2015 Book #50 – Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell

Posted in 2015, Book reviews, Pop Sugar Reading Challenge 2015 checklist, Reading Challenges, Young Adult by rebeccabook17

Title: Eleanor & Park
Author: Rainbow Rowell
Date finished: 5/27/15
Genre: Young adult – romance
Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin
Publication Date: February 26, 2013
Pages in book: 325
Stand alone or series: Stand alone

Blurb from the cover:

Eleanor… Red hair, wrong clothes. Standing behind him until he turns his head. Lying beside him until he wakes up. Making everyone else seem drabber and flatter and never good enough… Eleanor.
Park… He knows she’ll love a song before he plays it for her. He laughs at her jokes before she ever gets to the punch line. There’s a place on his chest, just below his throat, that makes her want to keep promises… Park.
Set over the course of one school year, this is the story of two star-crossed sixteen-year-olds – smart enough to know that first love almost never lasts, but brave and desperate enough to try.

My rating: 4.25 stars out of a scale of 5

My review: This book will be counting towards my goal for the Pop Sugar Reading Challenge 2015 checklist under the “a book set in high school” check box since it is in fact about two high school students. I had heard a lot of good things about this book and after reading Fangirl recently, I definitely wanted to get my hands on this one. I saw it a couple weeks ago at my local library and snatched it right up. Almost from the very beginning I was hooked on this book. I have to be honest in saying that I find some young adult romance novels overwhelmingly frustrating because everything is so angst-y all the time and it ends up feeling like the characters are just whining a lot. I have never in my life before had a book make me feel what this book did. I had a high school love, most people do, and even if you didn’t necessarily have a love, most people have felt the thrill of having a crush. Does he like me too? And then once you think he does, there is the thrill of the first time he holds your hand and the first time you kiss and just the thrill of being young and in love. This book dug deep inside my memory banks and brought back all those feelings I experienced in high school to the forefront. It really was astounding for me.
Eleanor has a lot of family issues (Park has some too I guess but Eleanor has way more and they’re more serious) that are discussed in the book. An abusive stepdad, a mom that won’t stand up for herself or her 5 children, an absentee dad, I could just go on and on. She doesn’t have a toothbrush until halfway through the book for goodness sake. Eleanor’s life and her family as it is described in book added a darkness to the book. The harshness of Eleanor’s life really was a great contrast to the joy and light blossoming inside her as she develops her relationship with Park. I mean her home life is awful and I was frustrated with her mom for pretty much the entire book but the fact that Eleanor was able to trust Park was unexpected and it shows how her character grows throughout the novel.

Overall I very much liked this book. I couldn’t put it down, it was one of those that sucks you in and two hours you look up and think “where am I?” The feelings that will consume you while reading this book are overwhelming, so just be prepared. They’re good feels though so don’t panic. The characters both grew a lot in the novel, Park specifically learned that you shouldn’t care what everyone else thinks, which I think was a great life-lesson for him. There are many parts of their relationship that seemed so realistic, especially for high school students, like Park being embarrassed about the way Eleanor dresses only because of how other people think of it. The ending I think is as it should be but I can see how some might like a more neat and defined ending. I like to think that in the future, Eleanor and Park end up together forever and get married and are happy throughout their marriage like Park’s parents.

The bottom line: I would definitely recommend this book. Falling in love for the first time all over again is not something that can usually be duplicated, but this book does a damn good job. Go buy it now, you want to have these emotions!

Link to author website
Click on the cover to go to the book’s Amazon page

29Apr2015

2015 Book #39 – To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before by Jenny Han

Posted in 2015, Book reviews, Pop Sugar Reading Challenge 2015 checklist, Reading Challenges, Young Adult by rebeccabook17

Title: To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before
Author: Jenny Han
Date finished: 4/28/15
Genre: Young Adult
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Publication Date: April 15, 2014
Pages in book: 355
Stand alone or series: There is a sequel to this book coming out next month (P.S. I Still Love You)

Blurb from the cover:

What if all the crushes you ever had found out how you felt about them…all at once?
Lara Jean Song keeps her love letters in a hatbox her mother gave her. They aren’t love letters that anyone else wrote for her; these are ones she’s written. One for every boy she’s ever loved—five in all. When she writes, she pours out her heart and soul and says all the things she would never say in real life, because her letters are for her eyes only. Until the day her secret letters are mailed, and suddenly, Lara Jean’s love life goes from imaginary to out of control.

