They Both Die at the End Review

Title: They Both Die at the End

Author: Adam Silvera

Rating: 5/5 Stars

I’d like to start this review by saying even though this book follows 2 boys that received a call telling them they’re going to die, it is more so about living.

The book is set in a world where a company named Death-Cast calls people at midnight to inform them that it is going to be their last day. They are not given the information of how or when they are going to die for sure, just that it will be before midnight once they’ve received the call.

The main characters, Rufus and Mateo, both receive the alert right away in the beginning of the book. They meet each other early on through an app called the Last Friend, specifically designed to help people who have received the alert to find a friend to spend their end day with.

Despite their death sentence, Rufus and Mateo live their last day to the fullest in ways that they would not have been able to do had they not met each other. They face their fears, overcome emotions that have been holding them back, and live a lifetime within a day.

I would highly, highly recommend this book! The majority of the book didn’t feel very sad to me, but the end was definitely sad. Like I said before, although the book is leading up to death, it is ultimately about living to the fullest and not being held back by the things that scare you.

I cannot wait to read Silvera’s other books! Adam seems like an awesome and genuine person and I will support him by buying and reading everything he comes out with in the future.

Also! I thought it was really clever that the book took place on September 5th which was the release date of the book.

Let me know what you thought of They Both Die at the End if you have read it and if you haven’t, let me know if you want to read it! Also let me know what you would do with your last day if you knew it was your last.  I think I’d be so terrified about how and when it was going to happen that I would stay in my bed terrified.

Daughter of the Burning City Review

Title: Daughter of the Burning City

Author: Amanda Foody

Rating: 4.5/5 Stars

Hello all!

Long time no post, I’ve been busy starting a new job as a stylist at a salon and taking all of the tests that go along with graduating cosmetology school, but I am so excited to be back and reviewing again!

I had been trying to get through Daughter of the Burning City for what felt like forever and I finally finished it  yesterday. The plot of the story follows a 16 year old girl named Sorina who is an illusionist in a freakshow that is part of a traveling festival called Gommorah. As an illusionist, Sorina is able to create people in her mind and bring them to life. As her illusions (which she considers her family) begin dying one by one, Sorina has to undergo investigations to try to find out who is killing her illusions as well as how a figment of her own imagination can be murdered. Sorina is a part of 2 investigations, one with her father and the boss of the entire festival and one with a boy she met in the bad section of Gomorrah, named Luca. Luca is by far my favorite character, he is funny, charming and kind but he also portrays some of the arrogance that often draws us to male characters in YA books.

There is a bit of romance in this novel, but it takes a backseat to the mystery of the plot. The mystery is very well told and unpredictable. I never would have guessed the outcome and I really enjoyed being surprised by it.

I did think that the first half of the book was a little bit slow going, but I was also in a bit of a reading slump due to all of the other things going on in my life when I started the book. By the middle of the book I could not stop reading and ended up finishing the second half in an afternoon. I would recommend this book to anybody who likes a good fantasy set in a world that feels like it could be real.

I would love to see a sequel to this book, but at the same time I felt content with the ending.

If anybody wants to talk spoilers email me at readbykylie@gmail.com ! Let me know in the comments if this sounds like a book you would be interested in or if you’ve already read it I would love to know your thoughts!

Unpopular Opinions Book Tag

Hey guys!

I first saw the Unpopular Opinions tag here and thought it looked like fun, so here we go!

A popular book or series that you didn’t like:

Gone by Michael Grant; I tried to read the first one and I couldn’t even get through it. I’ve heard a lot of good things about the series so I have been considering trying to read it again. Let me know if you have any opinions on it! I just didn’t think it was written very well and didn’t personally like it. The story seems really interesting though so maybe if I gave it another shot I could get to like it.

A popular book or series that everyone else seems to hate but you love:

The Twilight Saga by Stephanie Meyer! I don’t know why everyone that used to love it seems to have decided to hate it now! I will forever love it.

A Love Triangle where the main character ended up with the person you did NOT want them to end up with. Hunger Games spoilers ahead!!!

Super unpopular opinion actually. I did NOT want Katniss to end up with Peeta, I wanted her to end up with Gale. I wanted her to be with Gale so much so that I googled the end of the last book before I was finished with it to see what happened with the love triangle and I ALMOST didn’t finish it after I found out. I’m glad I sucked it up and read the end, but I’m still not happy about it. But then after the movies came out, they made Gale out to be kind of unlikeable which bummed me out. I feel like I’m the only person in the world who shipped Katniss and Gale until the end of the end, but I can’t be!!

A popular book genre that you hardly reach for:

I don’t know if this is really an unpopular opinion, but I do not like classics. I don’t have the attention span for them. Unless they are classics written for children (like Oliver Twist) then I have a hard time concentrating hard enough to get into it. I tried to read Lolita recently because the whole banned book thing seemed appealing to me. Unfortunately I got about halfway through and I felt like so little happened from page to page.

A popular or beloved character that you do not like:

Back to Twilight! I did not like Jacob at all. I didn’t like him as a friend or as a love interest for Bella and the parts of the book that he was in were not as interesting to me. Sorry, it was the only one I could think of!

A popular author that you can’t get into:

E.L James

I read the first 50 Shades of Grey book and it was okay, but I didn’t love it. My best friend was absolutely obsessed with the series but I had no interest in continuing after I finished the first one.

A popular book trope that you’re tired of seeing (ex. “lost princess”, corrupt ruler, love triangles. etc.)

Killing off characters once the reader gets attached is something I am tired of seeing. I understand that sometimes it’s the only logical ending, but life is sad enough as is. An unrealistic happy ending never hurt anybody!!

