Book Review- Kissing Shakespeare by Pamela Mingle

Title: Kissing Shakespeare

 Author: Pamela Mingle

Series:  N/A

Published:  14 August 2012 by Random House

Length: 352 pages

Warnings: suggestive situations 12+

Source: Netgalley

Summary (abridged): Miranda has Shakespeare in her blood: However, after her disastrous performance in her school's staging of The Taming of the Shrew, Miranda skips the opening-night party. All she wants to do is hide.  Fellow cast member, Stephen Langford, has other plans for Miranda. When he steps out of the backstage shadows and asks if she'd like to meet Shakespeare, Miranda thinks he's a total nutcase. He wants Miranda use her acting talents and modern-day charms on the young Will Shakespeare. Without her help, Stephen claims, the world will lose its greatest playwright.  Miranda isn't convinced she's the girl for the job. Why would Shakespeare care about her? And just who is this infuriating time traveler, Stephen Langford? Reluctantly, she agrees to help, knowing that it's her only chance of getting back to the present and her "real" life. What Miranda doesn't bargain for is finding true love . . . with no acting required.

Review: Miranda has spent her life growing up with Shakespeare. So when Stephen, boy from her drama group, offers her the chance to travel back in time, meet William Shakesperae and keep him on a writing path. This leads to her taking on the disguise of Stephen’s sister, Olivia (but for purposes of continuity, she will only be known as Miranda throughout this review),  dodging religious fanatics of Elizabethan times, and as the title suggests, kissing Shakespeare

Time travel stories involving real people are always nice to read. I wasn’t sure if I’d love it, but the premise was interesting to fans of romance, historical, and Shakespeare alike.

It starts off really quickly, which is nice. We get an establishing scene of Miranda working playing Kate in her school’s production of The Taming of the Shrew, but it’s obvious that this isn’t the point. Miranda’s love for Shakespeare’s plays is revealed as we go further on, saving boring character building and working it into the plot.

It’s really fun how Miranda and Stephen have to try not to be discovered having dropped in from modern day America. Miranda’s reactions to actually being in 1581 are understandable, and even more understandable are Miranda’s actions when adjusting to life in the 14^th century and when she is told that she’ll be seducing Shakespeare. I wouldn’t want to be pulled back to a time when women are seen as possessions or suddenly be told to chat up my idol either.

Miranda develops a bit. She becomes more mature over the course of Kissing Shakespeare,  and a bit more interesting. The other characters are also good, Stephen and William especially. The other supporting ones are interesting, but not that great.

The plot is good, without being overshadowed  by the romance, even if that was part of the main plot. Shakespeare being tempted to join the church was a major part. It wasn’t all that interesting though. This is a rare book where I enjoy the romance more than anything else.

I found it really cute seeing Miranda and William work together on The Taming of the Shrew, with him telling her the early version and she telling him the lines that she’s learnt, hundreds of years later. This then creates an awkward paradox which, quite simply, makes my head hurt.  

There’s one scene in which Miranda goes off with Shakespeare, being fairly successful in her task of seducing William. And they get kind of on. and then he calls her Anne. Way to kill the mood. But it also is a nice bit of character building for him, especially as we know that he ends up marrying Anne Hathaway. It also furthers their relationship, as just friends. The romance between Stephen and Miranda is done nicely.

Overall:  Strength 3 tea to a book with good potential, but not amazing results.

Links: Amazon | The Book Depository | Goodreads | Author website |

Book Review- The End by Nora Olsen

Title: The End (Five Queer Kids Save the World)

 Author: Nora Olsen

Series:  N/A

Published:  15 December 2010 by Prizm

Length: 270 pages

Warnings: Sexual longings, not too much actually happening 12+

Source: Author

Summary : When World War Three breaks out, seventeen-year-old Julia is on a school trip to Amsterdam, while fourteen-year-old Marly is trapped in a prison for delinquent girls. They both discover magical amulets, and try their best to save themselves and those around them. But it looks like their best will not be enough, as nuclear war threatens the survival of the human race.
 On her journey home to New York, Julia is joined by three other queer teens--the mysterious and alluring Ginger; lipstick lesbian Vikki; and five-thousand-year-old Skilly, who has an amulet that grants him eternal life. When Julia and Marly meet, they are immediately attracted to each other. But romance has to take a back seat as the five friends learn the true powers of the amulets. Can they travel through time to save the world from total destruction?

