Hi all! I was lucky enough to receive this beautiful new addition of Twilight and Life and Death (Twilight Reimagined).

First off, if you are looking for me to pan it, you can go ahead and stop reading. Seriously.

The reason why Twilight was such a huge sensation, for teens and adults alike (okay okay, mostly women) was because Twilight NAILED teenage angst. Upon re-reading the book ten years later, I found her character motivations dead on.

Look, I’m watching Twilight!

“But think about the children!” some of you will say. “What kind of role model are we setting are kids up with? Bella is not a feminist!”

You’d be wrong. Bella is her own person, and for her character, Edward is everything. Now let’s all think back to when we were teens. Some of you probably dreamt of traveling the world. Some of you wanted to be doctors, lawyers…and some of you were in love with love. I remember so many girls just dying to fall in love – everything else would fall into place later. Careers, if and when to have children, major life decisions all were later. NOW was all about finding the perfect person to spend the rest of your life with.

Now as for feminism, let us not forget that feminism, is at it’s heart, about choice. It’s perfectly fine for someone to go into the corporate world and kick butt, just like it’s okay for another woman to stay home and bake freakin’ chocolate chip cookies all day and wipe up drool. As long as she has the choice, we’re good. Right? You’re not putting your own beliefs and values on someone else, because that would be the antithesis of feminism. Right? Right.

Phew! Glad we got that out of the way. As someone who HAS done the corporate thing, traveling the country and world, etc., I can say it IS wonderful. We should all try it! If you want.

Anywho, back to the teen angst. It’s so perfect I felt myself melting back to highschool, when hubs and I were teenagers, and I was so crazy in love with him I literally couldn’t imagine a life without him. As an adult I now realize that’s crazy. But hey, it worked out for us in the long run 😉 But Bella is in that moment, falling head over heels in a very old-fashioned way with a vampire, and Meyer nails it so perfectly.

Life and Death is a twist on that, proving her point that the story is about a PERSON falling in love with a vampire, not a girl. Honestly, I thought the rewrite was fine. It didn’t zing with me as much as the first, and neither book is my favorite. I’m not usually a romance kind of girl, give me rough and tumble heroines or Hermione’s any day. But the rewrite is solid, actually more so than the first, and it has a cool new ending. I won’t say any more on that, but I liked it.

So if you’ve never read it, go ahead and get this beautiful deluxe edition. It may not be your favorite, but you’ll at least get a taste for what SOME (read: most) girls go through in highschool: Total, all-consuming and completely irrational love. As a mother I shudder to think of my girl giving herself over to a vampire, but hey. This is fiction. So let’s all breathe and remember we read fiction for fun. And you will have fun with this book, if you allow it.

Liz died in an accident and found herself in Elsewhere – a land of the dead. It’s a lot like Earth, with beautiful sunny days, a stormy ocean and people. Hundreds of thousands of people. And instead of getting older, everyone is getting younger until the day they are ready to be reborn on Earth again. Now Liz lives with her grandmother, whom she never knew in her previous life, and it’s not going well. Liz can’t cope with the fact that she’ll never turn sixteen, she’ll never move on and never grow up. But when she meets a guy who intrigues her in a most adult way, Elsewhere gets more interesting. Can she let go of the life she was supposed to have, and embrace the life in reverse she has now?

A beautifully written book that made me cry on several occasions! With a deep emotional tug that won’t let you go, Elsewhere is a perfect read for teens and adults covering a timeless and heartwrenching question: What happens to us when we die?

Highly recommended! Buy it now!

I SEE KITTY is an adorable board book, perfect for preschoolers and younger. The simplistic, bright and engaging illustrations will delight small children. They will be entranced as we follow Chloe, a sweet little girl who loves kitties. First she sees them in the pet shop window up for adoption, which sets her imagination on fire. Chloe sees Kitty in the clouds, in a puddle, in cotton candy and in a woman’s crazy up-do hair at the bus stop. Chloe dreams of kitty in a psychedelic kitty paradise complete with a milk river and more cardboard boxes than any kitty could ever dream to hide in…

Read more!

