The Lost Code by Kevin Emerson

TL;DR global warming has ruined everything and Atlantis used to be a thing

(not actually finished the second time, oops. Stopped reading 6/1/15)

I honestly don't know how to describe the book more than that. I read this book for the first time last April, and this re-read seems to be even more lackluster than the first time. 

The narration is basically on par with The Selection, but I think it's even worse considering it's a 15-year-old boy who falls in insta-love and has a thought process more along the lines of a stereotypical 12-year-old girl. I don't know how else to put it other than that. Also, that's really surprising to me, considering the author is a guy. I don't really think anyone thinks the way Owen does regarding having crushes on someone they just met--not unless you're a YA heroine-- but it's kind of off-putting. I don't want to be all, "oh, he can't have a crush, he's a guy, that's such a girly thing," but the way he acts reminds me of a preteen girl obsessively fawning over a member of 1D or 5SOS, and that's creepy. 

There's also way too much telling over showing. Camp Eden and EdenWest in general isn't introduced well in terms of visuals; Owen just lists off a bunch of details in a mini info-dump, and a lot of times it's in a string of simple sentences like an elementary school kid would write. (Not that elementary school kids are bad. I just think a 15-year-old would be a little better with describing things eloquently.) 

The worldbuilding in general is also pretty weak. I don't care all that much about the science behind the global warming, but the HZ and the domes don't make all that much sense to me. (The science behind the radiation doesn't make sense to me, either, but I'm not a very science-y person, so I'm not really gonna talk about that part. I'm better with discussing geography.)

(via NASA website) The HZ would be the white area at the top (and I guess Antarctica, though it's not mentioned). I feel like it's not enough to support human life, and there's not enough to explain why it's habitable. There's no real explanation as to how the HZ sustains itself, nor how the domes outside the HZ manage to survive.

Speaking more of the domes: 6km wide isn't that big of an area at all. 

I tried to center it around the White House. I think I was a little off. 

I mean, now that I look into it a little more, sure, DC is about 4x the population of EdenWest. But DC is entirely city. There's nothing really sustainable about DC. Everything has to be brought in. If you dropped a 6km wide dome on DC, it would fail. 

Page 33 of the paperback says that Lake Eden used to be part of Lake Superior, and somewhere else I think it says they're in Minnesota, so I put the circle over a Minnesota city on Lake Superior. Just for posterity. 

Anyway, I don't think it's impossible for EdenWest to be completely self-sustainable, I just find it highly unlikely with the few details we've been given. Also, Camp Eden seems to be huge, and I think such a large "summer camp" place would cut into valuable city or farming space. The water takes up a significant amount of space, because at some point Paul asks, "Did you realize you'd [swam] over two kilometers from camp?" (pg 185). I don't even know how all of these kids are paid for. A good part of them seem to be Cryos, which would mean that their parents are long dead and they're basically wards of the state, and Owen and one other kid (Noah?) are "charity" cases. Do the camp counselors get paid? Is this their way of earning their keep? I don't know!

And I'm just gonna skip right over the logistics of making a 6km wide dome and its upkeep and how tall the dome has to be in the center vs the edges and how they keep everything uniform and--

okay. I think you get the point.

I accidentally kept the book a week past its due date because I returned half the batch of library books and forgot to renew the others, so I only made it to page 300 this re-read. I'm posting this because I've already read it and know what happens at the end. 

The end was the least interesting part of the book for me, to be honest. From what I remember. I mean, my whole interest in the books was because of the Eden domes and the results of Owen's "spinning evolutionary clock" (pg 298). Once the plot starts to move in a different direction, I was like, "nah." I wasn't interested enough to continue reading the series even during my first read, and I think it's pretty unlikely for me to pick up the second book at this point unless I find it at the library and have a small stack of books at that point. 

Honestly, I think The Lost Code would make more sense as a Middle Grade book. I think I would've enjoyed it more when I was younger (especially with a little more narration tweaking), but it's just not very exciting as a 17 year old. I don't know if that's a fault in the narration or plot, or if it's an age thing, or if it's because I'm more sensitive to these things now that I'm a writer myself. 

TL;DR I thought it was pretty boring and unbelievable but it might keep you busy one afternoon if you're bored. 

