The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.

I just saw Hunger Games: Catching Fire last night. It was my favourite of all three books so, as you can imagine, I was incredibly excited to see it.

There we were, sitting there, eating popcorn and waiting for the movie to start when the most exciting thing happened.

"See the story in a way the movie doesn't show: From inside her head."

The movie ads before the movie proper were encouraging viewers to read the books after the movie..

Hot damn, I don't know who was in charge of that marketing campaign (I also don't know why this hasn't been implemented from the start of Harry Potter) but I want to see more of these guys' work!

Throne of Glass, by Sarah J. Maas.

About a week ago, I entered a contest to win Sarah J. Maas' new book Throne of Glass held on Yolanda Sfetsos' website.

As someone who hardly ever wins any of these contests (largely because Australian addresses are often too far for American giveaways to be sent), I was hugely excited both to have an opportunity to enter this contest, and then also to win!

The book arrived today, courtesy of Bloomsbury Australia, and I couldn't wait to read it. Having gone from knowing nothing about this book about a week ago, Goodreads.com has equipped me with a fount of information, reviews, as well as many people I know who are looking to read the book early this month. 

And, it turns out: this book is amazing. From the first chapter, I was comparing it to the Anna Bishop character Lucivar (from The Black Jewels, a stunning yet sadly finished series that I also heartily recommend) were the genders reversed.

Celaena is a young woman who has been made a slave in the mines for a year and earns her reprieve in the opening pages of this book.

Although the sticker on the front cover obviously wants to compare this novel to The Hunger Games (an amazing set of stories and I myself can hardly wait for Catching Fire to screen in cinemas later this year) the fact that Celaena is an assassin makes me draw parallels between this book and other assassin-centric books: Grave Mercy, or the Robin Hobb Assassin trilogy. Thankfully, it's not like the former.

I have found the pacing of this novel is phenomenal. There isn't a slow moment, paragraph or scene so far! About the only thing that I have cause to complain about is the letter 'C'. Celaena. Chaol. Captain of the King's Guard. Crown Prince of Adarlan! (Crown Prince's hunting dogs). The first time a character without a 'C' in their name or title walked past the page, I almost dropped the book.

All in all, this is a first book by an author I've only recently heard of. It's impressed me and I'll definitely consider picking up another book of hers in the future. Indeed, I have it on Yolanda's good authority that the second book is even better than the first! :D

August 2013 reading list

I had four of these titles decided and ready to go from the evening of the 3rd of July. Luckily, I had all of these on hand, rather than having to rely on library availability. I think I would have cried if I had to go into a cue for this line up of novels.

I've also had a friend over from Brisbane last month, who found out what happens if you try to steal my books away from me.

So I'm being a little ambitious this month with my books, but as many of them are YA, I think I should manage to get through them alright.


For this month:



Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir.

4/5 - really great comedic writing.
I've been to a Reading Party where one of the hosts was reading out chapters from this novel. Don't know if it will stand up to being as hilarious as it sounds when being read out loud, but if things can stand the test of that, mostly they're as good as they seem.

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing.

DNF - There's one in almost every month.
This Young Adult novel has been sitting on my to-be-read shelf for entirely too long. It may not be a library loan, but my partner is finally going to take it back off me if I don't get around to reading it this month! What can I say, I have a partner who indulges and encourages my love of YA lit. What can I say?

Divergent.

3.5/5 - Not exactly what I expected it would be, but a rewarding read all the same.
There is a lot of dystopian fiction in YA writing at the moment. I've already written a blog post about it here, so I won't go into that again here. Mostly, I'm reading this one because I'm interested in seeing the way Veronica Roth paints her view of our future world.

Wolf-Speaker.

4/5 - I've read this book before. Loved it then, loved it now. 
I first read this series of novels in late high school. They were a copy that belonged to a friend of mine, and I must have read them through till the spine started cracking. These are my very favourite series of the entire of Tamora Pierce's wide array of teen fiction subverting the idea that young women in fantasy can't play a main part in adventures. I'm reading it this month as a "buddy read" with a friend on Goodreads.com.

The Poison Eaters.

4/5 - Yes, yes, yes. Only one week story in this and it's definitely a re-read title.
This is a first time read largely because I cannot believe there is something by Holly Black that I haven't read yet! Also, it's a must read for me before her novel of one of the short stories in here, "The Coldest Girl in Cold Town", gets released (more on that soon).

Throne of Glass.

3/5 - Very structured plot in the beginning. Character development let it down. 
This is a giveaway book from Bloomsbury straight to me. I'll be sharing my thoughts on the book very soon. Mostly, things I know about it: there's an assassin, there's a fantasy world she's in, there is a Hunger Games related sticker on the front cover, so I know who they are marketing towards. It should be interesting.

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As ever, feel free to follow my reading or just follow me outright on my account at Goodreads.com
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6878229.Nicole_D_Fergusson

Talking about YA fiction.

When I was young, the television shows I watched would be about saving the planet (Captain Planet, Widget the World Watcher) and young adult fiction was either about the finding a real life threat inside your video games (Space Demons, Skymaze), running off into some wonderful fantasy world where young women could be heroes with a sword too (Songs of the Lioness, The Blue Sword) or finding romance (The Vampire Diaries).

There's still a lot of interest in the latter, as evidenced by the television show The Vampire Diaries. You might even recognise this handsome man as the visual inspiration for one of my own characters. :)

There has also been the popularity of such series' as Cassie Clare's The Mortal Instruments, which I believe they are making into a series of movies due to come out later this year. I've also been a long time fan of Melissa Marr's Wicked Lovely series, which I've made no bones about loving and having almost a whole shelf dedicated to in my bedroom.



There's also the retold fairy tale genre which is really big at the moment, and includes novelists like Sarah Cross, Alex Flinn, Robin McKinley, Juliet Marillier, Francesca Lia Block and Malinda Lo.

However, there's another kind of genre within the young adult umbrella that has been pushing itself forward. We saw it in The Hunger Games novels (and movie). Marie Lu's novel Legend was another good example of it. Instead of the worries about the environment that categorised the 90s, the media aimed at young adults seems to hold a message that is: don't be so complacent that the government can rule you. Sort of a 1984 for kids, just like Space Demons might have been a good early read for people who would go on to love Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game.


Two months ago, I read a book called Delirium by Lauren Oliver and read the follow up sequel Pandemonium this month. Lauren's main character, Lena, lives in a world where love has been labelled a disease for which a cure has been found. (For the full review, click here.) What I thought was amazing was how little the love angle would have mattered at all if not for the backing plot of the story. The same scenario was offered in The Hunger Games; Katniss simply couldn't spend any real number of pages simply falling in love with either of the guys. She was too busy fighting just to stay alive.

I love coming back again and again to the books in this genre. It feels as though there is so much more in YA to read today than there was 10 or even 15 years ago. Subjects like loneliness and alienation are still being tackled, but are now widening to include stories told about interracial and gay, lesbian or bisexual minorities. I read this really interesting interview by two of my favourite young adult writers recently that made me feel really proud to be reading this genre I love so much.

"Both Holly and Sarah are not shy about discussing the difficulties of promoting diversity in Young Adult literature. And they were willing to discuss their experiences in crafting their own works as a way of offering advice to other authors who are seeking to do the opposite of what has been the advice offered time after time to write what they know rather than what they may imagine." (read more)

This interview opens with questions like what advice they would give for writers who want to write outside of their own experiences with gender, race and sexual orientation and goes on through some interesting observations on the way race is depicted both on screen and by readers of these novels, including a quick look at Katniss' depiction in the recent movie The Hunger Games.