A (Late) Two-Book Post

I know I know I know, I'm terrible at remembering to blog after taking a week off. It's after 12:30 in the morning and I'm just now getting to my blog for Tuesday. It's just taking some time to get back into things. Things meaning blogging and thesis. Oh, thesis. *melodramatic sigh* I love screenwriting. I love IF I STAY, which is the novel I'm adapting for my thesis screenplay. But I have so many ideas for other things right now...i.e. totally revamped vampire stories (yes, that bad pun was mostly intentional) and screenplays that I haven't figured out that involve nightmares and nerdy best friends and death threats and scary knives.

But anyway. I have two books to tell you about.

First of all, I finished SKINNED by Robin Wasserman. It was excellent. Very science-fiction; almost a cross between Aldous Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD and Mary Pearson's THE ADORATION OF JENNA FOX (both of which are excellent books, by the way, though very different from each other). It's set at some unspecified time in the future when technology basically rules everything.

The fact that technology rules everything means that Lia's car should never have crashed. It should have taken her safely to her destination without Lia having to do anything but curl up in the backseat and take a nap. But something goes wrong, and the car does crash, and suddenly, Lia's life as the beautiful, popular girl that everyone loves is over. Actually, her life is over, period.

Except for the advanced technology that allows the doctors to download her brain into an artificial body. Now she supposedly has the best thing anyone could ask for: she cannot age, she cannot die, she will never get sick, she's basically indestructible. The one thing she isn't is human. And the friends (and boyfriend) she had before cannot accept that the personality inside is still her. Lia is lost, looking for someone to show her how to live again. And she just might find it - but first, she's going to have to come to terms with who she is.

I realize the ending of that summary sounds incredibly corny and lame, but I promise, the book is anything but. You should definitely read it. It's the first in a trilogy, and I'm definitely going to have to get the second one soon. (I believe it's called CRASHED. Fortunately, my library has it. Yay library!) You can find out more about these at Robin Wasserman's website.

The other book that I absolutely have to tell you about because it was ohmygoodness-wonderful-and-fantastic is GLIMPSE by Carol Lynch Williams. I'm assuming it just came out, because I found it on the New Teen Books shelf at Barnes & Noble today. It's 484 pages long, but it's written in verse so in terms of word count it's probably pretty short. I read it over about an hour and a half while I was in B&N with CJ and AF. It's a quick read and an amazing book so please don't let the length scare you off.

Hope is 13. Her older sister Lizzie is 14. They have other friends, but ever since they were 3 and 4, they've been best friends and they've protected each other. So when Hope walks into their shared bedroom to find Lizzie pointing a gun at her own head and Lizzie gets shipped off to a mental hospital, Hope's world turns upside down. She doesn't understand why her sister would want to die. She doesn't understand what she's supposed to do now that she can't protect Lizzie anymore.

Hope's mother is not exactly a source of comfort; it seems like Lizzie has always been her favorite, but neither one of them was planned, and Momma hasn't really been there for the girls since their father died eight years ago. What Momma does have is a secret, and that secret may explain why Lizzie wanted so desperately "to leave/for good."

GLIMPSE was beautifully written and once you start reading it you just can't stop. Absolutely a must-read. So, so good. It was excellent.

And on that note, I really need to go to bed, 'cause it's now after 1am. Oops. Goodnight!

~Bex