The Princess Diaries Reread & The Start of My YA Love Affair: Books 1-3

If you’ve been visiting my blog for a while, you’ve probably heard me mention my love for Meg Cabot’s Princess Diaries series. When I found out that she was publishing a continuation, adult novel in the series, I knew it was time for me to revisit the series- and I do mean the whole series. I own all of the novels, all but one of the novellas (before e-books, when they used to be published in tiny little paperbacks) and all of the companion how-to guides. I even recently started re-buying the novels in the newer paperback covers because my covers are all mismatched since they changed so much over the years. Couple this with the fact that 2015 marks the 15th anniversary of The Princess Diaries publication and I am in full on fangirl mode.

A Bit About My YA Reading Experience as Influenced by Meg Cabot

The Princess Diaries holds a special place for me because it was literally the first YA book that I ever read. Ever. It all started when I was in fourth grade and we had to choose a book for an independent reading project. I had seen the movie and loved it, so I went to my local Borders and picked up the pink paperback. Writing style wise, I loved it (I was always one of those kids who was a more accelerated reading level than what was being written for my age group- I was so tired of middle grade novels at that point). Content wise…well I was definitely a bit shocked, haha! Mia deals so candidly and realistically with topics that freshmen in high school have to confront, from sex to boys to school to politics to self-actualization. I flew through the novel and reread it multiple times, holding it near and dear to my heart, feeling giddy and slightly sneaky reading about teenagers at the age of 10. (A funny aside- when I showed up to school with the book, two of the “popular” girls immediately went out and got it for their projects too. After reading a few chapters they went to the teacher and demanded to be allowed to choose another book because they felt the content was too mature for them). The Princess Diaries series was definitely my “gateway read” into YA, and I haven’t looked back since.

Revisiting and Re-reading

I started my re-reading project this past summer, but it kind of fizzled out with all of the other books on my TBR. Once I decided to participate in the 2015 Re-reading Challenge, I knew that re-reading the rest of the series was a must. If anyone wants to join in, let me know!

Reviews

The Princess Diaries (1)- There’s nothing quite like reading this book, especially in comparison to the movie. Set in New York instead of San Francisco, and with a Grandmeré who is the complete opposite of Julie Andrews, every time I reread this book I get more and more out of it in terms of the pop culture references. I love Mia’s raw and emotionally open portrayal in her diary entries and the cast of unique and often hilarious characters (such as Lars the bodyguard, Lily the neurotic best friend, and even Rommel, Grandmeré’s psychotic dog).

Princess in the Spotlight (2)- The sophomore installment in the series really keeps the charm of the first book, focusing on Mia having to start to train as a royal while also juggling notes from a secret admirer (Jo-C-Rox). I love love love Mia’s hilarious lists in the series from ranking Lifetime movies to detailing which celebrities she’d hook up with. There’s also the very important plot line of Mia’s mother being impregnated with Mia’s algebra’s teacher’s baby. There’s also a lot of hilarious yet subtly insightful commentary on different political and social differences between people who live in different parts of the US, as Mia’s mother’s family comes to visit New York from Indiana.

Princess in Love (3)- This is my favorite book out of the entire series, as it covers the Thanksgiving and Christmas seasons and all of the holiday drama that goes with it. Mia’s stuck in a relationship with absolutely cringe-worthy Kenny, pining after Michael who is apparently dating Judith the human fruit fly, and trying to balance finals (don’t we all know that stress too well?) I also like how Mia continues to grow as an individual and away from Lily’s influence (like with the walk-out Lily plans that happens to be during her stepdad’s class). We also get more of the fantastic characters who are missed in the movie (like Tina!) The ending is so cute and my teenage self thought the way Mia comes together with Michael in this book was the cutest thing ever.

Future Posts

Through the spring I’ll be rereading all of the books and novellas and bundling my reviews a few books at a time, leading up to the release of the new book in June! If you are interested in joining me, let me know! I can’t wait for Mia’s story to continue, and for those of us who grew up as 2000’s teens it’s satisfying to see Mia embarking on her adult life, just as we are!

Landline by Rainbow Rowell- Review

Landline by Rainbow Rowell

My rating: 4/5 Stars

Publisher: St. Martin’s Press (2014)

Length: 310 pgs

Genre: Adult Conemporary Fiction

Format: Hardcover, checked out from my local library

Goodreads Synopsis: Georgie McCool knows her marriage is in trouble. That it’s been in trouble for a long time. She still loves her husband, Neal, and Neal still loves her, deeply — but that almost seems beside the point now.

