book #2: Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins
Reason for reading: someone recommended it to me as a good YA book.
quote: “For the two of us, home isn't a place. It's a person. And finally we're home."
length: 372 pages
genre: young adult
rating(out of 10 stars): 6.5
summary: Anna was looking forward to her senior year in Atlanta, where she has a great job, a loyal best friend, and a crush on the verge of becoming more. So she's less than thrilled about being shipped off to boarding school in Paris-until she meets Etienne St. Clair. Smart, charming, beautiful, Etienne has it all . . . including a serious girlfriend.
But in the City of Light, wishes have a way of coming true. Will a year of romantic near-misses end with their long-awaited French kiss?(from amazon book description)
review: okay, i really liked this book. it was a really good book that i'd recommend to everyone. it was well written and wasn't decorated as anything other than what it is - a young adult book. it's about teenagers being friends, navigating through life, falling in love. i enjoyed this book, i couldn't put it down. it's not good in that 'omG!! life changing' way, it's good in that 'oh, i need something fluffy to read way'.
something i dislike about this book though is the title - 'Anna and the french kiss', it's so silly and immature. i don't understand how you'd finish writing your book and decide to call it 'anna and the french kiss'. because of the title, i could not read it at school, i only read it in the cover of my own home.
also, tiny things bugged me about this book. while the girl lived in france, she was learning how to conjugate -er verbs in french. i wish the author had done more research, she mistook passe simple endings for passe composer endings and it kinda bugged me through out the book. also, towards the end, the characters were always crying, i couldn't keep track of who was crying. in fact, the more i type this, the more i think i should give this book a 6.
would i recommend it? totally, despite the little things, i still loved it. it was a good read.
book #3: 'The Kite Runner' by Khaled Hosseini
reason for reading: i browse through books on amazon all the time and it had a really good rating on amazon, so i decided to order it and read.
quote: “I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.”
“The problem, of course, was that [he] saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and what was white. You can't love a person who lives that way without fearing him too. Maybe even hating him a little.”
length: 324 pages
genre: Historical Fiction
rating(out of 10 stars): 8.5
summary: The Kite Runner follows the story of Amir, the privileged son of a wealthy businessman in Kabul, and Hassan, the son of Amir's father's servant. As children in the relatively stable Afghanistan of the early 1970s, the boys are inseparable. They spend idyllic days running kites and telling stories of mystical places and powerful warriors until an unspeakable event changes the nature of their relationship forever, and eventually cements their bond in ways neither boy could have ever predicted. Even after Amir and his father flee to America, Amir remains haunted by his cowardly actions and disloyalty. In part, it is these demons and the sometimes impossible quest for forgiveness that bring him back to his war-torn native land after it comes under Taliban rule.
review: i don't know where to start with this book. i need to collect my thoughts. i liked this book, i didn't love it. i thought for a first book, it was excellently written. really, Khaled is an amazing writer but at times, i think he compensates. some places in the book i felt like he was telling me what he wanted me to see, the things he wanted me to notice, he wasn't letting his story tell itself. also, i knew exactly what was going to happen before it did. i predicted everything right before he made his move, don't get me wrong, it was still fascinating when i actually got to the reveal but it deducted points from the book. i started this book late last night and finished this morning because it was engrossing. it's not the type of book you start and want to let go the first half but after a while, it simply draws out, after a while, you just want it to end.
when he talked about his childhood, it had you flipping pages, he paints vivid pictures and takes you on a journey around his neighborhood, around his childhood but once he grows up you stop taking that journey with him. once he loses his innocence, you absolutely lose your trust in his narration, that's the thing with the first person narration of this book. i feel like an omniscient narrator would have done it justice.
also, i found some of his writings to be cliche but he has some pretty unique stuff that more than makes up for it, i felt giddy reading the first half of this book, so many quotables, so many things to steal, so much good use for words.
nonetheless, i really enjoyed reading this book and it stayed on the new york times best selling list for about 2 years and it has such fantastic reviews. even if you're not interested, read it just to have an opinion on it because this is the few middle eastern book settings out there, read it because it's relevant in modern literature, read it for the first half of the book, it more than makes up for the rest of the book.
would i recommend this book? absolutely, i enjoyed it. and i'll definitely will be reading his second book soon.
let me know of any book you think i should read. i already put all of the ones recommended last post on my wish list on amazon and will be ordering them sometime this week except for hunger games. i've read the hunger games and i actually own them, good books.
i hope y'all are having a good weekend? if you've read any of these books, let me know what you think about them in the comments!! don't forget to leave a recommendation.
love,
leggy.
7 comments:
You recommend the hunger games? I've been wanting to read them but with all the movie ads, I felt like the books might suck.
I hate first person narration, I can not get through books written like that. The first book I got through was Breaking Dawn but still never again.
Your review makes me want to read the Kite runner.
@shanah, i own all three books of hunger games. the books are always, always better. i loved the hunger games but i read it before all the hype so i guess that's why i loved them. never read or seen any of the twilight series, you should read the kite runner and tell me what you think of it.
You know I sometimes forget you're YA :) I wanted to say the first book's title was so immature. Well you said it too. The Kite Runner was amazing, but I think A Thousand Splendid Suns was even more awesome. One of my top ten books of all time, and I've read thousands.
I was about to recommend A Thousand Splendid Suns if you haven't read it already but Myne beat me to it. A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah is also a really good book. I've been putting off The Kite Runner for a while now; I think I should get around to it.
I really liked Anna and the French Kiss even though the title bugged me a lot. But I saw a review on Goodreads.com and it turns out that the title is waaayyyy too immature for the book. The Kite Runner is on my to read list too. I'm also doing a 100 book challenge. I did one last year and it's amazing how many wonderful and horrible books you can read in a year. Anyway, if you have a Goodreads account, you can keep track of your books and find revgiews and recommendations more easily. Good luck!
“It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime...” A good quote from the book as well.
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