The Witches of East End by Melissa De La Cruz

Title: The Witches of East End
Series: Beauchamp Family Series Book #1
Genre: Fantasy/Paranormal
Author: Melissa De La Cruz
Published: 2011 by Hyperion
272 Pages
I Got It: http://www.bn.com
I Read It: August 5 - August 7, 2014
I Rated It: 4/5 Stars


Joanna Beauchamp and her two daughters, Freya and Ingrid, live in a quaint coastal town in New York. The three women seem to lead average lives yet they actually harbor a long-standing secret: they are powerful witches who have been banned from using their magic. Over the course of the book events happen that slowly encourage all three women to break the rules and begin using their magic again to unlock a centuries-old secret. 
I really liked this book. I found it to be very reminiscent of Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman which is one of my favorite books of all time. It was a fun, fast-paced and compelling read. Over the past few weeks I had been sliding my way into a reading slump. I was not enjoying anything that I was reading and I was not excited to start anything new. I realized that I was craving something in the paranormal/fantasy genre and this book hit the spot.
I liked all of the characters in the book. I especially enjoyed the three Beauchamp women and I really related to Ingrid. I felt like all of the characters were fully fleshed out and i am excited to see how they will continue to develop over the next few books. 
This book series has been turned into a TV show on Lifetime. I started watching the television show which is actually pretty different from the book, at least it is different from this first book, but the show is still good in its own right. 
I liked the beginning a lot more than I liked the ending. It took a weird spin towards the end that I didn't enjoy. There were too many references to events in the previous lives of the women that didn't get fully explained or resolved which was confusing and annoying. This was especially true in the last 1/3 of the book. 
I am excited to read the rest of the series and to start De La Cruz's Blue Bloods series as well. 
I would recommend this book to fans of witch stories, fans of paranormal books and to both young adult and adult readers. 
4/5 stars

Review: Insurgent by Veronica Roth

Every choice has consequences, and as unrest surges in the factions all around her, Tris Prior must continue trying to save those she loves, and herself, while grappling with haunting questions of grief and forgiveness, identity and loyalty, politics and love. (-Synopsis from GoodReads)

Title: Insurgent (Divergent trilogy book #2)
Author: Veronica Roth
Publication Date: 2012
Publisher: Harper Teen
Number of Pages: 525
Where I Got It: Nook by Barnes and Noble
Dates I Read It: November 6-November 12, 2013
Number of Stars: 4/5
Read It For: Just for fun!


     I really liked Insurgent, despite being confused out of my mind for the majority of the book. I was so confused at the start of this book that I had to view Roth's blog post: But I Read Divergent A Year Ago! which was super helpful in reminding me how Divergent ended since it had actually been more than a year since I had read it. Once I read her blog post I had to start the book over and re-read the first 40 pages, this time with a little less confusion.

(two pages from my reading journal open to the Insurgent entry)

     The characters were still really awesome and we got to see a continuation of character development with our main cast in this book. I really liked the majority of the characters and I thought that they all fit into their roles perfectly. I was pretty pissed off at Tris at several points in the book, and especially at several of the choices that she made and a lot of her reasoning behind her actions and decisions. She is Dauntless after all, though, so I suppose I can't stay too mad at her for too long. I liked how we got to see the humanity of Tris in this book. She is a Dauntless girl in the middle of a factions war, and yet she still spends a great deal of the book feeling guilty about killing someone who was threatening her life. I appreciate Four for the role that he plays. He does a great job as the male lead. I do hope that we get some more from him in Allegiant. I want to know more about him, his back story and his inner thoughts and motivations. Even though I loved the main characters, one of the most annoying things about this book for me was the secondary characters. Roth included an enormous cast of characters in this book and I found it incredibly difficult to keep track of all of them. I wasn't sure who was good and who was evil and who I was supposed to root for and who I was supposed to thumb my nose at and who was born into what faction and who switched to what faction and why. Too much!
     The pacing of the book was excellent. This is a long book (525 pages) but it passed very quickly and I was genuinely surprised when it ended; I had thought I had at least 100 pages to go! I did read this book on my Nook so perhaps that helped quite a bit with my not realizing how long it was. Despite the actual length of the book, it flew by and I think that this was mainly due to all of the action that took place. It seemed that every time I sat down with the book there was a battle scene resulting in an emotionally heavy outcome. These books are dystopian done well and Roth continues the excellency of the world building. There did seem to be some redundancy of action to me which only added to my confusion at times. I feel like perhaps those extra scenes could have been left out. It was still a fabulous book that I thoroughly enjoyed and I would recommend.
     I viewed the second teaser trailer for the Divergent movie on YouTube last night while G was in the computer room and he watched it over my shoulder and he seemed really intrigued. I think it might have
gotten him thinking about reading the books before I drag him to the movie. The trailers look great so far and I highly approve of the casting for this movie. I can't wait for March!
     Oh, and I decided I'm pretty sure I would be in Amity, even though they do dress like Ronald McDonald.

