february book report.

Love, Rosie This book was interesting. It took place over 42 years of best friends Rosie and Alex's lives, and was basically a back and forth of them missing the opportunity to be together romantically. It was a great plot idea, but the way it was executed was a bit exhausting, and after a while, it's like, "I know that they're going to get together in the end because it's fiction, so can we just get on with it?" Also, there were so many discrepancies with the ages in the novel, I guess because there were a million characters with all different birthdays and things going on, so it got confusing. But if I as the reader can pick up on the errors, surely an editor should have? Just a thought, stuff like that drives me nuts. It was an alright book, but the movie version was adorable and spanned only about 12 years, so was much more satisfying, to be honest.
“Our life is made up of time; our days are measured in hours, our pay measured by those hours, our knowledge is measured by years. We grab a quick few minutes in our busy day to have a coffee break. We rush back to our desks, we watch the clock, we live by appointments. And yet your time eventually runs out and you wonder in your heart of hearts if those seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, and decades were being spent the best way they possible could. In other words, if you could change anything, would you?”

The Sky Is Everywhere I wanted to read this book as soon as possible after I had finished I'll Give You The Sun, as it's by the same author, and that book just really stuck with me. This one was just as well written, though a little shorter and more straightforward, but I still really loved it. The descriptions of loss and love for all different types of people were phenomenal, and the characters were just the type of quirky people I like to fall in love with in books. The main character, Lennie, wrote tons of short poems throughout the novel, which were either at the end or beginning of a chapter, and I think they were my favorite part just because they were all kind of broken thoughts quickly jotted down and seemed very honest. Jandy Nelson really knows what she's doing, and I need her to write a million more books for me to fall in love with.
“This is our story to tell. You’d think for all the reading I do, I would have thought about this before, but I haven’t. I’ve never once thought about the interpretative, the story telling aspect of life, of my life. I always felt like I was in a story, yes, but not like I was the author of it, or like I had any say in its telling whatsoever. You can tell your story any way you damn well please. It’s your solo.”

Big Little Lies This book was a lot different than I thought it would be. It is described as a light-hearted murder mystery, but really, the mystery of who is murdered wasn't on my mind all that much throughout. The novel scratched the surface of some very serious issues, like domestic violence and abuse, divorce, and bullying, but was also really funny, which I didn't think took away from the issues being discussed at all. There were definitely a few twists and turns that I wasn't expecting, but I did figure out about halfway through who it was that was murdered, though it wasn't crazy obvious. But the way it all happens is shocking, and there's really no way to guess all of it, so it was still exciting. I enjoyed it, though I would have loved an epilogue telling me about the characters a few years into the future, because I got a bit attached and just want to know what went on a while after the murder.
“Champagne is never a mistake.”

These three make 9/25 of my 2015 reading goal. Now reading: Slaughterhouse Five, with Wonder on deck.