ARC Review: Zeroes - Scott Westerfeld, Margo Lanagan, Deborah Biancotti

Zeroes
Scott Westerfeld, Margo Lanagan, Deborah Biancotti
Series: Zeroes, #1
Genre: Young Adult, Science Fiction, Fantasy
Release Date: September 29th, 2015
Publisher: Simon Pulse
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Goodreads | Amazon | Book Depository

Subversion, superheroes, and Scott Westerfeld are three of my favorite S's, so I was looking forward to see how this book would play out (also before anyone says anything about the last S, I know there are three authors but I am not familiar with the other two and their names are not S names so do not start with me).

I love stories where the main characters aren't, well, the heroes. I find it so enamoring exploring the multifaceted nature of people and the way they can be so much. I absolutely am here for the concept of a superhero that isn't the typical "fly around in a mask, tight suit, and cape and save the city from imminent disaster day after day" and I am so about the idea that your superpower might not be all it's cracked up to be. Everyone wants to be an Avenger, but what if your lot in life is a "reject/crappy" superpower? I like that this is a book about the other superheroes, the ones that aren't living it up in Stark tower anytime soon.

The powers themselves were pretty cool. Like I said, I liked that they were fleshed out and were hindrances as much as they were helpful. We had Ethan, who had another voice in him that could say whatever one wanted to hear and charm his way places, but the voice didn't shut up when the situations seemed like they'd be trouble; Kelsie; who can control the energy of a crowd, which can go happy or anxious; Thibault, who's got the invisibility with a catch: everyone forgets him; Riley, who's blind but can see through other people's eyes; and the leader, Nate, who can make people follow him.

I wasn't sure if I liked that there was a clear-cut leader just appointed like that. I usually prefer when groups exist in books and leaders emerge through character development. Also speaking of character development, I feel like the book was so long but there was so little fleshing of the characters? I can see why because there was a rotating cast of first-person narrators to switch between and that forced the authors to make some sacrifices, and it wasn't like they were static characters by any means. I just wished some aspects of their selves came across a little bit more.

My only other real negative is the pacing. I'm not sure if I would call it slow exactly but it didn't work for me 100%. There was just a lot of switching between characters and they each told tiny bits of things happening and then back to another character and while it did pick up towards the middle it took me a lot longer to read it than I anticipated, even though I did like the story a lot. However, both the pace thing and the character thing are still only enough to knock one star off, although I'm still mulling the book over.

Now that we've got negatives out of the way, I was super into the story! Throughout the whole book, you could really see the characters struggling to come together as a team, and I loved that the authors highlighted the problems with trying to be heroes. The plot raised a lot of questions about who to trust, which characters would act which way, etc and I liked that it wasn't assumed that once the team got back together they'd just cooperate and be best friends.

The characters I mentioned before, although they might not have been 100% what I wanted developmentally personality wise, their stories were brought to life quite well. I was engaged reading about how they influenced one another and the world around them, as well as how their powers worked. These aspects of the story were definitely well-thought out and well executed.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and I thought it was a new and refreshing concept and I can't wait to see more from these authors.

- Noor

Think carefully: if you had a superpower, what would it be?

Let us know in the comments!

ARC Review: Six of Crows - Leigh Bardugo

Six of Crows
Leigh Bardugo
Series: Six of Crows #1
Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy
Release Date: September 29nd, 2015
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Goodreads | Amazon | Book Depository

Look, if that divinely morbid cover art isn't enough to convince you . . . then I'm pretty much at a loss.

I'll try anyway.

The incredible amount of hype for this book unsettled me, primarily because I've never read Leigh Bardugo's previous work. The line for this ARC copy (thanks Henry Holt and Company!) was excessive, and when I first picked it up, I had relatively indifferent thoughts towards it, even after the blurb.

