The Pull of Gravity: Review

Title: The Pull of Gravity

Author: Gae Polisner

Release Date: May 2011

Published By: Farrour, Straus, and Giroux

Pages: 208

Goodreads Rating: 4.00 stars

Review: While Nick Gardner's family slowly falls apart, his best friend Scooter is dying. His last wish is that Nick and their strange classmate Jaycee deliver his prized copy of Of Mice and Men to the father that abandoned Scooter as a baby. There's just one problem, though - no one's heard from the Scoot's father in years. Guided by Steinbeck's wisdom and their own tentative friendship, Nick and Jaycee set out on a journey that just might fix - or destroy - everything.

THE PULL OF GRAVITY is a sweet and touching read, focusing around Nick and Jaycee as they struggle to make sense of life. Both have their problems, and their ways of confronting and grappling with the issues they face are admirable and heart-warming. There's both laughter and tears present in this novel, from the sarcastic witticisms of Jaycee to the hard-hitting obstacles they come up against.

One aspect that I truly loved was simply how well fleshed-out the characters were. A book like this has a concept that's certainly been done many times before, and in order to make it unique, there has to something different. In this case, it was the depictions of the characters. The individual personalities of Jaycee and Nick felt real, and their responses to the problems plaguing them were honest.

However, I did wish that either the romance was handled a little differently or that there simply wasn't one at all. It seemed to come out of nowhere, which bothered me, and so I couldn't really relate to the love between them. Perhaps if it developed a little more slowly, I could have bought into more and have had a better reading experience. As it was, though, I think I would have preferred to just see their friendship grow.

All in all, THE PULL OF GRAVITY is a short but lovely read examining two lives brought together in the face of their varying hardships. I particularly enjoyed reading about how much Nick grew as a character by the end of the novel, and although the romance was not exactly my favorite part of the book, the wonderful cast of characters made up for it. This is a book for anyone who enjoys a nice, touching contemporary coupled with a journey of sorts.

Waiting on Wednesday (on Thursday)

Happy late Independence Day, everyone! This is my Thursday blog post sneakily masquerading as a Waiting on Wednesday (shh...). Although it's too late for me to participate in the official meme, I wanted to share a book I'm anticipating anyway.

Let the Sky Fall by Shannon Messenger. Vane Weston should have died in the category five tornado that killed his parents. Instead, he woke up in a pile of rubble with no memories of his past—except one: a beautiful, dark-haired girl standing in the winds. She's swept through his dreams ever since, and he clings to the hope that she's real.

Audra is real, but she isn't human. She's a sylph, an air elemental who can walk on the wind, translate its alluring songs, even twist it into a weapon. She's also a guardian—Vane’s guardian—and has sworn an oath to protect him at all costs.

When a hasty mistake reveals their location to the enemy who murdered both of their families, Audra has just days to help Vane unlock his memories. And as the storm winds gather, they start to realize the greatest danger might not be the warriors coming to destroy them, but the forbidden romance growing between them. 

Let the Sky Fall releases March 2013. I'm normally not a big fan of paranormal romance but I approve of the girl being the guardian and also THE COVER LOOK HOW PRETTY.

What do you think of this book? What are you waiting on this... uh... Thursday?

Fair Coin: Review

Title: Fair Coin

Author: E. C. Myers

Release Date: March 2012

Published By: Pyr

Pages: 285

Goodreads Rating: 3.53 stars

Review: Ephraim Scott is horrified when he comes home to see his mother collapsed from a suicide attempt because she claims she saw his dead body at the hospital. Among his dead double's belongings, he finds a coin. With a single flip, his mother changes from an alcoholic to a model mother, but the more flips he makes, the more things change... and not always the way he wants them to. The coin can give him anything he wants, if he learns to control its power before his luck runs out.

I thought FAIR COIN would be more or less your typical magic wishes novel, where the protagonist learns that his original life situation was better than making so many changes and so on and so forth. However, I ended up being pleasantly surprised at the rather unique (and science fiction-esque) explanation behind the "magic wishes". It was well-explained, believable, and very original compared to explanations I've seen in other books.

It was unique not just in its concept but also in its cast of characters. Each character was fully developed and original, particularly the entire scenario concerning one of the characters, Nate. Of course, I won't go into it in order to avoid spoilers, but he was particularly complex in a good way. In general, the characters felt real, as if they are captured personalities stuck on a page and could walk off at any moment.

All in all, FAIR COIN was a suspenseful and intriguing science fiction novel that takes a new spin on an old concept. From the un-put-down-able storyline to the well-developed cast of characters, this is a book for anyone who doesn't usually enjoy science fiction or just wants to read something with an interesting concept behind the plot.

Too Many Books

Can such a thing be possible? Of course not :) But what I mean by the heading of this post is reading too many books at once.

Now that it's summer, I have not only more free time but also a great deal of summer reading in addition to my regular reading to accomplish. As a result, I am somehow juggling five books at once, which at first I thought I would not be able to handle.

Surprisingly, though, I haven't found it to be that confusing, perhaps because some of the books are nonfiction and the novels are distinguishable enough that I don't overlap the books in my mind at all.

What about you? Do you have problems reading too many books at once? Do you prefer just reading one book at a time without any interruptions from other books?