as simple as snow- gregory galloway

caution: this is not a short review.

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Anna Cayne had moved here in August, just before our sophomore year in high school, but by February she had, one by one, killed everyone in town. So begins this beautiful, tragic, maddening novel. If I've ever come across a better first line, it currently escapes me. And, believe it or not, the novel gets even better than this. But, to give you a bit of back story before I leap into my unending praise:

It is said that Anna Cayne was born in a thunderstorm. A slightly spooky and complicated high school girl with a penchant for riddles, short wave radios, Houdini tricks, and ghost stories, Anna spends much of her time writing obituaries for every living person in town. She is unlike anyone the narrator has ever been with, and they make an unlikely, though happy, pair.*

Until Anna disappears, a week before Valentine's day. There is no evidence left behind except for a neatly placed dress near a hole in the frozen river, and no one is certain what's happened to Anna- murder, suicide, runaway- but the narrator is desperate to find out, especially as anonymous packages and coded messages continue to reach him. As Simple As Snow is a tale of love, of mystery, of ghosts, and of codes.

So much of this story is a mystery that it's a bit hard to write about. Anna, to start with the obvious, is the most enigmatic character I have ever encountered- not only in her disappearance, but in everything that precedes it- her bruises, her peculiar habits, her postcards and packages and notes, her riddles and her on again/off again tattoo. As she puzzles the narrator, the reader is left hopelessly confused as well- but hooked, captivated from their first conversation. Of course, Anna isn't the the only mystery here by a long shot. The narrator is never named, for one thing, which is even more infuriating here then it is in Rebecca, because of Anna's tantalizing hints. And actually figuring the name out posed even more questions- and more crazy theories. Even the acknowledgements are written in a code, mentioned earlier as belonging to Houdini and his wife (with the author's apologies to Harry and Bess). But while all of this makes me mad in both senses of the word, I love it. All of this is what makes the book impossible to put down, at least with obsessing over it for every second it's not in your hand. This is a book that you (I, anyway) stay up until 1:30 in the morning finishing, have nightmares about, and start thinking about again as soon as the alarm clock goes off 5 hours later.

Well. That's, at least, one of the things that make this novel so amazing.

The characters are multifaceted and fascinating. Anna- impossible, enigmatic, twisted Anna- is more compelling than any character I've ever read about. Her riddles, her lies, her answered questions; she has no equal in the worlds of any of the other books I've read. And Anna is only the beginning. There's Claire, the girl who is too sweet to be a Goth; Carl, the most popular guy in school, a drug dealer, and the narrator's only friend; Bryce Druit, Mr. Devon, and their inexplicable relationships with Anna; the complex and utterly screwed-up parents of Carl, Anna, and the narrator. Our storyteller himself, who very early on assures us that he is 'bland as milk- or, worse, water' establishes himself otherwise almost immediately.

And, of course, I can't resist a good love story. What I like about Ana and the narrator's relationship, first of all, is that it starts nearly right away- there is a minimal amount of the whole pining and chasing and ridiculousness that is seen in nearly every book out there. Everything about their courtship is so straightforward, so to the point. So simple. The contrast between this and the complexities of the novel and the relationship itself is brilliant. Also, there is nothing gushy or cutesy about Anna and the narrator's interactions,and yet they are an incredibly endearing couple. Their intelligent banter, their twisted manner of flirting- there is an intimacy to the way they talk, and it though neither of them once say it, it is undeniable that they love each other. And you- or, I, anyway, once again- find yourself thinking: this is what matters. This is what perfect is: not roses, not getting on an airplane with someone at a moment's notice, not landing the gorgeous guy or the most romantic first kiss or the biggest engagement ring. This. Conversations like those. That is perfect. That is love. And it is utterly devastating when it comes to an end.

The writing is exceptional. I regretted checking this book out of the library as soon as I started it- there is something on practically every page that merits annotation, hearts and underlines and scribbled thoughts. I will definitely be needing my own copy of this. Galloway writes with skill, with feeling, with beauty. As clever and as well thought out as the story clearly is, it never seems contrived. It feels so real, in fact, that I have to wonder whether I'm so sure it's not.

Yet another mystery.

But Anna sums that up better than I could if I tried to re-write this review for a lifetime:

"It's almost more fun not knowing," she said, "if you knew what it all meant, then it might not be as interesting or compelling. That's probably half the fun, not knowing. Sometimes there's more in the mystery of things than anything else."

