Wake by Lisa McMann (CBR-III #31)

Cannonball Read III: Book #31/52
Published: 2008
Pages: 224 (13,609 total pages so far)
Genre: YA/Supernatural

Janie can see other people's dreams. That's pretty much the plot. If she's in the same room as someone dreaming, she kind of blacks out and enters enter their dream. This makes sleepovers kind of hard.

I wasn't a huge fan of this book. The premise sounded promising, but ultimately it let me down. It just wasn't interesting enough. Most of the book was the same thing: Someone falls asleep, Janie sees their dream, blah, blah, repeat.

They did throw in a love interest, which wasn't actually that nauseating for a YA novel. It was a little over dramatic (pretty accurate for most teens though), but luckily the most annoying thing about Cabel was his name.

**SPOILER**

The ending was eye-roll inducing too. Cabel is actually working undercover with the cops and they want Janie to use her dream watching skills to help them apprehend criminals. I have a HUGE problem with this.

First of all, who the heck dreams real life past events? I sure don't. Even if someone does, how can you use that as police evidence? How do they know what is fact and what is simply your brain making up stuff?

**END SPOILER**

The dreams really annoyed me. Apparently, everyone dreams every time they fall asleep. Personally, I dream a LOT, but not every time I sleep. Also, I know you have to enter into REM sleep to dream, which takes a little while. These kids are falling asleep in class and within seconds are dreaming. I was practically a professional at sleeping through high school, and I rarely dreamed there because you only get 15 minutes or so of sleep at a time and it's not a deep sleep.

Like I mentioned in the spoiler paragraph (this itself isn't a spoiler), they all also dream real life past events. EVERY TIME. I don't think I've ever dreamed real events that happened, unless they were drastically changed to be all weird and dream-like.

For instance, once I was mad at this guy so I dreamed that he turned into a baby tiger and I stomped on him. Yeah, no one dreams like that in this book. It's all straight-up, factual history dreams.

Also, the book was very choppy with almost all simple sentences or sentence fragments. I don't think I'm going to bother with the other books in this series.

The Passage by Justin Cronin (CBR-III #30)

Cannonball Read III: Book #30/52
Published: 2010
Pages: 784 (13,385 total pages so far)
Genre: Post Apocalyptic

In a post-apocalyptic future, survivors of a government experiment gone awry live their lives in fear of "virals". Virals are pretty much just your average vampire with a more interesting back story. They were created by the government using death row inmates as guinea pigs. Eventually, they escape, multiply, and wipe out most of North America (and possibly the world, but no one knows for sure).

Then we have Amy. She was taken as a little girl and given a new version of the virus (that created the virals). Almost a hundred years later, she shows up at The Colony - a village of surviving humans in California. However, Amy appears to be around fifteen years old, not a hundred. They find an electronic chip in her neck that says to return her to Colorado if she is ever found. So the journey begins (about 2/3rds into this brick of a novel).

I actually really liked this novel. The first and last thirds of the book were amazing. The middle chunk was kind of boring and slow. I think this book could have done with a little more editing, especially since it clocks in at almost 800 pages. I have no problem with long novels, but the length here didn't really seem to add to the story.

For one, the characters should have been much more vivid in my mind than they were. I was more than halfway through the book before I realized that Caleb and Hightop were the same person. Sometimes they referred to him by his nickname and sometimes by his real name. There were also too many love triangles to bother figuring out, especially since you barely knew the people involved. This problem was really bad in the middle when everyone was at The Colony, but by the last third of the book it finally focuses on one main group of characters: the group heading out to Colorado with Amy. You get a much better grasp on these characters once they're all together in a smaller group.

Overall, I definitely think this book is worth checking out if you can make you through the muddled center. The beginning and end more than make up for it.

The Things That Keep Us Here by Carla Buckley (CBR-III #29)

Cannonball Read III: Book #29/52
Published: 2010
Pages: 416 (12,601 total so far)
Genre: Post Apocalyptic

Peter and Ann divorce just before a version of the avian flu decides to wipe out half the human population. Together, along with their two daughters and Peter's female lab assistant (they of course happen to study avian flu strains), they must try and survive as everyone around them is dropping like flies and the world turns to chaos.

I found this book to be very similar to Life as We Knew It. However, I felt this one was much better written. I think I mainly liked that it was geared towards adults. Peter and Ann do have a teenage daughter, so we're not totally without the teenage perspective of losing everything you've ever known. It's just less angsty and whiny when the entire book isn't focused on a teen and their misery over not being able to see a crush.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. It wasn't exactly action-filled, but the simple survival plot really keeps your attention. It's definitely one of the better family-survives-a-global-tragedy books out there.

The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan (CBR-III #28)

Cannonball Read III: Book #28/52
Published: 2009
Pages: 320 (12,185 total so far)
Genre: Post Apocalyptic/Young Adult

This is a zombie book. I don't really care for zombie books, but this one looked pretty promising. It follows a teenager named Mary who grew up in a fenced in town in the middle of the Forest of Hands and Teeth -- named for the zombies that reside there. After the zombification of both her parents, Mary is rejected by her brother and sent to live with the Sisterhood in the town chapel. While there, she falls in love with Travis and meets a strange girl named Gabrielle who appeared from the forest one day.

