Mini-Reviews: Infinity + One, Fangirl, I'll Give You the Sun and The Year of Reading Dangerously

These are a few books I read in January that I never reviewed on my blog. I had strong feelings about each of these books so I decided to condense them into mini reviews. 

Infinity + One by Amy Harmon

Synopsis: When two unlikely allies become two unwitting outlaws, will two unforgettable lovers defy unbeatable odds? Bonnie Rae Shelby is a superstar. She’s rich. She’s beautiful. She’s impossibly famous. And Bonnie Rae Shelby wants to die. Finn Clyde is a nobody. He’s broken. He’s brilliant. He’s impossibly cynical. And all he wants is a chance at life. One girl. One boy. An act of compassion. A bizarre set of circumstances. And a choice – turn your head and walk away, or reach out your hand and risk it all? 

Review: I really adored The Law of Moses so I had high hopes for this one. The whole book was Bonnie and Clyde traveling around the country together getting into one unbelievable shenanigan after another. The police get this crazy idea that he kidnapped her and every single scrape they get into just furthers that suspicion. After a while, I just had to laugh out loud because I was thinking "this would never happen!!" And did they simply call the police and explain the misunderstanding? Nope, not one bit. Bonnie struck me as kind of selfish and Clyde struck me as way too grumpy. And there were way too many references to the fact that he loved math and his real first name was Infinity. Yes, you read that right. Infinity. So there were endless references to the title "Infinity + One." I started rolling my eyes after a while. Recommendation: Skip this one.

Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

Synopsis: Cath is a Simon Snow fan. Okay, the whole world is a Simon Snow fan...But for Cath, being a fan is her life—and she’s really good at it. She and her twin sister, Wren, ensconced themselves in the Simon Snow series when they were just kids; it’s what got them through their mother leaving. Now that they’re going to college, Wren has told Cath she doesn’t want to be roommates. Cath is on her own, completely outside of her comfort zone. She’s got a surly roommate with a charming, always-around boyfriend, a fiction-writing professor who thinks fan fiction is the end of the civilized world, a handsome classmate who only wants to talk about words... And she can’t stop worrying about her dad, who’s loving and fragile and has never really been alone. For Cath, the question is: Can she do this? Can she make it without Wren holding her hand? Is she ready to start living her own life? Writing her own stories? And does she even want to move on if it means leaving Simon Snow behind?

Review: How does Rainbow Rowell do it? She always manages to write a story that I can't put down that has wonderful characters and a tender romance with very few cliches. Excuse me while I fangirl over Fangirl. Ha. I loved Cath so much and could related to her desire to remain locked in a world of fiction. I know I read so much for that very reason and I am procrastinating on the book I am writing because it is so much harder to write my own characters. Wren kind of drove me crazy, but I understood that she was just trying to form her own identity in college. Again, I could relate because I was the same way. And I fell in love with Levi. He is my new book boyfriend. I just hope my husband doesn't mind. Recommendation: Buy!

I'll Give You The Sun by Jandy Nelson

Synopsis: Jude and her twin brother, Noah, are incredibly close. At thirteen, isolated Noah draws constantly and is falling in love with the charismatic boy next door, while daredevil Jude cliff-dives and wears red-red lipstick and does the talking for both of them. But three years later, Jude and Noah are barely speaking. Something has happened to wreck the twins in different and dramatic ways . . . until Jude meets a cocky, broken, beautiful boy, as well as someone else—an even more unpredictable new force in her life. The early years are Noah's story to tell. The later years are Jude's. What the twins don't realize is that they each have only half the story, and if they could just find their way back to one another, they’d have a chance to remake their world.

Review: I think I am copping out by doing a mini review for this one instead of a full review. But I just loved this book so, so, so much that I was afraid of not doing this book justice in a full review. Then again, I am not sure I can do it justice in a mini-review either. I thought it would be confusing for two different points of view at two different time periods, but it wasn't. Both Noah and Jude were so different and yet the same. I loved reading about their relationship and I was frustrated when they were disconnected from each other. I was more invested in the relationship between Jude and her brother than I was in any of the romance. Luckily, the romance didn't distract from the story. I think the only other thing I can say about this book is that you need to read it NOW! Recommendation: Buy!

The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life by Andy Miller

Synopsis: A working father whose life no longer feels like his own discovers the transforming powers of great (and downright terrible) literature in this laugh-out-loud memoir. Andy Miller had a job he quite liked, a family he loved, and no time at all for reading. Or so he kept telling himself. But, no matter how busy or tired he was, something kept niggling at him. Books. Books he'd always wanted to read. Books he'd said he'd read that he actually hadn't. Books that whispered the promise of escape from the daily grind. And so, with the turn of a page, Andy began a year of reading that was to transform his life completely.

Review: I thought I was going to like this one a lot more than I did. First of all, he doesn't talk about every single one of the fifty books he read; he talks about half of them. But he does give a full list at the end of it. Also, the title is misleading in that I still have no idea why these books saved his life. He talks about how there were books he wanted to read, but kept making excuses why he didn't have time. So he made time and read the books. End of story. In each section about the books he did talk about, he mainly talked about the plot of the book and whether he liked it or not. There were a few of the books in which he could relate a few of the lessons in the book to his own life, but those were few and far between. The passages were dry and boring. There was also a lot of judgment regarding other peoples' choices in reading material. He kept saying he didn't judge, but then he would turn around and make snide comments about people who read Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code. Yeah, I get it. The guy hated the book. There was no need to beat me over the head about it. Recommendation: Skip.