Switched, by Amanda Hocking

So, this is a re-read. I read the entire Trylle trilogy this past spring, but I loved it so much, I had to get the paperback and read it again, and I dare say it was better the second time around. I suppose it's also worth mentioning that I re-read books a lot, and you probably should too if you really enjoy them - I find books that I re-read are more inspiring in my own life than ones I'm happy reading only once.

Here is the Amazon summary:

When Wendy Everly was six years old, her mother was convinced she was a monster and tried to kill her. Eleven years later, Wendy discovers her mother might have been right.  She’s not the person she’s always believed herself to be, and her whole life begins to unravel—all because of Finn Holmes.

Finn is a mysterious guy who always seems to be watching her.  Every encounter leaves her deeply shaken…though it has more to do with her fierce attraction to him than she’d ever admit.  But it isn’t long before he reveals the truth:  Wendy is a changeling who was switched at birth—and he’s come to take her home.   

Now Wendy’s about to journey to a magical world she never knew existed, one that’s both beautiful and frightening.  And where she must leave her old life behind to discover who she’s meant to become…

Well, I'll spoil it for you (let's face it, if you read book blogs or keep up with the young adult publishing industry, you know this already) it's about trolls. Wendy and Finn are trolls. Not the nasty under-the-bridge trolls you might imagine, but beautiful magical creatures, and Wendy is a princess in the Trylle kingdom. 

Guys? It's an awesome story. Just go Google "Amanda Hocking" and take a moment to read about her wild sucess in self publishing. That is how I found her, from reading book blogs and industry blogs back when Amanda's Kindle sales of her $.99 cent books were blowing her up and making her a millionaire. I, like many other writers at the time, were entralled by her success. I still am entralled by her success, but I heed what Amanda has to say about self-publishing. 

She did everything the way everyone else does when the self publish a book - she submitted it to Amazon, Smashwords, etc., she marketed on her blog and other social sites, and she waited for the money to come in. But it's what she did BEFORE she published that has made her a success. She wrote a goddamn wonderful story. 

When I read, especially when I read YA, I read to escape. I love the paranormal YA stories more than most lately, and the sci-fi and horror, because they are so far from my real life I can just slip into a book and totally drift away from anything that is bogging down my mind. Well, Amanda created a whole new world to slip into, a world of hot guys and magic and mystery and decadence with some intrigue and violence thrown in for good measure. It's a troll-filled treasure of a book, and an amazing start to a series. 

This girl, she's one young author who I can say for sure deserves every one of the millions of dollars she's making from her stories. Because really, they are that good. I promise.

Imaginary Girls, by Nova Ren Suma

I've mentioned author Nova Ren Suma quite a few times on this blog already, and believe it or not, I hadn't even read one of her books until now. She's just a great blogger, with an amazing blog for writers and readers, and is worth mentioning regardless of whether you've read her books, in my opinion. So, with my handy dandy Amazon gift certificates, I purchased her much talked about Imaginary Girls.

 Here's the synopsis from Amazon.com, because I'm no good at summarzing:

Chloe's older sister, Ruby, is the girl everyone looks to and longs for, who can't be captured or caged. When a night with Ruby's friends goes horribly wrong and Chloe discovers the dead body of her classmate London Hayes left floating in the reservoir, Chloe is sent away from town and away from Ruby.

But Ruby will do anything to get her sister back, and when Chloe returns to town two years later, deadly surprises await. As Chloe flirts with the truth that Ruby has hidden deeply away, the fragile line between life and death is redrawn by the complex bonds of sisterhood.

Okay, so. I read this summary over and over again  before buying this book, because I've seen reviews of this book everywhere, but no matter how many times I read it, I never could grasp what was actually going on in the book - and frankly, for most of the story, I STILL couldn't grasp what was going on. However, this didn't turn out to be a bad thing. At first, I was confused. Then, I was annoyed. Finally, in the last third of the book, I was enlightened - we were all enlightened as to what Ruby did and what it meant for Chloe and everyone else in the town. 

