what I'm (well, was) reading: december

I haven't had a huge amount of time to read recently with midterms, but I've sort of scraped the surface of my to-read pile. Just a little bit.

Unspoken by Sarah Rees Brennan

I have been shamelessly stalking this wonderful person for quite a while now, but it's taken me forever to get my hands on one of her books. It is sort of amazing. I had to hole myself up in my room, only emerging for food and tea, for a day and a half because I couldn't put it down. It was physically painful. The characters were wonderful, a big cast of them that were all very individual and interesting - it's nice to read about a heroine who has friends who are girls and doesn't dump them for the boys. Kami, the heroine's, friends are an integral part of the story and I love them. The last quarter felt a little rushed to me, and it stretched my suspension of belief a bit on how well everyone was taking this huge amount of crazy information they were getting. It made me cry anyway. Seriously, this book will tear out your heart, eat it, and smile at you all the while.
I can't wait for the next one.




Tithe by Holly Black

I have a complicated relationship with Holly Black. I love the Curseworkers to death. I have all three books stacked in the Favorite Wonderful pile next to my desk. I cannot stand the Spiderwick Chronicles and never could. I could just never get through them.
I have mixed feelings about Tithe. It's the gritty sort of faerie tale I always wanted to read, blending legends and modern teenager-ness nicely. The settings were fantastic. The characters were realistic; they swore and smoked and dreamed and generally acted like teenagers. And that is possibly what made this hard to read: people aren't black or white, and they do things you don't like and things you do. Sometimes they make decisions that you sort of hate them for.
The heroine Kaye stands up for herself against lots of testosterone-driven sleezy teenager boys and I applaud her. She has these wonderful realistic regrets about it. But her relationship with her best friend seems thin and the girl herself is a little annoying.
 I thought the pacing was off; the beginning was slow and when it sped up it was really too fast and stretched my suspension of disbelief. Overall, it had some really, really wonderful things in it, and some flaws, too but it was worth the read.