However, after barely the first page, I was hooked. This, in itself, is really a feat. If you're on a a reading low, read this book. I haven't really been getting that interested in what I'm reading these days . . . but this book wrenched me right out of my slump. Bardugo blasts through the first chapter, guns blazing with clever, well-paced prose, lively and mysterious characters, a fitting and adaptive tone, an eerie and dangerous setting -- it's fantastic. The greatest achievement of this book, however, is in its totality: it is one hell of a series-starter. Bardugo is able to present six of the wildest and angstiest people I've had the pleasure of reading, with a twisted as hell plot, and she does this all while laying down un-finished story arcs, tiny Chekov guns, and a breathtaking finale that releases the major tension in the novel but piles on so many more questions.

In short, this book is probably smarter than all of us.

The characters are just incredible. Kaz, Inej, Nina, Matthias, Jesper, and Wylan. Each of the six main characters are utterly believable and interesting in their own rights. Now, this is hard enough to do with traditional narration. But Bardugo tackles the mountain of a challenge of using multiple-character narration in this piece, giving us five different persepctives. AND IT WORKS. So often, characters in such pieces are either reduced to caricatured language, or they all sound the same. In this piece, Bardugo really works herself hard to keep each of the characters distinct. It's not completely distinguishable, mind you, and there are a couple of instances of overlap -- but this is to be expected as six people should share some kind of similar thought.

Also . . . the characters. They're so good. They're handled so well. Kaz, for example, is nearly indestructible for much of the novel due to his level of forethought, intelligence, and utter emotional coldness . . . but Bardugo still imparts great suffering and hardship on Kaz and because of her ability to craft well-defined characters, we suffer as well. And it's weird that we suffer because all of the characters have the morals of a black hole.

Also, THE CHARACTERS. Their romances! Are! Not! Prioritized! The characters have emotional journies that are not entirely relative to the main plot of the novel, and this has the incredible effect of making the novel feel as though its characters are historical and actually real rather than fictional. All three of the main ships in this novel never interrupt the main storyline, and we are then able to actually watch how the ships affect characters in their decisions unrelated to romance. It's a work of art.

The prevalence of non-traditional morals, characters with disabilities, strong female friendships, and romances that back-grounded and developed . . . . it's good on the representational front. Not perfect, but good enough to keep me going.

The writing is just good. It's just so good. And its implemented to build a world that I want to live in after having read it. I want to be in Kerch and explore the whole of the city.

- Marlon

What is your weapon of choice? 
Let us know in the comments!

Top Ten Tuesday: Books On My Fall TBR

Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. Here at We Live and Breathe Books, two of us choose five books each week. This weeks topic is...

Books On My Fall TBR

Kiersten's Picks

The Fantasticks
Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt
Goodreads | Amazon | Book Depository

College is hard and gets in the way of all my fun YA novels. But that doesn't mean I'm not reading - being a theater design major means reading a lot of plays. This week, my set design class is starting our project on The Fantasticks, so I'll be reading it, and listening to the music, very soon.

Company
Book by George Furth
Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim

Goodreads | Amazon | Book Depository

Company is another musical I'll be reading and listening to this week. This musical is for my costume design class. My costume class is quite intense and I have to read and design the show in a week. This should be interesting.

Moonchildren
Michael Weller
Goodreads | Amazon

Of course, my design classes aren't the only ones that require I read plays - I'm also taking a play analysis class this semester. You may have figured it out (it's not obvious at all), but one must read plays in order to analyze them. Moonchildren is the play we will be discussing later this week, so I'll be reading this soon.

A Flea in Her Ear
Georges Feydeau 
Goodreads | Amazon | Book Depository

This play isn't exactly for a class - this play is one that my school will be doing later this school year. Even though I'm a costume focus within my major, I am assisting lighting design for this show, so I must read this play. I'm sure you can guess when I need to read this play... this week! I am in quite a predicament.