September Girls by Bennett Madison

TL;DR mermaids and what I imagine being in a trance feels like

(finished 6/1/15)

Guys, I learned! I made sure not to read reviews before I read the book! I only got so far as seeing that one blogger I followed rated it no stars, and another one rated it 5. That was really confusing. I avoided reading the reviews themselves until after I wrote all my own ideas down, so you can see my reaction to them further down in this post. 

First up, the narration is really vulgar. It didn't really bother me that much, but it's definitely more than what I'm used to reading. Honestly, I think it's pretty realistic; I can tell you for a fact that the amount of vulgarity wasn't exaggerated for a 17 year old boy. There's only so much you can ignore from your peers. It drops off a little bit to just cursing  (and what the plot requires) after a few chapters. As a disclaimer, though, I am not a 17 year old boy and I read very few books narrated by boys that this point, so I could be very wrong on how realistic Sam's inner monologue is. 

Other than that, though, the narration itself is pretty lyrical, for lack of a better word. I liked it, but I doubt that it's very realistic for a teenage boy. There was some stuff in there that was so profound it was trying too hard to sound cool. 

"Say there's this thing you want, this thing that seems more important than everything, this thing you've been waiting for because it will make you into something else. And then you get a chance at it and it's almost as if you don't want to change. Because you'll miss the person you were before." (pg 126)

That was the only example I sticky-noted. I know stuff like this isn't unheard of coming from a teenager's mouth, but to me, it just reminds me of that phase everyone goes through where they're all philosophical and big-picture thinkers before they realize that does them no good in the long run, that they just have to actually do things instead of pondering the mysteries of everything. (I have no idea if this is a universal thing. It could very well have just been my peer group. idk.) 

I'm not really sure what I think about the characters. There's obvious character development, but I have pretty neutral feelings towards it. I'm kind of leaning towards the opinion that they aren't characterized realistically, but that didn't break the book for me. 

I'm kind of divided on the worldbuilding, to be honest. Like, you can see almost from the very beginning what's going on, but it's never really explained. I was hoping for an actual explanation of the trance-like state of mind that I mentioned up in the TL;DR, but nope, nothing. The whole explanation about the girls was pretty weak, too, and I don't know if I was having trouble focusing or if their attempted explanations make no sense. 

... I actually don't have much more to contribute than that;; I rated it three stars since I really loved the mood the narration created, and because it didn't suck, but the ending was a little more lackluster than I'd expected. At some point I had considered rating it four stars, but it never really reached the kind of excitement / tension I thought the kind of plot demanded of the climax. 

Honestly, I can understand the low overall rating (2.99/5 last I checked) and the problems people have had with it. All the characters come off as sexist, but to me it felt more like the sexism promoted and ingrained in society rather than the characters purposefully coming to that decision. (If that makes sense. I'm sorry. I was a little tired when I wrote this.) Like, yeah, I hated the morals of all the characters, but it also came off as a characterization decision, because let's face it: there are inevitably guys (and girls!) that are so sexist it makes you question how they function in life. 

I'm definitely not okay with the characters' overall sexism, but I understand where it could be coming from. We can't just pretend people like the September Girls characters don't exist, because they do. 

Now that I've read through some other reviews, I have a better understanding of why people hate it with such intensity. Let me sum it up for you:

"Wow, look at this 17 year old male narrator unexposed to the concept of feminism! It's like he's only been exposed to the mainstream media and his peers! How dare he disrespect women in the only way he seems to understand how to treat them! How dare he not have a role model that would have taught him better!"

I'm sorry. That was way more sarcastic than I wanted. Anyway, my point is that most of these reviewers seem to be adult women; I completely understand where they stand and their issues, and I agree, but I don't think they're trying to understand the character at all. My male peers are often pretty sexist, but that's because it's perpetuated. Nobody tells them not to -- in fact, it's a never-ending cycle because this lack of "don't do that, you're stupid" constitutes an "okay", and by the time someone does say "stop, you're a dick", they're likely to blow your comment off. The same goes to the Girls: they are not taught any better. 

So, yes, all the sexism in the book is terrible, but they literally have no other example to live by. The Girls literally base their entire image off the mainstream media.

In scrolling through the entire first page of reviews on goodreads, there was only one guy that contributed a review, and it was too short to really touch on anything. Everything else was written by women. Who, of course, are going to have a very different view than Sam or Bennett Madison because some of them have unfortunately been the victims of sexism. 

