Book Haul, or the One With the Random Random House Package Randomly at My House

I took a tiny blog hiatus this week since my dog, Ginger, was having a couple health issues, and I just couldn't find the energy or the focus to do bloggy stuff. Thankfully, Ginger is going to be better than ever, having undergone a very simple surgery on Thursday to fix her knees. So all is well here at Casa Ginger and Gillian! Both the blog and the dog will be back to normal this week.

I wasn't expecting to do a book haul today, since I didn't get any books this week, when lo, a package from Random House randomly appeared at my house! I didn't request anything from them (and I hadn't heard of the two books inside), so it was a lovely surprise to brighten up my Friday.

From Random House:



The Tyrant's Daughter by J.C. Carleson

 I can't believe I'd never heard of this book. It sounds amazing! It's about a girl who is the daughter of king of a country in the Middle East, and there's a coup and she finds out her father might have been a dictator and there's intrigue and suspense and I'm SO EXCITED for this one. Thank you, whoever randomly and generously sent me this.



The Secret Ingredient by Stewart Lewis 

I absolutely hate that girl's shorts, but this is set in Silverlake, a cool and funky LA neighborhood, so that should be fun to read about. Apparently there is cooking, a cute boy, two dads, and a search for a birth mother, so it sounds like it's got a lot of the things I like going on there.

Mortal Heart by Robin LaFevers Cover Reveal and ARC Giveaway!

Series Goodreads info

MORTAL HEART! MORTAL HEART IS COMING! I super adore Robin LaFevers' His Fair Assassin series, because it's about assassin nuns in medieval England doing all kinds of amazing things. And today I get to show you the cover to the third book in the series, Mortal Heart! You ready for it?

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No, seriously, are you ready for it?

Top Ten Reasons I Love Being A Blogger and a Reader

Hosted by The Broke and the Bookish

I've been a reader my whole life (well, for as long as I've been able to read, anyway--which is a long time if you believe my parents) and a blogger for about a year and a half. They're two of the things I love best about my life, after my dog and really good chocolate cake. And that's saying something.

The Perks of Being a Readerflower:

I get to experience things, do things, and be things I never would get to in books. Flying on the back of a dragon? Done that. Defeated the Dark Lord? When I was sixteen, bitch. Kissed on top of Notre Dame? BEEN THERE. Speaking of...

What can I say? I love romance. I love getting to live vicariously through all the ships in fiction. I love loving them, obsessing over them, and drawing them. Seriously, drawing still lifes and all that junk is so boring. I'd rather draw fictional characters kissing.

Back to that whole "Readers live a thousand lives" thing. When you read, you can be anyone and go anywhere. Not only do you get to visit historical France or China or wherever, but you can step into the shoes of someone with a totally different life experience than you have. I'm pretty sure reading is the thing that keeps us from being totally ignorant.

It's fun. I am never ever ever bored. What do people who don't read DO with all the excess brain space?! And all that free time? Like, say you're killing time in the waiting room of a doctor's office, or a friend is late for lunch, or you're standing in line for something, and you don't have a book. What do you do? What do you even talk about?

I'm definitely the obsessive type. I don't like things; I love them passionately and wholly. I dream about them, I draw them, I write about them, and I talk about them. Reading about fictional characters and visiting fictional worlds gives me both a focus and an outlet for all that nerdery. it's like my brain is Tumblr and I need something to reblog. FEED ME FANDOMS.

The Perks of Being a Bloggerflower:

When you're a blogger, you get exposed to a ton of books you otherwise wouldn't see because of other bloggers buzzing, and publicists, and all that jazz. I have big pretty shiny book piles full of awesomeness. My TBR mountain is absolutely gigantic now, and that's all because of blogging.

It's a little sad how little I knew about the industry I hoped to become a part of pre-blogging. Book blogging is an excellent education in publishing and the internet world of books in general. Plus, whern you're a blogger, you totally get to be a reading hipster, reading and loving books before they're cool. Before they're even out. Plus there are awesome perks, like meeting and lunching with bestselling authors.