A popular series that you have no interest in reading:

Percy Jackson Series by Rick Riordan. It’s not that I wouldn’t read them, it’s just that there are so many books ahead of them on my TBR that I highly doubt I’ll ever get around to reading them.

The saying goes “the book is always better than the movie.” but what movie or TV show adaptation do you prefer to the book?

I think that the True Blood HBO series is way better than the Sookie Stackhouse Series. Had I read the books first I think I would have liked them better, but a lot of the main characters in the show aren’t really in the book so it’s hard to compare the two.

ALSO! Gossip Girl.

In the books, Chuck Bass is a horrible human, but in the TV series he is everything to me. (I’ve only read the first 3 books so I don’t know if that changes!)

 

Hope you enjoyed reading this post and let me know your unpopular opinions or if you’ve made a post on the tag!

 

To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before Review

Title: To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before

Author: Jenny Han

Rating: 4/5

Page Count: 320

Let me start off by saying I was extremely disappointed when I first started reading this book! I was so excited because I’d heard such good things about it and normally I love YA books like this one. Through the first few chapters, the voice of Lara Jean seemed extremely childish to me and it annoyed me. She put me in mind of the narrator of the Junie B. Jones books the I read when I was little, or Karen in the Babysitter’s Club books. Granted I did love both of those books at one time, but I was also in the age demographic that they were aimed at.

So this morning I decided I should give it a shot because I had it borrowed from my library on Overdrive and I saw that someone else was waiting to get it. After I started getting into it, I really enjoyed it and Lara Jean stopped seeming as immature. I read 75% of the book today and I feel ready for the next book. Unfortunately I do not have the next book and the copy from my  library has a waitlist 😦

To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before is about a girl named Lara Jean, who is a Junior in high school. Every time she feels like she “loves” a boy, she writes a love letter to end her feelings. She keeps the letters in a hat box in her room and has no intention whatsoever of the recipients of her love ever seeing them. One day, the letters get sent out to the boys she wrote them to. Lara Jean finds out when the boys start coming up to her and asking about them.

To save face with the boy she actually likes (her older sister’s ex-boyfriend) she starts fake dating a different boy,  Peter. It turns out that it isn’t as easy to fake date without developing real feelings as Lara Jean and Peter had thought. Obviously it’s not that easy, as it never is in books, which is why I would like to have the next book so that I can find out what happens!

Overall I would recommend this book to anyone who is a fan of mindless reads and YA romance. I think it would be a good book to get a person out of a reading slump as it is really fast and easy to get through and doesn’t require a lot of deep thought or concentration. If you have trouble getting through the first part keep going!! I promise it gets a lot better.

If anyone has any opinions on the book I’d love to hear them!

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A Court of Thorns and Roses Review

A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas

Rating: 5 Stars

Pages: 416 (paperback)

I just recently found the “Booktuber” side of Youtube and 99% of the Booktubers I watch rave about this book. I walked past A Court of Thorns and Roses in my local bookstore numerous times and it never caught my attention. There is nothing wrong with the cover but for some reason I didn’t even bother to pick it up and read the description. Earlier this month I went on a Booktube recommendations buying spree and this was on my list. Even after reading the synopsis on the back of the book I was not sold, but I figured that if everyone thinks it’s such a good book, I should just give it a chance and I am so glad I did!

A Court of Thorns and Roses is a fantasy novel about a girl named Feyre who hunts to keep her family fed. She is the only breadwinner in the family, her father having an injured leg and her sisters seemingly above taking care of themselves.

One day when Feyre is hunting she sees a wolf that she suspects could be a faerie. Although the wolf is doing nothing to her, simply minding his own business, Feyre kills him. Killing the wolf in the woods leads to another mysterious wolf/faerie, Tamlin, showing up at her doorstep and demanding her life for the life of his friend that Feyre killed. Rather than killing her, he takes her back to his home as a captive.

The way that the story is described on the back of the book made it sound to me like Feyre suffers from a case of Stockholm Syndrome, falling for her kidnapper, so I was a bit surprised that Tamlin treated her as well as he did and actually gave her a reason to fall for him. Obviously there is a lot more conflict and Feyre and Tamlin do not just fall in love and live happily ever after.

I would definitely recommend A Court of Thorns and Roses if you are interested in fantasy novels. Although wolves and faeries are not typically my favorite subject for fantasy, I was pleasantly surprised in how much I liked this book. Normally I don’t like reading a whole series one after the other but I was left wishing I had a copy of the next two books in the series.

If anyone wants to talk spoilers with me send me an email at readbykylie@gmail.com

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Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire

Rating: 4 stars

Every Heart a Doorway is about Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children; a sanctuary for kids who have found a door to a fantasy world and that have had to come back to the real world. Most of the fantasy worlds sound unappealing to the average reader, however, the worlds perfectly fit the children who find the door. When the kids come home, nobody believes their stories about where they have been and their parents send them to Eleanor West, an odd lady who believes and understands what it’s like to come back from your fantasy world.

All of the children at Eleanor West’s home long to find their door back to the fantasy world again, but the likelihood that the doors will appear again is slim. Eleanor teaches them how to cope with returning to reality.

The main character Nancy identifies as asexual. I have never read a book with an asexual character before so I thought that was pretty cool. I can’t speak for the representation of asexuality but I have read reviews by people who also identify as asexual and they have said that Every Heart a Doorway does a very good job with that aspect of the book.

The description I read didn’t give away much of the plot, so I went into the book knowing very little about it. I think knowing little about the book benefited me as a reader in that I could not predict what was going to happen and I ended up surprised with the outcome. The book was a lot darker than I had expected, which I was pleasantly surprised with.  If you are looking for a good quick read I would definitely recommend Every Heart a Doorway!

 

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