October Girls: Crystal and Bone by L.C. Glazebrook

Release Date: 04/10/10

Publisher: Create Space

Pages: 264

Target Audience: Teens/Young Adults

Genre: Fantasy/Fiction

Synopsis: Five days until Halloween and all hell is about to break loose. 

And it’s all Crystal’s fault. 

Momma warned her not to consort with the dead and tried to teach her the magic spells that would close the portal to the afterlife. But Crystal doesn’t want to be a trailer-trash witch like Momma. She has dreams of going to community college and escaping the Appalachian town of Parson’s Ford. 

Her best friend Bone is only too happy to escape the afterlife and help Crystal break the rules. Bone died too young, and she’ll do whatever it takes to remain among the living. 

Then a teen movie maker comes to Parson’s Ford, and he has a very special project in mind: a horror movie starring a real ghost. The kids who watch his movies turn into brainwashed zombies. And to totally complicate matters, Crystal thinks he’s kind of a hunk, and she’s afraid her boyfriend Pettigrew only loves her because of Momma’s magic spells.

Now it’s Halloween, the night when the portal to the afterlife is widest, and somebody’s been messing with Momma’s potions. The fate of the world is in Crystal’s hands, but she hasn’t been paying attention to her lessons. And a mysterious figure in the afterlife is urging Bone to stay loyal to her own kind instead of to Crystal. 

The movie is rolling, the creatures are stirring, and the brainwashed teenagers are ready to welcome a new star from the other side of the grave. 

Crystal and Bone must overcome drama queens, coffin cuties, and mangled magic if they want to remain best friends forever—but at this rate, forever may not last much longer.

My Review:  I received this from the author in exchange for an honest review and I want to thank him for giving me the opportunity to read and review his book.

I'm going to start by saying that there were some very original ideas here that had the potential to take off and make this a great story and I really can't knock the author's originality as I haven't honestly read a book with this spin on the paranormal.  So it's a shame that myself and this book just didn't click at all, and for several reasons.

The first issue I had was simply the writing style. Though I was able to read the story and follow it through, at points it seemed to jump about a bit and I'd be left wondering how I got from one point to the next. Occasionally I'd even flick back a few pages to see if I'd missed something important.

The other major issue I had was lack of plot building in some areas. What was Bone doing that night when she got hit with the UPS truck? I mean I was able to put it together but it was never fully explained and I couldn't understand how a story based on the friendship of two girls had so little background on either themselves or the events that led Bone to be deceased. 

The other plot problem was that I also didn't grasp how the whole world ending thing was Crystal's fault. Yes, I get she was a bit lazy and didn't do her spells, but it's not like she was responsible for the evil going on elsewhere nor was she responsible for Bone's actions either. Maybe I'm a softy, but that character is a wee bit too harshly treated, by both herself and her mother.

I would have loved to have learned more about Bone's and Crystal's past in order to make more sense of their relationship and to therefore understand how Bone can do what she did and I would also have liked to have read more about the Judge since there didn't seem to be any good reason for the plan he forms or for why he does what he does.  

There was a good basis for a plot but I just didn't get along with the way it was executed. I know some people have loved this and given it five star  ratings, but for me I just couldn't like it as much as I wanted to. This is not to say that readers of this review shouldn't give it a go. If you like an original twist on horror/fantasy/humour than don't hesitate to read this, you may find you completely disagree with me.

Swirls by F.A. Hershey

Target Audience: Teens/Young Adults
Genre: Fantasy/Sci-fi/Fiction

I would like to start by thanking F.A. Hershey for the chance to review this book in exchange for an honest review. I would also like to say that though this book had some interesting ideas though I didn't take to it as much as I would like, which I will go into in more depth once I've given a synopsis:

'Sixteen-year-old Julia finds herself leaving her London life behind to move with her parents to the Amazon jungle. 
A native descendant, she becomes familiarized with her own roots for the first time in her life. However, she never imagines she is about to discover much more than her own past but also just how crowded our little planet is' 

I had a few issues with this book and I hate to write anything  negative, but I won't write a false review and compromise my integrity as an reviewer, otherwise I may as well not be reviewing.