Maybe that was always beside the point.

Two days before they’re supposed to visit Neal’s family in Omaha for Christmas, Georgie tells Neal that she can’t go. She’s a TV writer, and something’s come up on her show; she has to stay in Los Angeles. She knows that Neal will be upset with her — Neal is always a little upset with Georgie — but she doesn’t expect to him to pack up the kids and go home without her.

When her husband and the kids leave for the airport, Georgie wonders if she’s finally done it. If she’s ruined everything.

That night, Georgie discovers a way to communicate with Neal in the past. It’s not time travel, not exactly, but she feels like she’s been given an opportunity to fix her marriage before it starts . . .

Is that what she’s supposed to do?

Or would Georgie and Neal be better off if their marriage never happened?

I’m going to preface this review by coming right out and saying it: I really, really enjoyed this book. I know it’s received a lot of mixed and lukewarm reviews, and a lot of readers prefer Rowell’s first contemporary novel Attachments (you can read my review here). However, I found Landline to be a book I couldn’t put down. No, it’s not action packed, and no, it’s not quite sci-fi despite the “magic phone” element, and it may not appeal to the same YA lovers who proudly profess their love of Fangirl but it’s an introspective look at a character trying to evaluate and save her marriage, and if there’s one thing I know about Rainbow Rowell, it’s that she writes fantastic characters that are easy to adore.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn Review- The Book That I Was Not Expecting

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

My rating: 3.5/5 Stars

Publisher: Crown (2012)

Length: 419 pgs

Genre: Adult Fiction/Mystery/Thriller

Format: Hardcover, checked out from my local library

Goodreads Synopsis: On a warm summer morning in North Carthage, Missouri, it is Nick and Amy Dunne’s fifth wedding anniversary. Presents are being wrapped and reservations are being made when Nick’s clever and beautiful wife disappears from their rented McMansion on the Mississippi River. Husband-of-the-Year Nick isn’t doing himself any favors with cringe-worthy daydreams about the slope and shape of his wife’s head, but passages from Amy’s diary reveal the alpha-girl perfectionist could have put anyone dangerously on edge. Under mounting pressure from the police and the media–as well as Amy’s fiercely doting parents–the town golden boy parades an endless series of lies, deceits, and inappropriate behavior. Nick is oddly evasive, and he’s definitely bitter–but is he really a killer?

As the cops close in, every couple in town is soon wondering how well they know the one that they love. With his twin sister, Margo, at his side, Nick stands by his innocence. Trouble is, if Nick didn’t do it, where is that beautiful wife? And what was in that silvery gift box hidden in the back of her bedroom closet?

My Review:

With Gone Girl I was expecting a thriller. Something that would keep me up at night and make me check around corners warily. Instead, Gone Girl was not a action thriller, but rather slow-burning, psychological thriller that brings up the disturbing questions: Are the ones who are closest to you the ones who can hurt you the most? Do those who love you cut you the deepest? Do we love others because they secretly emphasize our love for ourselves?

Top Ten Authors I’ve (Sadly) Only Read One Book From…And Want to Read More From!

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature hosted by the fantastic blog The Broke and the Bookish. This week’s topic was “Top Ten Authors You’ve Only Read One Book From, But Want To Read More From.” The list is in no particular order! I’ve also listed the next book I plan on reading from the author!

1) John Green- I’m waiting to be more impressed by one of his works after TFIOS.

Next Read: Paper Towns

2) Abigail Haas- Dangerous Girls gave me the biggest book hangover of 2014, and I’m excited for Haas’ work to astound (and slightly terrify) me again!

Next Read: Dangerous Boys

3) Rosamund Hodge- Cruel Beauty was phenomenal and I think she has a lot to offer in the genre of fairy-tale retellings!

Next Read: Gilded Ashes (novella)

4) Bethany Griffin- She knows how to do Steampunk brilliantly, which I think is an unexplored area in YA!

Next Read: Dance of the Red Death

5) Sherman Alexie- I read Ten Little Indians in a multicultural literature class and I think he has a really interesting narrative voice and treads a fine line between humor and tragedy, often being able to creatively portray both simultaneously.

