Alison awakes in a strange room; she doesn’t know where she is or why she is there. She has lost almost two weeks of her life. She discovers that she has been involuntarily committed to a mental institution and is a suspect in the disappearance of a classmate. Slowly she begins to remember that she is the last person to see Tori, but her memories can’t be right…because if they are Tori dissolved right in front of her! Thus begins Alison’s journey of discovering who and what she really is. She has always hidden her ability to see the world around her in a different way, but at Pine Hills she finds out that it is a condition called synesthesia. It is the ability to see words as colors and Alison has it in spades. But that still doesn’t explain how Tori disappeared or Alison’s mental breakdown.
This was such an interesting book. You never knew who to trust throughout the entire thing and at the end I am still not sure what to believe. Was Alison a reliable narrator? She had a mental breakdown. Can we trust her version of events? I think Anderson does a marvelous job of leaving that up to interpretation. You can decide for yourself what you believe at the end. I am not going to spoil it, but I think it is up for interpretation. Is is all part of Alison’s mental issues or did it really happen as described? I think that is the most interesting part of this book. We just don’t know for sure. That and the fact that it is beautifully written. I love the descriptions of the the synesthesia. It sounds like a horrible condition to have but Alison describes it beautifully. She can literally taste and see each word and letter and they all have their own personalities.
Very interesting book that you can draw your own conclusions about.
Aria’s life in Reverie has been relatively normal. She spends her time in the Realms, a virtual world accessed via “smarteyes”, hanging with her friends and meeting up with her mother periodically. When the link to the pod that her mother is living goes dead and stays dead for over a week, Aria begins to worry and takes a risk that ultimately gets her kicked out of Reverie and all the other pods. She has effectively become an outsider and is pretty sure that she won’t survive the first day outside the pods. In the meantime, an outsider named Peregrine has managed to temporarily break into Reverie after an aether storm destroyed part of the pod. He’s in search of medicine for his young nephew, Talon, but the same catastrophe that gets Aria in trouble also prevents Perry from succeeding in his risky mission (one that is forbidden by his tribe and has been undertaken in secret). Lucky for Aria, she narrowly misses getting killed by an aether storm due to Perry’s arrival on the scene. Together they must attempt to find common ground so that they can each stay alive long enough to do what they need to do.
OK, so I’ve heard that Adam Rapp’s writing is gut-wrenching. When I read the description of this book, I figured I’d see just how disturbing it could really get. Turns out, pretty darn chilling.
I’m not entirely sure how to begin describing this book. It’s a story told through pictures, IMs, letters, scrapbook memorabilia, artwork and the occasional bit of text (emphasis on the “occasional”). The reader is left to piece together these components to determine what exactly happened in this story. I *think* it’s about a teenaged female piano prodigy who has lost her mother under tragic circumstances. I *think* she falls in love with the boy next door. She is definitely missing; last seen outside the convalescent home she’s been temporarily living in. I *think* she’s a world-renowned pianist, but that the pressure has become too much, rendering her unable to play anything other than “Chopsticks”, even at Carnegie Hall. But when I got to the end of the book, I ceased to be sure of anything. And I love that sort of thing. I immediately began flipping back through to begin reinterpreting and kept coming to different conclusions.
So, Jailbait has run away and Max Damage is continuing to attempt figuring out how to actually be a superhero after all his time as a notorious supervillian. Concerned for Jailbait’s safety while on her own, Max coerces a woman he has recently saved into wearing her costume and posing as her to prevent knowledge of Jailbait’s absence from getting out. Max also starts to realize it’s not particularly heroic to have an underage sidekick and begins to come to terms with letting Jailbait go her own way, whether she wants to or not.
It feels like I waited forever for this one to come out. Luckily, it was totally worth the wait. I loved the previous two books in this series and I love that the series isn’t linear. Bitterblue takes place a little while after Graceling ends and many, many years after Fire. Bitterblue is the daughter of King Leck, who is now deceased, which means that Bitterblue is now Queen of Monsea. The kingdom is still reeling from the brutality inflicted upon them by Leck and Bitterblue is determined to make things right. She realizes rather quickly that she’s never going to get the full story from her advisers, so she borrows her servant’s clothing and slips out into the city at night to learn more about it and the people who live there. What she discovers will only serve to make her job all the more difficult as she realizes that 35 years of brutality are not easily undone, no matter how earnest the monarch.
