val

I thought it was sweet, but not enough to hold my attention long enough to finish it. (I don't like reading slowly.) Some moments felt a bit meh-ish and, while this has nothing to do with the book itself, I don't like that the back cover stated it as Romeo & Juliet with a happier ending.

Definitely a light read.

For self-reference, the ones I like most so far:

Geriatric Ward
Dust
Homeless in Hell
Inventing Lovers on the Phone

realism really is lauren oliver's strength in YA.

maggie stiefvater has crafted a series too fucking beautiful to really exist. i mean, i'm a stiefvater fan and i've read so many of her books.

but this.

this blows the previous book, and all her other ones, out of the water.

holy crap wow i did not expect to love this so much.

1.5

I wanted to like this. I really did.

With a title like Click to Subscribe, I honestly thought there would be more of an emphasis on the vlogging aspect, but it just seemed too forced and unnecessary. I skimmed every time he got into a camera ‘confession'. I think Sam and Cat have an abundance of personality (sometimes to the point where they become nothing but personifications of every teen on tumblr), but this book frustrated me so much and not in a good way. Too much build-up and too hasty a resolution as everything just fixes up. Actually, everything after the first part of the book felt hasty even when he kept beating around the bush of blatant obviousness.

Format-wise, waaay too much caps-lock yelling and some other stuff that I thought made it obvious that this was a self-pub. I don't think I've ever seen kthxbye in a passage before.

Tl;dr needed more utilisation of the vlogging. Had there been scripts of vlogs rather than emails, the title would have been a better fit. Right now it's just another novel about a penpal who isn't who they seem, which the synopsis prepares you for but geez.

Also not enough romance to warrant a reread for fluff. Bummer.

I just want to stretch that ending out over and over and play all the possibilities from then on.

I thought the Dessen magic would finally wear off on me and I'd find this book average. Based on the synopsis, I wasn't very enthusiastic, that's for sure.

However, now that I've finished it, I honestly think this is one of her best. Sarah Dessen is royalty in the YA chicklit world.

The one weird thing about this book for me was that Harry Potter, actual Harry Potter, was given a mention in it when I was under the impression Simon Snow was AU Harry Potter.

Like, if Harry Potter actually existed I'm not sure if Simon Snow would be the ~#1 obsession~ it is in Cath's world? The world of Harry Potter is way more open-ended and provides so much more fodder to work off, so that mention really threw me off because I started overanalysing it.

idk, the ending seemed too rushed and thus it detracted from the whole love interest issue. i still love parallel universes though so major points to this book just for approaching it in a way that i enjoyed.

Really, really good. Like, exceeded expectations good.

Sigh, if only there was an actual novel about Celie.

i loved sourdough so i was disappointed. this just made me feel like rushing through to get to the end :( totally can see the comparisons to ready player one. it started out really promising and fell flat as more characters were introduced and the puzzle became unveiled. the main love interest felt like it came out of nowhere and only for the convenience of driving the plot.

4.5 stars.

called the ~twist~ way early, which meant lots of skimming afterwards to get to the point of realisation and lots of “ugh FIGURE IT OUT ALREADY” but at the same time, such a cool book that i've been waiting for ever since its query win on queryshark.

also aww, claire's voice in IMs was spot-on.

Sci-fi YA is definitely the in thing of 2012. Not complaining.

i really do like lauren destefano's writing. i just don't think the massive task that is dystopian worldbuilding is something she was meant to do.

that being said, what i'd REALLY like to see from her is a non-dystopian STANDALONE. something in which she can focus on the characters and not on the high! stakes!

also series may have a $$$ factor behind them, but that every single freakin thing has to be part of a trilogy these days bugs me so much. they're paced too far apart that by the time i crack open the next instalment i've already lost any interest i had in the characters.

While I'm unsure of the rating I want to give this, I can say that it was excellent and left me incredibly depressed by the end.

The lolz of this book was almost unbearable.

it's really weird how an ending can change your perspective of a book, but seeing as i spent the majority of this book not being able to stand either brie (and the overuse of italicised thoughts when the book's already in her pov) or patrick (pet names... i get it) or the cheese quotes or the way brie was dealing with life (the conclusions she jumped to were way harsh and over the top imo)... it's weird how my mental rating of it zoomed up from a 1 to at least a 3. i suppose my ratings have always been incredibly reliant on how coming out of the book makes me feel.

i liked the revelation of what was actually going on with jacob and sadie; loved it, actually, because this book didn't go down the whole ‘ex-boyfriend is a total douchebag who deserves everything that's coming to him' route. instead, jess rothenberg made her characters human. brie did bad things, but a big part of the story was that it wasn't always about her.

so yeah. some of the bad: a) i couldn't get into brie's voice. b) the romance didn't really speak to me as much as it was thrust upon me from the start, and i didn't feel much for it.

i did feel a lot for the characters, though, and i'm glad i didn't rage-quit because there were a few times i wanted to so bad.

When it comes to ‘psychological thrillers' I usually try to cover all my bases guess-wise so a good chunk of this didn't surprise me as much as it should've, but something about the vagueness was really appealing.

One star for the beginning. The rest of the book bumps it up a bit.

Nothing particularly groundbreaking about this. After reading too many dystopians I was hoping the concept would make this one more interesting, but it's just about breaking rebelling against the system. In series form. Again.

This book suffers from that whole ‘adults are useless' trope. All the parents just willingly go with it and the kids aren't even allowed to mourn anything because it's immediately assumed they're depressed? Like, is this actually America today? If so, I am concerned.

I love memory-wiping and brainwashing books, but the execution of this one made my eyes roll. Is this futuristic or alternate universe? I can't remember, and typing on my phone means I can't scroll up and check. The concept of what they're doing in the book, with the rehabilitation, seems very backwards and hard to believe. Maybe I would have liked the story better if it was told in a less linear way? That may be cliche, but it works in making you want more.

Also, from a scientific point of view, how does drugging and ‘fixing' one generation ensure the safety of the next when the ‘disease' is genetic?

This series totally had one of my favourite concepts of any middle-grade book. I just wish I could find it again.

murica

Emma is one of the most unlikeable protagonists of a book I've read this year. I almost gave this two stars because I thought Josh was decent, but the ending was just too disappointing.

3.5

What I remember most about this book is its creepiness, and how much I disliked the protagonist.

Good read nonetheless.