In the small town of Hadlee, Mississippi, during the 1980’s, Jason Lee Rainey struggles to find his way amongst the old, steadfast Southern attitudes about race, while his friendship with a black boy, Samson Johnson, deepens. 
By way of stories from others, Jason Lee learns about his larger-than-life father, who was killed in Vietnam. He longs to become that sort of man, but doesn’t believe he has it in him. 

In The Clock Of Life he learns lessons from the past, and the realities of inequality. He flourishes with the bond of friendship; endures the pain of senseless death; finds the courage to stand up for what he believes is right; and comes to realize he is his father’s son. 

This story explores how two unsettling chapters in American history, the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, affect the fate of a family, a town, and two boyhood friends.

Okay, so before I get into this review, I just want to apologize ahead of time if I sound negative as I explain my thoughts. But as always I strive to give you all my honest review.

When looking at the cover, and if you know me well enough or have just read a few of my reviews then you know this doesn’t look like the usual book I go for. If you guessed it, you’re right! The cover is a little plain, has neutral colours and goes pretty well with the book. The cover does its job, and matches the title of the book.

Even though the cover isn’t usually the type I would pick up in the store, or grab at the library, I couldn’t resist giving it a shot after listening to all the amazing things Nancy Klann-Moren told me about her story! I also did a little research online, and found that many other book bloggers really enjoyed it, and were happy that they got the chance to read it.

My favorite type of book, in the ENTIRE world, is a book that I would usually never give a try, but do, and completely fall in love with the story and its characters!  I like when books prove me wrong, I guess. But at the end of the day, The Clock of Life wasn’t one of those books… While I did see all the qualities many reviewers raved about, ultimately it just wasn’t for me.

Going into reading The Clock of Life, I was actually excited to get started and see if I also enjoyed it as much as everyone else seemed to have. But overall the story was a bit confusing to me, maybe because I was picking it up and putting it back down often, instead of reading in longer sittings.

In general I was just having a hard time keeping up with the story, the characters and everything that was going on. I was entirely confused about the death of Jason’s father, the death of his friend, his mother’s mental state and his racist neighbor; as well as how all that tied together.

Going in with an open mind, The Clock of Life did have quite some potential. While the story wasn’t for me, I do see why many others liked it! If the synopsis sounds like something you would enjoy, I say go for it as I think you will! 

“Kitty is living a happy, carefree life as a dairymaid in the countryside. The grand family she is employed by looks after her well, and she loves her trade, caring for the gentle cows and working in the cool, calm dairy. And then, of course, there is Will, the river man who she thinks is very fond of her, and indeed she is of him. Surely he will ask her to marry him soon? Then one day disaster strikes: Will disappears. Kitty is first worried and then furious. She fears that Will has only been leading her on all this time, and has now gone to London to make his fortune, forgetting about her completely. So when Kitty is asked to go to London to pick up a copy of Pride and Prejudice, the latest novel by the very fashionable Jane Austen, Kitty leaps at the chance to track down Will. But Kitty has no idea how vast London is, and how careful she must be. It is barely a moment before eagle-eyed pickpockets have spotted the country-born-and-bred Kitty and relieved her of her money and belongings. Dauntingly fast, she has lost her only means of returning home and must face the terrifying prospect of stealing in order to survive – and of being named a thief …”

After recently posting about Austen and August, I think this is a fitting review to follow the trend of historical fiction.

From the little dairy in the country side to the overwhelming bustle of London, Kitty gets herself into, and out of, trouble better than you would expect of a woman from the Austen era. She is hardly a simpering air-head. Her trusting heart and moral compass can be blamed for a fair bit of the heart stopping drama. Even I wanted to stamp my foot at Will.

Highlights in the book for me were the graceful way in which Kitty panders to the wishes of her employers’ daughters. They want her to teach the cow to do… what?!

I find my tastes don’t usually run to historical fiction, or even really to the classics, however I thoroughly loved The Disgrace of Kitty Grey. It’s short, sweet and balanced well, especially for the uninitiated, like me.

