Bits 'n Pieces - Lisa McMann

Lisa McMann is the author of the YA novels Wake and Fade. Wake is a New York Times bestselling book.

It's sequel, Fade was released yesterday, February 10th. 

To read my review of Wake go heeere. And don't laugh. I wrote it a while ago when my writing was even worse than it is now. :P

Also, go check out Lisa's site for some fun info about the books. You can read Lisa's blog here. 

This or that:
Rain or shine? 

Shine! There is no rain in Arizona where I live.
iPod or mp3 player? 

Eep, I have neither.
Movies or TV? 

Tough one. TV
City or country? 

City
Mountains or beaches? 

Beaches (love the mountains, but I miss water!)
Dots or stripes? 

Stripes.
Dogs or cats? 

Both.
Cooking or eating out? 

Eating out, but I also love to cook.
Coffee or tea? 

Neither. Diet Coke.
Books or magazines? 

Books!

Favorites:
Book- 

eep! I can't answer this question. All of them.
Book store- 

Changing Hands in Tempe, AZ
Movie- 

Love, Actually
Music artist- 

Ack! I can't answer this either.
Website- 

Facebook
Designer- 

Vera Wang
Coffee chain- 

I prefer the indie hole-in-the-wall type
Color- 

Charcoal gray

Have you ever:
Lived abroad? 

No
Gotten a tattoo? 

Yes
Stayed up for the midnight release of a movie or book? 

Yes - book, No - movie (except maybe in college)
Disliked your job? 

Um...yes. But not the writing job.
Cried during a movie? 

Dozens of times.
Sang karaoke? 

Not officially.

Questions:
If you were on a desert island, what 5 things would you bring with you?
a boat, a high power transmitter, throwing stars, my computer, and some
food.
What’s on the list of things you have to do during your life?
clean the house...oh, wait. Good things? Travel around the world.
If you could have one super power what would it be?
I know what it wouldn't be -- getting sucked into other people's dreams.
What’s your perfect music playlist?
I have one on my myspace page -- Teen Troves made it for me. :)
What’s the one food you could eat day after day and not get sick of?
Peanut butter.
If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go?

Greece
What moment in history do you wish you could’ve experienced?
The first woman voting.
What does your dream library look like?
Like the one in the Harry Potter movies 

When you walk into a bookstore, where do you head first?
The bathroom. Er... to the teen books, of course!
If everyone had to read one book, what would you have it be?
The Giver by Lois Lowry

Thank you so much Lisa! And if you haven't read Wake or Fade yet, I highly suggest you do. Wake is fantastic and based on all the fan girly reviews of Fade out there, I'm guessing that it, too, is just as fantastic. :)

Bookshelves

Thought I'd join in on the bookshelf sharing fun. :) Here's mine. I have all the books I've finished in alphabetical order by author's last name (yeah...OCD, I know) and then all the books I haven't read including library books are shoved onto the bottom shelf, however they'll fit. It's kind of bursting right now and I don't even have very many books. I definitely to get a second shelf even if it's tiny. So I can satiate all of my organizational needs. 

Oh and the weird looking versions of books (Audrey, Wait, Twilight, and New Moon) are Swedish versions. Just so ya know.

What do you think of my humble collection? 

(and I think you can possibly click on the pictures to make them bigger)

Skinned by Robin Wasserman

Some miracles come with a price.

Lia Kahn was perfect: rich, beautiful, popular - until the accident that nearly killed her. Now she has been downloaded into a new body that only looks human. Lia will never feel pain again, she will never age, and she can't ever truly die. But she is also rejected by her friends, betrayed by her boyfriend, and alienated by her old life.

Forced to the fringes of society, Lia join others like her. But they are looked at as freaks. They are hated...and feared. They are everything but human, and according to most people, this is the ultimate crime - for which they must pay the ultimate price.

(Summary from jacket flap)

Um. Okay. This book was good. I kept reading, the plot moved, the characters were fine. But there was a problem. 

Futuristic fiction is one of my favorite genres. I love reading about what authors think or dream the future's going to be like. I've read the Uglies series and I Was A Teenage Popsicle which both fit solidly into that classification. Reading Skinned, I felt like it was just a copy of both of those books together. 

In IWATP, the girl if frozen because she's sick and there's no cure. She's given new life through a cure twenty or so years into the future and is thrown into society. Everyone thinks she's a freak and she has to find new friends and reinvent her life. 

In the Uglies, everyone's beautiful, there's an outcast society for all the people who don't want to be like everyone else, there's denied love, etc. 

In Skinned, the girl dies, is given a new body, and is even more beautiful and perfect than everybody else. She is rejected by her friends and by society. She has a guy fall in love with her whose feelings she doesn't return, she goes and joins an outcast society. Sound familiar? Exactly. ALL of the little story elements in Skinned could be connected back to those two books I read. I was looking for something new and original and unique. A new perspective on the future world. It's sort of different from IWATP and Uglies but not by much. There just wasn't anything too special about this book. I felt like I was just rereading. 

But I guess I can't say that all of that ruined the book for me. Being an avid fan of futuristic fiction, I couldn't denounce Skinned just because of it's unoriginality. And there were a few bright points for me. Lia's character was pretty good. She had really relatable thoughts and struggles and worries, so as she grew and found out more about herself and her new life, I felt more connected and drawn to her. 

The part about her new body and her adjustment to that was really well described and cool. If people ever learn to transfer brains to new synthetic bodies in the real future, I think I'd be a little in awe but also terrified. The whole idea of not being in my own body and not having the sensations I have now is a weird thought. 