I get to write about something I really love all day long. Books are something I've never really been able to talk about to the extent I love. But now, not only do I have a space in which to blather, but I actually have people listen. It's the coolest thing in the world! Plus I get to have a hobby that doesn't require horribe things like pants or leaving the house or people.

I had NO IDEA such an amazing blogging community was out there. We are a powerful bunch of badass bitches, if you ask me. We know the pain of a cover redesign mid-series, when a highly anticipated release gets pushed back, and when a favorite character dies. And that leads me too...

WHAT WOULD I DO WITHOUT THE FRIENDS I'VE MADE THROUGH BLOGGING? You guys get my references. You've been to the worlds in my head. You know what I mean when I randomly scream "HECTORRR!!!1!!" or "STURMHOND <333". You know why I have nightmares about the dreaded not-yet-released third book in the series. If I start a Disney singalong on Twitter, dozens of you crazy people will join in.

Because of blogging, there are awesome people willing to do things like, oh, help me put this thing together (holla at Christina Franke My Dear, Ell Oh Ellis, and Megasus). I've met a ton of people I otherwise wouldn't meet, and I've made super awesome friends who are always willing to talk nerdy to me at odd hours of the day.

Book Haul, or the One In Which I'm Very Eco-Friendly

No print books this week! All electronic, baby! I am singlehandedly saving world. Climate change will soon be a thing of the past, all thanks to me, obviously.

For review:

From Hought Mifflin Harcourt:



A Death-Struck Year by Makiia Lucier

I've already read this, and it's a pretty solid historical novel dealing with a subject matter I haven't seen much of in YA: the Spanish Influenza outbreak of 1918. Also, I keep mistyping that author's name as Makiia Lucifer, which is kind of a problem.

From Simon & Schuster:



Falls the Shadow by Stefanie Gaither

YES. I love this cover and this concept so much that I actually clapped when I saw I got approved for this. Pleeeeease be good!

100 Sideways Miles by Andrew Smith



Double yay! I really enjoyed Grasshopper Jungle, Smith's absolutely bananas and hideously green novel that just released from PenguinTeen. I hope I enjoy this one as well.Or that I at least have a smoother journey than that poor horse.

Servants of the Storm by Delilah S. Dawson



O_O Good God, that cover is creepy. Um... I requested this? Me, the marshmallow who categorically refuses to watch horror movies? I have no memory of this, but that sure was brave of me. Gulp.


In addition to listing the books I got this wekk, I'm also going to start doing a recap of my bloggy week (a weecap? weekap? weekcap?) on my haul posts. So, yeah. Here it is.

Weekcap:

On Sunday, I posted a new 'Ship Shape installment discussing how painful it is to invest in a sinking ship.

On Monday, I reviewed Better Off Friends by Elizabeth Eulberg.

On Tuesday, I got in the Valentine's spirit and listed the books that make me swoon. I also made graphic thingies for the very first time.

On Wednesday, the blog tour for A Mad, Wicked Folly by Sharon Biggs Waller stopped by the blog. I loved this book so much, and I'm so happy PenguinTeen asked me to be a part of the tour!

On Thursday I reviewed the weirdest book I've ever read, Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith, and hopefully explained why weird was good!

And on Friday, I showed you guys both my geekiness and my drawing skillz with my YA Bookentines (there's a giveaway here, too)!

And now your weekly dose of Ginger:

 "HUMAN HUMAN noooo why are you reading instead of paying attention to meeeeeeeee human look at meeeeee"

(And yes, she really does sit that way.)

Bookentines: Valentines Featuring Your Favorite YA Couples + Giveaway!

Happy Valentine's Day, awesome nerds! Now, maybe you have a significant other with whom to spend this holiday, but for me, the steadiest relationship in my life is the one between me and my ships (surpassed only by my relationship with my dog and my relationship with food). I also helped put together a really cool post over on Gaby's blog that you should definitely go check out.