Next Read: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

6) Jeffrey Eugenides- Middlesex was utterly captivating, and the cultural and generational back stories tied in so intricately with primary story of gender questioning and identification. He’s one of the best adult fiction writers I’ve come across.

Next Read: The Virgin Suicides

7) Jennifer Donnelly- Her historical fiction/paranormal hybrid novel Revolution blew me away (and she also writes a great stand alone novel, which seems to be rare these days).

Next Read: Deep Blue

8) Christopher Moore- His humor is laugh-out-loud worthy and he takes the overdone historical and paranormal tropes and parodies them fantastically. He’s a favorite of my boyfriend and I love his quirky book covers.

Next Read: Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

9) Sarah Ockler- I was a bit underwhelmed with #scandal but I’ve seen so much love for her previous works by other bloggers that I really want to give her writing a second chance.

Next Read: Twenty Boy Summer

10) F. Scott Fitzgerald: Because I feel like I should experience his writing outside of Gatsby.

Next Read: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Which authors were on your list this week? Let me know/link back to your TTT post in the comments!

Attachments by Rainbow Rowell- Review

Attachments by Rainbow Rowell

My rating: 3/5 Stars

Publisher: Dutton Adult (2011)

Length: 323 pgs

Genre: Adult Fiction

Format: Hardcover, checked out from my local library

Goodreads Synopsis: “Hi, I’m the guy who reads your e-mail, and also, I love you”
Beth Fremont and Jennifer Scribner-Snyder know that somebody is monitoring their work e-mail. (Everybody in the newsroom knows. It’s company policy.) But they can’t quite bring themselves to take it seriously. They go on sending each other endless and endlessly hilarious e-mails, discussing every aspect of their personal lives.

Meanwhile, Lincoln O’Neill can’t believe this is his job now- reading other people’s e-mail. When he applied to be “internet security officer,” he pictured himself building firewalls and crushing hackers- not writing up a report every time a sports reporter forwards a dirty joke.

When Lincoln comes across Beth’s and Jennifer’s messages, he knows he should turn them in. But he can’t help being entertained-and captivated-by their stories.

By the time Lincoln realizes he’s falling for Beth, it’s way too late to introduce himself.

What would he say . . . ?

My Review:

Attachments is the first adult novel by Rowell that I’ve read, and the second I’ve read by her (I adored Fangirl) and I’ve found that Rowell has a way of writing a great contemporary with layers of feeling and emotion subtly laced throughout. She doesn’t have to hit you over the head with the depth to her characters, rather she lets you in bit by bit, letting readers find empathy with ordinary characters, relating to the struggles, emotions, and desires of the average person that most of us go through (I felt this way with Cath in Fangirl, and with Lincoln in Attachments).

This book reminded me a lot of some earlier 2000s adult contemporary reads by Meg Cabot, such as Every Boy’s Got One and The Boy Next Door. Set at the turn of Y2K, it was a lot of fun reading and reminiscing on how things were at the end of the 90s and how new everyone was to the concept of email and the internet (and thus many were paranoid about internet security). The email format between Beth and Jennifer stayed consistent throughout the book, intermixed with narrative passage’s from Lincoln’s perspective. I loved this format for this story because it really felt like you as a reader were monitoring the emails as Lincoln, and were able to get to know both women’s characters solely through their online communication, as does Lincoln. It was a fun way to structure the narrative and gave me some nostalgia for when email was this shiny new concept and authors were super trendy for using the format in their contemporary novels.

What I really liked about Attachments is that each of the three main characters is struggling with a different stage of life at the onset of their thirties, and is still trying to establish themselves as an “adult.” From Lincoln, who lives with his feminist, anti-establishment, yet Betty Corocker-esque constantly cooking mother to Beth who has moved out on her own yet is still supporting her college sweetheart’s band aspirations to Jennifer who is married but still as terrified of pregnancy and motherhood as any sixteen year old, each of the characters acknowledges that just because they have “big-kid” jobs and are in their late twenties and considered more or less “adults” does not mean they have their lives figured out yet. And I have to tell you, this is refreshing to read as a twenty-something and continued some of the coming-of-age themes in YA and NA, which is fantastic, because who really has their entire lives figured out by the time that they’re thirty? I also loved Rowell’s knack for writing colorful secondary characters who may be in the background but add so much fun to the story, such as Doris the vending machine lady who is the first to befriend Lincoln to his D&D group members to the insufferable yet smoldering Chris.