Review:Skilly is sailing, Ginger and Julia are on a school trip, Marly is in prison and Vikki is out of rehab for bulimia when nuclear war looms. Fate brings them together, these teenagers (aside from Skilly, who’s thousands of years old) who have amulets blessing them with various powers. Romances quickly form, but they have other problems- an ancient goddess is rather upset with her husband and is hellbent on destroying the earth.

 It’s really nice seeing books with LGBT characters in which the main focus isn’t their sexuality/gender. We do have another plot, underneath the tangle of romances, of Muldoona plotting her destruction and our heroes trying to stop her. It’s nice also seeing a genderqueer character-the T part of LGBT is hardly ever represented. Marly becoming comfortable with sometimes not feeling like a girl, not always feeling like a boy, and sometimes feeling like “a gender free mutant with magic powers” is a development that you could easily see coming and felt natural.

In terms of sexual orientation and gender, we have a diverse range of characters. But on other counts we have a lot of variation too. Age wise, personality wise, and species wise –we have a random selection of deities from multiple cultures. Vikki I found a little boring, as she seemed a bit stereotypical and she didn’t do that much, but the others were good. Ginger is my favourite,  Marly is independent and Skilly is nice in that he’ll try things out for the rest of the team, even if it extends to living out a month again because his time travel theory wasn’t quite right.

That whole time travel thing was a little bit hard to get my head around. Not because it was time travel (I do quite well in understanding it, unless you mess it up like Stephen Moffat does in Doctor Who), but because all characters revert to the bodies that they had. In this case, our five main characters become four years younger. Leaving Marly age ten. It’s hard getting used to a ten year old heroine, when, from many books and this book too, you get used to them being a bit older. Still, ten year old Marly is a good character, even though it does take a little bit of time getting used to them.

This whole timeskip does lead to some rather awkward situations too. We have Ginger lamenting not being able to carry on a relationship with Skilly because she is now in the body of a thirteen year old, while (with his immortality amulet) he is in one of a seventeen (I think) year old. And, before the timeskip, we have a fourteen year old asking an eighteen year old really bluntly “Do you want to have sex now?” I get that they’re in a post apocalyptic environment, but they’ve only known each other two months and I don’t know what fourteen year olds Nora knows but most of us don’t want sex at our age.... I don’t like young (under sixteens) people in sexual situations. That’s something that bugs me. Aside from that, the romance is good and built up nicely.

Overall:  Strength 3 tea to a LGBT novel with a lot of action, romance, and cuteness.

Links: Amazon | Goodreads | Author website | 

Book Review- Fever by Dee Shulman

Title: Fever

 Author: Dee Shulman

Series:  Fever #1

Published:  5 April 2012 by Puffin

Length: 400 pages

Warnings: non-descript kissing, sex references, violence in gladiatorial context 12+

Source: Spinebreakers

Other info: Dee has written and illustrated many other books. This is her first for the YA audience.  On Death Books and Tea, we took part in Operation Fever. You can read an extract and see trailers here.

Summary : A fearless Roman gladiator. A reckless 21st century girl. A mysterious virus unites them . . . 152 AD. Sethos Leontis, a skilled and mesmerising fighter, is unexpectedly wounded and lies dangerously close to death. 2012 AD. Eva is brilliant - but troubled. Starting her new life at a school for the gifted, a single moment in the lab has terrifying results. An extraordinary link brings Sethos and Eva together, but it could force them apart - because the fever that grips them cannot be cured and falling in love could be lethal . . . Can love survive when worlds collide and threaten time itself?

Review: Eva is a girl who’s starting a new life at a school for gifted children. Sethos (aka Seth) is a Roman gladiatior, brought from Greece to England as a slave and forced to fight. Both come extremely close to death, and are infected by a virus. The virus is what brings them together, but it’s also what will keep them apart.

