“Waiting On” Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted by Breaking the Spine, that spotlights upcoming releases that we’re eagerly anticipating. My “waiting on” this week is My Life in Black and White by Natasha Friend. What can I say, I love stories where the pretty, popular girl is brought down a notch.

Title: My Life in Black and White
Author: Natasha Friend
Release date: June 28th, 2012

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and The Bookish, and this week’s theme is “Top ten books written in the past 10 years that I hope people are still reading in 30 years”. As soon as I read the topic I knew at least half the books to add to my list, and I had a lot of fun choosing the full ten. And as always, never a Top Ten Tuesday without Jellicoe Road! (Have I convinced you to read it yet?)

1. Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta
This book is beautiful and heartbreaking and so incredibly full of emotion that I find it hard to believe that anyone with a heart can read this and not fall in love with Marchetta’s writing.

2. The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily M. Danforth
Hopefully we’ll have come a long way with gay rights 30 years from now, but I still think it’s important to keep reading about how bad things used to be, and I hope that The Miseducation of Cameron Post will be looked back on as an example of how hard it used to be  to come out in a society that deemed gay as a disease that can be healed.

3. Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys
There are some things that should never be forgotten, and World War II is one of them. Between Shades of Gray is the story of a Lithuanian girl and her family who are sent to work camps in Siberia during the war, their fight to survive, and the hope that kept them all together.

4. Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver
As much as I would love to say that bullying will no longer be a problem in 30 years, I know that that’s not realistic, and so I hope that teens will keep reading Before I Fall, as it serves as a great reminder of how much you can eff up someone’s life with bullying, and how we all have the power to change things, to help people, if we only choose to do so.

5. Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher
This one is related to what I just said about Before I Fall. Thirteen Reasons Why is the most honest story about teenage suicide I have ever read, and it will really make you think about how much even small actions, small comments, can influence someone, and how you never know what someone is going through on the inside even if they look okay on the outside. Your one nasty comment can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, pushing someone to something as drastic as suicide, and you don’t want that, do you?

6. The Help by Kathryn Stockett
Another one of those things that should never be forgotten, never brushed under the carpet, is the segregation and the way black people were treated, not even being allowed to use the same grocery stores, the same buses, the same bathrooms as white people. The Help is the only book I have read that shows both sides of the story and tells things the way they were without judgement, and it is one of the most important books I have read.

7/8/9. Paper Towns / The Fault in Our Stars / Looking for Alaska by John Green
John Green is an amazing author, his books are all so genuine and real, and they deal with things important to teenagers without ever being patronizing or judgmental. I would not be surprised if Looking for Alaska will be put on the same shelf as Catcher in the Rye 30 years from now.

10. Unwind by Neal Shusterman
This book is creepy and fabulous and dystopian at its very best. What gives it staying power is that it has taken the pro-choice/pro-life debate and turned it into something unnatural and insane, and as you read it you start out thinking “this would never happen in the real world”, then realize that in a messed-up world with the wrong people in charge, it actually could.

Honorable mention: The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
This book was written in 1999, so it doesn’t really count for the topic, but I still need to mention it as it’s a book I hope people still read 10, 30, even 50 years from now. If you have not read this book yet, make sure you do before the movie (starring Emma Watson) comes out in September.

What’s on your Top Ten Tuesday list this week?
Which books would you like to see people still reading in 30 years?

Release date: 

Mia Price is a lightning addict. She’s survived countless strikes, but her craving to connect to the energy in storms endangers her life and the lives of those around her.

Los Angeles, where lightning rarely strikes, is one of the few places Mia feels safe from her addiction. But when an earthquake devastates the city, her haven is transformed into a minefield of chaos and danger. The beaches become massive tent cities. Downtown is a crumbling wasteland, where a traveling party moves to a different empty building each night, the revelers drawn to the destruction by a force they cannot deny. Two warring cults rise to power, and both see Mia as the key to their opposing doomsday prophecies. They believe she has a connection to the freak electrical storm that caused the quake, and to the far more devastating storm that is yet to come.

Mia wants to trust the enigmatic and alluring Jeremy when he promises to protect her, but she fears he isn’t who he claims to be. In the end, the passion and power that brought them together could be their downfall. When the final disaster strikes, Mia must risk unleashing the full horror of her strength to save the people she loves, or lose everything.

It’s not often that a book trailer has sold me on a book, but the trailer for Struck is completely epic, and could just as easily have been made for an awesome action movie as for a YA book. Here, watch the trailer if you haven’t already (unless you like going into a book blind, in which case don’t).

