Month: August 2015

A kinda sorta update post.

Pardon me for my lack of updates lately, I’ve been a bit bogged down with preparing to start my Ph.D. program next week. I’ll be going full time, so there last minute class preps, contacts to make, professors to track down, and materials to buy. I even have to buy a parking permit. I’ll be lucky if I have two nickels to rub together by next Monday.

Realistically I am not sure how much time I will have to update this site when school starts. I know that my pleasure reading time will ultimately dwindle down to a trickle, as most of the time I’ll be highlighting and pouring over required course readings and such. It is a good thing I write a lot when I do read, as I have several dozen folders of reviews for books I’ve previously read already written in my cloud drive. So if you look to the left and the “Currently Reading” widget from Goodreads doesn’t match the last, say, five reviews I’ve given, you know why.

This is all not to say that I no longer care about this site (I do!), that I won’t honor review requests (I will!), or that I don’t appreciate the mounds of support that I already get from you guys who regularly read this site. Just know that the pace of things may change a bit around here. Please please please bear with me. Your patience is appreciated. 😉

Review: Everything, Everything

  
Review for “Everything, Everything” by Nicola Yoon (to be released in September 2015)

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

This book is damn near close to perfect.

I am in awe of first time author Nicola Yoon and her extraordinary talent. It is rare I find a YA book that I truly like, and this was one of those books. From the time I began reading this, I could not put it down. The main character we follow is Madeline, a teenage girl with an extremely rare disease (SCID, Severe Combined Immunodeficiency) that makes her allergic to everything in the outside world. She has lived completely indoors since she was young in a kind of artificial, “bubble-like” existence: filtered air, specially cooked foods, and no outside visitors. The only people she communicates with are her mother, her doctor, and Carla, her nurse. Madeline has resigned herself to her housebound fate until she glances out of her window one day and discovers a family moving in next door. She is immediately drawn to the teenage boy living there, Olly, and from there her entire world changes.

I won’t say any more about the plot here because this book will not be released until September 2015 and some of you have to wait for it. But I will say that this book was throughly engaging for me. The romance wasn’t cheesy like a lot of YA books, but completely organic and it fit perfectly in the story. There are also charts, graphs, and illustrations that added a certain special touch to the book that teens will enjoy. 

I’m giving this five stars. It’s not often that I do this, but I actually stayed up until 3:20 am on a school night finishing this, and I don’t regret a moment of it. Beautiful, beautiful book!

[I received this advanced publisher’s copy from Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.]