Five overflowing cups of coffee could not bring me the same sense of euphoria as this book. No lie.

Go. Read this book.

And if you already have, uh... please email me or something so we can chat about it because I need to discuss this with someone.

ever so glad to be making her comeback,

Caroline

I feel as if a part of me is gone

How long's it been? Nearly a month now?

Sorry about the lack of reviews. I have no excuse for myself, and the only excuse I can think of for Caroline is that she is always slack like this. And that she has books I lent her months ago still on a shelf dedicated to me, unread (oh, how I love it). But I can tell you the reason is one-hundred-percent NOT becuase of a lack of books. No, we have plenty to read. In fact, I feel as if my life has been engulfed in books. Not a bad thing, I tell you. I've been moving from book to book and not giving myself time to review them. I'm sort of planning on just shoving myself back into the literary world and forcing myself to review Becoming Chloe by Catherine Ryan Hyde (amazing, if I do say so myself). But...I don't know. It's a very high possibility that shoving won't occur for some time. I've read many books since I seemingly abandoned Plenty of Paper, just having made myself review them. I will, though, soon (I hope).

I also hope that Caroline will bring forth a review of the many books she has read, too, because I just love reading what she has to say. I'm sure you do, too, don't you? She has a way with words I've yet to master, and I'm hoping she'll grace us here with her presence once more in the near future (and I'll be sure to tell her that either tonight or tomorrow at school).

So thanks for those of you who still read our lovely blog. Thanks for your patience, your loyalty, and most of all, your bookwormness.

Heather, your long lost reviewer.

Also, is anyone else just a tad bit sad that the Paper Towns Countdown has been completed? I mean, I'm happy the wait is over (even though mine was over a little while ago) but really? It's like the end of an era.

It's Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini

Like many ambitious New York City teenagers, Craig Gilner sees entry into Manhattan’s Executive Pre-Professional High School as the ticket to his future. So with single-minded determination, Craig works night and day to ace the entrance exam. Once he does that, he gains admission to this elite school. That’s when everything starts to unravel.

Once Craig starts at the new school he realizes a shocking truth. He is just one of the many brilliant kids who attend the school. In fact, he isn’t even brilliant, he's just average. Craig soon starts to see his once-perfect future crumbling away. He begins to have trouble eating, sleeping doing the routine things that used to be simple everyday activities. He eventually realizes he is clinically depressed.

So begins Craig’s battle with depression- which involves seeing a myriad of specialists, taking medication, and, at his most desperate, checking himself into a psychiatric hospital. There, Criag meets a motley crew of patients- his roommate, who is afraid to leave their room, a girl who has scarred her own face with a pair of scissors, and a transsexual sex addict. But somehow this odd cast of characters start to seem more like real friends to Craig than anyone he has ever known. At the hospital, Craig is finally able to come to terms with the overwhelming pressures that come from the school, his friends and most of all, himself.

The dynamic characters interwoven into every part of this witty novel were themselves witty, interesting, and personal. Craig is the main character, depressed and unstable, and learning hist story was a great way to spend my time, but he wasn't the only one with an intersting history. When he goes to the psychiatic hospital, Craig makes many friends, and they all have heartbreaking pasts and hopeful futures. You want each of them to succeed and this connection to the story sucks you in until you get lost in the map of It's Kind of a Funny Story.



Ned Vizzini's writing is clever and has a unique voice which transcends the gap between writer and character. There's no other novel about a messed up teenager that is this good. He makes something that is as sad as depression, into something heavy with dry wit. No matter how much you think you should be upset, or tearing up, or feeling bad for these people, he can make you crack up at a single action, until you realize you shouldn't feel bad for the people in the psychiatric hospital, you should be laughing along with them.



Ned Vizzini himself spent five days in the same hospital Craig spends his time in. He gives you a look inside the mind of a depressed teen, and all his friends that are likewise screwed up.



5/5 cups of coffee.


♥Heather

Is it just me...

or does it seem like you go through phases with books? The whole summer, I picked up very few novels that I thought were worth my time (and money), and then even less that I thought deserved much praise.

But then, just a couple weeks ago, I recieved Paper Towns by John Green (review directly below) and my whole reading life turned around. I've read so many spectacular--or at the very least well-written and executed--novels. These include The Wednesday Letters by Jason F. Wright (review in progress), It's Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini (also a review in the near future), and The Warrior Heir by Cinda Williams Chima. So now that I'm on a roll, I'm almost fearful of continuing, in case I break the streak. But that still won't stop me. =)

So I've got a questions for all the readers out there:

1) Do you hit periods of highs or lows when reading a continuous supply of books? Times when all you read is bad, or everything you pick up is good?
2) When you do hit those, do you ever think of stopping because you give up trying to find something good? Or because you're afraid the next one will be bad?
3) What have you read recently that's worth mentioning?


