The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson

Hub Reading Challenge: PPYA

I’ve known about this book for quite a long time and even attended the studio recording of the audiobook. And yet, I just wasn’t interested in reading it. I’ve had it checked out for a month and only somewhat unwillingly picked it up yesterday morning because I thought I should give it a try. Well. Apparently I just didn’t know what this book was all about because it was fantastic. I have an hour’s time this afternoon while I wait for my daughter in dance class and I couldn’t even save it for then. I had to just spend the morning reading it until it was done because I was so caught up in it.

The first thing that made this so compelling was the fact that it’s set in a boarding school! Present day, London. Rory has moved there from New Orleans and is going to spend a year there while her parents are on sabbatical.  Just as she arrives and is dealing with fitting in a murder occurs that mimics the first murder of Jack the Ripper. A second soon follows and the city is caught up in copycat Jack the Ripper panic. I’ll pause here to say that Rory becomes involved and it’s a great thriller and I totally recommend it. If you don’t mind spoilers scroll on down past picture and I’ll tell some details that might explain it better. Otherwise, just take my word for it, enjoy the photo, and go check this book out of the library (and p.s. the cover was one of the things that turned me off. I hope it’s better in the paperback version.)

OK, so what I didn’t know that made the book completely exciting was that due to a near death experience the first night at school Rory can see ghosts. And it turns out that she’s not the only one-that others who can are part of a super secret, denied by the government, but run by them, organization. Ghost police, if you will. And without realizing she was seeing a ghost, Rory saw the murderer who is terrorizing London and becomes involved with this ghost squad in trying to stop him before he kills his next target, who is Rory herself.
This was an exciting and suspenseful mystery. The supernatural element was not totally crazy. There’s some historical stuff in there, which was nice, and there were loads of the type of boarding school details that I just eat up.
Really great.

Brain Jack by Brain Faulkner

Plowed through this in a day! Very exciting, fast paced book.  It reminded me a little bit of Ready Player One, just because of all the computer stuff, but it was actually quite different.

In the future Las Vegas has been obliterated by a nuclear blast.  There really aren’t a lot of “crazy future things” except that and the use of “neuro-headsets”.  These neuros are caps you wear to operate your computer-no mouse, no keyboard, you just think what you want and it reads your brainwaves and happens.  Sam is a genius hacker who attracts the attention of the Cyber Defense Division of Homeland Security.  There are many pages describing Sam’s work, which is kind of weird.  It reads like you’re reading about a group of people in fighter jets-wingman, pointman, watch my back, look out you’ve got them on your tail, I’ll repel them by throwing a blaster at them, etc.  I mean, frankly, it made literally no sense to me that it was actually describing computer things. This was one of those cases where you just read for the action and don’t even try to understand what is happening.  And it was easy to do that because it was all very exciting and dangerous feeling and I could see it like a movie in my head.  Sam and his colleagues discover an insidious threat to the entire civilization and it’s up to them to save the world before it is literally too late.

I thought the ending was kind of strange and a bit unbelievable, but I was satisfied nonetheless and recommend this.

You’ve Been Warned by James Patterson

I cannot believe James Patterson gets paid as much as he does. Seriously. This is the only book of his that I’ve ever read and maybe his early stuff is awesome and he’s just phoning it in now, or maybe he always wrote stuff like this.  (This novel is actually co-authored, leading me to believe even more that he’s just coming up with a story idea and farming out the actual writing.)

The writing was just really kind of lame. And for a 370 page book there were very few words on each page, and there were something like 95 chapters. Because near the end each chapter was only a page long. I’m not kidding. And every chapter ends with some brief “shocking” sentence like “Only she wasn’t alone.” Every time I read one of those things I could hear “bum bum BUM” in my head and imagined David Caruso on a boat with sunglasses.