re nothing to be excited about…Make people think that maybe you are exciting. It’s me. I’m here…You use the word just, you allow people to adopt the position of disappointment.”
Unfortunately, these few and far between moments were not redeeming enough to make the book truly enjoyable or particularly interesting for me. I’m sad to say it because I had hoped to be blown away, but I would probably give this one two of five stars.
A Graveyard Visible was released from John Hunt Publishing on May 3rd, 2018 and is available now if you’re interested in checking it out for yourself.
Foolish Hearts by Emma Mills
Foolish Hearts is a YA contemporary by Emma Mills which was included in the December OwlCrate box. It centers on Claudia, a young woman who attends a rather posh private high school where she generally gets along with everyone but doesn’t have any really close friends, because her best friend attends the public school in their town. While at a party, Claudia accidentally stumbles into an awkward situation where she overhears one of the school’s popular girls, Paige, breaking up with her girlfriend, Iris. This puts her in a bit of a sketchy position with Iris and her feelings toward her when they go back to school, and of course, because high school is basically one huge edition of Murphy’s Law, the two get paired up for a group project. When it doesn’t go well, the teacher mandates that both of them participate in the school’s upcoming production of A Midsummer’s Night Dream, which ends up putting Claudia in close quarters with not just Iris, but also other new friends, including Resident Popular Boy™ Gideon, who seems to have an interest in her as more than just a friend.
At first glance, this may seem like just a YA romance, and of course, there’s a very cute and, in my opinion, romantic component to the novel. But trust me when I tell you that not only is the romance here very well done (it was very realistic, not “insta-love” or overdone or downright silly like some romances), but there’s also so much more to it than that. While I liked the romance between Claudia and Gideon, what I was really here for was the strong female friendships and the lessons Claudia learned as she went through hardships, learned how to be a good friend and a good sister, figured out her place in her family, and fumbled through social interactions. She’s a very real and very relatable character just trying to figure shit out, and I can completely get on board with that. This book was written really well, and it was awesome to see teenagers acting like teenagers in a YA book. I am loving that more and more YA authors seem to be more comfortable portraying teenagers in a realistic way. Teenagers swear and they don’t always have things figured out and they screw up (actually, all these things can be used to describe humans in general, not just teens) and it’s great to see that represented on the page.
While the book has its serious moments, like with Claudia’s sister’s pregnancy or with some difficult moments in her friendships, it’s also frequently super funny and there are some genuine laugh out loud moments, such as Claudia’s awkwardness at the Fall Fun Festival or her “Fuck, Marry, Kill” debates with her best friend and her brother that had me practically snorting.
And of course, I’m sure none of you will be surprised to find out that my favorite character in the book was Iris. I love that Iris is surly and misunderstood and doesn’t make it easy to like her—and I love that Claudia gives it a shot anyway. I really enjoyed seeing Iris’s realistic social interactions with her peers and felt really, really attached to her. (This girl’s idea of sweet and fluffy niceties is telling someone “I give a shit about you, okay?” She’s a character after my own cold little heart.)
All in all, I loved this book. I actually read it a couple months ago but wanted to make sure that I still shared my thoughts on it because I was so caught off guard by how totally in love with it I was! I loved seeing the characters bond over video games. I loved seeing them be awkward and inappropriate and funny. I loved that while there isn’t one huge climactic events, there are a lot of smaller events that add up and make them who they are and they learn as they go. This one was a five out of five for me!
I highly recommend it for anyone who is a fan of contemporaries, anyone who has ever nerded out with their friends (or alone), and anyone who had a shit time being a teenager or is currently having a shit time being a teenager and wants some characters they can actually relate to.
This book is available now (it released back in December), so you can pick it up on your very next trip to the bookstore! Or just buy it with a few clicks from your phone online without getting off your couch or out of your pajamas, because technology, amiright?