Time travelly romance isn’t something there’s a lot of, and there should be more of. I definitely like the idea, although the whole “Eva is Seth’s love from gladiatorial time” is typical and was really predictable.

There’s a whole load of research involved in this. And it showed. I think. I’m not an expert on virology and such, but everything was so well built, so detailed that either Dee researched or made everything up in crazily good proportions.

Eva and Seth are similar characters. They’re both strong and determined in their own way, and each have their own fair shares of trouble in both of their lives. Eva’s experiences  at the new school were realistic-falling in and out of friendships and getting to know her way around. She’s very clever and resourceful, and likeble. Seth is ok, and while he’s really determined to get things done, sometimes I just felt like saying to him “calm down. Don’t be so overdramatic. Slow down. Don’t expect Livia/Eva to understand everything”. The other characters were interesting and believable.

The two worlds, Roman and Modern London, were very well described, with the right atmosphere of the places being evoked. Roman London especially-you got a good idea of Seth’s ideas of the fights and the crowd hysteria and importance of  fighting for a living.

Parallon is a totally different thing. After Seth and his friend Matthias die, they don’t end up in the afterlife they believed in. Instead, there’s an almost empty London, mainly modern, where they are immortal, can do anything they want, can make things appear and such and such. They’re like gods. And then you get the little subplot about Matthias bringing people to Parrallon. It was predictable, and from the moment with the motorbike, it was kind of obvious what he’d do. I don’t think that that little subplot was wrapped up very well, if at all. Hopefully it’ll be done addressed in book 2.

Overall: Strength 4 tea to an enjoyable romance with a different spin on it.

Links: Amazon | The Book Depository | Goodreads | Book website| 

Book Review- The Future of Us by Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler

Title: The Future of Us

 Author: Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler

Series:  N/A

Published:  21 November 2011 by Razorbill in America. UK – January 5^th 2012 by Simon and Schuster Childrens’

Length: 356 pages

Warnings: sex references 13+

Source: WHSmiths

Other info: Jay Asher also wrote Thirteen Reasons Why. Carolyn Mackler also wrote the V Valentine series, as well as other things.  

Summary : It's 1996 and less than half of all American high school students have ever used the Internet. Facebook will not be invented for several more years. Emma just got a computer and an America Online CD-ROM with 100 free hours. When she and her best friend Josh log on to AOL they discover themselves on Facebook... fifteen years in the future. Everybody wonders what life has in store for them.
Josh and Emma are about to find out.

Review: Josh and Emma are your normal best friends, and have been forever. Then various things happen and Josh joins AOL. Emma takes the disc, fires it up, and finds her Facebook profile. Except there's something else. This is 1996. Facebook has not been invented yet. And the entries are dated fifteen years into the future. Armed with the knowledge of their future lives, they set around putting the gears into motion to make these things happen. Except maybe they don't. Emma and Josh soon learn what it's like to mess around with the future.

Read the premises, fell in love. What a great idea. And coming from two reputedly amazing authors, well, awesomeness was sure to come some time.

The world building is quite good. I say world building because I'd say it was an effort to fully imagine a world where hardly anyone knew how computers worked. It's amazing how easily I can imagine a world completely different such as the Victorian period or some sci-fi setting with ease, but need a little time to adjust to it being in the decade I was born.

It's quite a thought provoking book. You wouldn't think it, but it is. For example, Josh reads on his facebook page that he and Sydney end up married. Before then, he'd always thought of her as being out of his league, and it's only when he knows they'll end up married when he starts flirting with her. If you knew that in the future, something happens to you that you'd never thought would happen, would you take steps to actively bring about the event? Or stop it?

Emma does something similar, refreshing her page to see if she can change her future.   this all makes for interesting events, conflict between Josh and Emma about what's happening, and an interesting storyline.

Emma, you can understand why she'd want to change her  future, but I did find myself wanting to shout at her for playing about when she already had a good life mapped out, according to Facebook. Josh is a very down to earth character, very likeable, and I kept hoping that throughout all of Emma's messing about with time, that he got a nice future.