I might have mentioned once or twice that I have a lot of YA couples that I swoooon over. What you might not know is that, besides this blog, I've also got a fanart Tumblr of my own drawings--and they're pretty much all sketches of my favorite fictional people making out or holding hands or generally being adorable. Whatever, every artist has a theme. For this Valentine's Day, I made some YA Bookentines to celebrate the love between a girl and her fictional characters. I mean, the love between fictional couples. So I can live vicariously through fictional people in possession of far more exciting love lives than I. WHATEVER, I HAVE MY DOG, OKAY?

I tried to figure out a way to make them printable, but that is far beyond the realm of my talents, so instead they'll just be going up on Tumblr like usual. So they'll be rebloggable, which... is kinda like 21st century printing. It's the eco-friendly version.

Tumblr link

The first Valentine is about Anna and Etienne from Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins. So I made them kiss. Frenchly.

 

 Cath and Levi from Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

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Celaena and Chaol from Throne of Glass and Crown of Midnight by Sarah J. Maas

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Cress and Thorne from Cress by Marissa Meyer. This is kind of like a pre-meeting, Cress-has-a-crush-on-Carswell-Thorne-because-who-doesn't fantasy moment. If you've read Cress, you'll know what I mean.

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Eleanor and Park from Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell

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Percy and Annabeth from the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series by Rick Riordan

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And lastly, Ron and Hermione from the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling, which I guess is me coming down decisively on one side of the Great Shipping Wars of Our Time.

So yay! Bookish couples! And you know what's even better? Giveaways! There will be two winners: one international, and one US only. The international winner gets to choose any of the books above. The US only winner gets to do the same, but they'll also win an ARC of Elusion by Claudia Gabel and Cheryl Klam.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Note: Please don't forget to attribute all of these images to me and my Tumblr! Reposting without attribution is super lame. You don't want to be lame, do you?

Other note: One of the giveaway options is to reblog one of the Bookentines on Tumblr. I'll be uploading them onto Tumblr periodically throughout the day and then posting the url back here, so you might have to wait a little bit.

Review: Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith

Review: Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith
Goodreads 
Release date: February 11th, 2014
Publisher: Dutton Juvenile (Penguin)
Series: No
Source: ARC from the publisher
Rating: WHAT THE HECK EVEN WAS THAT AND WHY THE HECK DID I LIKE IT I think my brains are on the floor



Sixteen-year-old Austin Szerba interweaves the story of his Polish legacy with the storyof how he and his best friend , Robby, brought about the end of humanity and the rise of an army of unstoppable, six-foot tall praying mantises in small-town Iowa.

To make matters worse, Austin's hormones are totally oblivious; they don't care that the world is in utter chaos: Austin is in love with his girlfriend, Shann, but remains confused about his sexual orientation. He's stewing in a self-professed constant state of maximum horniness, directed at both Robby and Shann. Ultimately, it's up to Austin to save the world and propagate the species in this sci-fright journey of survival, sex, and the complex realities of the human condition.


The end of the world began at about 2:00 a.m., around three-and-a-half feet away from a discarded floral-print sleeper sofa infested with pubic lice in Ealing, Iowa.

I read a lot of books. The more I read, the easier it is to review them. I become accustomed to formulas. I learn to recognize cues. The elements that go into judging and analyzing a novel are far simpler for me to dissect, because almost all fiction adheres to the same basic roadmaps. I feel quite comfortable driving my readerly car through their bookish towns, following the author's directions, taking notes as I go.

And then Andrew Smith directed me to Ealing, Iowa. And he took away my car and gave me a giant fucking praying mantis to ride and decided to drop a nuclear bomb in my path. And then he cut my parking brakes and decided that maps had no business being here, because here, in the utter drugged-up mindfuck lunacy of Grasshopper Jungle, all the rules go out the window on page one. 

There are things in here: Babies with two heads, insects as big as refrigerators, God, the devil, limbless warriors, rocket ships, sex, diving bells, theft, wars, monsters, internal combustion engines, love, cigarettes, joy, bomb shelters, pizza, and cruelty.