All the Little Lights by Jamie McGuire
*An e-ARC of this book was sent to me for free in exchange for an honest review.*
Oh, Jamie McGuire. Jamie, Jamie, Jamie. Try as I might, I have this perpetual soft spot for McGuire and her dysfunctional new adult romances. I fell hard for her work back when I first read Beautiful Disaster and am a big fan of the OGs, Travis and Abby. (Despite the fact that I implore all of you to never aspire to having a relationship like theirs. Please. For your own good and everyone else’s. It’s only cute when it’s fictional.) I even went in for her self-published novel, Providence, and read it twice, because I actually enjoyed it despite some of its glaring Twilight-esque issues (seriously, the MC came just short of sparkling in the sunlight).
So when I found out she was releasing a new novel, I was beyond excited. I was ready for some more Travis & Abby/Trenton & Cami level fire.
What I got in the form of All the Little Lights was more akin to a lukewarm blip.
All the Little Lights skews to a slightly younger character set than we usually get with McGuire’s twenty-something MCs. Our leads, Elliott and Catherine, are only about twelve or so when they first meet, and when they reunite they’re high school seniors. Elliott used to visit his aunt and uncle in the small town where Catherine lives, and after a fast and somewhat romantic friendship with Catherine, he is forced to leave right after a tragic event in Catherine’s life because his mom shows up and takes him back home.
Keeping in mind, of course, that he is literally a child, Catherine apparently totally hates him for this and vows to never forgive him. But Elliott returns in high school when his parents split up and he moves in with his aunt and uncle while he finishes his education. And of course, because this is a romance novel, after all this time, he still has a thing for Catherine. Part of the book is spent on Catherine awkwardly despising Elliott and Elliot awkwardly trying to win back her trust, and then the second half of the book is spent kind of meandering through various unimportant seeming events in their lives as they navigate their relationship (awkwardly) and Catherine forbids Elliott from ever coming inside her house because she “has a big secret” which has also caused her to drop her only two friends like hot potatoes. Obviously, Elliott wants her to tell him whatever the “big secret” is and obviously, Catherine reminds us like every five pages that there’s a big secret.
I don’t know, y’all, this one just didn’t do it for me. Right from the get go, the stakes didn’t feel very high. At least in the Beautiful Disaster and Providence series, as sometimes over dramatic as they may be, there are some pretty high stakes. The whole first half of this book just felt so inconsequential as Catherine half-heartedly hated Elliott for something he had literally no control over because he was a literal child when it happened. I just couldn’t really get behind it and it seemed really silly. Even the characters don’t seem to have a ton of conviction in their feelings. There’s also some stuff with Elliott’s mom insisting that Catherine will drag Elliott down because she’s from a small town and small towns are terrible and they will go nowhere because nobody ever leaves small towns. Being from a small town myself, I totally get this mentality and I can see where McGuire was trying to go with it, but it was really surface level, not fleshed out at all, and even that concept seemed to lack any real conviction. There was also some stuff where family members half-heartedly implied that Elliott was being targeted by police in the disappearance of a classmate simply because he was Native American, and even that seemed to lack conviction. It seemed like perhaps there was so much that the author was trying to work in, none of it really got the fair chance to be fully developed so that the reader could get truly invested in it.
And then there was the big reveal or the big twist, and while I won’t spoil it for you here, suffice it to say I was not impressed. I didn’t think it was executed very well and it almost felt cheap, if not a bit mishandled (for lack of a better word). There was definitely some effort on the author’s part to be respectful about it and show empathy for the characters involved in the twist, but for some reason, I didn’t feel great about it and I wonder if it might perpetuate certain negative stereotypes about a certain group of people.
On the upside, there was a romance and it did have its cute moments now and then, like when Elliott teaches Catherine to drive or shows gives her an old photo of her and her dad (which was cute, but also a bit…stalker-ish). Catherine also makes friends with a girl from her school named Madison who people seem to think is quiet and shy until she has little outbursts like turning around during a football game to the girls who frequently bully Catherine and yelling at their ringleader to eat shit. Honestly, I would have stuck it out just for her little outbursts and random comments which made for great comedic relief. If Madison had a book all to herself, I’d totally read that and she would probably make for a much more entertaining main character, whereas Catherine seemed to have only slightly more personality than a damp washcloth.
But I digress.