ANYWAY. I got really carried away there. I'm sorry. I'm surprised I had so much to say, to be honest. 

TL;DR it's a kind of mindless read. If you can get past the characters that reflect the sexism actually present in the world, and the lackluster plot and worldbuilding, it'll probably keep you occupied if you're bored. 

Blog-related Goals

By the time this goes up, I'll either be working on or finishing at least a couple of these goals. I hope. I have no idea what life could throw at me before this is published.

This is also related to point #4.

#1: blog redesign
I already wrote a post about this, but tl;dr I have found an interest in web design and I'd like to make my page reflect that. It's been the same for a while, something I threw together to make it presentable, but now I want to make it more than that.

#2: talking to people
I'm kind of terrible at this, both online and off. I've gotten much better at talking to people in person, though, and I'm hoping to improve on my online people skills. I'd love to talk to more people and right now the only thing that's really holding me back is my confidence level.

I've improved on that, though. The other day (probably a month back by the time this is live) I commented on someone's blog for the first time! It was a little comment, but it felt like a pretty big step to me. Nothing exploded when I did it. In fact, I saw the author's reply to it, and I was just all-over very content.

I'm hoping that I can become brave enough to talk to completely new people and collab with others one day!

#3: copying reviews to goodreads
Honestly, a lot of my reasoning for posting book reviews here is that I was kind of scared of posting on goodreads. I was afraid of the larger potential audience, and thus my only reviews so far are stars.

I'd like to go back and retroactively add all the reviews I've written, though. I've become more confident in my reviews, and I'd love to add my reviews to the site, even though very few people will end up seeing them, anyway. Being on the site for this long has led me to realize that posting my reviews there will be just as "shouting into the void" as posting here is. Unless my review gets a lot of likes. Then it'll be more visible. But I don't really see that happening.

#4: making more graphics
I made graphics for, like, two posts before I stopped using my editing laptop on a regular basis. I honestly don't think I've touched it since March. The laptop I use now doesn't have Photoshop, which was my go-to -- only Paint and an expired trial of InDesign.

Of course, I've finally come to realize I've been making excuses and that there's nothing stopping me from using online resources to make graphics. I've realized that some of my posts are un-pin-able because there's no image to use on Pinterest. Eventually I'd like to go back and make graphics (even just really simple ones) for all of my blog posts.

This would also be really good practice to improve my (still pretty basic) design skills. There's probably going to be a huge lack of consistency as I try to find my groove, so please bear with me!

Anyway, I hope to start working on these asap!!

The Elite by Kiera Cass

TL;DR love V and some vague political problems

(finished 5/30/15)

So when I wrote my review for The Selection, I said that I would give The Elite a chance. I also predicted it would be 300 pages of love V melodrama. 

And I wasn't wrong. 

Honestly, I can't say that anything really happened in The Elite other than America being pretty stupid. And a few rebel attacks. That's it. There was nothing really differentiating it from The Selection other than there being fewer girls. 

Surprisingly, though, I had no sarcastic sticky notes. I guess that can be taken as a good sign. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood. The entire month of May felt like an emotional rollercoaster. 

I can say that The Elite was interesting enough that there was no point that I wanted to abandon it to read at some other time. It sat in my backpack the last week and a half of school, when I didn't really have time in class to read it, but I sat down to finish it on the last Saturday of the month. (I'm kind of running out of time to finish my library books. And I've been really bored now that school is out for me.) 

I really don't know if The Elite counts as a "middle book syndrome" example. Somehow it actually felt like an improvement on The Selection, but that may just be the lack of snark on my part. I mean, there's little to no plot advancement, so I definitely think that should be kept in mind, but it wasn't like I hated the book at any point. It's just okay. 

I am planning to read The One, though at this point I've figured out that I just want to read The Heir. I honestly have no interest in America and Maxon, or even America and Aspen -- I just want to see what happens with America's daughter. I'm kind of hoping it'll be a better part of the series, though I know better than to bet on it. 

The narration wasn't any better this time around, but since I was expecting it, it wasn't necessarily bad. The only thing I wish was improved was characterization and character development. The story could be so much stronger if America proved that she learned something during this whole ordeal, or if her and Maxon's actions were consistent to what an actual person would do and not just things that would advance the story how Cass wanted it to go. (That's also something I'm learning about in my writing, so I can't truly fault the writing on that. It's really just something that has to be learned out of experience.)