This book is a teenage boy's wet dream written as directed by an indie film director on the worst kinds of drugs. This book is a vintage horror B movie mixed with high literary introspection regarding personal legacy and sexual orientation. This book is hilarious and vile and vulgar. It is the strangest goddamn collection of sentences I have ever encountered. This book has a million things happening, and every single one of them is important. This book is about smalltown America, homophobia, and friendship. This book is about the private inner struggle of a boy in love with both his female girlfriend and his male best friend. It about the global scale of the apocalypse, as led by giant fucking (literally) praying mantises. It is about I don't even know the hell what.

Like, I literally don't even know what a book is anymore. I thought I knew. Now I'm pretty sure they're just pointy paper things with words in there somewhere.



Will you like it? I have no idea. No, I really could not tell you. Austin, our narrator, is both a budding historian, focusing on the minutiae of his own life and family past, and a sexually obsessed teenager who gets turned on by nearly everything. He is thoughtful, crass, incredibly funny, and absolutely the weirdest first person narrator I have ever inhabited. But I cared about him, his girlfriend Shann, and about Robby Brees, while also hoping they'd just become a bisexual threesome already, which is clearly what Austin wants. I really, really, really loved the LGBT aspects of this book, and they are probably where the bulk of my enjoyment stemmed from.

This book pulls no punches on any topic. It's sexual and it's violent and... well, there are giant fucking preying mantises! Literally fucking! And the world ends! And things happen! The whole thing is a careening snowball of ever-expanding lunacy! And I loved it! I don't even know. I didn't think this book would work for me, but it did.There are... oh, possibly twelve other people who will get as big a kick out of this book as I did. The writing is almost as bizarre as the premise, thought it's fascinatingly insightful and laugh-out-loud funny, even if at times it needed a bit of cleaning up or veered towards the oddly formal (sometimes Austin would forgo contractions). You won't recognize the plot or its development as anything resembling anything you've seen before. There are so many elements that it's hard to say whether or not they truly all coalesce by the end.

It's just weird, really, and it's about discovering whether Grasshopper Jungle is your flavor of weird or not.



If you want to give this book a shot, go in forewarned. It's certainly a unique read, and you'll only know you'll like it once you've actually tried and liked it. In fact, it wasn't really until I finished it, and I realized I was laughing and experiencing a surprising amount of feelings, that I came to the definitive conclusion that yes, I enjoyed my breakneck journey through the cracked out masturbation fantasy of a rabbit hole that is Grasshopper Jungle.

Read the first couple of pages, get a feel for the writing, and see if you can stomach its explicitness. It's a book that deserves all the stars for completely being its own insane and insanely creative thing, even though I'm still staring at my ARC of it, all green and pointy on my bedside table, because I'm still not even sure what it is. And I'm half-convinced it will turn into a freaking insect and eat me.

Blog Tour: A Mad, Wicked Folly by Sharon Biggs Waller

I'm so happy to be part of the blog tour for one of my favorite reads of the year, A Mad, Wicked Folly by Sharon Biggs Waller, a historical and romantic tale full of feminism, art, and fighting for what you want. I loved it with the power of a thousand suns (as evidenced by my gushing review), and I'm honored to have the author invade the blog for the day and tell you about all the research that went into recreating Edwardian London.

There was so much research that went into A MAD, WICKED FOLLY. I think just about every paragraph in the book has some research to it! I'd stop and think, what kind of dessert would a working class person eat? Then I'd go look it up. Plum duff! That's what they would have eaten.



[Gillian: Apparently this is a plum duff. Working class life in turn-of-the-century London looks delicious.]

I really wanted to bring the Edwardian era to life, so I had to know everything, from the fashion, to the way people spoke, to how they travelled, how they danced. I love research, so it wasn't boring for me. I'm really nosy so I like to search around and get all the details, it drives my husband crazy sometimes. I bought over 30 books for FOLLY and I filled five notebooks with handwritten scribbles.

Source

I went to England twice to research the suffrage movement and to walk in Vicky's footsteps. I got to meet with the curator of the Museum of London and look through all the suffragette collection. They actually have a loaf of bread from Holloway Prison. And the gag and funnel from force-feeding.