A Thousand Nights
E.K. Johnston
Goodreads | Amazon | Book Depository

IT'S NOT A PLAY! HUZZAH! I actually contemplated listing my calculus textbook since I've been relearning calc 1 and 2 over the weekend in anticipation of my first calc 3 exam tomorrow (well, today now), but I saw that Noor mentioned this one below, so I decided to include it. This is one book that I really want to find time for in the next two or so weeks. Since I have an eARC of this, I'm way more likely to actually read it than a physical copy. But I'm still insanely busy - if the four plays I need to read this week weren't enough, I'm also going into technical rehearsals for Kiss Me, Kate, a show I was the associate costume designer on, on Thursday. Woooooo! I love not sleeping.

I apologize that this Top Ten Tuesday turned into a pity party. I hope all you lovely people are able to spread your Fall TBR out over more than a week.

Noor's Picks

Illuminae
Amie Kaufman & Jay Kristoff 
The Illuminae Files, #1
Goodreads | Amazon | Book Depository

Not only does this have a beautiful, hardcore cover, but it sounds so exciting and thrilling and ever since I got my hands on it at BEA I've been anticipating reading it. I've got a few books I'll be tackling before this one but it won't be long before I see what's in these ~600 pages.

Black Widow: Forever Red
Margaret Stohl
Goodreads | Amazon | Book Depository

Marvel won't give us a Black Widow movie, but at least Margaret Stohl has given us a Black Widow novel. Not only do I adore Margaret Stohl as a human being, but I also just love Black Widow as a character and so I am high key excited to read this book and expunge my mind of anything Natasha Romanoff did in Age of Ultron.

A Thousand Nights
E.K. Johnston
Goodreads | Amazon | Book Depository

Fairytale retellings -- I know 1001 Nights isn't a fairytale exactly -- are honestly my favorite concept, I would go to war for a good retelling. This one in particular looks like it'll be great so I'm hopeful. It doesn't come out until the end of October so while I have to wait a month like normal people, Kiersten has a NetGalley ARC, so if she gets to it before I do, I'll definitely be harassing her for details.

Please Ignore Vera Dietz
A.S. King
Goodreads | Amazon | Book Depository

After I read I Crawl Through It (review here), I immediately wanted to explore other works by A.S. King. I honestly just picked this one because it had a cover I liked and at least one person said they liked it in the Goodreads reviews of I Crawl Through It. I'm interested in seeing the variation in her writing and this could very well not be the next A.S. King book I read, but I know I'm definitely going to try to read something by her soon.

Kafka on the Shore
Haruki Murakami
Goodreads | Amazon | Book Depository

I've been meaning to read this, and Murakami in general, for an obscenely long period of time, and I've actually had this sitting on my bookshelf for a while, but for some reason my mind decided that this was a book I needed to read while flying so I'm going to read it on November 10th, on my flight to New York.

What's on your TBR?

Let us know in the comments!

ARC Review: I Crawl Through It - A.S. King

I Crawl Through It 
A. S. King
Series: N/A
Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary, Surreal
Release Date: September 22nd, 2015
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Goodreads | Amazon | Book Depository

This was the most unexpected book I have ever read.

Never having encountered a piece of fiction quite like this -- a YA novel surreal to the core, but still grounded in reality -- it took a few pages for me to get with the program and understand the way it was written. When Stanzi mentions the invisible red helicopter her friend Gustav is building that she can only see on Tuesdays, this does not mean he does not allow her to see it any other day or that it's merely a joke between them. It means he is truly building a helicopter that is invisible to most, and to Stanzi, it is visible on Tuesdays. When China Knowles says she has swallowed herself, turned herself inside out, this is not simply a metaphor for shrinking into herself after a traumatic event. She is genuinely seen as organs on legs by the characters in the book.