I really wasn't happy with the ending, but I'm not really sure how to explain it. It's like Cass set it up to become one thing and then the characters completely reversed the expected outcome for reasoning that wouldn't fly in real life. 

Also, you know how this story could really be improved? A poly relationship. Like, do you know how much it would improve if we didn't have to watch America be all wishy-washy with which boy she wants to pick? I would love to see a book where the character in the love V is like, "Why can't I just love them both?" instead of feeling so much pressure on having to pick one of them as a end-all decision. America obviously cares strongly for both Maxon and Aspen -- even if it wasn't a poly relationship, there is honestly no reason that she can't keep her friendships / interpersonal relationships with both guys. Of course, in Illea, that might be easier said than done, but at least I came up with a solution. Unlike America's presentation at the end of the book.

Actually, I'm gonna talk about that a little bit. Skip over this paragraph if you don't want spoilers. I honestly cannot understand how America would be able to come up with such a daring presentation like that and then not include talking about how to pull it off or how to minimize the repercussions of what she was suggesting. I thought she would've been smarter than to just say, "Hey, let's completely destroy our current order of life" and then just end her presentation after listing how bad it was. You can't do that. 

TL;DR It's basically just the same thing as The Selection. Take that as you will. 

My Non-Writing Pinterest Boards

So a little while back I made a blog post about my Pinterest story boards. Today I thought I'd share some of my non-writing Pinterest boards! My boards are split pretty 50-50 between writing stuff and not-writing.

I'm actually gonna provide little descriptions of the boards this time, since I have stuff to talk about. More than the writing boards, at least.

Follow Joy's board Books Worth Reading on Pinterest.

This was a preset board, and I decided to keep it. I don't follow any book boards, so this one is really short. I don't use it much.

Follow Joy's board For the Home on Pinterest.

This board I use a lot more than I expected when I first started. I just like looking at pretty rooms. There's also a lot of beach-themed house pictures since I follow a couple coastal living boards ;; I really like the interior designs of beach houses and I don't really know the reasoning behind that.

Follow Joy's board photography on Pinterest.

I've actually used this board more than once for work in my Photography class. Our teacher will usually ask us to find pictures on the internet that match the theme of our assignment, so we get ideas of what we want to look for, so this usually saved me a lot of effort.

Follow Joy's board Places on Pinterest.

A lot of the things on this board would've gone on the Photography board if they didn't have the location in the description. There isn't really organization to the board. I know there are at least a few pins of places we've been, and a few I'd love to visit eventually, but other than that it's mostly just pretty photography with the location listed.

Follow Joy's board Fashion on Pinterest.

All the fashion on Pinterest was what kind of inspired my 50s aesthetic that I've been rocking recently. I'd actually dress girly a lot more often if I could find outfits like these more easily! Most of the clothes on the board are 50s dresses or cute skirts. And some runway fashion.

Follow Joy's board Food on Pinterest.

This board is pretty short, since I only follow one person with food boards, but there are definitely some things I'd love to make.

Follow Joy's board Crafting on Pinterest.

This is kind of a given considering my tagline on Pinterest (•̀ᴗ•́)و ̑̑ I actually haven't worked much on cosplay (or sewing in general) since around Christmas, so I'm really looking forward to my free time this summer! I'd love to start quilting.

Follow Joy's board To Save on Pinterest.

This is a mix of a couple different things. I think half of it is blogging stuff, which I should really just make into its own board. Other than that, it's just stuff I can't sort into boards very easily. I should go back and re-organize it.

Follow Joy's board Design on Pinterest.

I started this one when I began working on my school's lit mag, since I was way in over my head and I had no idea what I was doing. It came in handy! At this point, it's mainly just color palettes, because holy crap do I have a weakness for cute color combinations. There's some free font posts and design tips / tricks as well. I'm hoping to put this to use a lot when I redesign my blog!

Anyway, thanks for looking! I hope the boards were interesting enough. I have a lot of fun with Pinterest ♥ If you guys have Pinterests, link me to your pages! I love looking at other peoples' boards.