Sydney was happy with her life before her brother went and ruined everything. When her handsome, enigmatic brother falls down the slippery slope of drinking irresponsibly, he accidentally cripples a young neighborhood boy. Suddenly, Sydney is being stared at everywhere she goes and her brother is sent to prison. Her parents, attentive before the accident, have completely forgotten her. Everything is about her brother, his rehabilitation and his life inside those dark four walls…

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Cath is leaving home for the first time to attend college. As if this wasn’t hard enough, Cath’s twin sister, Wren, doesn’t want to be roommates. She wants to find herself and become her own person away from Cath. Burn.

So off to college Cath goes, meeting a new roommate and her hot boyfriend, as well as secretly writing her Simon Snow fan-fiction. She isn’t just a fan of Simon Snow, a Harry-Potter-esque magical book series. She’s the BIGGEST fan, writing fan fiction that thousands of followers read every week. She can’t let the fascinating world of Snow go. After all, it’s what she and her sister clung to after their Mom left them years ago. Most of all, Simon Snow lets Cath dive into a world that’s not her own, and continue being the girl she was back at home.

But challenges arise when her writing professor dumps on her fan fiction. Then she falls for the hot boyfriend of her roommate, and her sister gets herself into some serious trouble. Add in her Dad and his own bouts of mental illness, and it’s enough to make any freshmen lose it. Can Cath keep it all together? Can she grow up and still be the same Cath who loves Simon Snow and her thousands of fans?

This is a really fantastic read – definitely my favorite contemporary YA. I’m not usually a big fan of the genre, but this one was so unique, and so well written, that I immediately fell in love. As a HUGE Harry Potter nerd myself, I identify with a character who has a hard time letting go and growing up. I thought Cath was accessible and likable, and I rooted for her the whole way. You should definitely pick up this book today!

Cecelia is the perfect tupperware-wielding upper class wife. Her adorable children are successful at their private school, and her handsome husband makes all of her friends jealous. But something is…off. So when she accidentally finds a letter addressed to her, from her husband, she’s terribly curious. The instructions say to open only in the event of his death. She starts running through oddities in her head, adding up his private crying fits and foul secretive moods into something huge. Should she open the letter? What could he possibly be hiding from her, and is it the reason he’s been acting so strange for their entire marriage?

Unable to take the suspense, she opens it. What she finds will tear her world apart, and shed light on a decades-old mystery. Told from multiple perspectives, The Husband’s Secret is a fascinating thriller unlike others. Instead of trailing us along to finally realize who did what, we know up front some pretty horrible truths. The bigger question is, what would you do with a secret that could ruin the life of someone you love? Follow your sense of morality, or defend them to the death?

And if you chose to ignore the truth, can you handle the consequences?

This is a fabulous beach read for the summer! Intriguing and dark without dipping too far into psychological mayhem, Moriarty keeps us guessing what people will do until the very end. It’s a very real, human story about making hard choices, The Husband’s Secret will make you question just what you would do if put in an awful situation. The story is told from very clean multiple perspectives, and is done well. I always knew whose head I was in, which is hard for many writers. I would highly recommend it!

The Girl on the Train is the debut novel of journalist Paula Hawkins.

Rachel loves the train. She rides it each day on her way in to London at the exact same time, and takes it back out again like clockwork. What she loves most about her morning trip, though, is the sneak peek she gets into the lives of those in trackside house number 15. He’s handsome, she’s beautiful, and they are enormously happy. At least, that’s the story she’s made up about them in her head complete with imagined names and personal quirks. And since everything in her life is spinning out of control, Rachel relishes their normalness.

Until one morning in the train, she sees the trackside woman with another man. A man who is most definitely not her husband. When it is revealed a few days later that the trackside woman of number 15 is missing, Rachel begins an investigation into the perfect lives of people she’s never even met.

