Are you ready for this?

Mockingjay (The Hunger Games trilogy, Book 3) by Suzanne Collins

**SPOILERS!**
(But only if you haven't read The Hunger Games or Catching Fire. And if you haven't read them, then what the hell are you waiting for?! Go. Read. NOW.)

Quick recap: Welcome, ladies and jellyspoons, to District 13!

Katniss Everdeen and those other crazy kids who escaped the Quarter Quell, the Capital and/or District 12 are in the mysterious District 13, and it smells a bit like the state of Denmark. President Coin has been watching over this group of survivors, and she's a big fan of having everyone's daily schedule tattooed on their arms and beating and imprisoning people for taking bread out of the eating area. Yeah, Coin's a blast.

Meanwhile, there's widespread rebellion in all the Districts, Kat's suffering from a raging case of the PTSDs, Peeta is still M.I.A., and Gale is learning how to be the best he can be. The end, she is nigh.

Well...?: With Mockingjay, Collins takes her Hunger Games trilogy to the next level. This book isn’t another glossy, action-packed adventure; it’s a gritty and unflinching portrayal of what it truly means to be at war. It’s one hell of a tough ride, and it’s definitely not everyone’s cup of tea. I’ve talked to a couple of people about Mockingjay and most of them either loved it or they hated it. Here’s what it seems to come down to:

DON’T read this book if you’re simply looking for a good-triumphing-over-evil, pat, happy ending. You’re not going to find that here. Seriously, turn back now.

DO read this book if you’re willing to be challenged by a messy, complicated, and very realistic story about a damaged seventeen-year-old trying to negotiate her way through a bloody revolution. This book is dark and difficult and, even though there is some hope at the end of it, it’s definitely not the kind of story that will leave you with a case of the warm fuzzies.

Overall: Read these books! The Hunger Games and Catching Fire are excellent, but with Mockingjay... well, not to overstate it, but I think Suzanne Collins has written the best war book I've ever read. I know. That's quite a claim, and you may disagree, but the woman managed to write YA-appropriate book that takes a raw and complex look at war and its weight on humanity without becoming patronizing or pedantic. Even if you don't think Mockingjay is the best thing since All Quiet on the Western Front, I think you have to admit that what Collins has accomplished is still pretty damn impressive.

If you liked this series, you may also like these: The Carbon Diaries, 2015 by Saci Lloyd, Fearless by Tim Lott, The Declaration by Gemma Malley, Fray by Joss Whedon

Break on through to...

As promised, the other side.

Boneshaker (The Clockwork Century series, Book 1) by Cherie Priest

Quick recap: There's gold in them thar hills! Priest speeds up the gold rush so that by 1865-ish the fever has spread to the Yukon and Seattle, WA is quite the bustling gold town.

Dr. Leviticus Blue enters a contest to create a machine that can dig through the Yukon ice to get to the sparklies--the Boneshaker. But in testing out his newfangled contraption, he wreaks major havoc in Seattle, causing mass cave ins and general hysteria. Just as the dust clears, the fractured earth begins belching out a noxious gas that will later be known simply as The Blight. It either kills people outright or turns them into rotters (aka zombies). They wall off the city to contain the heavy, slow-moving fumes.

The story begins fifteen years after the wall has been finished. Young Zeke ventures into the forsaken city to find out the truth about his father (the one and only Dr. Blue) and the Widow Blue (now Briar Wilkes) is forced to go in after him. Hilarity ensues.

Well...?: While I didn't quite love it, I definitely liked it and I'm glad that I read it. I felt that the scenes where the rotters showed up and attacked were particularly well written. Fortunately, unlike in The Forest of Hands and Teeth, these weren't the only scenes that were well written. I enjoyed the characters, especially Briar, and there were some great quiet moments of human connection wedged in between the incidents of rotter madness. I do have to say that when I got to the end I wanted a little more steampunk, but as I am new to the genre please feel free to take that statement with a grain or two of salt.

Overall: I would say this was a really good zombie book and a decent steampunk novel. If you enjoy books in either of those genres, then this is totally worth a read.

If you liked this, you may like this: Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld

Here we are now, entertain us

Just started reading Boneshaker by Cherie Priest. The great cover has been calling to me for weeks and the plot... lots of action involving steampunk and airships and zombies--oh my! I'm so in. Only eighty pages in so far, but I'm liking it. See you on the other side.

That toddling town

Although I've been on a dystopian novel kick lately, I took time out to read some urban fantasy: Some Girls Bite and Friday Night Bites, the first two books in Chloe Neill's Chicagoland Vampire series. When Merit, a doctoral student at the U of C, is attacked and almost killed by a vampire, Ethan--a less murderously-inclined vampire and the Master of Cadogan House, natch--steps in and turns Merit, thereby saving her life. Sort of. The books are mostly about the egregious amounts of sexual tension between Merit and Ethan, and Merit's "unexpected" mad vamp skillz. Oh, and some other stuff, too.

I'm a fairly discerning reader in this over-stuffed genre. I won't read just any book with a sexy, armed woman on the front. (And the books with half-dressed, long-tressed men on the covers are automatically out. Oh, yeah. I totally judge some books by their covers.) Admittedly, I picked up Some Girls Bite because the series is set in Chicago, but I stuck with them for other reasons. There are a lot of fun pop culture references--I've always been a total sucker for those. Sucker, get it?! Har har. And I really do love the Chicago aspect of them. Neill has obviously lived in Chicago for a while as she's captured the feeling of the city to a T. That's harder than it may seem, and it's a skill that we Chicagoans really appreciate. I also just like the world she's created. I like spending time there. Overall, the plotting is... okay. Neill seems to have let the plotting languish a bit for the sake of the relationships and the world building, which is not as bad as it sounds. The books do keep moving along at a nice pace. I think that unless she makes some horrible missteps in the next book, I'll keep coming back for at least the next two or three books in the series.