♥Heather

the much-anticipated Paper Towns by John Green

Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificently adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs back into his life--dressed like a ninja and summoning him for an ingenious campaign of revenge--he follows.

After their all-nighter ends and a new day breaks, Q arrives at school to discover that Margo, always an enigma, has now become a mystery. But Q soon learns that there are clues--and they're for him. Urged down a disconnected path, the closer he gets, the less Q sees the girl he thought he knew.

When entering this novel, my expectations were high for a favorite author and vlogger John Green. After reading Steph's review I was even more expectant of a major wow-ing.

And I wasn't completely disappointed. This novel comes in three parts (I was actually just imagining John saying that in my head as he does for his videos) and the first of which is astoundingly resonating. Margo Roth Spiegelman is the most dynamic character ever presented by John or any other author and as she leads Quentin through a whirlwind of adventures throughout this part and the rest of the novel, pieces of her start to form together, creating a whole new person no one ever knew.

I can't deny that Paper Towns shows resemblance to Looking for Alaska, John's first novel, but I can't deny, either that it is a book of it's own and should be judged so. Not only Margo, but every other character in this world has his or her own role (just as is pointed out near the end of the story). Quentin's two best friends are Ben, a tragically confident band geek that can't live up to his own hype, and Radar, a computer whiz who spends all his time editing Omnictionary articles on his handheld. And then you have Quentin himself, a regular high school guy on the bottom of the food chain, whose only friends are in band when he has no apparent talent at all and enjoys boredom.

John Green has yet to put together a cast so familiar of a high school and yet so spectacular as he has now done with Paper Towns.

And while the middle drags a bit, as Quentin follows Margo's trail, John's writing transcends this pause in action as he ponders poetry, metaphors, the human nature, and how we're all connected. He uses his brilliance (because John Green has a brilliant mind) to ask questions that reach far beyond the simple mind-set of a typical YA novel.

I can't tell you if Paper Towns is any better than John's other novels because it sits on a different plane. It doesn't have the same hilarity of An Abundance of Katherines, nor the pain and sadness of Looking for Alaska, but it does have it's own unique in between story of a girl and a boy whose lives run parallel for the longest time and finally intersect one night, leaving them both changed forever.

5 large cups of bookstore coffee.

Heather

To pre-order your own copy of Paper Towns online, you can go to Amazon, Books-A-Million, or Barnes and Noble.

just a few and a little

Updates and explanation, that is.

To explain: The whole being AWOL thing isn't because we're giving up on this or reviewing. I've been asked that a few times and I'm just clearing things up. My reasoning for my lack of presence is partially--and ironically--because of summer reading. The books I have to read are tedious, boring, and demand most of my attention. Plus, I fear that if I pick up another book, I'll keep picking up books after that and never get around to giving in to the dark presence that is summer reading. The test(s) are in four days and I'm only half-way through my first book (of two). This is, to say the least, abnormal for me, usually I'm done at least 5 days before the tests. =)

So that's part of the reasoning. My absence is primarily do to that, but I have to give credit also to the fact that I'm slack, lazy, and always procrastinating. I've put off writing my review for How To Build a House by Dana Reinhardt (a fantastic book, btw) for months. Now I've almost forgotten the specifics and my review will probably be lame. Eh, what can you do? Oh, wait, I know. Review a book right after you read it. Alas, this probably will not happen in the near future with school starting and writing other things before certain dates in January and all other busy stuff that may involve getting a job. But I will try.

To update: I'm hoping to keep the contest bar updated better than I have, so please, please, please let me know if you're hosting a contest of any sort or you know about one that isn't already listed in the sidebar. The easiest way for me to recieve the information (prize, how to enter, link to the post about it, link to your blog--I occasionally forget the urls--the end date, and anything else you think I should add in) is through email (plentyofpaper234@aol.com). You can send a message to me on myspace (link to our page in the blog roll), but I prefer email.

