Review -- Love is the Drug by Sarahbeth Purcell

Summary (via Goodreads): "Hello, my name is Tyler Tracer and I am falling apart. I am twenty-four years old, and I have no ability whatsoever to choose an occupation or a hair color."

 Meet Tyler, the singularly irresistible and straight-talking heroine of Sarahbeth Purcell's touching first novel. An incurable romantic, Tyler's chief obsessions include music, list-making - and David, the man who broke her heart. Despite an exhaustively detailed list of reasons for why she should just forget about David once and for all - including (but by no means limited to) chronic illness, terminal self-absorption, and geographical inaccessibility - Tyler remains hopelessly hooked on him. Hence the wild ride she embarks upon in the wake of her father's death, a ride that takes her from her hometown in Tennessee to sunny Los Angeles, all in hopes of saving David from his ominous take on life.

This hilarious and dark cross-country expedition finds our young heroine negotiating the universally perilous terrain of sex, love, and relationships with uncommon verve, wit, and more than a little recklessness. Along the way, Tyler discovers, among other things, the uniquely redemptive powers of roadkill, the fact that enduring love tends to blossom in the most unexpected and unlikeliest places, and, above all, that nothing can stop her from making her own rules and mapping out her own life. Not even herself.

Review: (Warning! Spoilers!)Tyler is “irresistible” huh?

Man, you've got to be kidding me.

I'm irritated. Seriously irritated. I had high hopes for Purcell's Love is the Drug. After reading books about straight-talking, strong and feisty female protagonists I thought maybe I should give this one a shot. I mean, what person hasn't been where Tyler's been? Who hasn't liked or loved a person who didn't necessarily reciprocate those feelings? Who hasn't sat around with their gallon of ice cream (or, let's be honest, bottle of wine) and mourned that for a little while. I know I have. The difference is for a little while.

Tyler has only known this guy for a couple of months and most of that is from the Internet. She leaves Nashville for California to spend a few weeks with this guy who, after the first glorious day or two, wants essentially nothing to do with her. The thrill is gone. So she leaves back for California, desolate and heart-broken.

(Btw: this guy is a LOSER. There is not one redeeming quality given to this character to make us understand why she 'loved' him in the first place.)

She returns back to CA and has to deal with her father dying and her supposedly dysfunctional family, who have made her the way she is. Even in these moments, she's still obsessed with David.It takes her father's last note to her, reminding her of all that she wanted to accomplish, to get her moving. So she does. She leaves Nashville...

With the goal of rescuing David from himself.

GIVE ME A BREAK. I mean it. I don't think I've been this disgusted with a character for a long time. It literally takes Purcell 117 pages of a 212 page book to show Tyler even considering somewhat of a change. Even when she works her way through the list of things she wants to accomplish, she's doing all of it with David in mind. Along the way, she meets another guy who makes it all better for awhile. Completely out of left field, it's a rock star who sweeps her off her feet.

Why couldn't this woman learn to stand on her own two feet?  Why would you automatically throw her into the arms of someone else right after SHE ATTEMPTS SUICIDE? ( Btw, the way she's cured from this suicide makes me want to kick someone in the teeth. I'll just say it involves an armadillo.)Why not have her get help? Where on earth are her FRIENDS (There are two mentioned and she only interacts with each once) to help her through this?

Tyler's low self-esteem and self-respect is allegedly the fault of her family. We're not given any evidence of this until the end of the book. Her family is mentioned several times but, even when she's living with them, there is very little interaction. Still, she must rid herself of this poison. She must walk away.

I don't know what I was supposed to come away with, what meesage I was supposed to get. I just know that I spent a little while with a woman who made me cringe. The last few pages of the book made me angry. This character showed no growth, (in my opinion) no depth and she, even though depressed and 'broken, evoked no sympathy.

Music lovers may love this book. She makes a lot of music references (Don't get excited...She's no Vinyl Princess) and uses them to influence many of her top ten lists, which I actually enjoyed. Too bad this wasn't a book of Top 10 lists.

LitSnit Grade: D

Review - Sisters Red by Jackson Pearce

Summary: Scarlett March lives to hunt the Fenris-- the werewolves that took her eye when she was defending her sister Rosie from a brutal attack. Armed with a razor-sharp hatchet and blood-red cloak, Scarlett is an expert at luring and slaying the wolves. She's determined to protect other young girls from a grisly death, and her raging heart will not rest until every single wolf is dead.

Rosie March once felt her bond with her sister was unbreakable. Owing Scarlett her life, Rosie hunts fiercely alongside her. Now Rosie dreams of a life beyond the wolves and finds herself drawn to Silas, a young woodsman who is deadly with an ax-- but loving him means betraying her sister and has the potential to destroy all they've worked for.

