As I Wake by Elizabeth Scott

Ava wakes up in a house she doesn't know, into a life she doesn't recognize. Everyone is a stranger, and Ava can't shake the odd feeling that she's not who they say she is. Though she struggles to make out the memories that begin to resurface they're of a different life entirely--one filled with danger. Ava doesn't know what to make of these visions in which she and familiar-faced friends play very different, and very deadly, roles. But when Morgan appears--the one boy able to step from her memories into her reality--the high stakes and ultimate sacrifices of eternal love become the fiercest truth of all.

Rating: 2.5 stars at the most.

Loved the cover though :D

This review will have a few spoilers, but I can't do a review without them.

This book was an interesting one, and I, personally, hated it. The plot was incredibly original though, and I gave it an extra star for that. But the rest of the book was awful, the action was hard to follow, and it took me a long time to get interested.

I actually read this book twice, because the first time I had absolutely no clue what was happening, the plot was jumpy, and I mostly skimmed over it. When I forced myself to pay better attention, it made more sense, but I still found myself disappointed.

So you have Ava, who wakes up in a room, then wanders outside. For no reason other than she likes open doors better than closed ones. The she blacks out and wakes up again in a hospital with a hysterical woman screaming 'OhGod' over and over again. Apparently this woman, Jane, is her mother. She doesn't remember who she is, and she doesn't remember her mother, friends, crush, or anyone else.

Then she starts having strange dreams, where she stalks this number, 56-412, who is apparently a guy. His name is Morgan, but she doesn't call him that until about the second half of the book, although you know it's him. She can't see him while she's stalking him, only hear him.

After listening to him for a while, she meets him, and oh, the insta-love. Spoiler alert here, Morgan came to her attic place to through all her stuff outside and get her killed, but he doesn't because she said, and I quote, "Hello" to him. And he didn't think that would happen.

Ava's character annoyed me, she didn't care about anyone but herself. She would lie occasionally to please her mother, but the rest of the time she just went along and made no effort to appease with her friends.

Morgan was nice. I like Morgan, sure he was a bit creepy, but he went through great efforts to find Ava, who (Spoiler) ends up killing him.

I though Sophy, one of Ava's friends, would play a bigger part, mostly because of her venomous attitude toward Ava and the power-hungry personality she had, but she ended up being just a nasty girl. Olivia was a bit weird, but sweet. She had a crush on Greer, the other friend of Ava's, but Greer never noticed. I liked Greer, she stood up for Olivia when Sophy was being annoying and power hungry and I admire her for that, and she seemed to me like the leader Sophy wasn't.

Clementine was a stupid villain. She was just trying to protect Morgan, she wasn't trying to kill anyone or take over the world, she was just an overprotective (Spoiler) grandmother and I couldn't blame her. It hinted at her being a cruel woman before, but I had no evidence she had ever killed anyone. I found no reason to hate her, she was just trying to keep her grandson from running away with some low class girl who was going to get him killed.

The book was one you either loved or hated, and I hated it. I give it one star for the cover, and another for originality, but I hated the book. It was one of the worst I've ever read.

xxAvalon

The Iron King by Julie Kagawa

Megan Chase has a secret destiny--one she could never have imagined... Something has always felt slightly off in Meghan's life, ever since her father disappeared before her eyes when she was six.  She has never quite fit in at school...or at home.  When a dark stranger begins watching her from afar, and her prankster best friend becomes strangely protective of her, Meghan senses that everything she's known is about to change.  But she could never have guessed the truth--that she is the daughter of a mythical faery king and is a pawn in a deadly war.  Now Meghan will learn just how far she'll go to save someone she cares about, to stop a mysterious evil no faery creature dare face...and to find love with a young prince who might rather see her dead than let her touch his icy heart.

Stars: 5

I was incredibly surprised with this book. When I first saw it I thought nothing of it, it didn't interest me in the least. But after stumbling upon a few good reviews on it, I decided, hey, why not give it a go.