The friendship between Madison and Catherine after Catherine spent so many years as a loner being bullied is definitely a major upside of the novel. There’s also a cute moment where Catherine and Maddy end up having to ride home from an away football game on the bus with the players and Elliott thinks about how much he likes Catherine as he watches her from the back of the bus. So, yeah, it’s a romance novel, which means it’s not without its cute (though sometimes unrealistic) moments. It has its slightly redeeming moments, and like I said at the start, I have a major soft spot for McGuire that I just can’t shake.
As a result, I’d probably give this book about two and a half stars, maybe three, but let’s not get too crazy.
I still kind of enjoyed reading it at times, I just wish it had been better. But I also have to be honest with myself about the fact that no book is ever going to be Beautiful Disaster and no other couple is ever going to be Travis and Abby, so I acknowledge it is a little unfair of me to expect that from new Jamie McGuire books.
Spring is here and summer is coming up fast, and I think All the Little Lights would make a great beach read if you want something kind of cute that you don’t really have to think about too much. (and if you’re curious what the big twist is). All the Little Lights officially releases from Montlake Romance on May 29th, just in time to grab a copy for June beach trips.
The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater
So, remember that time when everyone on Instagram hyped ACOTAR and the ACOTAR series so hard and constantly talked about how it was so amazing and talked about the characters constantly and I got so excited about it and totally fell for the hype because it really seemed like something I would like and because how could it be bad when this many people loved it??? And remember how I read it and absolutely hated it and seriously felt like I must be reading a different book than everyone else because dear Lord the experience of slogging through that nonsense was actually physically painful at times???
That experience was a big part of why it has taken me so long to read The Raven Boys. I realize it has been out for a long time, and it has a huge fan base. After seeing Paper Fury constantly talk about how it is amazing and how much she loves it and how much of a diehard Stiefvater fan she is, I was definitely interested. And then when I started seeing it all over bookstagram, I felt like I was really onto something. Everything about this series seemed like something I would love….but I was terrified I would be let down again like I was when I read ACOTAR.
And I was not prepared for another heartbreak like that.
Thankfully…I had the complete opposite experience with this one.
Really, I shouldn’t let the negative experience with ACOTAR affect me so deeply because bookstagram and book bloggers also led me to The Lunar Chronicles, which I quickly fell in love with, so I haven’t always been let down by the hype. Sometimes the hype is totally warranted, and in the case of The Raven Boys, it is completely justified.
I’m pretty sure everyone who has ever been to a bookstore or on the Internet has probably heard of this one, so maybe I don’t need to tell you what it’s about, but if you’re looking for a brief rundown: Blue is a young woman who lives with her psychic mother and her mother’s psychic friends. She’s kind of quirky and intentionally unconventional in a lot of ways, but the most unconventional thing about her is that she is surprisingly not psychic, unlike all the women she lives with. So when she goes with her aunt to a cemetery for a procession of the spirits of people who will die in the coming year, she is surprised to see her first spirit—a young man who introduces himself only as Gansey. Neeve, her aunt, informs her that there are only two ways Blue would have been able to see the young man: either he is her true love, or she is responsible for killing him.
And then she meets Gansey in real life, and things only get more complicated as she meets his little band of friends—Adam, Ronan, and Noah—and learns about his nearly obsessive quest to uncover the legendary Welsh king, Glendower. Blue gets involved with The Raven Boys and their quest, but always with the knowledge of her aunt’s prophecy about herself and Gansey looming over her head.
I can see why everyone loves these books, not just because they star a band of adorable boys with a deep-seated interest in the paranormal and a complex set of dynamics that make them seem more like real, fleshed out human beings, but also because the plot and themes of the book are so appealing. I loved Blue, and I loved the group of women she lives with, and I loved the deep dive into the mystery and legends at the center of the story. I loved the spooky and paranormal connections, and the different methods the boys use to investigate the legend, and how that intersects with Blue’s life and the predictions from her mother and mother’s friends. This whole book was spooky, mysterious, cute, suspenseful, and really compelling. I breezed through this one because I did not want to put it down, and just today I went to Barnes & Noble and picked books two and three in the series, so I will definitely be continuing on with this one. I can’t wait to see what happens!
