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Title: Catching Fire
Author: Suzanne Collins
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 5/5
Why I Read It: I read The Hunger Games (the first in the series) earlier this year and loved, loved, loved it.

Summary: After surviving a fight to the death, Katniss Everdeen has to adjust to her new life of privilege while everyone she knows and loves still struggles to put food on the table. Not to mention she’ll have to figure out what to do about the two young men in love with her.

Review: The worst part about this book was coming to the last page and realizing I have to wait a whole freaking YEAR before the next book comes out.

This woman sure do write good. Best love triangle I’ve ever read. How does she make me sway from Team Gale to Team Peeta and back again, over and over?

The suspense of the 75th Hunger Games consumed me. I had about 20 pages to go when I had to leave for work one morning in order to make it to an early meeting. So I stuck it in my bag and brought it to work with me.

That day was absolute TORTURE. I had meetings all morning, with no time to go back to my desk in between. Then at lunch, I had only a couple minutes to read before my afternoon meetings started. And again, no time at my desk between meetings. WHY ME?!?

Finally, FINALLY my last meeting was over and it was time to go home. On the way to the car, I threw the keys to my partner and pulled the book out of my bag. When I got in the car, I propped the book open on my knees and started reading. THEN I put my seatbelt on. It’s all about priorities, people.

Suzanne Collins, if there’s anything I can do to help you focus on writing over the next few months, you just let me know. I can walk dogs, babysit kids, formulate a magical body spray that will make bathing unnecessary. You name it.

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Did You Like This Book? Try:

• Shiver
• Going Bovine
• Graceling—My rating: 5/5
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Title: The Carbon Diaries, 2015
Author: Saci Lloyd
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 3.5/5
Why I Read It: When a Texas librarian says she really can’t recommend a book enough, you listen.

Summary: By 2015, global warming is a reality no one can ignore. And unfortunately for 16-year-old Londoner Laura, the UK becomes the first country to mandate carbon rationing. Which means cutting back on her punk rock band practice and taking the bus to school, not to mention all the fights at home about who’s been using up too many carbon credits.

Review: Props for timing on this one. This is the kind of book I’d love to write. So yeah, I was pretty much seething with jealousy when I started reading it.

But Laura’s snark soon distracted me.

We had a power outage in the night. The house is so cold now, it feels like 200 years of evil chill creeping into my bones. Reminds me of the Great Storm. Power outages give me the creeps—you know when you go to switch the light on and it’s dead? It was so freezing I went shopping to Waitrose with Mum and Dad just to keep my blood moving.

Super-strange experience. It was all dark in there cos they’d switched off loads of lights and the aircon and those fans that waft baking bread smells around. It was just like a big warehouse. It was pretty funny, all the nice middle-class people pretending they weren’t panic buying and that it was completely normal for them to be pushing six carts around, totally bulging with stuff. The staff kept making people put things back at the checkout cos they’d gone over their CO points.

My mother nearly had a fight with this other woman over a multipack of garlic and basil pasta.

Laura’s language is clever, fresh. (Or maybe that’s how all British teens talk?)

The only thing I didn’t love is that sometimes when characters were sharing information about the state of the world, I felt a teensy bit preached to. In some of those situations, I would rather see something not be 100% explained, leaving a little to the reader’s imagination.

But even so, I loved this book like a trip to Ibiza during carbon rationing. And I’m very much looking forward to the sequel coming out next year!

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Did You Like This Book? Try:

• Ostrich Boys
• The Rock and the River
• The Knife That Killed Me
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Title: Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd
Editor: Holly Black, Cecil Castellucci
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 3/5
Why I Read It: Self-proclaimed geek, here. So after Abby, Liz, Nymeth, and Lenore talked up this book, how could I resist?

Summary: A collection of stories from YA authors celebrating geekdom in all its many forms—from roleplaying to Buffy to being the smartest kid in school.

Review: I recently told a friend of mine about this collection. She’s been reading some YA lately, she’s a huge Buffy fan, and she’s one smart cookie to boot. So I thought she might be into the whole “celebrate your inner geek” thing. But when I suggested that she might like it, I’m pretty sure I offended her.