Review: Warning. Spoilers Ahead.

I wanted to like this book. I really did. Being a fan of the Fables series I was excited at the prospect of a fairy tale retelling. Unfortunately, I was bitterly disappointed. Actually, at points I was downright angry.

It didn’t help that I hated the character of Rosie from the very moment she appeared on the page. Her sister Scarlett is physically disfigured and emotionally tormented from a Fenris attack when they were children and has made it her life’s work to defend mankind, yet Rosie’s main concern throughout most of the book is cooking, grocery shopping, and her blossoming romance with Silas.

Their romance is thrust upon the reader from the moment they meet with little explanation as to WHY they are suddenly so in love with each other. Silas and Rosie are smitten literally from first sight, so the only thing we have to base their relationship on is Rosie’s much lauded beauty. Rosie moons over Silas, which is understandable for a girl falling in love for the first time. However, this continues ad nauseam throughout the entire book until I found myself wishing for the death of Silas, a character I didn’t really dislike (actually he was so bland I still don’t have any strong feelings toward him) just so she’d shut up.

Everything about the novel just felt forced. To me, the best stories make you forget that there is even an author at all, that there is someone behind the scenes who has created this world and these characters that you’ve suddenly lost yourself in. In Sisters Red I felt every move Pearce made. She seemed so determined to have the characters do exactly what she wanted that they seemed to go through the motions without any soul behind the story. The characters were just words on a page to me. I never really felt myself caring what happened to any of them, even Scarlett who began with so much potential.

Rosie is clearly the Pearce’s favorite of the two sisters, as she seemed to tell most of this dual point of view story. I kept waiting for Scarlett to get some semblance of a storyline of her own, but the novel was quickly and conveniently wrapped up when Rosie receives her “fairy tale ending,” while Scarlett is in the exact same position she was when the novel began. You can’t help but draw the conclusion that the moral of this story is that beauty is everything and, in the end, Scarlett is punished for being disfigured.

Lit Snit Verdict: D

I wish I could muster something more positive to say about Sisters Red, but I just couldn’t get into this one at all. The concept was interesting, however, it just missed the mark for me. I’d recommend picking up a few issues of Fables and saving yourself the time and energy.

Review - Writing Jane Austen by Elizabeth Aston

Critically acclaimed and award-winning -- but hardly bestselling -- author Georgina Jackson can't get past the first chapter of her second book. When she receives an urgent email from her agent, Georgina is certain it's bad news. Shockingly, she's offered a commission to complete a newly discovered manuscript by a major nineteenth-century author. Skeptical at first about her ability to complete the manuscript, Georgina is horrified to know that the author in question is Jane Austen.

Torn between pushing through or fleeing home to America, Georgina relies on the support of her banker-turned-science student roommate, Henry, and his quirky teenage sister, Maud -- a serious Janeite. With a sudden financial crisis looming, the only way Georgina can get by is to sign the hugely lucrative contract and finish the book. But first she has to admit she's never actually read Jane Austen!

Review: Spoilers Ahead

I've been sitting here for the last fifteen minutes trying to find a pretty & poetic way of saying: I didn't like it. At. ALL.


Aston's Writing Jane Austen has the potential to be a lovely tribute to the subject and her work, but with undeveloped characters, rushed plotlines and lack of conflict, this story falls flat.

The protagonist herself spends nearly the entire first half of the book whining about how she can't accomplish the task she's been given because she's not familiar with Austen's work and has no desire to be. After a few pages of her finally reading and falling in love with the books, she spends nearly the entire second half whining about how she can't recreate Austen's voice and that she's suffering from writer's block. She suffers from no particular conflict. There are no obstacles in her way. She just doesn't want to do it.

Oy.

The cast of characters surrounding Georgina make the story a bit more interesting and that may be a slight exaggeration. They each have their own problems. Her landlord, Henry, has a cheating girlfriend referenced to, but never confronted. (We actually never meet this character at all.) His little sister has runaway from boarding school because she's 'different'...how exactly, we don't know. Throw in the cook & her sudden romance and you have a bunch of story lines never fully explored.

All in all, this book dragged and dragged until the last fifteen pages, where it seems Aston realized she'd better wrap it up. At this point, everything is tied in a messy little bow. Nothing explained, nothing given.

Lit Snit Verdict: D--The potential for a great story is there but after reading Georgina whine about Austen for nearly an entire novel, I almost didn't want anything more to do with Austen OR Georgina.