4 out of 5 stars

Review: The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin

The June selection for book club is The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin. Since I haven't read (or even been to) any of the books for book club since JANUARY I figured that I ought to read the book and attend the meeting for June. (I did attend for May, I just didn't finish the book: Look Me In The Eye: My Life With Aspergers). I tried to get a used copy of this book everywhere since summer is coming and anyone who works in public education can tell you that the summer months really can strain you financially. I was unsuccessful with that and when I tried to borrow a copy from the library the waiting list had 55 people before me! So, last Saturday I sucked it up and bought a copy at Barnes and Noble. I got myself a green tea and sat down to see what the book was going to be like. I ended up sitting in the cafe for over an hour, absorbed in the story. I would have had it finished in just a few days, but that pesky thing called "work" got in the way and it was a doozy of a week last week. However I was able to read the majority of it this weekend (over half of the book in two days!) and finished it up this morning, sobbing on my balcony and into my coffee.


Title: The Orchardist
Author: Amanda Coplin
Publication Date: 2012
Publisher: Harper Collins
Pages: 426
Where I Got It: Barnes & Noble (Huntersville, NC)
Dates I Read It: May 4-12, 2013
Number of Stars: 4/5
Read For: Book club






The Orchardist is a man named William Talmadge and later the orchardist is a baby born into the land, Angelene Michaelson/Talmadge. William Talmadge had a rough childhood involving the death of his father in a mining accident and then his mother to sickness and then his sister to a mysterious disappearance. Left with literally nothing but the land he makes his life among the trees which he cultivates into a profitable orchard. By the time Talmadge is already well into middle age two teenage girls, Jane and Della, swipe fruit from him one day then follow him back to the orchard where Talmadge leaves food for them and eventually draws the girls in like stray cats to the comfort of his home. Did I mention that the two girls are pregnant, 'cause they are; very. Since they are teenagers and have been living in the wild, needless to say the pregnancies don't end completely happy, yet a child is born and named Angelene after one of Talmadge's family members. Over the course of the book the daughter grows into a woman all the time living in the orchard and picking up farming techniques rather astutely. If I give away any more of the plot it could be spoilerific, so I'll stop there, but do know that there is so much more to the story than just that.

I really enjoyed the story, despite the fact that it unfolded very slowly and the only real "action" didn't occur until the end of the novel. There were several themes that were explored throughout the book that piqued my interest. The first of those is the theme of family, specifically, what makes a family? It is not necessarily the people that we are born to, but rather, for Talmadge, it is the people you choose to love despite their aversion to affection. The question of what length would someone go to for someone that they love, especially if that person was incapable of giving love back is explored through the various characters in this book and examined closely through the difficult relationships of Talmadge and Della and Angelene (and to a lesser extent, Caroline Middey, the town Midwife and companion of Talmadge and Angelene).

The trauma of childhood comes into play as a central theme of this book as well. All of the characters have experienced some kind of trauma, some more than others, but for each character it is still something that motivates and gnaws at them throughout the entirety of the novel. With this type of theme and high emotion one would expect an extreme amount of character development and certainly Coplin left room for that development, yet it was so lacking in this department.  I needed to know more of the emotions felt by these people who were obviously drowning in emotion. For me, this was well done with Angelene, yet I felt as if I never really understood Della's or Talmadge's reasoning behind the actions that they took and the actions that they take are severe actions of the desperate.

The story blooms very slowly, much like the fruit on Talmadge's trees and it spans over two decades. The manner in which Coplin writes it, however, makes it seem much faster than that as she effortlessly makes the years seamlessly flow together. I was confused at times by the lack of quotation marks and it took me a good 10 pages to realize when people were speaking. I'm not sure why Coplin went with this strategy of forgoing quotation marks. It did add well to the flow of the novel, and that is one thing I can't praise enough about this book is how easily it seemed to flow. It read like an easy day by a slow moving river. Coplin is a master of the "show; don't tell" theory of writing. Each word, then sentence and ultimately each paragraph are chosen carefully and well thought out. Overall this is a very well done and beautifully written first novel! I will seek out more of Coplin's books should she write any more in the future.