I would definitely give this one a five out of five and if, like me, you are hesitant to jump into this series, don’t be! I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
This one definitely earned the hype, and Stiefvater is a truly talented writer who I can’t wait to read more of. I’m so glad I decided to give this one a shot, because I think I may have found a new favorite.
Unbury Carol by Josh Malerman
If you’ve been around for a few posts, you may remember that Bird Box is one of my absolute favorite books. I fell totally in love with it when I read it. It was creepy, anxiety-inducing, thought-provoking, and all around totally spine-chilling. So when I found out he had another book coming out last month, I had to get it right away.
I’m just going to cut right to the chase here: I didn’t like this one as much as I liked Bird Box. I liked it. I liked it a decent amount. But I didn’t love it the way I did with Bird Box, and I definitely didn’t have that feeling of needing to look over my shoulder when I walked through a dark space the way I did with Bird Box.
The overall concept of Unbury Carol is actually super scary: Carol Evers suffers from a rare condition in which she frequently “dies”, falling into such a deep coma that the average doctor thinks she has passed away. The only two people currently in her life who know about this condition are her husband and her best friend. But then her best friend passes away, leaving only her husband, who has less than honorable intentions. The next time Carol “dies”, her husband rushes to bury her and have her funeral ASAP so that once she wakes she will be buried alive, successfully murdering her without a trace as she suffocates under the ground, leaving the husband with all of Carol’s considerable wealth (and freeing him of a wife who is headstrong and has her own ideas and thoughts—the horror!—when what he really wants is a demure and obedient partner).
Meanwhile, Carol’s ex, famous outlaw James Moxie, gets word of her death. As the only other person alive who knows about Carol’s condition, he suspects what is going on and sets out to make it down the treacherous Trail and get to Carol’s town in time to save her.
This idea is actually terrifying, especially because while Carol is in her coma she can still hear and is very aware of what is going on around her. The best part of the book is definitely the terror of putting yourself in Carol’s shoes and imagining listening to your husband plot to bury you alive and not being able to do anything about it. Malerman did an excellent job of writing from Carol’s POV and describing how she felt and what she saw and heard in her coma (or “Howltown”, as she refers to it) in order to induce maximum horror.
Unfortunately, there were a few downsides, too. I felt like there were too many POVs in the story and it really actually served to lose my interest rather than keep me invested. I could totally get on board with there being chapters from Carol’s POV as well as Dwight’s (her husband), and James Moxie’s. That all made sense. But I wasn’t interested in all the extra points of view, like Smoke, Farrah, Clyde, Sheriff Opal, Manders—in my opinion, it was just too much jumping around and I didn’t want to get that involved in their thoughts. I also felt like the book dragged on a little long. I read one review that said they felt like it flew by because it took place over only a couple of days, but for me that was the reason why it felt so long. The whole thing takes place over just a couple days, but it takes sooo long to get through those two days because we have so many POVs to read and so many different threads to pick up on and follow (in addition to Carol almost getting buried alive, we also have Smoke and how he lost his legs and how he is trying to get revenge on the men who cut them off, and James Moxie and his “magical” duel that made him famous, and Ed Bunny who tracks all the men on the Trail…). It was just a lot. I would have liked it a lot better if we could have stuck with the main storyline.
But, despite the drawbacks, I really love Malerman’s writing, and it was spooky and interesting. So overall, I’d give it three out of five stars.
I’d recommend this one if you’re a fan of horror that’s not super scary and a little bit more cerebral, and also if you’re a fan of Westerns or novels with a vague Western vibe. It’s no Bird Box, but it’s not bad.
This collection of reviews has honestly been a bit of an emotional rollercoaster, but y’all know I will always be completely honest with you and tell you what’s really going on in my mind. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I did things any other way. Of course, there’s no accounting for personal taste, so as Lavar Burton once said….
Never be afraid to give something a shot—or to not give something a shot if you know it just won’t be your cup of tea! We’re all different and that’s what makes the world go ‘round, right? No shame in that. As always, these are just my personal opinions, and I have the utmost respect for how much work most writers put into their work.
Have you read any of these books? Are you planning to? Are you a Raven Boys fan? Let me know in the comments! You know I’d love to talk. <3
& stay tuned because I have a super exciting post coming your way!!!