FF Friday: In Which I Adopt A Fictional Beast

Feature & Follow is a weekly blog hop hosted by Parajunkee and Alison Can Read.

This week’s question: If you could have any animal in the world as a pet, what would you pick? Fictional ones count too!

Answer: Fictional animal for sure. I’d want a pet that is bizarre, creepy, and useful, so I’m going to pick a Thestral. I’m not totally sure if I’d be able to see my pet because they’re only visible to people who’ve witnessed death, but it would be awesome to have one. It could give me a ride when I didn’t feel like walking. And I could take it shopping with me because a lot of people wouldn't be able to see it. I can totally picture myself walking through the mall with a Thestral.

The follow part: If you are a book blogger and you leave a link to your blog in the comments below, I will follow you on Bloglovin’. I’d love it if you also followed me. If you want to be friends on Goodreads, Twitter, BookLikes, or G+, that would be awesome, too. Click the links to go to my pages on those sites. I’m looking forward to “meeting” you.

Review: The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender – Leslye Walton

The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender – Leslye Walton

Magical realism, lyrical prose, and the pain and passion of human love haunt this hypnotic generational saga. 

Foolish love appears to be the Roux family birthright, an ominous forecast for its most recent progeny, Ava Lavender. Ava—in all other ways a normal girl—is born with the wings of a bird. 

In a quest to understand her peculiar disposition and a growing desire to fit in with her peers, sixteen-year-old Ava ventures into the wider world, ill-prepared for what she might discover and naïve to the twisted motives of others. Others like the pious Nathaniel Sorrows, who mistakes Ava for an angel and whose obsession with her grows until the night of the Summer Solstice celebration. 

That night, the skies open up, rain and feathers fill the air, and Ava’s quest and her family’s saga build to a devastating crescendo. 

First-time author Leslye Walton has constructed a layered and unforgettable mythology of what it means to be born with hearts that are tragically, exquisitely human.

Review: It took me a week to write this review because I couldn’t find the words to describe how much I love this novel. I don’t know what to say to make you go read it.

The narrator, Ava, is born with feathers and wings. To find out why, she starts looking into her family history. This book chronicles four generations of her unusual family. It’s a story about obsession and heartbreak and wasted lives. It’s both devastating and surprisingly hopeful. “Strange” and “beautiful” are the perfect words to describe it.

I love magical realism, and I like family sagas if they don’t feel completely plotless. This novel is definitely character-driven, so there isn’t much of a plot, but it’s fairly fast-paced, and the characters are fascinating. They’re all so well-developed, which is impressive because there are a lot of them. They each have a distinct personality. I feel like I really understand them.

This is a book about love, but it’s not a love story. The characters’ relationships don’t always work out. Sometimes the swoon-worthy hero doesn’t turn out to be all that swoon-worthy. I love this book because it has elements of magic, but it still feels so real. It’s honest. The author doesn’t hold anything back. The characters’ emotions are raw, and even the good guys have some pretty nasty flaws.

Can we talk about the writing? I can’t believe that this is a debut novel. The writing has a melancholy tone with some bursts of humor. The descriptions are on-point. Most of the story is set in Seattle, but it’s a surreal, otherworldly Seattle. The writing completely embodies the strangeness of Ava’s family. The reader can really feel the characters’ desires and triumphs and heartbreaks. It’s not writing. It’s art.

Since this is a review, I have to come up with something to criticize. If you don’t like magical realism, character-driven stories, sadness, or family sagas, you probably won’t like this book. I love the hopefulness of the ending, but it’s a little rushed. Also, the author repeats names too often instead of using he/she/they. The repetition became slightly distracting.

That’s all I can come up with to criticize. Seriously, I was stunned when I finished this book. I can’t think of anything I hated about it.

This is easily one of the best books I’ve read this year. I can’t wait to read whatever the author writes next.   

Top Ten Tuesday: Auto-Buy Authors

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. This week’s topic is top ten auto-buy authors. A few months ago, I wrote a post about how I have no auto-buy authors. For me, the synopsis is way more important than the author. If a book sounds boring, I won’t read it, no matter who wrote it. My favorite authors are Margaret Atwood and Stephen King, but I wouldn’t consider either of them auto-buy authors. They’ve both written many, many books that I have no interest in reading. So, this week’s topic was difficult. These are the authors who come closest to being auto-buy authors for me. I chose them because I’ve read and loved several of the books they’ve published.

My Almost-Auto-Buy Authors

V.E. Schwab: Her books are guilty pleasures. They’re not great works of literature, but I have so much fun reading them that I don’t care. I can’t wait for the sequel to A Darker Shade of Magic.

Rainbow Rowell: I love her characters. She’s so good at writing realistic teens and young adults.

Karen Russell: She’s one of my favorite short story writers, and her novel is pretty awesome, too. I don’t know why she isn’t more popular in the blogosphere. She writes strange, imaginative magical realism.  

John Green: I like the ideas he explores in his books. They make me think about things in new ways.

Markus Zusak: I love his writing style.

That’s all I can think of. Am I the only one who doesn’t have auto-buy authors?

Review: 5 to 1 – Holly Bodger

5 to 1 – Holly Bodger

In the year 2054, after decades of gender selection, India now has a ratio of five boys for every girl, making women an incredibly valuable commodity. Tired of marrying off their daughters to the highest bidder and determined to finally make marriage fair, the women who form the country of Koyanagar have instituted a series of tests so that every boy has the chance to win a wife. 

Sudasa doesn’t want to be a wife, and Kiran, a boy forced to compete in the test to become her husband, has other plans as well. Sudasa’s family wants nothing more than for their daughter to do the right thing and pick a husband who will keep her comfortable—and caged. Kiran’s family wants him to escape by failing the tests. As the tests advance, Sudasa and Kiran thwart each other at every turn until they slowly realize that they just might want the same thing. 

This beautiful, unique novel is told from alternating points of view—Sudasa’s in verse and Kiran’s in prose—allowing readers to experience both characters’ pain and their brave struggle for hope.

Review: I was super-excited to read this book, but I was a little disappointed when I finished it.

5 to 1 is set in a futuristic Indian society. There are five boys for every one girl, so when a girl turns seventeen, a group of boys compete for the chance to marry her. It’s basically a dystopian version of The Bachelorette. The winning boy gets to marry the girl, and the losers are sent to guard the wall around the city, where most of them die. The story is told from duel perspectives. Sudasa’s chapters are in free verse and Kiran’s are in prose.

There are some elements of the book that I love. First, it’s a beautiful book. The cover and the illustrations at the beginnings of the chapters are gorgeous. Also, it’s a really quick read. I got through it in a few hours. I like the Indian setting—it’s something that I haven’t seen before in a dystopia. The mixture of poetry and prose is an unusual way to tell the story, and most of the poetry is very well-written.

The greatest thing about this book: No romance! None at all. I’m not a huge romance-lover, so I’m always excited when I find a young adult book that isn’t romance-based.

Even though there are elements of the book that I love, I still have a lot of issues with it. I think it would have benefitted from being much, much longer. The story is rushed and underdeveloped. I don’t feel like I know either of the narrators. All Sudasa and Kiran really talk about is how much they hate the government of their city, but I don’t feel like I understand the government either. The reader does get to see some aspects of Indian culture, but there isn’t much world-building at all. For me to believe this dystopian society, I needed a lot more background information about the city and how it came to exist.

This story had the potential to be awesome, but there were just too many missed opportunities for me. It’s an entertaining read, but I wanted a lot more depth and development.