Really, this is a book about sisters. That fact won't get lost on anyone. However, it was a relationship that I was incapable of understanding. One sister idolizes the other... partly because she's..magical? It's hard to say, even up to the end. The truth was, I didn't like either of the characters. I hated Ruby - so full of herself, so sure that she could use and manipulate anyone she wanted - she's probably the biggest narcissist I've ever encountered in a book. Then, Chloe, the doting little sister. I wanted to grab her and shake her and say "You have to see through Ruby, you have to see that something is wrong with her and this isn't the way people should be!" And I was shocked that that was never a revelation that Chloe came to. 

Hm. It's going to be hard to write about this book without giving anything away. I don't know what I am trying to say at all, really, other than - despite me hating the characters, I loved this book and I loved this story, but most of all, I loved Nova's writing. It makes me want to ask her, "Did you read a lot of Alice Hoffman before writing this?" Because there is nothing else I can compare it to. 

Nova's writing GLOWS. It's beautiful, and lyrical, it's like poetry squished into prose, and as annoyed I was by the characters and what they chose to do and say to each other, I was thrown down the rabbit hole into Ruby's mystery and I didn't want the story to end - in fact, it took me damn near two weeks to read this, because I didn't binge it, I just kept sipping away little by little until I got to the epilogue, which is when I put the book down for two whole days, knowing I only had a chapter left, because I didn't want it to end. Not that I didn't want the story to end - it was done, I knew I'd be glad to be rid of Ruby, I knew that if she were my sister I would have rebelled against her and told her "You aren't so special," but I didn't want to stop reading the words that fit so beautifully together on the page. 

Nova's a good storyteller. The story kept me confused and guessing and intrigued, which is what good story tellers do with mysteries, and I suppose this was a mystery more than anything else, part paranormal, mostly contemporary, and sort of horrifying. So yeah, she's a good storyteller. But she's a BRILLIANT WRITER. She puts words together, ordinary words, and they sing like extraordinary songs.

Characters be damned - Ruby sure will be. The writing is where it's at, and Nova Ren Suma is definitely one to watch and follow, because she's going to be an even bigger name than she already is if she keeps it up to this level. 

The Unit, by Ninni Holmqvist

I really need to review these books as soon as I finish them, because I am pages away from finishing my third book of the year, AND halfway through another one. So far, the first twelve days of 2012 have been ones of voracious reading. 

The Unit is a book I've had on my Kindle for a while but never started for one reason or another - but once I did, I really couldn't stop reading it. This is a piece of speculative fiction, sort of like Never Let Me Go, but, in my humble opinion, much more fast paced and accessible. 

The Unit follows the story of a woman named Dorrit. She has reached her 50th birthday without having children, and so therefore in her society she is a dispensible person. She's sent to the Unit - the Second Reserve Bank Unit for Biological Material - because being her age, with no husband, no children, and no one out in the world who "needs" her, she has become a drain on societies' resources. Lucky for Dorrit and thousands of other elderly people, The Unit will make her quite useful. 

Upon arriving at The Unit, where she is never allowed to leave, even to go outside, she finds that her apartment is nice, luxurious even, and that she can pretty much do as she pleases there. The Unit has theatres, gyms, parks, libraries, stores, art galleries - plenty of things to keep people occupied and happy while they are undergoing extensive medical test, drug trials, and organ donations until they make their "final donation" usually before five years have passed in The Unit.

So yeah, it's all very macabre, very dark and makes you feel like an icky voyeur for reading something that is so terrible, but that's why I like it - and it gets worse - because Dorrit falls in love while she is in the Unit, and then something remarkable happens that makes her wonder whether she is really indispensable after all. 

---

I really enjoyed this book - more than most I have read recently. I find it very... fascinating when writers create a world that is just like ours but with one major (or even minor) variation that changes everything. It was like that, sort of, in A Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, and that is one of my favorite of her books. 