My TBR Shelf June 2015

Oh, man. Last time I checked the number of books on my goodreads TBR shelf, it was around 1300. I have a lot of fun looking at the new release blog posts that show up in my feeds. And Listopia is really fun.

Anyway, I decided to sort through my TBR shelf a couple different ways and see what shows up.

#1 book: Beautiful Disaster by Jamie McGuire

This was the first book I marked as to-read when I joined goodreads. I don't use the order on the to-read list as any indication of priority -- especially considering this has been sitting on my shelf for three years at this point at #1. 

Now that I'm looking at the description for it, I don't even know why I marked this as to-read. This doesn't sound like anything I'd really read. Not that I'll delete it, though. Feels kind of blasphemous to knock it from its #1 spot after all this time. 

Highest rating: Nebula by L.A. Sees, 4.66/5

This only has 29 ratings and 9 reviews on goodreads, so I think that may be skewing the results a little bit. There's only one version of it listed and I honestly have no idea how easy this will be to find. 

Nebula is #1054 on my to-read list. Look at the cover. It's so pretty. 

Lowest rating: Delusion by Laura L. Sullivan, 2.85/5

I don't remember adding this. It's #150 and I apparently added it back in Feb 2013. I don't really have any comments on this one;; I don't even think I'd seen it since I first added it. 

First alphabetically by author: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

My Video Production teacher actually suggested this to me. I never really had any interest in it before, but once she explained the concept to me a little better, I decided it was something I'd probably like. 

Last alphabetically by author: Poison by Bridget Zinn

I added this to my TBR back in Feb 2013, but I don't think I've seen it at all in person. I don't know if my library system carries it at all.

First alphabetically by title: The 100 by Kass Morgan

I'm pretty sure I added this because of the tv show. Which I haven't watched. I don't know. I apparently add a lot of books and then forget about them. Looking at the top reviews, though, a lot of them are one or two stars, so I'm a little concerned about that.

Above World by Jenn Reese

I added this one in, too, since the first one was technically a number. This is apparently a middle grade book, and I don't remember adding it, but my friend rated it 3 stars, so I think that's promising. 

Last alphabetically by title: Zoe Letting Go by Nora Price

This is #45 on my list, so I added it a long time ago. Looks a little depressing, now that I'm reading the description of it. 

Anyway, most of these'll probably stay on my TBR for a while. I have no idea if any of these are in my library system, and I'm not really inclined to go out of my way to find these. 

If you guys have read any of these, I'd love to hear from you! Let me know what you thought of them! 

Upcoming Blog Redesign

I've been thinking this over for a while, and despite pushing the window of time back at least a month, I've decided that I want to try and overhaul my blog design from the ground-up.

This is what it looks like right  now as I'm writing.

What I have now is just an update I did when I decided to post on a regular schedule (something which has helped me immensely in more ways than one). I changed my color scheme to be reminiscent of the ace flag, though the effect of that is pretty minimal. All I did was change the colors around a little bit. I kept the same theme when I updated it.

I follow at least five different blogs via email, a whole bunch more through Blogger itself, and I can't tell you how many blogs I've looked at via Oh, the Books! weekly recap posts. Those posts are my favorite. They've been so helpful in finding bloggers I otherwise wouldn't find, but they've also been good at showing me a whole variety of blog designs and teaching me what I like (and don't like) from first glance.

Now that I'm out of school for the summer, I'm gonna try and dedicate my time to creating my own unique blog layout.

Hopefully it won't be too hard. I've got some background on HTML and CSS, both from in school and outside of it, and not to mention all I've gotta do is open Google for help. A lot of the weekly recap posts have helpful stuff about the technical stuff of blogging, including a lot of suggestions and freebies for blog design / layout, so I think I've got this.

It's gonna be daunting, but I may as well throw myself into it, right?

My initial inspiration for the redesign was working on my school's lit mag. It was a lot of fun to work with the other design manager and improve so much on last year's design. I didn't know what I was doing when I first started, but I kludged my way into a cool-looking journal, so I think that definitely counts for something. I can only hope that I can make it look as hella as our lit mag.

My blog design is probably going to go through a couple different phases by the time that I decide what I want to stick with, so please bear with me! Hopefully when I'm done I'll remember to make a blog post reflecting back on what I did.

