Life Of Books

I am super excited for Teri Terry's debut novel Slated, due for release tomorrow! I am usually an avoider of YA novels, especially since the release of Twilight. Since its success all I've ever seen is books filled with lousy plots, over the top love triangles (squares, OCTAGONS?), terrible leads (Mary and Gary sues) and the complete decimation of supernatural/dystopian themes. However, I see Slated as the beginning of the YA genre making a triumphant comeback.

Will deff. Be making a trip to chapters tomorrow!

Cheers and happy reading!
-Perin Squires

Raised alongside her numerous brothers and sisters by the formidable empress of Austria, ten-year-old Maria Antonia knew that her idyllic existence would one day be sacrificed to her mother’s political ambitions. What she never anticipated was that the day in question would come so soon.

Before she can journey from sunlit picnics with her sisters in Vienna to the glitter, glamour, and gossip of Versailles, Antonia must changeeverything about herself in order to be accepted as dauphine of France and the wife of the awkward teenage boy who will one day be Louis XVI. Yet nothing can prepare her for the ingenuity and influence it will take to become queen.

                    So far House Of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski is proving to be one of the scariest books I've ever read, as well as a close second favorite to my favorite book Life Of Pi, by Yann Martel. I am very excited to reach the end, but I don't want it to end haha. Below is an excerpt from Chapter V:

"....Ironically, hollowness only increases the eerie quality of otherness inherent in any echo. Delay and frightened repetition create a sense of another inhabiting a necessarily deserted place. Strange then how something so uncanny and outside of the self, even ghostly as some have suggested, if it is imaginary and at best the product of a wall, there is still something else out there, something to stake out in the face of nothingness."

    When literature student Anastasia Steele is drafted to interview the successful young entrepreneur Christian Grey for her campus magazine, she finds him attractive, enigmatic and intimidating. Convinced their meeting went badly, she tries to put Grey out of her mind - until he happens to turn up at the out-of-town hardware store where she works part-time. 

The unworldly, innocent Ana is shocked to realize she wants this man, and when he warns her to keep her distance it only makes her more desperate to get close to him. Unable to resist Ana’s quiet beauty, wit, and independent spirit, Grey admits he wants her - but on his own terms. 

Shocked yet thrilled by Grey's singular erotic tastes, Ana hesitates. For all the trappings of success – his multinational businesses, his vast wealth, his loving adoptive family – Grey is a man tormented by demons and consumed by the need to control. When the couple embarks on a passionate, physical and daring affair, Ana learns more about her own dark desires, as well as the Christian Grey hidden away from public scrutiny.

Can their relationship transcend physical passion? Will Ana find it in herself to submit to the self-indulgent Master? And if she does, will she still love what she finds?