Tea Time: Another Little Piece

**Warning: Spoilers May Abound**

Another Little Piece, Kate Karyus Quinn

The spine-tingling horror of Stephen King meets an eerie mystery worthy of Sara Shepard's Pretty Little Liars series in Kate Karyus Quinn's haunting debut.

On a cool autumn night, Annaliese Rose Gordon stumbled out of the woods and into a high school party. She was screaming. Drenched in blood. Then she vanished.

A year later, Annaliese is found wandering down a road hundreds of miles away. She doesn't know who she is. She doesn't know how she got there. She only knows one thing: She is not the real Annaliese Rose Gordon.

Now Annaliese is haunted by strange visions and broken memories. Memories of a reckless, desperate wish . . . a bloody razor . . . and the faces of other girls who disappeared. Piece by piece, Annaliese's fractured memories come together to reveal a violent, endless cycle that she will never escape—unless she can unlock the twisted secrets of her past. (source:goodreads)

Cover-I'm not going to lie, the cover threw me off. For some reason I expected this to be . . . well, not-paranormal.

From an artistic point of view, though, the cover is very pleasing to the eye. Not too much image, and not too much text; what's interesting is how they kept both separate. I love the large title; the font they use is really cool, too, and the red gradient makes it pop out.

Overall? Yes, very pretty.

★★★★☆

Narrative-I kind of loved it. This book is told from first person POV, narrated by a person who, basically is "not-Annaliese." Eventually I came to know her as Anna. What's extremely striking is the way in which the little bits of her not being Analiese come out in the narrative, so it reflects what she believes about herself beyond just the storyline.

Example: she doesn't call them Mom and Dad. Instead, they are "the mom" and "the dad." For some reason I got a kick out of it.

What's also really cool is that every chapter starts with a poem that was written by Annaliese-the real one. This is how we get a lot of who Annaliese was, because so much of her life is tied into these poems that she left in weird, random places. So instead of getting the Annaliese that everybody else saw (as they try and get Anna to remember), we get Annaliese's life as she saw it, which I thought was pretty cool.

Flashbacks were also used, and artfully done, so definite kudos.

★★★★★

Plot-The plot really pulled out that part of me who loves gore and creepiness. The pitch compares it to Stephen King, and I think it's a bit accurate: it's chilling.

This book is a mystery. You know from the beginning that Anna is not Annaliese; the questions are: who is she, and where is the real Annaliese?

The pacing of this novel really pulled it off. As you read, you get mixes of Anna within Annaliese's life, suffering the consequences of her strange disappearance, and you also get flashbacks. But the flashbacks aren't to one life, they're from many, and you begin to piece together (haha, "piece") that Anna is not just one girl, but many. The contrasts between past and present were really well done and pushed the book along.

Then, oh my goodness, when you find out what really happened and how Anna become Annaliese? Dude. Chiller. I loved it.

I've explained in the past, however, that what throws me off is an incomplete plot. This book was fairly rounded, and all novels tend to leave questions unanswered, but either these questions were too big, or they were too many:

Who is the Physician, really? Why do they have to cut out each others hearts in order for the "transformation" to take place? Why cut open their arms?

Okay, so that's only three questions, and maybe it's just my insane desire to know every detail of weird things like this. There's a lot of mystery still shrouding this book by the time it comes to a close, which makes me question if the gore was really necessary (don't get me wrong, though, I love gore), and I'm still not sure whether that's a good thing or bad.

★★★★☆

Characters-I'm going to do this part in list format just because . . . well, I can.

Anna: Our main character, whose many experiences drive the narrative. I actually really liked her; she's plagued by this terrible notion that she doesn't know who she is, but she knows she's done terrible things. Not only is she trying to decipher her own life, but the life of Annaliese, as well. It creates a certain type of fear and reluctance within her, which was a trait that was really appropriate and made her feel extremely real and well-rounded. It translated through her actions as well as through her voice. As a character, she's one of my all-time favorites.

Dex: Here's an interesting one. Dex is the next-door neighbor who's a recluse, and who also managed to film an important part of the original Annaliese's horrific disappearance. The world hates him, though, because they believe he leaked the video online, and now he's not only a recluse but a freak and a creep in the eyes of the local population. After Anna meets him, however, we see a more realistic side of him, where he's just a lonely boy with a secret that he's forced to live with, which drives him crazy at times. Overall he's a good guy; I really liked him as a character and as a love interest due to his willingness to help Anna without holding her back and also providing her with a kind of love that she'd been looking for.

