Friday, March 16, 2012

Unearthly by Cynthia Hand

This book definitely took me by surprise, and I absolutely LOVED it. I finished in about one or two days, and grabbed Hallowed as soon as I had finished. At first, I was a little hesitant. The blurb talked about angels, moving schools, and a possible love triangle... hmmm, where have I heard this before? However, Hand's novel was beyond my expectations.

The writing, for one, is smooth, flowing, and clever. I highlighted countless lines on my Kindle, and couldn't help smiling at multiple scenes. Clara is also a very relatable heroine. She feels lost and confused at times, but she perseveres for the ones she loves. Speaking of loved ones... I fell for Tucker. Hard. And truth be told, I didn't really like him at first. Christian was just that brooding, god-like male character that I tend to love reading about, but later on he just kind of irritated me. Tucker is most definitely THE ONE.

All the characters served a great purpose in the book. I loved everyone, including Angela, Wendy, Jeffrey, and Clara's mom. Even Kay Patterson, the "mean girl", was interesting to read about. The storyline was fast-paced, and kept me rapidly turning the pages. Partly for Tucker, and partly because I wanted to get to the fire scene already! When I actually got to it, even that took me by surprise. (Wonderful twist in the story, BTW).

All in all, Unearthly is amazing. If you haven't read it yet, go get it now. You won't be disappointed.

~Lily~

Penspinning


This would be the definition from Urban Dictionary. The guy had some serious spelling mistakes, so I fixed those for him :D

Penspinning is a very fun way to annoy your teachers and/or waste time and/or look impressive :) 
That was a lot of "and/or"s but oh well. That guy up there says that most people learn from the Universal Pen Spinning Board (which would be right here: http://forum.upsb.info/). Looking around their website, I have noticed a few links to KTrinh93 on Youtube. http://www.youtube.com/user/KTrinh93 
He has good tutorials, so if you really want to learn how to penspin, you should probably look at his tutorials :D

The fundamentals of penspinning are sonic, charge, thumbaround, and fingerpass.
Personally, I find that fingerpass was the easiest to learn because you are merely manipulating your fingers. 

Here are the tutorials:
  • Sonic: http://bit.ly/FOrOeJ By the way, this takes a really long time to learn
  • Charge: http://bit.ly/FOgcwm
  • Thumbaround: http://bit.ly/wJ4mv5
  • Fingerpass: http://bit.ly/FOqnwF 
These are bit.ly links because the Youtube links were much too long :P

Seeing as this post has nothing to do with books, I might as well finish my post :)
I hope you end up trying pen spinning, its really fun :D

~Lioness

This is me being boring and annoying my friends by spinning (they were afraid I was going to hurt myself. Pfft. No trust at all XD) 

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Review: Delirium by Lauren Oliver

I really did enjoy the book. It was great. I just didn't absouletely love it to death or whatever. So, I give 4/5 stars.

Summary: Seventeen year old Lena starts out as a self-doubting, weak-willed girl. She also happens to live in a dystopian society where love is a disease, something to be cured of at age 18. Marriage? Just a convenient match to reproduce. Anyways, few months before Lena gets her surgery, she falls in love with Alex, a boy who never had surgery and was born in the wilds. And then the story unfurls.

My thoughts: The premise was unique and undoutedly interesting, something really hard to achieve in this YA dystopian craze. The plot itself? Not as interesting. I could see the plot unfurl more into something more exciting than the generic forbidden-love-in-dystopia formula. It wasn't bad. Just not outstanding. The characters? Okay about them. They're not bad. Just Lena seemed too indecisive and wimpy, while Alex was too average and dull. However, I did love Lauren Oliver's writing style. Despite its nearing 500 pages thick book, the writing was beutiful and flowed from the author. Put all my opinions together? It was a pretty good back that just didn't stand out or shine in any way.

So yup. 4/5 stars for this book.

P.S.  To all the people comparing Delirium to the Hunger Games: Dystopian? Yes. YA? Yes. Forbidden love? Yes. Hunger Games? Um no. Definitely not. They aren't even closely similar to one another..

-Joanne-