I suggest this one for an outdoor read on a Spring afternoon with a snack of brie and crackers.

http://www.maryhooper.co.uk/

Paperback, 288 pages

Published May 9th 2013 by Bloomsbury Childrens Books (first published January 1st 2013)

ISBN: 1408826711 (ISBN13: 9781408827611)

 “Jeff discovers he’s a serial killer clone—and he’s got to track down others like him before it’s too late. A thrilling YA companion to S&S Touchstone’s Cain’s Blood, releasing simultaneously.

This dark, literary thriller is a story about blood: specifically, the DNA of the world’s most notorious serial killers, captured and cloned by the Department of Defense to develop a new “breed” of bio-weapons. The program is now in Stage Three—with dozens of young male clones from age ten to eighteen kept and monitored at a private facility without any realization of who they really are. Some are treated like everyday kids. Others live prescribed lives to replicate the upbringing of their DNA donors. All wonder why they can’t remember their lives before age ten.

When security is breached and the most dangerous boys are set free by the now-insane scientist who created them, only one young man can help find the clones before their true genetic nature grows even more horrific than the original models: a fifteen-year-old boy, an every-boy…who has just learned that he is the clone of Jeffrey Dahmer.”

Project Cain is filled to the brim with information, background knowledge and a ton of other things. I didn’t want this review to be too extremely long, so instead of summarizing the book myself like I usually do, I just inserted the synopsis from the Barnes and Noble website!

The element that stuck out the most to me was the amazing cast of characters! Each one, from Jeff to his father, to Castillo, had substance and history. I found every single person that the reader was introduced to, to be very interesting!

Jeff is only one of probably thousands of clones created by the government. Each clone is created from the cells of the world’s most infamous serial killers. So not only did we learn about each of these teenage boys, but we also learned real information on serial killers – interesting!

Jeff has being living, what seems to be, a normal life. He is a teenage boy, who lives with his scientist dad, who enjoys learning, and talking about what he knows. That is until he finds out whom he really is. Before his life did a three-sixty, Jeff never once had evil thoughts like he does now, never once had he dreamed of dead people. Besides the extraordinary characters within Project Cain, the struggle Jeff has with himself is what pulled me in and forced me to read this book. He knew what he was, and who he was, but he was in constant battle with himself.

When reading Project Cain, it’s obvious that this isn’t any average Young Adult Thriller. I think that’s because the characters are based upon real life serial killers, and there is so much REAL information within the book’s pages, that makes it stick out from the rest.

Overall I really enjoyed Project Cain and learned a lot. I can see where some people who claim “information dumping” to occur are coming from, but I didn’t know much about serial killers, and liked learning about it. I had just watched a documentary on Netflix the night before I received this book in the mail, and was totally in the mood already.

There were two small things that did slow the story down a bit for me, and those were the constant driving and sitting in hotel rooms that Jeff and Castillo did during their search. I understand that there’s a process, but I felt that the reader didn’t need to go through the entire thing. The second thing is that Jeff feels that he is useless when helping Castillo with the search! Yet he knows his dad, and he is the one who can most likely understand the clues that he left behind.

Project Cain was suspenseful, mysterious and dark! I felt like I was in Jeff’s head the entire time, and I really enjoyed that!

This is the story of a solitary young woman drawn into an online world run by a charismatic web guru who entices her into impersonating a glamorous but desperate woman.

When Leila discovers the website Red Pill, she feels she has finally found people who understand her. A sheltered young woman raised by her mother, Leila has often struggled to connect with the girls at school; but on Red Pill, a chat forum for ethical debate, Leila comes into her own, impressing the website’s founder, a brilliant and elusive man named Adrian. Leila is thrilled when Adrian asks to meet her, and is flattered when he invites her to be part of “Project Tess.”

Tess is a woman Leila might never have met in real life. She is beautiful, urbane, witty, and damaged. As they email, chat, and Skype, Leila becomes enveloped in the world of Tess, learning every single thing she can about this other woman–because soon, Leila will have to become her.