Logan: I think Logan is the black spot of the characters. I understand he's basically broken by what he feels is his contribution to the disappearance of Annaliese. I understand that he feels guilty. What I don't understand is why that guilt comes with a pathetic desire to love the girl he believes to be Annaliese. My guess is that he's still under whatever spell he was put under a year prior, but it's never actually explained, so I felt like Logan was a one-sided guy, and that side was not something that I think was built upon very well.

Eric: I'm calling him Eric, but, like Anna, he's gone by many names. Eric is, well, a douche. But understandably so because he's essentially one of the "villains" of the novel. He's cruel and wicked, and above all he's willing to do whatever it takes to ensure his own survival. I love an antagonist who knows exactly what he wants and won't let himself get distracted by other things, and especially when they have a story behind why they do the things they do. So Eric was evil, yes, but he was supposed to be, and whenever he showed up I felt my skin crawl, which equates to another well-written character.

★★★★☆

This book was, honestly, a little iffy for me. On the one hand I absolutely loved it; Quinn did an excellent job with the problem of memory and life and death. On the other, I feel like there were a few small things that were overdone or not stitched together quite right.

I also feel like the final answer is going to be a higher rating than I expected.

All in all, though, I'm not sorry I read this book. It was fantastic, and something that I would definitely recommend to others in the future.

Final Answer: 4.25 / 5

Rae

Shameless: Reading YA

So recently the Twitter-sphere was abuzz  with outrage over an article written by Ruth Graham on The Slate. The title of the article?

Against YA: Read whatever you want. But you should feel embarrassed when what you’re reading was written for children. (read the full article here)

Now, when I say that the Twitter-sphere was abuzz, I mean buzzing. The article sparked the quickly trending hashtag #PromoteaYAInstead, and set the YA world aflame, both authors and readers alike.


She included this quote in the beginning of the article: "The once-unseemly notion that it’s acceptable for not-young adults to read young-adult fiction is now conventional wisdom." Following this is a list of statistics about how the category of YA fiction has grown to include many readers over the age of 18. The paragraph ends with this in parenthesis: "The definition of YA is increasingly fuzzy, but it generally refers to books written for 12- to 17-year-olds."

Here's where I have my first problem: The definition of YA really isn't that fuzzy, and no, it does not refer to books written for 12- to 17-year-olds. As a number of people on the Twitter-sphere have pointed out, the age range specified here (which you can find on most books, as well) is honestly just a way to make shelving books easier for booksellers. This does not mean that only people within that age group can read the book.

Graham's opinion is then written: "Adults should feel embarrassed about reading literature written for children."

I want to state something right here, right now, before I get into the really murky things: I am not bashing Ruth Graham. Why? Because I'm one of those people who wholeheartedly believes that everybody is entitled to their own opinion *cue gasps*. In my opinion, Graham was being rather brave in writing this article and posting it on the internet, despite the backlash that she probably knew was going to head her way. She also has her reasons, which she states in her article.

However, it is also my opinion that Graham is wrong. This piece is not about Graham, though; I had my miniscule piece above. This is about YA.

Going by the definition that Graham uses as "adult" means that I should have left behind YA lit a year and a half ago. Yet I've bought over 50 books since my semester ended a month ago, very few of them being "adult" literature.

Yet I'm not going to talk to ya'll about reading YA; I want to talk to ya'll about writing it. Remember earlier in this post I talked about the authors who were outraged? I might only an amateur writer, but as I have aspirations for myself to one day become a published YA author, I was one of those.

I'm a junior at New Mexico State University. I'm studying Creative Writing. Last semester, Spring 2014, I took my first "real" creative writing class entitled Form & Technique in Fiction, and we studied a large variety of adult literature. Guess what? I enjoyed most of them. Yet when it came down to the assignment that was worth about 60% of my final grade-writing the first 40-60 pages of a novel-I began to find myself a little uncomfortable and getting downright pissed.

My professor wanted us to write adult literary novels. I told him that I was having a lot of trouble due to the fact that adult literary isn't my genre. So he asked what was, and I told him: I write YA.

Here's the thing about studying Creative Writing in my college (maybe more colleges, I can't say, but this is my experience): people look down on any kind of writing that isn't adult literary or in any way academic. You don't want to be the next Harper Lee, Khaled Hosseini, or Washington Irving?

Shame. Shame on you. Suddenly, everybody looks down their noses at you.

My professor told me: look, you can write an adult literary novel about teenagers.

The response that I thought but never said: Too true, my friend. But YA isn't just a book about teenagers.