Now, you can see why I was excited about reading Struck? Luckily my high expectations were not only met but exceeded; this book is awesome.

Mia is such a normal teenage girl, except for the whole lightning addiction thing. The author has perfectly captured that feeling of addiction, how Mia knows it’s bad for her yet always craves more. I loved how she was trying so hard to stay away from trouble, and to keep her younger brother Parker out of it as well, which is not easy when two different cults are trying to recruit you! Mia had some trouble knowing who to trust, as Followers, Seekers and Jeremy all seem to have ulterior motives, some more clear than others, and she makes some incredibly stupid decisions, but they’re all based on her love for her family and her need to protect them.

Mia has some very interesting family dynamics going on. Her mom is slowly going crazy, locked up in her own bedroom watching The Prophet’s TV-show, refusing to face the world. Parker, her younger brother, is doing everything he can to help out, even when that means going against his sister’s orders. Despite all of that, they are still very much a family, and they’re about to test just how strong that relationship is. I also really liked Mia’s relationship to Jeremy, the one person who appears to be free from both cults. He’s truly trying to help her, to do what’s best for her as well as avoiding the final disaster, and yet he’s hiding something big.

On the surface Struck is an action packed doomsday story, but it’s got an underlying theme of religious brainwashing that I absolutely loved. One of the cults is being led by a strong figure called The Prophet, who predicted the earthquake, and who’s been converting Followers via his religious TV-show since before the catastrophe happened. It’s weird to see how fear, and especially fear of the unknown, makes people desperate enough to believe just about anything without questioning the logic in it, and for me that was far scarier than any storm could ever be.

The ending of Struck ties up the storyline nicely, but it leaves enough open to make me excited for the sequel, because we are clearly not done with Mia’s story yet. I liked Struck a lot, and I hope you will too!

Purchased:
Shadow Bound by Rachel Vincent

Blood Bound was probably my very favorite book read in 2011, and I was so excited to finally get to read Shadow Bound that I did not get a thing done the day it showed up in my mailbox. I hadn’t thought it possible, but it ended up being even better than Blood Bound, and I cried and screamed and laughed and was so into this book that there was no way to stop reading until I was done.

For review:
Zoe Letting Go by Nora Price (signed!)
Amelia Anne is Dead and Gone by Kat Rosenfield

Thanks to Nora Price and Dutton Juvenile!

Which books did you get this week?

Release date: 

Thomas Mackee wants oblivion. Wants to forget parents who leave and friends he used to care about and a string of one-night stands, and favourite uncles being blown to smithereens on their way to work on the other side of the world.

But when his flatmates turn him out of the house, Tom moves in with his single, pregnant aunt, Georgie. And starts working at the Union pub with his former friends. And winds up living with his grieving father again. And remembers how he abandoned Tara Finke two years ago, after his uncle’s death.

And in a year when everything’s broken, Tom realises that his family and friends need him to help put the pieces back together as much as he needs them.

Melina Marchetta is a literary genius. Jellicoe Road is one of the best books ever written. Jellicoe Road is the kind of book that could convince even the most stubborn “YA is all stupid and just for kids” supporter that YA can be both life changing and incredible literature. Saving Francesca is almost as good, but lacked some of the emotion that made Jellicoe Road so special. The Piper’s Son, the companion novel to Saving Francesca (kinda like a standalone sequel), brought that back.

Marchetta has a way with words that never fails to bring out the most sore, tender emotions we have, the ones we hide inside and never show to our friends and family, the ones that truly makes us human. The Piper’s Son is filled to the rim with these emotions, with these words. We follow Thomas Mackee and his aunt Georgie as they deal with the broken pieces of their lives, both left behind when Thomas’ uncle, Georgie’s brother, died in a subway bombing in London. They are both so heartbreakingly sad, in that way where you not only question how to fix it, you question if it ever truly can be healed.

Tom is starting to get his life back on track, but he’s still haunted by the memory of Tara Finke and the 1,5 nights he spent with her two years ago before abandoning her completely. Now he wants to get her back, but she’s moved away, and she has a boyfriend. And so he starts emailing her. I absolutely loved the emails between the two of them, because Tom shows so much more of himself to Tara than he does to anyone else, and even if her responses are all mostly snarky and uninterested, you can clearly tell she still cares about him.

It is not often that a book manages to be this good without much happening, but The Piper’s Son is really more about the characters’ daily life than anything else, and with writing as good as this it actually works. Definitely a must-read for any Marchetta fans!