Atlantia by Ally Condie

TL;DR vaguely dystopian-like world divided above / below water

(finished 5/27/15)

I had kind of mixed expectations for Atlantia -- the concept and the cover art are amazing (and cover art can mean a lot to me, ngl), but I really wasn't impressed by Matched. And I've gotta say, I think Atlantia is definitely better. 

I think the execution of the concept is pretty good. I think it could've been better, at least in the sense that I had trouble sitting down and reading at first, but the worldbuilding was solid enough that I had no issues trying to read it. I think there definitely could've been more, but the stuff that's in Atlantia was enough for me for the plot to function without being overbearing. I'm very against super-long descriptions of settings, especially when a book is in first person. (Which Atlantia is.) If the narrator points out too many details, it's not realistic. That's the author's voice coming through. 

I can't say I was really attached to any of the characters. I understood them, but the possibility of them dying wasn't a very "oh no" feeling for me. (As a side note, death plays enough of a role in the story that you might want to avoid the book if that bothers you. It's not bad, but it is present and a part of the plot.) I was pretty ambivalent towards Rio, but she wasn't necessarily a bad character or narrator. I was pretty ambivalent about the romance aspect of the story, too, but it's a fairly small piece of what happens, so I'm just gonna let it go. 

Also, I can say that the dust cover / goodreads descriptions are great. They're actually what I would love to see all the time in books. It explains the background and inciting incident, and a little part of the rising action, while giving almost nothing away about the climax or the ending. The "plot twist" -- not like an "omg what the heck" sudden realization, but a very slow process -- wasn't what I was expecting to happen, but it fit, and in looking back at the blurb I realized that it almost exactly says what happens without giving it away. Why can't all books be like that? 

So I think the biggest negatives for Atlantia are the slow beginning (in my opinion) and the ambivalence I had towards the characters, but they aren't make-or-break by any means. Once the story got moving enough, I did sit down and read instead of being on the computer. I probably would've reached that point in the story sooner if I'd sat down to read it in class instead of only when I was waiting for my laptop to boot up completely. 

TL;DR a very solid 3/5 stars and a lot better than Matched. 

Infatuate by Aimee Agresti

TL;DR angels vs devils conflict in New Orleans

(finished 5/18/15)

I'd been waiting for Infatuate for a while, ever since I read Illuminate back towards the beginning of high school, and somehow I didn't realize it was at the library for a year and a half. Oh well. 

Anyway, I really liked Illuminate when I first read it. I bought the ARC of it when I found it at a thrift store, but I haven't re-read it since then. I actually lent the copy to a friend recently. I can't promise that my memory of Illuminate is accurate, so I'm sorry if I've gotten details mixed up.

Even though I really liked Illuminate, some things have changed since then, I think. Mainly with me and what books I read. Haven's narration stuck out sometimes in Infatuate, though it wasn't bad -- it was just stereotypical introspective narration of a young adult main character. The biggest problem I found was the little mini info-dumps: a lot of times, there were pretty substantial paragraphs to introduce the location, which I found kind of unnecessary. I'd rather have the information spread out rather than Haven dictate where exactly everything is in relation to each other. Nobody really explains a room like that in real life. 

Here, I even sticky-noted an example:

'We followed [Connor] down the worn carpeting to a room with a half-moon-shaped window looking out onto the grounds, a high ceiling with delicate moldings, and framed paintings of pale people from the Victorian era. Long folding tables and chairs were clustered in a heap at the center of the room, waiting to be set up. A bare metal bookcase on wheels sat in a corner. [...] And, indeed, a row of desks in the back was outfitted with a quartet of very ancient-looking phones.' (pg 61)

I understand the need in writing to set the scene, but I think there's a balance between painting a mental picture and just dumping the room into the reader's lap. I'm terrible at spacial reasoning when it comes to reading, so I tend to completely disregard these kinds of paragraphs and just make up my own picture of the room. All I focused on was the tables and phones. I didn't care about anything else. The window, high ceilings, paintings, and bookshelf were nowhere in the scene in my mind. 