I was trying to explain this to my roommate, and the one thing I kept repeating as I stumbled over my words was: "It's really hard to explain." Having immersed myself in the literary world since a young age, it was black and white to me, the same way a painter can look at two paintings that are exactly alike and say, "No, they're different. Look at the brush strokes."

When it came down to it, and I thought about it more and more, I realized this: in my experience (bolded, because I need to make sure ya'll know that I am not generalizing, here) adult literary work are largely internal battles of man vs self. There's a lot of growing as a person, and figuring things out about yourself through your own journey.

On the other hand, YA is almost exactly the same, right? Young adults trying to navigate their worlds and deal with all of the people and events around them while they grow as a person.

Yet I still argue that there's a difference.

In my experience, adult literary has things happen, but they happen in the background. Wars are fought and victories celebrated in the blurry black and white behind the protagonist while they analyze their roles in the present.

In my experience, young adult invites everything to happen all at the same time. The protagonist is trying to battle their own internal struggles with the war, with the victories, with the people and the settings and the problems and the solutions. Everything is vibrant technicolor and eardrum-bursting sound that's so loud they couldn't hear themselves scream even if they tried.

They can't slow down, because the world keeps happening around them.

Guess what? This is what happens to everybody.

True, it is a popular notion that this difference exists because young adults are in that period of time where they're no longer children and they're not yet adults. They can't have adult supervision all the time, but they're not trusted  in the big-bad world alone. They see the world around them in new ways because, guess what, they can think for themselves, and it challenges everything they've been taught. They're the next generation. They're discovering love and loss and pain and joy, and at the same time they're trying not to let the world crush them.

Whether it's a teenager maneuvering high school or trying to start a revolution in a futuristic world, o trying to survive an apocalypse: the problems and struggles are the same.

Here's where I return to the argument that adults should not be ashamed to read YA. People really overlook the fact that the "adults" have struggles, too. Their worlds are changing or have changed. They're the people who are old enough to remember what it used to be like to live, and the ones who can either hope for a better future or simply fear change, because they're so used to the way things are now that maybe it's easier if things stay the same.

Everybody wants a better world. Everybody knows that changing it is the hardest part. everybody knows that it costs something.

Just because you grow up, doesn't mean you grow out of your struggles with the world. You don't fade into the blurry background of somebody else's story. To you, everything is still that rainbow-filled world and everything is still exploding around you as you struggle to discover what you have control over and what you don't, and hope that you don't get destroyed in the process.

Isn't that what YA is about? Struggle. Not just internal, but with the world. It's man vs society and man vs god and man vs man all wrapped up in one untidy little package, and maybe-just maybe-the protagonist gets to learn a little bit about themselves in the process.

When I write YA, I'm writing to figure out my world. That might set you off-guard, right? You probably know by now that I write about settings that are not in the present, and heck they might not be in the future. These worlds are somewhere else and don't bear a single resemblence to the United States of America or anything else on this Earth.

Or do they?

Something a friend of mine talk about a lot is how YA reflects the world the author lives in, in some way or another. It deals with an issue that the author is or has dealt with, or sees in their communities. YA doesn't preach how to be a better human being, it suggests the fact that the world is messy and not everybody can exist with a silver crystal heart and soul. Everybody has smudges.

And it says that it's okay.

That's why I write YA. Not for the love stories and the "hopeful" endings that Graham talks about. Not for the sake of shoving another piece of literature down the throats of teenagers and adults alike. It's because I'm just as lost, sometimes, as the characters in my books, and I know that I'm not the only one.

Now tell me: is that something to be ashamed of?

I'm pressing the "publish" button on this post, now. I'm not going back to reread what I wrote because I'm afraid I'll try to change things, and that's something I really don't want to do. These are my thoughts, take them or leave them. Respond to them. Point out a typo.

Above all: think.

And I'm going to end this with a quote written by Kate Hart on her blog one year ago: "I write YA because a girl's problems can be trivial, but she is not. And that's something she should know at every age."

This goes for boys and girls, and nobody should give a damn how old they are.

Rae

Tea Time: Scarlet

So sorry for missing a post yesterday, guys. I had some work to take care of on top of a completely debilitating headache.