A Mad, Wicked Folly Synopsis:

Welcome to the world of the fabulously wealthy in London, 1909, where dresses and houses are overwhelmingly opulent, social class means everything, and women are taught to be nothing more than wives and mothers. Into this world comes seventeen-year-old Victoria Darling, who wants only to be an artist—a nearly impossible dream for a girl.
           
After Vicky poses nude for her illicit art class, she is expelled from her French finishing school. Shamed and scandalized, her parents try to marry her off to the wealthy Edmund Carrick-Humphrey. But Vicky has other things on her mind: her clandestine application to the Royal College of Art; her participation in the suffragette movement; and her growing attraction to a working-class boy who may be her muse—or may be the love of her life. As the world of debutante balls, corsets, and high society obligations closes in around her, Vicky must figure out: just how much is she willing to sacrifice to pursue her dreams?

Goodreads | Barnes & Noble | The Book Depository | Amazon

About Sharon Biggs Waller:

Sharon Biggs Waller is a novelist and award-winning non-fiction writer who lives on a 10-acre sustainable farm in northwest Indiana with two horses, four dairy goats, four cats, two dogs and 60 laying hens. She is a dressage trainer who for many years was a Civil Service Club instructor at the Royal Mews in Buckingham Palace in London. Visit her at http://sharonbiggswaller.com or on Twitter @Sbiggwaller.

Top Ten Books That Will Make You Swoon

Hosted by The Broke and the Bookish

You probably get really tired of hearing me say this, but this TTT topic was nearly impossible for me. I reach books because of the swoons. I love books because of the swoons (most of the time. As in, almost all of the time). So choosing just TEN books I swoon over when quite literally ALL of my favorite books are swoony is so hard. My entire archive of read books to choose from is swoony, really. But I did the best I could.

The Distance Between Us. Pivot Point. Both have incredibly wonderful, swoony, cuter-than-puppies romances. I hear there's an additional swoony couple in Pivot Point's sequel, Split Second

HER BOOKS. Anna and the French Kiss. Lola and the Boy Next Door. Gillian and the Bookish Boyfriends.

Another recent read that had me literally, physically swoon. I swear at one point I clutched the book to my heart and sort of sagged sideways across the couch.

Chapter Fifty-Five. And Fifty-Eight. And all the chapters. And oh my god if Mafi ever wrote a New Adult novel the world would just burst into flames of swoons and lust.

WES AND MAC. The cutes! The swoons! The slow build! The partnership! The trust! The cute moments!

Jase Garret, you can crawl onto my roof any day. Any time. He and Sam are so adorable together, and reading about their love story makes me swoon.

The thing I love best about Tammy's book are the ships. I mean, besides magic and plots and shenanigans and kick ass female heroines of all kinds. But you know me; I read for ships, and I'm not ashamed of it. Tamora Pierce has written three of my all-time OTPs, not to mention the most seminal kissing scene of my childhood.

LEVI AND CATH MAKE ME SWOON SO HARD. I can barely even talk about how much I adore reading about them come slowly, sloooowly together in Fangirl. Rowell writes scenes that are so damn cute they make your teeth ache, but they also hurt your heart because of all the LOVE and the PAIN, especially the pain, and especially in Eleanor & Park. Her couples are just so prefect and their connections are so pure.

Nobody brings the contemporary romance like Katie McGarry, and Dare You To is my favorite of hers. Ryan and Beth are so different, but their romance makes so much sense, and THE SCENE IN THE BARN. I went weak in the knees reading that scene.

Percabeth Percabeth Percabeth. Percabeth Percabeth. Percabeth.

It's a way of life.

"The kiss obliterated her.
It was like coming home or being born or suddenly finding an entire half of herself that had been missing."

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 I guess crowns are just really sexy to me. Or maybe it's just HECTORRRRRR.

This is a liiiitle bit of a cheat, since I've only read Catching Jordan, but I completely adored Catching Jordan and have heard nothing but the best and swooniest things about her other books from friends whose swoony tastes line up with mine.

Ohhhh, do I ship the ship in Scarlet and Lady Thief. I recently read and LOVED Lady Thief, book two, and trust me, this is where the swoons really come in to play. The kissing scenes... I can't even.