The beginning didn't impress me, it was so...depressing. Meghan, the main character, is ignored by her family except her four year old brother, humiliated in school--twice... is constantly made fun of for her rough lifestyle, gets left out in the rain, and she only has one friend. It was depressing, and I couldn't help but wonder if anything good was going to happen in this poor child's life.

But, after the beginning things got considerably more interesting. Things start getting weird when her prankster best friend, Robbie, starts acting protective and dark around her. Then her brother is 'attacked' by her dog, Beau, although he claims Beau was protecting him from the dark man in his closet.

As if this weren't enough, she comes home after being passed out in a nurses office to find her mother covered in blood, and her brother, Ethan, saying she slipped. When her step-father gets home, he takes her to the hospital, and Meghan is left alone with Ethan. Ethan gets very hungry, and upset that she won't get him food bites Meghan's leg. Right then, her friend Robbie comes in, and that, my friend, is where the truly strange things start happening.

 I hate books that move along the storyline to quickly, and what I hate worse is books that make dramatic changes quickly, for no reasons. I have read both these kinds of books, and I am extremely pleased to say this was not one of them. The romance was beautiful, not to much, and yet there was some in it. There were no random things out of place, everything worked it's way into the story.

It ended in a cliffhanger! Well, not a huge one, but one none the less, and now I'm dying to get my hands on The Iron Daughter, next in the series!

I am a huge fan of this book and am super-psyched to read the next one.

TOODLES

xxAvalon

Eve & Adam-Michael Grant and Katherine Applegate

In the beginning, there was an apple.   And then there was a car crash, a horrible, debilitating injury, and a hospital. But before Evening Spiker could regain consciousness, there was a strange boy checking her out of the hospital and rushing her to Spiker Biopharmaceuticals, her mother's research facility. Once there, Eve has to heal, and cope with an eerie isolation only interrupted by her overbearing mother, a strange group of doctors, and the mysterious boy who brought her there.   Just when Eve thinks she will die--not from her injuries, but boredom--her mother gives her a special project: Create the perfect boy.    Using an amazingly detailed simulation that is designed to teach human genetics, Eve starts building a boy from the ground up: eyes, hair, muscles, even a brain, and potential personality traits. Eve is creating Adam. And he will be just perfect...won't he?

So Eve is your typical daughter of a multimillionaire mother who is never there and a father who was killed in a car wreck. Your typical unhappy rich girl. But then she gets in a car wreck and  everything changes.

A young man, Solo, as he calls himself, is sent by Evening's mother to take her out of the hospital and into her Biopharm. facility, where she is working on a miracle healing product.

Eve wakes up, and not being able to leave, due to her injuries, gets very bored with her wanderings through the facility. So in order to please her, her mother gives her a special project to work on creating the perfect human being, who she names Adam. But then things get complicated, and she finds out a few very disturbing secrets about her family, as well as which side Solo really is on.

Rating: 2 stars

To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. I expected this book to be where the girl would create the boy and together they would fight whatever bad guy needed to be taken down, while she finds out more about the person she created, blah, blah, blah. I would have been at least satisfied with that, but this was a complete disaster.

In the beginning of the book, Evening is thinking about some apple when she gets in the accident. She knew she should be focusing on the road, but she couldn't stop thinking about the apple. Now, this would have made more sense if the apple came in later in the story, but nope it was apparently just a very memorable apple. Another thing I hated about this book is, Adam doesn't even come to life until the end, which I was not expecting at all. Here Eve and Solo are developing this relationship, while Adam is still being created, there is no room for him to fit in to make a love triangle.

Onto the characters. I found Eve a very unlikable girl. She was stuck up, rich, and got everything she wanted and had a fit if she didn't get it. It gets worse with her almost instant swooning over Solo, and later her total melt down when Adam came to life. She didn't spend to much time thinking about personalities, it was all about looks for this girl which got really annoying when it came to romance and such, everything felt so empty.
 
