Re: Books
So, I just recently finished two Young Adult books that I randomly found at our store and I feel the need to discuss the one and since no one else in the store would probably read it, I'm going to chat about it here. A semi-blog if you will.
The first one I read was called "Intertwined" by romance author Gena Showalter. It's a "Harlequin teen" and has about as much "suggestive situations" in it as "Omg, look at his butt!" and "If I change out of my wolf form, I'm going to be naked, you know." But then, I really didn't get the book for that. I'd get a full blown romace if I wanted sex scenes. This one grabbed me with a description of the main character's eyes. See, he's got four souls living in his head and each time one of them 'talks' to him, his eyes change color and the description given was how they looked like they were striped: blue, green, brown, and hazel but when the light hit them, they turned black. I don't know why, but I liked that. The book's pretty decent, actually and does keep you guessing a little bit through it (though there's other parts where the plot telegraphs itself.) It's Aden's quest to figure out why the girl he meets actually shuts the souls up and what his connection is to her. Ohyes, and the souls...have powers. One timetravels, one predicts the future, one raises the dead (not as handy as you think), and the other can possess people. Finished it in about two days, and that was with a sleep interruption, so I consider it good. The ending...can go either way. She's either tying things up (though very loosely) or she's setting it up to be a series but isn't sure if it's going to keep going. Still, if you like fantasy with a little bit of intrigue, check it out.
The second one was called "Hero" and the author escapes me at the moment. Take the heroes of the DC Universe, add in the movies "Sky High" and "Mystery Men," make the main character gay and you've got this book. Reading through, if you have even a passing familiarity with comic book characters, you can pick out where the inspriations for the heroes like Warrior Woman and King of the Sea came from. Some other reviews I read complained that there wasn't enough development of the heroes. I wanted to reply that these people obviously never read comics before in their lives. Anyway, the story follows Thom, a budding hero who winds up attracting the attention of the League, a band of supers that blackballed his father (a disgraced former hero) and now want him to join up. What follows is him trying to balance the whole "secret identity" in learning to be a hero with not letting his father find out on top of being your average 17ish year old kid (I don't recall his age ever really being defined, though you often forget he's supposed to be a kid.) On top of that, Thom is gay and he has several moments where that becomes a factor into his difficulties as well, including one climactic (no pun intended) scene in the book. Again, it's teen audience, but outside of a few masturbation references and one make out session, it's pretty tame. Ohyeah, and he eventually has to save the world, too. This is the one that I wasn't really sure about. I liked it, and yet, there were things, I don't know, I'd have done differently? Things that were a bit of a plot hole and other things that kind of just got dropped that I would have liked to see develop more. There's still the happy, if but bittersweet, ending and it is nice to see Thom develop as a character, but I think I would have liked to see more out of this. Good read, though, if you like superhero fantasy type fiction and don't mind that the character deviates from the norm with regard to your typical hero.