Also, the poll feature of our blog is hard to keep up if we don't have anything to ask. If you have a suggestion, please let us know in an email what it is. The last couple months have been late because we haven't been able to think up a question, but we want to keep it going. I think it's interesting to know what our readers think, what they like, and what they read. So please, if you have an idea, suggest it. We would be forevor indebted to you (okay, maybe not forever. There is an expiration date, I'm just not sure how long it'll last).

Thanks so much,

Heather

The Elite by Jennifer Banash

When Casey McCloy steps into The Bramford, she's overwhelmed by the sophistication and elegance of it all. Fresh from the Midwest [a town called Normal, fittingly], she's moved to New York City to live with her grandmother and attend the prestigious Meadowlark Academy. Here, all that matters is who you know. The designer to know is Zac Posen. The girl to know is Madison Macallister: popular, pretty, and platinum blond. She's not just Casey's new classmate and neighbor; she's an icon. So Casey aims to get in with Madison and her gorgeous gal pals from the start. As the reigning queen of coolness, Madison is capable of destroying reputations with one well-timed whisper. Better to be on her good side.

After a haute makeover from her new frenemy Madison, Casey is wearing [some of] the right clothes, saying [on occasion] the right things, and meeting the right people. Including Drew, the boy-about-town Madison thinks belongs to her and her alone...

When I first picked up this book, I was expecting to be awed or disappointed. I wasn't anticipating an odd combination of the both. But, for reviewing purposes, I'll point out both bad and good.

I was disappointed that this was what I expected it to be. The Elite was yet another story of a poor girl from the Midwest in a rich neighborhood in the northeast, going to an elite school that her family had to pull strings for her to even get into, and trying to befriend the richest, most popular, and nastiest girl she can find. Casey was yet another girl who was smart back home, but isn't now that she's moved to a new state, with new classmates, and new rules. She had a crush on the rich frenemy's not-boyfriend, and he liked her back. He was different from all those other guys. She was different from all those other girls. It had all the elements needed to be yet another one of those books--the ones I typically try to avoid. I could have run off a checklist and it would have met if not all then 99% of the criteria to be one of them.

This, I think, was the error. Having such a well-known plot won't bring recognition. I'm sure in a few months or a year, I'd forget I even read this book if it wouldn't be sitting on the top shelf of my bookcase. Even then, it's packed so tightly between more memorable books with more original plot lines that it might slip through the cracks and be lost to my memory forever.

But then, it also had some of the criteria needed for a good book, or at least one with potential, and maybe, I will remember it months or years from now. Jennifer Banash's style of writing was slightly different from the a-typical YA novel, using phrases, even if rare, that brought out the light behind the pages. And the characters have more depth than usual, each of them with a story. You even start to feel something for the girl you want to hate, which is an element key to a good story. If you don't like the characters, you can't like the book. But telling the individual stories of Madison, Sophie, Pheobe, Drew, and Casey, Jennifer Banash made a good decision. I liked to hear about their families, and how they really felt about everything. It made them more real and less of the typical mold that they fit. The only character I didn't think deserved any feeling at all (whether it be hatred or sympathy or something in the middle) was Casey. She was annoyingly self-conscious, a kiss-up, too clueless for her own good, and easily manipulated. I felt like she got what she deserved in Madison's horrid treatment of her. She wasn't anything more than the mold.

The most annoying thing about The Elite, though, was not the plot, was not Casey, and had nothing to do with the actual story. When reading it, I thought it surely must be a well-edited ARC, since the only other option is a poorly-edited finished novel. There were many mistakes I noted, the most obvious of which is the confusion of the school's name. I assume the correct title is Meadowlark, as that is what it's called on the back of the book, Casey says it's Meadow...something, and I counted 17 of those spellings, but I also counted 8 misspellings that name the school Meadlowlark, with an l. That is just one of many errors that I came across. [If you're reading this, Ms. Banash, I would be happy to point out every error that I actually marked so that they can be fixed for the next printing. I feel I have a very successful career as an editor, as I'm a total grammar freak--I've been called a Super Rambo Grammar Nazi, in fact, but don't ask me what that means.]

While there were many aspects of The Elite I didn't enjoy, I still feel like the next book in the series, In Too Deep, is one to look forward to, as most series only get better with time. This novel has potential, I guarantee, and I definitely wouldn't tell someone not to read it. I wouldn't tell anyone to jump up an buy it this instant, either, though. I give the first book in what seems to be a possibly promising series, just a 3.5, nothing too harsh, nothing to kind.

Heather

(a positive review from me can be expected soon, which I'm sure some of you will be waiting for, as my last few reviews have been mostly negative)