**Warning: Spoilers May Abound**

Scarlet, Marissa Meyer (The Lunar Chronicles #2)

Cinder, the cyborg mechanic, returns in the second thrilling installment of the bestselling Lunar Chronicles. She's trying to break out of prison--even though if she succeeds, she'll be the Commonwealth's most wanted fugitive. Halfway around the world, Scarlet Benoit's grandmother is missing. It turns out there are many things Scarlet doesn't know about her grandmother or the grave danger she has lived in her whole life. When Scarlet encounters Wolf, a street fighter who may have information as to her grandmother's whereabouts, she is loath to trust this stranger, but is inexplicably drawn to him, and he to her. As Scarlet and Wolf unravel one mystery, they encounter another when they meet Cinder. Now, all of them must stay one step ahead of the vicious Lunar Queen Levana, who will do anything for the handsome Prince Kai to become her husband, her king, her prisoner. (source:goodreads)

Cover-As the second book in the Lunar Chronicles Series, the cover fits in extremely well with that of the first book, Cinder. The text is fabulous, and I admit that the image relates well to the fact that Scarlet is a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood.

So we get the hood.

However, that's basically all we get. From far away, it looks like a red blob, and it's only once you get closer that you see the girl on the side. I would have loved if we got a bit more girl, or maybe if the hood was shaped different?

I don't know. Overall really good cover, but definitely not the favorite.

★★★☆☆

Narrative-Cinder covered the perspectives of Cinder and Prince Kai. In Scarlet, we get an added bonus of Scarlet Benoit, who tells the tale of what the heck is happening in France while Cinder and her new friend Captain Thorne try to escape the Commonwealth.

Trust me: with the added perspective, you are totally not disappointed, since each of the different narratives all feel somewhat unique to each character. It's just fabulous, don't doubt me.

★★★★★

Plot-I absolutely love it when there's two plots happening simultaneously. And I don't mean one big plot and all of those subplots that you get in novels. This is seriously two plots that happen to converge extremely well:

Scarlet Benoit wants to find her grandmother.

Cinder wants to not be caught, sent to jail, handed over to the Lunar Queen, and executed.

It's purely chance that their paths cross, for the most part. The only reason Cinder and Thorne head to France is because they're looking for: Scarlet's grandmother

Okay, so two plots legit become one not too far in, but seriously you've got to expect that. And then there's the mysterious Wolf, who has a part in this, but you're seriously not sure how a wolf-like creature like him ties in. It took me until about three-quarters of the way through until I remembered a small detail from the first book, and then I cackled like an idiot because I felt like a genius.

Basically, you're never bored. Like in Cinder, you're trying to figure out how the classic Red Riding Hood tale plays out with Scarlet. With Cinder, herself, you're along for the ride as she continues trying to figure out the truth about where the came from and trying to come to terms with the fact that she's the lost Lunar Princess that everybody's counting on to overthrow the queen. Then there's the fact that this part of the story ties in with Prince Kai-who we still get to see glimpses of-as he tries to ensure that the world doesn't go to war with the moon.

Never. Bored.

★★★★★

Characters-I already reviewed Cinder and Prince Kai in my review for Cinder, so I'm keeping them short: I still love both of them. And Iko (yes, Iko's back!). Kai is honestly more stressed than ever, the poor guy, and Cinder, well, she's stressed out, too. If you want me to be frank, Iko's stressed, as well, but only because she's trapped in the body of an entire spaceship when she's used to being a small android. She's still tons of fun, though.

New characters: Scarlet Benoit, Wolf Kesley, and Captain (*cough* Private) Thorne. Another set of characters that I love.

Scarlet's completely no-nonsense, says what she wants when she wants, and basically figures out how to get herself into trouble without any help. She's also a smart-ass sometimes, and she knows how to flirt, and she knows how to be kind-hearted, as well. I was really happy to know that her personality isn't like Cinder's, which can happen on accident when writing a new female lead in a book. Nope, she's her own person, with her own fears, and her own motives.

Wolf. I love wolf, and partially because he's just like . . . a wolf. His DNA's been mixed with that of a canine variety, at least, which means that he's not the person to mess with in a fight. At the same time, half the time he seems more like an abandoned puppy, which makes him adorable. The mix of gentle and strong makes for an interesting character, particularly since he's technically supposed to be a not-so-good guy. He knows where his loyalties lie, even though nobody else is really sure. Like I said: mystery.

Lastly, Captain Thorne. He's hilarious. Such a smart-ass, arrogant, self-obsessed, and likes to hear himself talk more often than not. He sweet-talks the ladies (works on Iko, not so much on Cinder), and there wasn't a single moment that I was sorry that he accidentally got brought along on Cinder's attempt to evade the authorities. Do you like that guy who's always making some sort of sarcastic remark, but deep down is sort of okay, and when the time calls for it he really steps up? But you still want to punch him regularly? That's Thorne.

★★★★★

Basically, a stellar sequel to Cinder, and I already bought Cress. Ya'll know what's coming up.

Final Answer:  4.5 / 5

Rae