The ending did seem a little anti-climatic, even if I couldn't think of a better way of ending it.

I really enjoyed the dual narration. Having both Josh's and Emma's point of view on everything made it interesting and meant we didn't see it all from Emma's slightly pessimistic (towards the end) or Josh's happy view  on things.

Overall:  Strength 4 tea to an original story that worked out very well.

Links: Amazon | The Book Depository | Goodreads | Jay’s website | Carolyn’s Website

Book review: TimeRiders by Alex Scarrow

Title: TimeRiders

Author: Alex Scarrow

Source: Library

Publisher and Published: Various, various times (according to goodreads. The book is downstairs

at the moment and I'm too lazy to get it)

Warnings: Blood, cannibalist mutants, violence, mild profanity

Summary from goodreads: Liam O'Connor should have died at sea in 1912. Maddy Carter should have died on a plane in 2010. Sal Vikram should have died in a fire in 2029. Yet moments before death, someone mysteriously appeared and said, 'Take my hand ...' But Liam, Maddy and Sal aren't rescued. They are recruited by an agency that no one knows exists, with only one purpose - to fix broken history. Because time travel is here, and there are those who would go back in time and change the past. That's why the TimeRiders exist: to protect us. To stop time travel from destroying the world...

Review: Right when they were about to die, three teenagers were asked if they to go with an old man, called Foster, or die. The first one is Liam who is aboard the sinking Titanic and has 90 seconds left to live (according the same old man). So he follows the him and wakes up in New York, 2001. But of course he doesn't know that. Then we get Maddy on a plane. Which will blow up in 90 seconds. Foster really pressurises these people doesn't he? She follows too. Sadly, we aren't told about Sal's experience. They are introduced to each other etc. and we discover that Foster is from "Never-neverland". How enigmatic. They also meet their team mate, Bob, an artificial human. They assigned roles, Sal the observer, Maddy the analyst, Liam the guy who

actually gets to time travel and Bob the support unit. I think that's the end of the basic character introductions.

I like how the team are based during 9/11 to distract the attention away from themselves. It's quite an interesting concept and it's probably true, people in the local shops would be more focused on the mass destruction around them. Other aspects of the book that many people believe don't make sense actually do. Depending on what theory you use. To make sure I don't give out any spoilers, I'm going to use the concept of autoinfanticide (if you don't understand, think of the child self as the information that the antagonist needs to know to change history: what he needs to change). If you went back in time and killed yourself as a baby you would no longer exist and "you" that existed at the time you killed your child self would not exist and you would not have been able to kill yourself. The Novikov self-consistency principle agrees with this statement and says this can't possibly happen. The parallel universe/alternate timelines says you can do this, great for you. The nonexistance theory doesn't work with this book. The destruction resolution I don't think would work and temporal modification negation theory does work. The delayed effect of the shifts if a form of the delayed ripple effect.

The characters don't change much (apart from Bob. He changed a lot). I found that really disappointing as the characters need to progress in sci-fi to make it more realistic. The "Tuesdays" weren't described much which is a shame because they would have made the book more interesting. I wish that Sal had written more in her diary and the Maddy's feelings were shown a bit more. I love the idea of an alternative future (though in this case, it's the past).

Rating: 4 Really good but you need to do some research to understand some things.

Book Review- The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya vol 1 by Nagaru Tanigawa

Title: The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya 1 (aka Haruhi)

Author:  Nagaru Tanigawa

Series: The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya #1

Published: October 2008 by Yen Press

Length: 208 pages

Warnings: Fanservice, aliens, time travel etc

Other info: This has a huge fanbase, theres an anime series, theres also a set of novels behind it. This is actually one of Katy’s reviews that I said I’d post for her, but forgot.

Summary from Goodreads : Haruhi holds the fate of the universe in her hands . . . lucky for you she doesn't know it!
Meet Haruhi - a cute, determined girl, starting high school in a city where nothing exciting happens and absolutely no one understands her.
Meet Kyon - the sarcastic guy who sits behind Haruhi in homeroom and the only boy Haruhi has ever opened up to. His fate is now tied to hers.
Meet the S.O.S. Brigade - an after-school club organized by Haruhi with a mission to seek out the extraordinary. Oh, and their second mission? Keeping Haruhi happy . . . because even though she doesn't know it, Haruhi has the power to destroy the universe. Seriously.