The premise of this book was very interesting. I kept wanting to read more, which is always a good thing. It was also well written, so aside from the sort of cheesy romance it didn't feel as "dumbed down" as some YA books seem.

Speaking of the romance subplot, it did suffer a bit from the Twilight Syndrome. There was sort of a love quadrangle between Mary, Travis, Travis's brother Harry, and Mary's childhood friend Cass. You see, in their village they do some sort of courtship thing where the girls are chosen by a guy to court in the fall and then they get married the following spring. Travis and Cass are courting and Mary is chosen by Harry, Travis's brother. However, Mary loves Travis and Harry and Cass have a thing. See? Very confusing. It's all the more confusing since we never really get much from any of the characters besides Mary. I have no idea why anyone is in love with anyone else because they don't really have distinct personalities.

Aside from the eye roll inducing teenage love crap, I really did like the story. Mary was a fairly strong female character, which seems to be rare in YA these days. She dreams of one day seeing the ocean and is even willing to give up the supposed love of her life to do so. I just wish the supporting characters were fleshed out a little more.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (CBR-III #27)

Cannonball Read III: Book #27/52
Published: 2005
Pages: 480 (11,865 total so far)
Genre: Thriller/Crime

This is probably one of the best crime-solving books I've read since Silence of the Lambs. I normally don't go for the crime genre, but this book has gotten such good reviews that I decided to give it a try.

I actually almost gave up after the first couple of chapters due to the dull corporate investigative journalism storyline going on. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why people seemed to love this book. I decided to give it a few more chapters and all of a sudden, I couldn't put it down.

Finally, the real story starts as Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander start investigating the mysterious disappearance of Harriet Vanger more than 30 years ago. Mikael is a journalist who was just successfully sued for libel and pretty much lost all credibility when he gets a strange offer from an elderly, wealthy man named Henrik Vanger. Harriet was Henrik's niece and he wants Mikael to spend the next year working on solving her disappearance (or murder, as Henrik believes).

Eventually, computer hacker/private investigator Lisbeth joins him on the case. Lisbeth is an interesting character. She's definitely got some sort of sordid past that is merely alluded to, but she's tough and good at her job. She was probably more of a minor character than I expected (especially considering the book is pretty much named after her) and I would have liked to see more of her.

I'm really glad I stuck with the book. I had no idea where the story was going to go and was definitely thrown for some loops. This book really stood well on it's own, so I'm not sure yet if I'll pick up the other two books in the series.

The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things by JT LeRoy (CBR-III #26)

Cannonball Read III: Book #26/52
Published: 1999
Pages: 250 (11,385 total so far)
Genre: Fake memoir?

First of all, apparently they was a bunch of controversy over the author of this book back when it came out. It was branded as being a true story about a young boy, but then it was found out to have actually been written by a middle aged woman who was going so far as to actually have another woman pose as "JT LeRoy" (he's suggested to be transgendered) at book signings. Anyways, I knew all this before I read the book so I read it solely as a work of fiction.

The book is more or less a collection of short stories from different points in the life of a young boy named Jeremiah. He was in foster care when he was a baby after he was born to his fourteen-year-old mother, Sarah. Sarah takes him back when he is around four years old and drags him around while she bounces between various boyfriends and her job as a truck stop prostitute.

The whole book is very sad and I can only imagine how much more horrifying it must have been when it was initially released as a memoir. It's all just story after story of horrific child abuse and neglect. I'm pretty sure I bought this book back when I was in my Google-disturbing-books-and-read-whatever-comes-up phase in college. It's sat on my bookshelf for several years and I'm glad I can finally mark it off my list, but I probably won't be keeping it around for a re-read.

L.I.E. by David Hollander (CBR-III Review #25)

Cannonball Read III: Book #25/52
Published: 2000
Pages: 256 (11,135 total so far)
Genre: Coming-of-age

L.I.E. is kind of hard to describe because it barely has a plot. It loosely follows a guy named Harlan and his girlfriend (sometimes) Sarah through various periods of their young adult life in the late 1980s/early 1990s. It's a very disjointed story that cuts to a different storyline practically every paragraph and a different year every chapter.

I don't think I "got" this book. It started off really boring. In the middle, it sort of got interesting for a chapter or two when the story started flowing a little better (i.e. not jumping back and forth between EVERY paragraph). Then the last third or so what just a big pile of WTF.

***SPOILERS AHEAD***

It starts getting kind of weird when Sarah borrows Harlan's car and gets run off the road by a black car with tinted windows. Up until this point, it was pretty much your run-of-the-mill teenage angst story. But then Sarah get away from the black car and it follows her to Harlan's workplace parking lot where the car tries to run her over. After escaping again, they open the car door to discover a crash test dummy was driving the rogue car. WHAT? Then a new chapter starts in some other year. Nothing else is said about it. If anyone can explain that to me, please do.

Also, the end is weird and makes no sense. Harlan and his new friend are driving the friend's little sister to school. They are trying to listen to a tape they made of their band and all of a sudden, the tape starts spewing out the book. Like an actual narration from the book you're currently reading - describing what they're doing and such. Of course this freaks them out. This is also never explained because the book just ENDS.

***END OF SPOILERS***

Why are we introducing new characters in the last chapter? WHAT ON EARTH IS THAT TAPE ABOUT?? This has got to be the most baffling book I have ever read.