The Hollow? What the heck is The Hollow? Honestly, I only go out to buy books knowing what I want. Occasionally on the spur of the moment, I get something that looks and sounds really good but I usually see books recommended in peoples IMMs or on Youtube.

The day I purchased The Hollow, I was at Barnes and Nobles, strictly for coffee and no books! But my friend wanted to pick up a book for her AP class, so she can practice before the big end of the year test. I wasn’t too interested in that, and didn’t just want to wait in the coffee area all by myself, so I decided to roam around and JUST LOOK at the Young Adult books. My eye caught this book called The Hollow. Never having seen or heard about it before, I picked it up, flipped it over, and read the summary.

It was awesome!

The Hollow is about a girl named Abbey who recently lost her friends, in a mysterious way. She drowned in the river, in the cemetery, which was Abbey and Kristen’s favorite place to hang out and be together. No one knew if Kristen did it on purpose to commit suicide, or if she accidentally fell in.

Get over it! She’s faking it! She’s weird! Are just a few of the mean things Abbey was told. I couldn’t believe how rude some of the cheerleaders were to her! Her best friend just died! How can you treat her like that? She’s going through something.

Even though a lot of the kids at school were mean and rude to her, Abbey ran into a mysterious boy she’d never meet before. His name is Caspian, he has blonde hair with one black streak in it. He’s three years older than Abbey, and he enjoys drawing, reading, and freshly baked snicker doodles. At the end of The Hollow, Caspian is nothing like what you thought he was at the beginning.

He was the sweetest guy ever. Caspian was really good for Abbey, he was the one she could talk to. Seeing him was the one thing Abbey looked forward to everyday when she had nothing else left. I love Caspian and I love what he and Abbey were, whenever they were together.

I wish we could have learned more about was Caspian, and his family and what happened to him. And Kristen and a little about her past. I think the story would have connected a little bit better. But The Hollow, is only the third book in the trilogy, so there’s still plenty time for that! If you haven’t read the book, and are looking for something that makes you feel every emotion possible, you really should pick it up!

• ISBN-13: 9781416978947
• Publisher: Simon Pulse
• Publication date: 8/3/2010
• Pages: 528

I know a good percentage of you have flown at least once, and there’s a pretty good chance than some of you, while flying, were stuck sitting next to someone you would rather not be in a confined place with for hours.

This is not the case for Hadley Sullivan when rescheduling her missed flight to London to be a bridesmaid in her Dad’s second wedding. Oliver is the young man she meets in the departure lounge and he is a cheeky young Englishman heading home for an event of his own. Neither of them really wants to be headed across the globe and they find and instant connection.

The mainly black and white cover photo by Oleg Oprisco, depicts a couple kissing on a generic city street with the double exposed images of passers-by’s around them. This gives me the impression of time standing still for the smooching pair. The font of the title alerts me to the fact that it is a story of young love and there’s a red heart drawn around the couple for emphasis.

This was an incredibly sweet book. I love the idea of meeting someone nice on a flight. Someone you can spend hours talking with and not getting the feeling you’re over sharing or sticking your foot in your mouth.

It’s set over 24 hours and has an amazing amount of depth for something with only 215 pages. I was even brought to tears at one stage.

The scene structures are simplistic but they are a fantastic backdrop for the character interaction.

There is a smallish cast until the wedding scene and it works well to give the polar opposite scenarios of isolation and privacy, compared to the crowded insanity of the celebrations.

Hadley is someone I can certainly relate to, and I was right with her through her emotional transitions of trepidation, anger, sadness, and joy. It feels mean to say, but she got on the plane as a brat and stepped out of the hotel a young woman. That’s some serious character development.

It is a challenge to find something out of place, but at a push I think there weren’t enough interruptions by the flight attendants. (See, it’s nothing)

I would say the book can easily be knocked over in an afternoon and it’s a really pleasant few hours you spend observing Hadley and Oliver as they try to figure out The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight.

Release date: January 2012

Paperback 216 pages

Published by: Headline Publishing Group

ISBN: 978 0 7553 8402 0 (978 0 7553 9217 9)

Follow Jennifer on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jenesmith

Presenting the initial Courtney Crumrin miniseries in a new digest-sized format. Courtney’s parents have dragged her out to a high-to-do suburb to live with her creepy Great Uncle Aloysius in his spooky old house. She’s not only the new kid in school, but she also discovers strange things lurking under her bed.

Paperback, 128 pages

Published May 28th 2003 by Oni Press

ISBN  1929998600 (ISBN13: 9781929998609)

I loved this story! Courtney’s courageous, smart and has a lot of spunk. If you’re looking for something that’s got a little bit of a creep factor, but enjoyable even for younger readers, I recommend this one.

This story opens up with Courtney and her parents moving to a posh part of town to live with their Uncle Aloysius. In the opening pages Aloysius is described to us by a gremlin creature, Butterworm, who is peeking through the windows. He tells us about the creatures and experiments that he has seen going on inside, and that moving into this particular house was probably not the best thing for Courtney and her parents.

From the first night Courtney has problems sleeping. She keeps seeing shadows and movements in the dark, and is, in no time, exploring the house – rooms that she was explicitly told not to go into by her Uncle.

She eventually discovers books in the library that are written in different languages. Picking one out, she begins to interpret some spells that may get the kids at school to like her more and stop beating her up for her money.

It works.

She takes on bullies, loved-spelled boys, Gremlins, changelings that smoke, drink whiskey and then try to auction off human children in the Goblin Market. From talking cats to dangerous creatures in the night, Courtney takes them all on, and barely breaks a sweat.