The best part of the book for me was Auden's little betrayal/brain fart at the end of the book made for a great cliff hanger so I'm holding out hope that the next book in this planned treasury will surpass Skinned on the originality scale but hopefully not copy "The Smoke" from the Uglies what with all of the outcast society stuff that Lia's now a part of. 

So I did enjoy it. Relatively. I'm a sucker for the future. 

I'd recommend Skinned in hopes that Crashed will be better. And also because I think Lia's pretty sweet. Just be warned that if you've read Uglies or IWATP you'll find a ton of stuff similar and unoriginal.

Read my Bits 'n Pieces interview with Robin Wasserman here.

Booking Through Thursday/Saturday #20: Too Much Information?

On Saturday

Have you ever been put off an author’s books after reading a biography of them? Or the reverse - a biography has made you love an author more?

Most of the time, learning more about an author is a good thing for me. I love getting to know more about the people who wrote books that I've read and loved. I feel more connected to the book if I know who wrote it and where it's coming from. I read a lot of author blogs because of that. I just get more into what I read the more I know and care about it.

On the other hand, there have been times where I've vowed never to read a book after learning about the author. Maybe not their biography in particular but their behavior or their reaction to negative reviews or how they've responded to me via email. I emailed an author once and she was completely horrible, in my opinion. Just rude and cynical. Like she didn't deem me worthy of her time. I never read her book. 

So for me, an author's image needs to be positive in order for me to read their book. I don't enjoy reading books written by rude or negative people. It's not my kind of thing. I want the whole package to be good; book and author together.

Waiting on Wednesday #5 - Anything But Typical by Nora Raleigh Baskin

Jason Blake is an autistic 12-year-old living in a neurotypical world.Most days it's just a matter of time before something goes wrong. But Jason finds a glimmer of understanding when he comes across PhoenixBird, who posts stories to the same online site as he does.

Jason can be himself when he writes and he thinks that PhoneixBird-her name is Rebecca-could be his first real friend. But as desperate as Jason is to met her, he's terrified that if they do meet, Rebecca wil only see his autism and not who Jason really is.

By acclaimed writer Nora Raleigh Baskin, this is the breathtaking depiction of an autistic boy's struggles-and a story for anyone who has ever worried about fitting in.

Sounds like it could be pretty decent, eh? I like books that deal with issues not often tackled. So if this is pulled off, I think it'll be great. 

Mostly I just picked it for the cover. :P It's an AWESOME cover.

EDIT: March 24, 2009 = release date. :)

Dust of 100 Dogs...Get Excited

Soooo. The Dust of 100 Dogs by A.S. King is being released today. The few people that were lucky enough to read it early, said it was amazing. And not just simply amazing, but extremely amazing. Which is why I am going out to snag myself a copy today. I need to see where all this wonderful excitement is coming from.

AND. To make this even better, Steph is running a fantastically huge release contest for D100D over on her blog. There's over $300 in books and gift cards (including $10 to Amazon, from me) up for grabs and all you have to do is go buy the book and send Steph the proof that you purchased it. What could be easier?

I recommend you go out and buy this book ASAP so that not only can you have a chance at taking home that prize pot, you also get to read a great book in the process.

Check back here later in the month for a review! :)

Cracked Up To Be by Courtney Summers

What's the worst thing you've ever done?

When "Perfect" Parker Fadley starts drinking at school and failing her classes, all of St. Peter's High goes on alert. How has the cheerleading captain, girlfriend of the most popular guy in school, consummate teacher's pet, and future valedictorian fallen so far from grace?

Parker doesn't want to talk about it. She'd just like to be left alone, to disappear, to be ignored. But her parents have placed her on suicide watch and her counselors are demanding the truth. Worse, there's a nice guy falling in love with her and he's making her feel things again when she'd really rather not be feeling anything at all.

Nobody would have guessed she'd turn out like this. But nobody knows the truth.

Something horrible has happened, and it just might be her fault.

(Summary from back of book)

I was kind of debating whether to write a review for this book or not. I mean, I'm relatively late reading it and there are already a gajillion reviews out there validating CUTB's awesomeness. So consider this short little post my affirmation and agreement with those reviews. 

I picked this up this morning because I was kind of expecting it to be a quick read and I wanted to see if I could get one more book in before the month of January was behind me. Boy was it quick. From the first paragraph, I was hooked. For me, it was Parker's voice that swept me along. She sounded so real. The writing had that awesome gritty teenager feel. Which is definitely a good thing. I don't know if the book would've been as good if it had been told any other way. I just can't picture reading this story from some other character's point of view or even in second person. It just wouldn't work. 

The weird thing is that in this novel everything fit perfectly. It seems like it's an enormous coincidence that it turned out as great as it did. Everything just FIT. The characters, the writing style, the flashbacks, the build up, the events, the conclusion, everything. Even the failed and depressed romances had their place. 

I'm the type of person who wants to read about wonderfully successful love. I'm a sucker for cheesy unrealistic endings. CUTB's ending is so far from that that I'm uber surprised I came out satisfied. 

And with all of the insanely dramatic build up, I wasn't let down. Throughout the whole book, you get these teasers and flashbacks of the event that changed everything in Parker's life, but it's not until the very end that you finally get it all shoved in your face. Based on that event, I was able to connect with Parker so much more because I finally got to see why she was the way she was. She was already a really complex character but learning the truth added a whole different angle. I loved it.

Cracked Up To Be deserves all of the praise it's been getting, and more. For a debut author to write a book like this her first time around, is astounding. Courtney Summers knows how to expertly knit a story together and she knows what kind of characters will complement that story best. It's an art form that she's already mastered. 

This is definitely going on my favorites list.

If you haven't already read CUTB, please do. You won't be able to put it down.