Lock and Key

Dessen inverts a familiar fairy tale:

What if Cinderella got the prince,

the castle and all its accoutrements,

but wasn’t remotely interested?

Lock and Key was ok, but it didn't measure up to some of her other novels. It fell into about the middle of them. The ending was what made it a little less apealing, even though the story was good. It didn't ever really say if Ruby and Nate got back together in college, but I guess a story can't end exactly the way I want it to. It is a pretty good book to read with a lot of family problems for the characters to overcome, which makes it a good character realization book. It deals with some parental abuse in Nate's case but not that much. I would say this book was good enough to recommend but definitely doesn't beat Just Listen or the Truth About Forever.

Review/ Description

]After her mother abandons her, Ruby Cooper is flying below the radar of officialdom and trying to make it to her 18th birthday, when she’s busted by the landlord and turned over to social services. Ruby gets taken in by her estranged sister, Cora, who left for college a decade earlier and never looked back, and Cora’s husband, Jamie, the wealthy founder of a ubiquitous social networking site. Resentful, suspicious and vulnerable, she resists mightily, refusing the risky business of depending on anybody but herself, and wearing the key to her old house around her neck. All the Dessen trademarks are here—the swoon-worthy boy next door who is not what he appears to be; and the supporting characters who force Ruby to rethink her cynical worldview, among them the frazzled owner of a jewelry kiosk at the mall. The author again defines characters primarily through dialogue, and although Ruby and her love interest, Nate, sound wiser than their years, they talk the way teens might want to—from the heart.

Persuasion

So like Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion started out really dull, but got better towards the middle of the story. In the begginng it's hard to determine the main character, but then Anne emerges and takes over. I really liked Anne's character, even though she was a little suttle. The ending was wonderful and the story was really touching about how love could wait eight years and be revived. It takes awhile to get used to the language, and understand the story. I recommend this book to anyone who had read Pride and Prejudice and even anyone who hasn't.

Review/Description

Persuasion follows the unfolding of the relationship between Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth. Anne is persuaded by a close friend and mentor to reject the marriage proposal from Wentworth. Seven years later the two are reunited and discover the mutual feelings they still have for each other. Circumstances have changed on both sides though and it's left to be discovered whether Anne marries Wentworth or is persuaded to marry William Elliot, her cousin and heir to the Elliot estate. Persuasion is charming, though the plot lags a bit at times. Through the different class distinctions of her diverse set of characters, Austen illustrates the abundant snobbishness in the nineteenth century. Anne, though, is lovable in her humbleness and lack of pretension.

A Great and Terrible Beauty

This book really disappointed me because the story had the potential to be really good, but the direction the author went just really made the book suck. You can figure out what is going to happen before it does and I got really aggravated at how easily she let the main character get mainipulated. Overall it was a waste of my time to read and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Even though the ending made up for a little bit of the story it didn't overthrow the way it unfolded. Apparently there are more in the series but I don't know if I'm going to read them.

Review/Description

It’s 1895, and after the suicide of her mother, 16-year-old Gemma Doyle is shipped off from the life she knows in India to Spence, a proper boarding school in England. Lonely, guilt-ridden, and prone to visions of the future that have an uncomfortable habit of coming true, Gemma’s reception there is a chilly one. To make things worse, she’s been followed by a mysterious young Indian man, a man sent to watch her. But why? What is her destiny? And what will her entanglement with Spence’s most powerful girls—and their foray into the spiritual world—lead to?