This book follows Clay, a young web designer who ends up working at a bookshop (I'm sorry, I can't bring myself to say bookstore, it just feels wrong). The bookshop is open 24 hours a day, which is a bit unusual to begin with, and it also has a huge section of weird books which a strange assortment of people come in and borrow. The books follows Clay and his attempts to figure out what is going on.
I really enjoyed reading this and zoomed through it, but I think that I wanted the explanation for everything to be a little bit more.. interesting? I don't know. Also the WOW TECHNOLOGY IS AMAZING theme annoyed me a bit. Enjoyable though! It is a first novel though, so I'm looking forward to reading the next one!
Shadow and Bone
This is the first book in what will be.. a trilogy, I expect, seeing as it's YA. The book is set in a place obviously heavily inspired by imperial Russia, and follows a girl called Alina. She is an orphan, who grew up with a boy called Mal, who she is love with (obviously) but who doesn't notice her (obviously). Ravka, the country they live in, has a whole group of people called Grisha, who have special magical powers. It is discovered that Alina has one of these powers (obviously) so she gets taken away to learn how to use it.Ravka is also disconnected from the rest of the world by the Shadow Fold, a dangerous area full of darkness and monsters, and it may just be that Alina's power can get rid of the shadow fold forever (obviously).
...As the above synopsis suggests, this follows a LOT of YA tropes, but it's well done, and I was ridiculously grateful that it managed to avoid some of the most annoying ones, and that the main character was likeable! I bought the second book immediately after finishing this one, so that shows how much I enjoyed it.
A word of warning - if you know anything about Russia the setting may annoy you (I've read several really annoyed reviews talking about how the names etc were wrong), but I don't really so it didn't bother me. But I can understand, as anything based on Japan or Britain that got loads of stuff wrong would annoy me too. If you're the kind of person who doesn't get annoyed by that kind of thing who also likes YA, I fully recommend it!
Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)
This book is basically a series of essays written by Mindy Kaling. They were entertaining, and I enjoyed it, but that's about all I have to say. I'm not a particularly girly girl, whereas Mindy Kaling is, so quite a lot of the time I found myself understanding her point of view, but not feeling that it really related to me that much. Not that that's a bad thing, particularly! It did make me want to just hang out with her for a while (although I'm not sure what we would have in common...)
Where'd You Go, Bernadette
Phew!
A few more posts and I might actually catch up!