Enough. It’s time to reclaim “geek” as a badge of pride. First step? Read this book.

Full disclosure: I didn’t love every story in this collection. I share Nymeth’s disappointment in “The Truth about Dino Girl,” and I flat-out stopped reading one of the stories. But aside from those two disappointments, I enjoyed every story, even if that particular subculture of geek was new to me.

I absolutely adored three of the stories and was sad to reach the last page of each:

• “Secret Identity” by Kelly Link
• “Quiz Bowl Antichrist” by David Levithan
• “The King of Pelinesse” by M.T. Anderson

So check this one out. If you find that you’re not loving one of the stories, you can always skip it and go to the next.

You owe it to your inner geek.

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Did You Like This Book? Try:

• Shiver
• Liar
• Fairy Tale
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Audience Pick!

Title: 13 Little Blue Envelopes
Author: Maureen Johnson
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 2.5/5
Why I Read It: Because you told me to!

Summary: Ginny’s aunt is gone, but she left Ginny 13 mysterious letters. She is to do exactly as they say, and she can open the next one only when given permission. The first letter gets her on a plane to London, the second takes her to a complete stranger’s house, and the rest just get crazier from there.

Review: I had trouble connecting to Ginny in the first half of the book. She was just going through the motions and following the letters to the uh, letter. I know that was the crux of the plot, but her passive nature kept her flat in my mind. However, by the second half, what finally made her come alive was her grief. The ending even choked me up a bit.

This was an enjoyable read with a nice little romance. If you typically enjoy MJ’s books and especially if you’ve ever wanted to tour Europe, this one’s worth the time. (By the way, my fave-iest fave by MJ is still The Key to the Golden Firebird.)

From the Land of Writerly Musings: I liked the aunt’s letters spread throughout the book, but I wasn’t a fan of the few letters Ginny wrote to her best friend back home. They weren’t frequent, so they jarred my reading. Also unsettling was going from third-person point of view where Ginny’s emotions aren’t all that clear to a letter where she lays her heart out. I found myself wanting the emotions to be more woven into the text instead of stuck in those letters.

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Did you like this book? Try:

• Looking for Alaska
• An Abundance of Katherines—My rating: 4/5
• Girl at Sea—My rating: 2.5/5
• More Recommendations from LibraryThing

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Title: Revision & Self-Editing: Techniques for Transforming Your First Draft into a Finished Novel
Author: James Scott Bell
Category: Nonfiction
Rating: 5/5
Why I Read It: I was looking for a practical guide to editing my first draft.

Summary: A national bestselling author and writing teacher lays out a plan for revising your novel’s first draft.

Review: I wish I could roll up all the tips in this book into some Silly Putty and stick it directly on my brain.

So far, I’ve flipped through about 20 different revision books. Most of those books were too abstract in their advice, and some others (while excellent) were focused on line editing. I needed a book to guide me on the macro edit—pacing, character development, setting, voice, and so on.

This book has all that and more. Including a revision checklist at the back. I am a checklist sort of a girl. (Sometimes in the morning, while I’m in bed waiting for my daughter to wake up next to me, I’ll start composing my checklist for the day in my head and then obsessively repeat the items over and over so I don’t forget them before I get to paper & pen.)

The advice in this book is practical, with writing exercises that aren’t just busy work. It’s clear they’ll get you further along on your revision goals.

As the author suggests, I’m going to expand the checklist to include all the other nuggets throughout the book I want to be sure to check for. But I’m out of the school mindset, so I’ve otherwise drawn a blank on how best to absorb all this wonderful knowledge.

Here’s one tip I plan to use soon:

Then, after some cooling off, produce a summary of the novel. A synopsis, but one’s that subject to change. Because you’re going to try to make it better and deeper. You may even change it significantly.

The summary should be no more than 2,000 to 3,000 words, and you should produce several versions. …If you produce several of these summaries, and finally fine-tune the best version, the method will give you a roadmap for an organic second draft.

You can bet I’m going to read the rest of the Write Great Fiction series.

Your Turn: What tricks do you use to learn and internalize new things from a book you’re reading?

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