My rating: 2.75 stars out of a scale of 5

My review: This book will be counting towards my goal for the Pop Sugar Reading Challenge 2015 checklist under the “a book you can finish in a day” check box mostly since I finished this book in a day. I had seen this book on a lot of other blogs with rave reviews so when I saw it at the Harwinton Public Library I decided to give it a try. I have to be honest though, this was not one of my favorite books. I mean the book itself was a fine book and I can see why many people like it. It was just a little too much teen angst for me, which is one of the reasons I haven’t read many young adult novels since I was in high school. I am trying to get back into them because many of them have only a medium, tolerable amount of teen angst and that’s fine. This book though just had a little too much for me, I was so frustrated with Lara-Jean in the beginning of the book that I just wanted to scream.

I wasn’t a fan of this book in the beginning and then as the story progressed things seemed to get better. I began to like the story more and I was slightly hooked and wanted to keep reading. About 50 pages before the end though, things started going downhill for me again. I guess I just don’t get the point. I started to think that the point was that we liked Peter. But he cheats on his tests, he is continually hanging out with his ex-girlfriend that he’s still in love with (umm can anyone say red flag??) and he did not make an effort to dispel Gen’s evil rumor that he and Lara-Jean had sex in the hot tub on a school trip. Excuse me, but this doesn’t exactly sound like a stand up guy to me. Certainly not one I would want to date. But then after Lara-Jean’s mad for awhile she pretty much just let’s it go and starts writing Peter a letter. Is she doing this to get back with him? To be done with him for good (my vote)? The book just ends there. And I get that there is a sequel but honestly I was kind of mad. I put all this time and effort into reading the story and I can’t even leave off with the heroine being happy with a good guy? It was just too much frustration for me.

The bottom line: Was too much angst and not enough resolution for me. Although this is altogether a popular book, I would probably not recommend.

Link to author website
Click on the cover to go to the book’s Amazon page

18Apr2015

#ReadingMyLibrary Challenge – Weekly Update #3 April 18th

Posted in #ReadingMyLibrary Reading Challenge, 2015, For the love of books, Reading Challenges by rebeccabook17

Thank goodness tax season is over! Now that I’m not going to be working quite as much, I’m hoping to get some work done on my house and also get some more reading done! Over this past week I was able to read three books for the reading challenge: Every Boy’s Got One, The Magician’s Lie, and I just finished Cat Out of Hell this morning (book review to be posted later today). The first two books I got from the Terryville Public Library and the Cat book I got from the Simsbury Public Library.
As part of the #ReadingMyLibrary Challenge, you get an entry into the challenge giveaway for reading one book as part of the challenge but you get an additional entry for reading 5 additional books (up to two additional entries so 10 extra books). Since Vintner’s Daughter was my book 1 for this challenge, that’s my one book for the first part of the challenge. My next 5 additional books were last week’s Cure for the Common Breakup, You’re So Fine, and Find Me and this week’s Every Boy’s Got One and The Magician’s Lie. I’m hoping to get through another 5 books in the next 12 days so that I can get that second additional entry into the giveaway!

So as part of the #ReadingMyLibrary Challenge, there are optional weekly update posts. The topic for this week’s post is: Why you love libraries or why you love being a librarian. I worked at the library in my town all through high school and when I was home on breaks from college. I’ve always loved books and reading, ever since I was little. Late in middle school though I really started to get addicted to reading. When it came time for me to find a job in high school, I could think of no place I’d rather work then a library. Luckily for me, the library was within walking distance of my high school. I begged and pleaded with the library director until they gave me a job. I was a big talker (loud too) early in high school so I think they were nervous about giving me a job at first. I have to be honest, I was a pretty rambunctious kid and I think working at the library is really what settled me. I relished the quiet and peace of the library and realized how much I loved and needed those periods of silence through the day.

Another reason I loved working at the library is that I’m absolutely addicted to books. I can’t walk into a book store or a library without buying/checking out a new book, even though I already have a stack of 50 books to read at home and I know that I absolutely do not need another book. And the thing that really fed the addiction is that working at the library I could check the same books out over and over again if I didn’t have time to read them. I think I had one book checked out for almost a year. So really the library was just about the perfect place for me.

Over the years I have learned that I love not only working at my home library but also just going to any library and browsing the books there gives me immense pleasure. I have about a million (might be a small exaggeration) books on my TBR list and coming across one or two of them at different libraries and checking them out to read is a great feeling. Each new book is a new adventure for me and I’m able to travel to so many places through reading. Libraries provide me with that. What could one possibly not love about a place like that?