The first issue I had was the writing. Now, I make mistakes with my grammar and spelling as much as the next person but then again, I don't have an editor so I think myself and my other fellow reviewers can be excused to some degree.  
However, there are a lot in this book, and I mean a lot. Nearly all the books I've read have had one or two in that make me chuckle a little bit, but some of the errors in this confused me some what. 
Even so, I could probably ignore spelling mistakes, if it were not the sentence structure that annoyed me a bit too, and the way things tended to jump around a lot.   I think with a good editing these sorts of errors could easily have been avoided, so it's a shame that I've had to drop my rating partially based on that fact.


The other problem I had was the lack of detail and explanation. From what I gathered from the story I understood most of it but some elements seemed to far out there with no explanation that it just didn't make sense. For example,certain characters were supposedly aliens (so to speak) but why would they chose to come to earth and why would there be people chosen to have powers like them? I just couldn't wrap my head around it completely.


The characters, for the most part were OK. I liked Julia though I found her a little contradictive. One moment she's helpless, the next she suddenly understands everything and doesn't question a thing. This is a  thing that annoys me with characters; when they have a life changing event and they just cope, with very little urging or adjustment (I can't write much more about that without posting spoilers)

The other characters, such as Lola, I loved to pieces. I thought she was genuine, pretty funny and such a good friend for the main character.

Gabriel was an awesome love interest and hey, he sounded very nice too, and played a part that was a lot bigger than rescuing the damsel in distress, which made a nice change.

The actual idea of the story was really good. The powers that Julia developed were different, fascinating and it would have been interesting to see how they developed further, and to see how well she learned to use them.  There were a few holes in the plot and I think the ending could have been a bit more descriptive as the events were stretched across two places and I didn't get to see what happened in the other place, which by the sounds of it, all the exciting things seemed to happen.

If I'm honest, and I always like to be, this has the potential to be a good YA book. It has the characters, a decent plot and a pretty good cliff-hanger/unexpected ending. The only thing stopping it from being so is a lot more revision, some rewriting of events and a few tweaks to the characters and background info. 

I'm not saying I'll run out and get the next book in the series, but I will give it a go in order to find out how the story progresses.

Maximum Ride: The Manga (Volume 1)

Target Audience: Teens/Young Adults
Genre: Manga/Fantasy/Fiction

Alas, I really wanted to love this but sadly I couldn't.
The story itself is the same as the book, for those who don't know anything about the maximum ride books here's the link to my review of the first novel: The Angel Experiment.

I didn't have a problem with the story because it wasn't altered at all, but I did have a couple of other issues.
My first niggle was that for quite a long Manga it didn't cover a lot of ground and yes I do get that it is Manga and that it is supposed to have a lot of imagery, but even so, it didn't even cover a third of the book :-(
My second niggle was that I wish the artist had read the descriptions of the characters a bit better (Fang does not have hair down to his butt in the books).

I don't think it's that I don't like Manga, but more that after reading the original novels I didn't think it was a good adaptation. I do feel that if you haven't read the Maximum Ride books and you hadn't already imagined the characters yourself or how things happened then you won't have a problem it at all.
I wouldn't say don't read this because a lot of people love Manga based on books, but it really wasn't for me. If I could give half hearts I would give this one and a half, but as it stands, it scores a two.

Betwixt by Tara Bray Smith

Target Audience: Kids/Teens
Genre: Faerie/Fantasy

To start with, i'd just like to say that i hate giving bad reviews for anything, but i wouldn't be honest if i said this was good. Don't get me wrong, some of the ideas were brilliant and there was massive potential for this to be an engaging and exciting read, but to me it just fell flat.

To start with, the story came across as confusing and disjointed, with no apparent direction and it seemed to take forever for any conclusions to be drawn, something that infuriated me to no end.

The characters themselves were another problem, there was a distinct lack of depth to them, as if the reader isn't allowed to get to know them properly or love them. The result? I really didn't care what happened to them by the end, which is unusual for me!

Also some of the things that happened weren't explained properly until further after the event, which i found distracting. I'd be reading about something else on page 200 and something and then something from 100 pages back would be explained. Not sure why really, i spent a lot of my time making 'eh?!' noises.

I do think that if this had been more organised and well written this would have been an amazing book. The idea of the story i don't have a problem with, the writing could definitely be improved upon.