Review:   A unique story about a boy (Kyon) who finds out that the girl (Haruhi) who sits near him in class not only is not only eccentric, but 'God' as well. To make matters worse, Haruhi doesn't know what powers she holds and unconsciously destroys the world during her bad moods. But there is hope for Kyon as ESPs, time-travelers and aliens have come to investigate Haruhi to try and solve their various problems (but then again, perhaps there isn't with the help he gets from them). The characters look younger than they are (they are 15-16 and they look 10 years old) which is a little bit off putting. However the author makes up for this by giving each character contrasting personalities and special powers (apart from Kyon, who has nothing). The SOS brigade are constantly taking part in different activities and cultural festivities that are unique to Japan which makes it engaging (and makes me jealous. I want a golden week too! XD) . Some panels are in the 'not-suggestive-but-something-like-it' category.

Overall:  Strength 4 tea for the reasons above.

Book Review- Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly

 Title: Revolution

 Author: Jennifer Donnelly

Series: N/A

 Published: October 12th 2010 by Delacorte Books

 Length: 472 pages

Warnings: Profanity, kissing, violence, drugs

 Other info: Donnelly has also written A Northern Light, The Tea Rose and The Winter Rose. Her website is here 

Summary: BROOKLYN: Andi Alpers is on the edge. She’s angry at her father for leaving, angry at her mother for not being able to cope, and heartbroken by the loss of her younger brother, Truman. Rage and grief are destroying her. And she’s about to be expelled from Brooklyn Heights’ most prestigious private school when her father intervenes. Now Andi must accompany him to Paris for winter break.
PARIS: Alexandrine Paradis lived over two centuries ago. She dreamed of making her mark on the Paris stage, but a fateful encounter with a doomed prince of France cast her in a tragic role she didn’t want—and couldn’t escape.
Two girls, two centuries apart. One never knowing the other. But when Andi finds Alexandrine’s diary, she recognizes something in her words and is moved to the point of obsession. There’s comfort and distraction for Andi in the journal’s antique pages—until, on a midnight journey through the catacombs of Paris, Alexandrine’s words transcend paper and time, and the past becomes suddenly, terrifyingly present.
Jennifer Donnelly, author of the award-winning novel A Northern Light artfully weaves two girls’ stories into one unforgettable account of life, loss, and enduring love. Revolution spans centuries and vividly depicts the eternal struggles of the human heart.

 Review: This is a story of Andi, who finds a diary of a young French girl. This French girl is Alex, who is basically child minder to Louis Charles, the son of Louis XVI. The whole plot revolves around Andi trying to find out more about Alex, Louis-Charles and what happens to them. And the diaries tell of her life during the French Revolution.

The starting few chapters are incredibly boring and slow and I don’t see what they do other than to introduce characters. This does not require the best part of seventy pages. It all starts when they find a photograph of a heart, which is said to be that of Louis-Charles. Andi wants to find out more, which leads to her going to France and finding the diary, and so on.

I liked best the diary entries- they’re well written, bring the streets of eighteenth century France to life, are well researched and give Alex her distinctive voice.

I also like the way most things come back to music-the ending especially-, which is also very well researched and interesting.

One problem I did have is language. She's in France, so she's speaking French. But I apart from the move from America to France, I wouldn’t have noticed. It doesn’t explain how she came to learn French, and how she knew it so well she knew what the diary says. Yes, this is just me being picky, but this sort of thing that I pick up on, and if it doesn’t work out, it annoys me.

I also said about the slow start. It took 70 pages for something properly interesting to happen. By this time, I was ready to give up (I normally get to page 50 of any book and decide whether I want to read on or give up), but I read on because I’d heard great things about it from booksrme-who I later discover hasn't actually read it. I'm glad I read it though, as there's a lot of description and a brilliant story.

Overall:  I give this strength 4 tea because apart from the extremely slow start, it was brilliant.