Granted, the books I enjoy the most are the ones that most people read and say "This is FUCKED UP!" but at least I know there are others out there who feel the same way I do. These worlds that are created in books, these dystopias, they are horrifying - but just real enough that it is easy to suspend your disbelief for just a little while and in that time maybe you might think, like I do, that this is just all too possible....

RUN, by Blake Crouch

Reading 52 books in a year is a huge task. That's one per week if you do things right, and even if I read like a maniac I don't think that this is going to be easy for me - but it's possible, and it's something that I want to accomplish so much, I even added it to my Life List. 

Anyway, here we are three days into the new year and I HAVE finished my first book of the year, so this is as good of a start as one could get, in my humble opinion. That it was a great book is just another plus. 

RUN, is the first book I've read by Blake Crouch. I was able to score it for free when he was offering it on Amazon just before the new year, and I started reading it while recovering from my New Year Hangover. That I blew through this in about a day and a half is a testament to how enjoyable this book was to me. I know that the dark and apocalyptic isn't for everyone, but it really is what I have been enjoying most these days.

RUN was about a family on the run from the vast majority of the American population. An event has turned people hostile and violent, and this is the story of one family who is trying to find a safe place to figure out how they will put their lives back together after society has collapsed. Unfortunately, the family runs into quite a few obstacles. 

From being chased down and shot at on roads, from avoiding concentration camp style execution, from spending a week without food and barely any water on a freezing mountain in the middle of winter with no shelter and barely any hope, I really didn't think this family was going to make it. The total breakdown of the world was too much, in my opinion, to ever be able to recover from, and a little unprepared family with two young children weren't the strongest heroes. 

However, it was the family that shone in this story - the way they struggled and got through danger, wounds, sickness, and loneliness when they were apart - it was a touching family story of survival with the extra goodness of pure, horrifying evil overtaking the rest of the world. 

(Have I ever mentioned that I suck at reviewing books? Like, SUCK at it?)

This was, as far as I am aware, the first independently published book Crouch has put out. I decided I wanted to read it because Crouch has often paired up with Joe Konrath to write books, do interviews, and contribute heavily to the indie publishing scene that I have found myself becoming a part of online. He's one of the ones who have done it right, and it's good to learn from the "pros", if you will, and I see here that RUN would probably have been a great seller if he'd published traditionally, it was just that good.

I'd really recommend this book to anyone who likes horror and intense emotional thrillers, with just the slightest hint of the supernatural. 

TRAPPED by Jack Kilborn

Trapped is the first novel I've read by Jack Kilborn, also known as Joe Konrath. I've been reading Konrath's blog, A Newbie's Guide to Publishing, for years, so I figured it was about time I give one of his books a try, and knew that I wanted horror. Well, I got horror. I got more than that, too.

I was describing this book to my friend Brian - group of teens and two adult companions go to an isolated island, start getting picked off by feral cannibal people, and they're tortured in so many horrible ways, I won't even get into the details. So Brian says to me, "Oh, you're reading torture porn?"

I had no idea what he was talking about, but Trapped certainly wasn't pornographic. However, by the details of the torture I told Brian about, he concluded this is "torture porn" because there are people in the world who really get off on the torture of other people. So, okay. I guess it was Torture porn.

There were times in this book that I was severely disturbed. You know, every once in a while you come across a book or a writer who shocks you so much, you can't even believe what you are reading. Someone had the guts to write this down and publish it? Someone had the guts to publish it at all? Parts of this book were so intensely disgusting and, excuse my curses but there is no other way to put it, FUCKED UP, I was just blown away by the bravery. 

Yeah, bravery. Joe Konrath is BRAVE. Brave for writing this, brave for spending so much time putting down on paper what most people couldn't even think up to wish against their worst enemies. It was a very interesting experience, reading this kind of book. I can't say I want to dive into more 'torture porn' any time soon, but I'm glad I read it, it's good to read new things, and certainly it got me interested in reading more of Konrath's books. I'm currently reading Origin on my phone and liking it even more than Trapped, but it's a totally different book. I'll review that one as well, eventually. Matter of fact, I have a lot of book reviews to catch up with....