Booking Through Thursday-- Authors You Know

This week's question from "Booking Through Thursday" is:

If someone you know has just published a book—do you feel obliged to buy a copy? Even if it’s not the kind of book you’d normally read?

I don't feel obligated to purchase it but I do feel obligated to offer myself up as a reviewer. The few author's I know write ebooks and I only, for the most part prefer to buy books in hard copy. It’s not only the wrong format for me, I also can’t spend as much money as I want to on books. And, believe me, the only thing I want to do is spend money on books. I have to reign it in sometime. It’s hard, though. I feel that if I know them I can’t say no to being a reviewer, even if I don’t want to, because giving a bad review is hard, especially when you know the author.

Answering this review has made me reconsider reviewing books for authors that I know. It’s too hard to make my review unbiased and when I feel obligated to do something I feel like I have to do it asap, which can be stressful, considering I’m a full time student with a job. I will, however, keep editing their books (for monies).

 

Review of Horrorstor

What a lovely--OH SWEET BABY JESUS 

The story starts out from the POV of Sam, an employee at a wanna-be Ikea. She’s late and she worries about being fired. That's how the book starts out. I didn’t feel like I got to know her much at all in the beginning. It was like Grady Hendrix threw a main character at me and expected me to know her, to love her. The ending was cliche. I knew what was going to happen. The mean guy turns around and becomes a nice guy. That’s until the latter part of the book when he reverts back to his old self. Duh. Nothing special about it. Perhaps the only part that I didn’t see coming was a death.

The cool thing about this book is how it’s setup like an Ikea catalog. And I mean just like an IKEA catalog. The front of the book shows furniture with price tags, a living room inside of a giant store. Oh yeah, and a demonic face with no mouth and wide eyes trying to get through the picture frame of the otherwise ordinary Ikea catalog cover.The back, though. The back is really cool. It shows the same scene but with everything destroyed by whatever force was taking over at night. There you go, that’s the good part about the book. It’s layout and it’s cover.

Like Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children and Asylum it’s a freaky story. It’s massively weird in most places and scary (and then boring) in others.

Would I recommend that you purchase this book? No. I wouldn’t. I’d recommend that you go to a bookstore and look at the cover and maybe open it to see just how much like an Ikea catalog it is. Quite impressive, though I won’t tell you that the story is.

"Waiting on" Wednesday-- Waistcoats and Weaponry

I haven't read Gail Carriger's second book in the Finishing School series but I'm excited for the third to be realesed. This way I can review the first, read the second, and hop right on to the third (no waiting period, which I hate). The book is titled Waistcoats and Weaponry.

I absolutely LOVED her Souless series, I'm thrilled that she produced a young adult series as well.

Here's the first (w/ links to amazon):


And the second:


And the highly anticipated third:

 

Top Ten Tuesday-- New Series I Want to Start

Can you find a theme? What series do you want to start?

First Paragraph, First Sentence of The 100: Day 21

No one wanted to stand near the grave. Although four of their own were already buried in the makeshift cemetery, the rest of the 100 were disturbed by the idea of lowering a body into the ground.

What do you think? 

Would you keep reading?

I'm Back! And Teen Reading Week

Hello all, I'm back! Went through a few big life changes but now things have calmed down. I wanted to share with you Teen Reading Week's top ten YA book:

How cool is that? I've read a couple but some I've never heard of. I made a shelf on my Goodreads account of these ten books. Go look!

I'm now the library assistant for the teen lounge so I'm constantly around teen books. SO MANY TO READ. If you haven't already, become a friend of mine on Goodreads and/or follow me on Twitter for updates (also on the right). You know what you'll get updates on? That's right, books!