I found parts of this novel to be quite confronting, and other parts had a quite sombre tempo.

It may have been my head space, but I had issue sympathising with the choices of the main character, Leila. She’s an awkward sort, and that’s how she is supposed to be, at times painfully so. I know this is intentional, so in that sense she was written really convincingly.

Having swerved close to the gravitational pull of an online ‘leader’ with charisma coming out of their ears, I know how easily it can be to be groomed and flattered into questioning your choices just to gain the pat on the head. Hence the confrontational feeling I experienced.

We flip between current or quite recent happenings in Leila’s life and looking back at the journey through Red Pill and the two story lines connect up in a round about way. At the heart of the story is the morality battle of suicide, which should never be something that makes you comfortable.

The thing that drew me in to enter the online competition to win a review copy of Kiss Me First was the book trailer… which connects to your Facebook through an app and will give you goose-bumps. You peek inside the world of Leila, as if you were she. Quite unnerving, but extremely effective.

Take a step outside your comfort zone and give Kiss Me First  a burl. I’d love to know what you think of it.

http://www.panmacmillan.com/kissmefirst

https://www.facebook.com/LottieMoggachAuthor

Imprint: Picador

ISBN: 9781447233190
Number of pages: 256

1 July 2013

It’s rare to read a book that touches you so deeply that you immediately want to know everything about the author, and despite Google-searching for hours, the information found does not suffice. For me, that book was How I Live Now. With the upcoming release of the film starring Saoirse Ronan, I thought that it was about time I revisited the novel that had impacted me so deeply.

Daisy is a fifteen year old girl who doesn’t belong. Sent away from her dismissive father and stepmother, she finally finds a place that she might be able to make her own with her maternal aunt and cousins. They’re unlike anyone she has met before or likely will again. Isaac is intuitive; knowing things that shouldn’t be possible for him to know. His twin, Edmond can read minds. The youngest, Piper, has a way with animals that surpasses anything human.

They live a carefree life with their beloved pets in the English country-side. For the first time, during the idle summer days of gardening and lazing by the river, Daisy feels like a part of something. Especially, and increasingly, when she’s around Edmond. But a war is looming ahead of them and every day brings it closer to their door.

There is so much to say about How I Live Now. It is beautiful, terrible, haunting, lyrical. Reading it is physically, desperately painful. Putting it down is impossible.

But that’s a lot of words without a whole lot of information. So, what I really love about this book is that it is literary and poignant and entire classrooms could talk about the nuances of it for months and still have more to say. All this, and it’s written for young adults.

Meg Rosoff has an incredible way of juxtaposing situations to accentuate our understanding of them. The war, when it comes, is brutal, destructive and incomprehensible. On the other side of that, the balance is Daisy’s budding relationship with Edmond. It is everything that the war is not; tender, positive and plausible. There are a lot of intelligent readers who want to know why Daisy and Edmond had to be cousins and it bothers me that they can’t see how much weaker the story would be if that had been changed. As a society we will judge two people for having fallen in love with the wrong kind; but we ignore war. The simple beauty of Daisy and Edmond’s love contrasted to the cruelty of the war makes us re-evaluate those views.

There are multitudes of ways that Rosoff has made me consider my opinions and beliefs, but she doesn’t preach. Her gorgeously evocative writing and phenomenal characters drew me into the world and kept me there. She is one of the rare few unapologetic writers. Daisy, in many ways, is self-interested and caustic. Her interest in the world only emerges when world events begin to affect her. All of her flaws, nuances and imperfections are spread across the page for all to see; no excuses, no apology. It works. Daisy’s loyalty and the way that she grows through the novel round out her flaws until we like her all the more for having them. There is something about imperfect characters written well that makes them unforgettable.

I could go on, but you are so much better off finding more out for yourself. If you’re in the mood for a bittersweet story as wonderful as it is painful, pick this one up before the movie comes out.

  How I Live Now – Meg Rosoff

 Penguin (August 5, 2004)

 ISBN: 9780141319926