A classmate goes missing, baby’s are stolen, Courtney practices magic, and a doppleganger tries to take over her life. I really enjoyed all the adventures that Courtney goes through. Not only does she roll with the punches, in the end she saves the day. I cannot wait to read more of Courtney’s stories.

Summary:

Once there were three. Three friends who loved each other—Jenna, Locke, and Kara. And after a terrible accident destroyed their bodies, their three minds were kept alive, spinning in a digital netherworld. Even in that disembodied nightmare, they were still together. At least at first. When Jenna disappeared, Locke and Kara had to go on without her. Decades passed, and then centuries.

Two-hundred-and-sixty years later, they have been released at last. Given new, perfect bodies, Locke and Kara awaken to a world they know nothing about, where everyone they once knew and loved is long dead.

Everyone except Jenna Fox

This is a sequel to The Adoration of Jenna Fox if you have not yet read that book, beware this review will contain spoilers.

260 years after leaving Jenna’s story we travel across what used to be the United States to the Eastern states. We find out that unbeknownst to Jenna’s father, one of his co-workers kept a copy of Locke and Kara’s information. They have been brought back to life to be visual examples of Dr G’s business. He keeps them hidden away in his mansion and displayed for wealthy businessmen to come and admire for the technology. Even though they are illegal specimens, it is known (because of Jenna) that it is possible, medically to reconstruct so much of the body with only the minimum cell samples. Early in the story Kara is unsatisfied with their current situation, and now that she has heard that Jenna is still alive, she has some questions that need answering, and they decide to escape.

This side of the story is told from Lock’s perspective. He is concerned about Kara’s determination to find Jenna, she has mysterious and dangerous thoughts in her head and he fears for Jenna’s safety. He is also still deeply in love with Jenna and desires them to all be reunited.

I found the author’s vision of the future in this book was very interesting. The United States being separated into two sections run by politics. The Republicans and the Democrats and you can only move to a different side of the country every 8 years. There are also added factors of the nomads in which she refers to as “land pirates” as well as super fast moving cars, trains and more intelligent robot/cyborg beings. It is highly imaginative and yet a believable and interesting look of what could be possible for our future.

My mind had a hard time grasping some of the emotions that occur within Jenna, Locke and Kara. Most of them would include huge spoilers for you, but mostly I felt it  hard to grasp onto how many emotions they have for being reanimated people. They not only experience human emotions of hate, anger, love, guilt and depression but it’s the level in which they “feel” these emotions I had a hard time understanding. It’s all very dramatic and overly emotional even for humans. Also, in the first book we are also introduced to the fact that Jenna must eat only a bag of nutrients only every couple of hours to sustain her system, but in this continuation of the story, I don’t remember there being any emphasis on the nutrients supplements, even in one part it refers to Lock eating off plates, but I don’t remember being filled in with any information or changes in the technology that allowed them to be able to handle real food.

The narrator for the audio book did a great job. There were times that I had to remind myself that this is somebody being reanimated after centuries and very confused about what was going on in the world because there were huge sections of just information about what he was thinking and “feeling”. He is in a body that is similar to the one he has always known, but doesn’t seem to be quite the same or work the same way.

Although there is a lot of traveling from the East coast to the West coast and we get to meet a lot of different types of dangerous people along the way 80% of the story is just Locke’s thoughts about what is happening, or did happen to him in the past. The narrator for the audiobook does a really good job of voicing the side characters as well. It is an interesting and unique twist to a science fiction look into our futures. How one day the advances in medicine and technology can bring us so close to being able to live for centuries at a time and still maintain our most basic of human emotions and instinct to survive.
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Listen to an audio sample.

This was my first accepted request from Netgalley.com; (http://www.netgalley.com/ ) so I was excited to delve in and experience Vee’s story for myself. Here’s the blurb…

“Sylvia “Vee” Bell hates that, like her deceased mother, she has narcolepsy. But this embarrassing condition is nowhere near as bad as what happens during these episodes: when Vee passes out she actually slides into somebody else’s conciousness and experiences the world through that person’s eyes. This is how Vee finds herself in the head of a killer, standing over a classmate’s slashed and murdered body.

When another cheerleader turns up dead, Vee realizes that someone is killing off her sister’s friends. Suddenly everyone is a suspect, and Vee finds herself enmeshed in a terrifying web of secrets, lies and danger. She must face up to the fact that she can trust no one-not even the family and friends she thought she knew.”

As it was an electronic uncorrected proof, I don’t have a cover to respond to, but judging by the options I can see on goodreads, both the UK and the US covers are going to be beautiful.  Here, take a look.  http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9542582-slide

I tore through this book in less than 24 hours and I felt it was authentically respectful to readers.

The characters are anything but stereotypical, and I am in awe of how multifaceted and well thought out each of them are.

My favourite character is Zane, without giving away spoilers; he’s an incredibly unpredictable dark horse, with a good heart. My least favourite character is Vee’s father. He’s so preoccupied that Vee is forced to practically give up her childhood to be the emotional rock for her sister. That’s just not right.

Jill Hathaway appears to have a way with bringing up touchy subjects such as suicide, binge drinking, and bullying, so as to create a non-judgemental playing field. Her characters are the ones with the moral compass. We are allowed to make up our own minds how these things make us feel. Things just are the way they are, like it or lump it in a very non-preachy manner.

The plot is thick and juicy, making the reading process quite enjoyable.  Her use of imagery plonks you right into Vee’s head and has you galloping right along with her in first person. You can’t possibly know a person until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes and I can’t wait to walk another mile in Vee’s.

Hardcover, 256 pages

Expected publication: March 27th 2012 by Balzer + Bray for HarperCollins

ISBN 139780062077905

http://jillscribbles.blogspot.com/