And, likewise, her explanations of people went kind of over-the-top, too:

'Gently, [Dante] creaked the door open to reveal a beautiful woman seated on a silk tapestry on the floor. She looked to be in her late twenties and had a long, luscious black onyx mane, sharp features, and flawless cocoa skin. She wore a tank dress long enough to fan out around her [...]' (pg 132)

Again, I get the need for descriptive language, but in first person, "onyx mane" and "cocoa skin" sounds awkward. There's at least one other time that Haven refers so someone's hair as a "mane", which in my opinion just sounds ridiculous. Haven's descriptions sound nothing like how a teenager would describe things. 

I also found a pretty big fault in the fact that Haven and Dante were both willing to lie to Lance. To me, that was a pretty big warning sign that Haven and Lance's relationship needed improving. The fact that Haven would rather lie to him than tell him a truth he probably wouldn't want to hear is bad, especially considering the nature of the lie. 

'I had had the sense, since earlier in the year, that [Lance] belonged to me, that we belonged to each other in some strange, unspoken way that transcended any typical, ephemeral high school relationship.' (pg 98)

If you have that great of a relationship, why are you so against telling him about Lucian? I think that kind of relationship would mean that you two could be completely honest with each other. Like, I know that the two of them are teenagers, and obviously they're going to make some poor decisions sometimes, but I was really frustrated with the fact that neither of them really seemed to trust each other and tell the truth and save themselves a whole bunch of trouble.  

The plot itself was okay to me. It felt like the same exact thing as Illuminate, only with more kids and a different setting. Take that as you will. The plot didn't seem as exciting to me because it didn't feel very fresh in comparison to the first book, but I think that some people probably won't have a problem with it. It's a different scenario, anyway, so it's not a carbon copy plot. The kids interact with the demons (devils? I forget) in a different way than they did with the staff of the hotel. The climax seemed kind of rushed, though, which sucks considering there's almost nothing to be found of the third book in the series so far. 

On a side note, I had trouble keeping Lance and Dante straight at first. I'm not really sure why I kept getting them mixed up, but once I got back into the story line and the characters they sorted themselves out. 

All in all, it was enjoyable enough to read, but it was a freakishly thick book and I think I would have been less interested in it if it weren't for how much I liked Illuminate. The characters could've been a little more believable. 

One last sticky-noted thing: after Sabine refers to Wylie as a hurricane, Haven refers to Lance as a tropical depression. I found that hilarious. 

Favorite New Music: May

Most of these aren't even from May, not gonna lie;;

I actually tracked this song down at the end of April, but I'd already made my post for the month, so I added it to this one instead. Surprisingly, I found it through the radio instead of through the songs Jenny or Tightrope. It reminds me of my OTP in Aperture, so it's definitely one of my new top faves ♥

And I found this one in the process of tracking down the first video! Acapellas are really intriguing to me, and I've found some really good ones recently! 

(So many "Shut Up and Dance", yolo) This is a little bit more of a "band-y" cover, but it's still fairly similar to the original. 

This is another song I found through the radio, but I never really found the name or the artist of it until now. It's a fairly chill song -- it's almost kind of sad, when you listen to the lyrics, but I'd really like to use it for a story playlist.

I heard this sometime during the day of prom -- I don't remember if it was on the radio or at prom itself, but I really love the feel and the lyrics of it. I talked a little about this in my graduation post, but I've felt really close to all my classmates, and this song kind of reminds me of that.

I actually found a mashup of this song with Katy Perry's "Peacock" a while ago through tumblr, but the audio in the post no longer works and the uploader apparently never put it anywhere else :( In trying to track it down, though, I finally listened to the original!

This has been on my music playlist on YouTube for at least a couple months, but I haven't really listened to it much. Now that I've found it again, though, I'm expecting it to become a theme song to the summer  \(۶•̀ᴗ•́)۶/

This technically isn't new to me at all, since I found this song / photoset combination a while back, but I listened to it a bunch the week before graduation. It felt very fitting. I love Viria's artwork and I'm still so very grateful to my friend for getting me into Percy Jackson in the past year.

This actually came up on Pop Up Video when I was sitting downstairs with my mom fairly recently, and I realized it was almost as fitting as (if not more so than) "How Far We've Come". It's got a much more uplifting beat, that's for sure.

I initially mentioned "Wildfire" in my first Fave New Music blog post, but I learned that one of my favorite cover singers recently posted her version of it to her channel, so I was really excited! JubyPhonic does a lot of my favorite English covers. Now that I've found it, I can't stop listening ♪