Following Rachel down the rabbit hole, we learn about her tangled history with the train, London, her ex-husband and the very house that she has eyed each morning for the past year. Is Rachel herself telling the truth? Who are these people, really, and what connection does she have with them?

And did she have anything to do with the woman’s disappearance?

This is an adult psychological thriller in the vein of Gone Girl. A fantastic book that I literally could not stop reading! Hawkins flips us back and forth between narrators and timelines, keeping the reader on their toes. What happened to the woman? Who really is Rachel, if not just another girl on the train? You’ll be guessing until the twisty end! I absolutely loved it, and highly recommend it! This is adult fiction, so not for younger readers, but I think that it’s a beautifully done novel that anyone would enjoy.

Graduation Day, by Joelle Charbonneau, is book three in The Testing series. Read my review of book one here, and book two here.

Cia is back, and it’s time to graduate. Will she and her friends find a way to bring The Testing to an end? Will she be able to do what it takes to make sure innocent kids won’t be killed – even if that means killing the testmakers herself?

I won’t do a full review, as I don’t want to give too much away if you haven’t read the series. Overall, this series is a fast-paced adventure that is perfect  for fans of The Hunger Games or Divergent. Cia is a totally relateable, likable character. I love that she is mechanically inclined and can create tools and weapons out of seemingly nothing! She is no wilting flower waiting to be saved. She’s fiercely loyal and terribly smart, and I loved following along on her adventure. Ingenuity is the name of the game in this series, and fans of dystopic or thrillers won’t be disappointed. Charbonneau is an excellent writer who really grabs you from page one.

I highly recommend this series! And, lucky you, the whole series is already finished. You can buy or borrow it all at once, like I did! There is seriously nothing better than reading a series like this one after another. You will not be disappointed!

Buy it now!

Independent Study, by Joelle Charbonneau. Ready my review of book one, The Testing.

Cia is back in this thrilling follow-up to The Testing. Set in a future world where the US is struggling to make it’s way back from the brink, Cia is one of the lucky few chosen to attend The Testing. If she passes, she’ll move on to the University to study among the country’s greatest minds and will eventually help turn the world into a more habitable place. Of course, The Testing is nothing like she’s been told all of her life. Candidates spar with one another for top spots, using poison to eliminate candidates. The government has rigged the tests to inure or kill students who get wrong answers, and those who fail are eliminated. Permanently.

Cia has made it through the testing and endured the memory wipe. Thanks to some ingenuity, she’s left her self a message that explains every horrible thing that happened to her. With this knowledge, Cia realizes that the University is not what it seems. She knows that if she fails here, she’ll be executed – even if no one has admitted that. So when she gets wind of a revolution, she joins up. She’ll do anythi

Penny has problems, and is a problem herself, all at the same time. Her mother never lets her forget it. So when she’s dropped off on her Dad’s doorstep in Seattle, Penny isn’t entirely surprised.  Maybe this time, she’ll be able to forget the horrors of her past and the ghost of a dead friend who still haunts her.

Then April, her stepmom, gets a crazy idea to refurbish the old Carver House in the remote North Woods. And the worst part is she’s decided to take Penny along for the two month ride.

Stuck in a pile of tinder that barely resembles a house, Penny begins to explore the mysterious woods and tiny one-horse town. Creeping, terrifying voices call out to her from the woods, begging to be followed, and the locals won’t dare to come near the house. In fact, they don’t want to talk to Penny or April at all. Battling her own demons, Penny begins to investigate the old stories of the North Woods and the Carver House. Why did all of those teens disappear around there? What happened to them? And what horrors did their families commit to bring them back?

Because the woods that surround her are watching. They are waiting, and they are hungry.

This terrifyingly good novel is a must-read for fans of ghost stories and mysteries! Penny is significantly flawed and relateable, and we find ourselves rooting for her to clear her own conscience of her misdeeds and solve the mystery of the house. Creepy window handprints, little girls peering out of forests, local legends and newspaper clippings give this book a classic ghost story feel. I devoured it in just three sittings! Ms. West is an excellent story teller and really creeps you out!