The best way to read this book is to take everything literally. In any other book, mentioning a character where her hair was so long you swear it grew a foot since the day before would be taken as exaggeration. Of course it didn't, but it seemed that way because it's just that long and the reader can piece this together. In I Crawl Through It, everything is so surreal, that nothing is exaggeration. Landsdale Cruise's hair grows a foot with each pathological lie she tells, and there is a dangerous man in a bush who gives out chains of letters that are infinitely long and there is an invisible island you can fly to in the invisible helicopter to escape the school where there are daily bomb threats and drills and practice tests.

And it all works so remarkably well. I finished the book not only mulling over what I just read but wondering why I'd never read anything by A.S. King before, resolving to put her at the top of my list of authors to be read soon.

Not only was the story so interestingly woven but it was well written and also had some important points about how we all cope with trauma/stress/bad-things-of-a-serious-nature in different ways. Whether that involves lying and baking or dissecting all the animals in the school or building something no one can see or writing poems about how inanimate objects have more self-esteem than you, this book showed teens compartmentalizing and avoiding their trauma and it also showed them dealing with it in important ways like standing up to an abuser, and it was cool that it wasn't just a weird book with inside out girls. Not that I wouldn't have read that book to be honest.

I briefly mentioned that it was well-written and I want to touch upon that as well. I absolutely loved A.S. King's voice in this novel. Every line seemed so purposeful, so powerful, and so many of them were so beautifully phrased. A lot of the book had an air of gloom and that was cool too because you could feel it coming from the character's words, not the author's, and it reinforced the fact that they were sad and stuck and looking for something.

When I picked up I Crawl Through It, I was expecting a regular realistic fiction YA book about sad, stressed kids in high school. I wasn't expecting anything bad, because regular realistic fiction YA books about sad stressed kids in high school are often books I like, but this was not like anything I've read before and I hope you read it too.

- Noor

Would you rather be inside out or hairnocchio? 
Let us know in the comments!

Stuffed Animal Saturday: Financial Accounting 9th Edition, Jerry J. Weygandt, Donald E. Kieso, Paul D. Kimmel

Stuffed Animal Saturday is a meme that we post here at We Live and Breathe Books to showcase the book we're currently reading with one of our favorite stuffed animals and discuss our stuffed animal's opinion (well, it's really our opinion, but that's besides the point). We hope you enjoy our quirky feature as much as we enjoy writing it!

This Saturday, me and Hydrant are reading Financial Accounting, 9th Edition, by Weygandt, Kieso, and Kimmel. While this is not our typical genre of book, we decided to try it out.

So far: We're on chapter two, but its looking like we're going to be spending the whole semester reading the book. What we know from our reading so far: accounting is very very important and everyone uses it, or at least the finished numbers of it, in business. Which is what makes the world go round, so we're learning very important stuff. Seems really educational for a Young Adult blog, but hey, we're open to reading anything here at We Live and Breathe Books. I'm also reading some lovely pieces on coding java, power politics in the Soviet Union, and more!

Sneak peek: The following is an excerpt from the opening section ("What is Accounting?") of "Chapter 1: Accounting in Action."

What consistently ranks as one of the top career opportunities in business? What frequently rates among the most popular majors on campus? What was the undergraduate degree chosen by Nike founder Phil Knight, Home Depot co-founder Arthur Blank, former acting director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Thomas Pickard, and numerous members of Congress? Accounting.1 Why did these people choose accounting? They wanted to understand what was happening financially to their organizations. Accounting is the financial information system that provides these insights. In short, to understand your organization, you have to know the numbers.

Accounting consists of three basic activities—it identifies, records, and communicates the economic events of an organization to interested users. Let's take a closer look at these three activities.

In all seriousness, I've been insanely busy the last few weeks and I've read at most the few pages of an actual YA book (I know, what a sad life I live). But when things settle down, I'll be able to get my act together and start reading more YA, but for now, me and Hydrant are still reading my Financial Accounting book.

- Amrutha

Are you and your stuffed animal reading anything interesting? 

Let us know in your own Stuffed Animal Saturday!