Overall: While I enjoyed Attachments as a quick and fun read, it’s didn’t irrevocably change me as a reader or have me yearning for more (hence the 3 star rating- I enjoyed it and it was pleasant but it’s not a new all-time-favorite). It was a cute, insightful contemporary and a nice break from YA fiction, and supports my belief that I’ll enjoy anything that Rowell writes.

If you enjoyed Attachments you may also like:

To read my review of Fangirl, click here:

Discussion: New Adult Fiction

Lately I’ve been hearing a lot about the new(ish) genre “New Adult Fiction,” with many varying opinions regarding whether it’s a great new idea or just another way to compartmentalize younger readers out of the adult fiction section. It’s still somewhat debated as to whether “New Adult” is an actual genre or a marketing term, but the idea (from what I’ve read and researched) is that it’s a midway point between YA and Adult, focusing on the age range of 18-25 and covering issues such as college, first jobs, starting families, etc.

My primary problem with the concept of “New Adult” is that is implies that readers over 18 are technically out of the YA age bracket. I know there’s been a lot of uproar over a very offensive and poorly written article that came out this month that tried to shame older readers over reading YA, and I feel as though pushing a new genre between YA and adult fiction can be perceived as insulting. It implies that there needs to be a “transition” period to adult fiction and that readers in this age bracket should be transitioned out of YA. Honestly though, at the age of eighteen I was mostly still very immersed in a lot of the topics that YA encompasses, and a lot of YA deals with emotionally mature themes despite having more high-school aged protagonists.

Yet the idea of a “New Adult” genre has its merits, and perhaps its inclusion as a genre would produce more books that cover college and post-graduate characters and topics, because there definitely seems to be a shortage of that (Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell is really the only YA book I’ve read so far this year that focuses on the college experience, and it was so refreshing to read about that rather unexplored time period in YA lit). While I love YA and will continue to read it as I age, I would agree that there needs to be more fiction inclusive of the 18-25 year old life experience. Do I think that YA is too immature for this age group? Not at all! I think that there is plenty of potential for these topics to be explored within YA, because during the ages of 18-25 most people still identify with the category of “young adult.”

I personally haven’t read any books marketed as “New Adult” so I can’t speak as to how these books read and what their content is like (and if it’s really so much different than YA that it needs its own genre). I would like to though, to see what this genre really encompasses, though I know titles are not abundant as many major publishing houses have not acknowledged the genre.

Have you read any “New Adult” fiction? Do you think it needs to be separate from YA? Is it an innovative idea or an insulting one? Do you have any good recommendations for either NA books or YA books that cover college or post-grad aged protagonists? Do you think NA is marketed too much as a romance genre? I’m really intrigued by this topic, so let me know in the comments!

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler- Review

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

My rating: 2.5/5 Stars

Publisher: Plume (A division of Penguin) (2013)

Length: 320 pgs

Format: Paperback, gifted to me

Goodreads Synopsis: Meet the Cooke family. Our narrator is Rosemary Cooke. As a child, she never stopped talking; as a young woman, she has wrapped herself in silence: the silence of intentional forgetting, of protective cover. Something happened, something so awful she has buried it in the recesses of her mind.

Now her adored older brother is a fugitive, wanted by the FBI for domestic terrorism. And her once lively mother is a shell of her former self, her clever and imperious father now a distant, brooding man.

And Fern, Rosemary’s beloved sister, her accomplice in all their childhood mischief? Fern’s is a fate the family, in all their innocence, could never have imagined.

My Review:

I didn’t really know what to expect from this book when I picked it up. It was generously gifted to me by some English professors and I was curious as I had not heard of the title nor read anything by the author previously. This book ended up being a mixed bag for me- it kept me interested in the story but I didn’t feel overwhelmingly attached to any of the characters.

The protagonist, Rosemary, has the self-proclaimed habit of telling stories starting in the middle, so when the novel beings she is attending UC Davis, though it is revealed later in the novel that the story has actually been narrated by an older adult Rosemary. Though I enjoyed reading about Rosemary’s quirky family, with her psychologist father and her eccentric relationships with both sides of her grandparents, it was a bit dizzying to read, as the narrative jumped from college to flashbacks of her childhood to mentions of the present. Fowler’s writing style was also a bit choppy, and by the end of the book I had become irritated with it.