Then Solo comes in. Everyone thinks he works for Terra (Eve's mother) but instead he works for some rebel company who doesn't like Terra and he's trying to get evidence that she's doing bad things, and he hit a jackpot. But as usual, his insta-feelings for Eve make him stay. (UGH!) Which is really stupid because they've only known each other for a few weeks, and he's been wanting to get Terra thrown in jail since his parents died. Solo himself is a very brash and unlikeable character with an over-macho reaction to everything. In the first couple of chapters, while Eve is still unconscious, he checks her out. Which wouldn't be that bad, except he thinks she's checking him out while she's unconscious.

The book, all in all, was awful. It had little to no action, poorly crafted romance, and an unsatisfying ending. The mystery was something you could guess at halfway through the book, the characters were oblivious despite obvious reasoning, and the only character I like was the cold hearted mom, because at least she knew where she stood with everything. It was one of those books where I looked to see how close I was to the ending because everything about it was just irritating me.

xxAvalon

The Dark Light-Sara Walsh

Stars: 4.5

Mysterious lights have flickered above Crownsville for as long as Mia can remember. And as far as she's concerned, that's about the only interesting thing to happen in her small town. That is, until Sol arrives. Mia's not one to fall for just any guy, but she can't get intense Sol--or the brilliant tattoo on his back--out of her mind.  Then Mia's brother goes missing. Mia's convinced that Sol knows more than he's sharing. But getting close to Sol means reevaluating everything she once believed to be true. Because Sol's not who Mia thought he was--and neither is she.

Mia is having a normal life in her boring little town of Crownsville when all of the sudden, children start disappearing. Not just in her town, but some of the surrounding ones as well, and her brother happens to be in the age area of the children they are  taking. It doesn't help her that she has to go to school, work, have a social life, and take care of her brother by herself because her only living family is a drunkard and rarely returns home sober, if he returns home at all.

Then Sol shows up.  A hunk with an immediately apparent bad attitude, Mia and some of her friends can't help but wonder if he's tied to the missing children.

While at the beach one day, Mia and her friends see Sol walking along shirtless, and whoa are they surprised to see the huge tattoo on his back, but Mia's reaction is a bit different. She's seen the tattoo somewhere else, that being on her brothers ankle. Oh, was it a surprise to find her brother went missing soon after that, could Sol really be tied with his disappearance?

As soon as I saw this on the shelf, I knew I had to read it. Although, I have to admit, I never expected it to go where it did, and I am grateful for that. I am really astonished at how original this plot was, no angels, no werewolves, no vampires, no ghosts even. The demons were an exception, seeing as the entire story wasn't about them.

The protagonist, Mia, is kind of well, a mean person. She has no idea of the real circumstances of her or her brother's situation, and so she puts it upon herself to go and screw everything up. I admire her determination to get her brother back, but I suppose it's understandable considering he's the only real family she's got.

Another thing I love about Mia, is she's a quick learner. Not unrealistically quick, but it's nice not to have a dirt slow pathetic main character. I've had enough of those. She gets the concept, and while she makes a few mistakes, she doesn't do anything without a reason.

Onto Sol. I was expecting Sol to be a kick-ass hero, yet still a jerk. He wasn't. He was actually very protective of Mia, and very rarely rude or disrespectful. He was like the unsung knight in a t-shirt and jeans. But Sol won't ever let Mia see him fight, which plays out to be a very big deal in the end, cause he's got a few tricks on his back. I don't know if that was a spoiler, but hint hint!

One of my favorite things about this book is the pacing of it. The action was perfectly timed out out, and (Thank the Lord) there was no instant love going on.

The only thing I didn't like about this book was when her father came on. Her father, who abandoned her, was trying to make things right with her, and only after he saves her does she forgive him. Seems a bit like it was a thank-you-for-saving-me kind of forgiveness rather than a I-forgive-you-for-what-you-did-and-let's-be-friends kind of thing. You know, the kind of forgiveness that lasts about a month before everything goes back to the way it was.

All in all, I really enjoyed this book and would recommend it a thousand times over. :D

xxAvalon

My First Post :D

So, I want to be a book reviewer so feel free to read my stuff :D I'm not exactly sure what to say, but hopefully I'll have my first review up soon!!! I love to read and write, and my dream is to become a book editor. And...yeah, that's about all for now, hope you enjoy my reviews!

xxAvalon