Lusting Lovelies

I know everyone has their version of a "Waiting on Wednesday" and lately I've been hit with a wave of lovely books that I've been lusting after like mad, hence "Lusting Lovelies". This is going to be an irregular series on my blog; I'll pretty much post these whenever I feel the need to let the world know about whatever book(s) I'd kill my sister to own. Sorry Tori! Since the wave hit I'm gonna have more than one book in this first post, but afterwards it'll probably be one or two if I keep up with it! Also, this is going to be a mix of books that have been released and some that haven't. Enjoy!

Stolen by Lucy Christopher

Gemma, 16, is on layover at Bangkok Airport, en route with her parents to a vacation in Vietnam. She steps away for just a second, to get a cup of coffee. Ty—rugged, tan, too old, oddly familiar—pays for Gemma's drink. And drugs it. They talk. Their hands touch. And before Gemma knows what's happening, Ty takes her. Steals her away. The unknowing object of a long obsession, Gemma has been kidnapped by her stalker and brought to the desolate Australian Outback. STOLEN is her gripping story of survival, of how she has to come to terms with her living nightmare—or die trying to fight it.

I've been dying to read Stolen ever since I first about it a couple of months ago, and since then must lust for it has been magnified. I haven't read any reviews on it because I want to be completely surprised by it but I know it's gonna be awesome. I started reading it in the bookstore the other day and I almost cried when I had to leave without it!

Glimpse by Carol Lynch Williams

Williams (The Chosen One) opens her latest novel with a bang--almost. Written in spare yet resonant verse ("Last night/ me and Lizzie/ sit/ in the dark,/ sit on my bed,/ in the quiet of/ night./ We're all grown up,/ I think./ But we are/ having us some/ troubles"), the book is told from the unreliable perspective of 12-year-old Hope, whose 14-year-old sister, Lizzie, threatens to shoot herself on page one. Lizzie is hauled off to a mental hospital, but the reason behind the suicide attempt remains unclear--even to Hope. As the story progresses, clues about the girls' upbringing are revealed in a series of flashbacks. Hope's memories paint a picture of sporadic sisterly bonding (secret club meetings in the attic, lip-synching to Jesus Christ Superstar), while other incidents (their father's death, Lizzie's crying spells, their alcoholic mother's abusive temper and prostitution) hint at a darker reality. Williams's decision to wait until the end to divulge the cause of Lizzie's misery is a gamble, but one that works. The truth-- exposed after Hope reads her sister's diary--is appalling.

The first thing that caught my attention with Glimpse was the cover; there is something so breath-taking and entrancing about it. The second thing was that it is written in verse; I love books in verse. The last was the summary, doesn't it sound amazing? Dying to read? Yeah, that's me.

Nothing by Janne Teller

"Nothing matters."

"From the moment you are born, you start to die."

"The Earth is 4.6 billion years old. You'll live to be a maximum of one hundred. Life isn't worth the bother!"

So says Pierre Anthon when he decides that there is no meaning to life, leaves the classroom, climbs a plum tree, and stays there.

His friends and classmates cannot get him to come down, not even by pelting him with rocks. So to prove to him that there is a meaning to life, they set out to build a heap of meaning in an abandoned sawmill.

But it soon becomes obvious that each person cannot give up what is most meaningful, so they begin to decide for one another what the others must give up. The pile is started with a lifetime's collection of Dungeons & Dragons books, a fishing rod, a pair of green sandals, a pet hamster — but then, as each demand becomes more extreme, things start taking a very morbid twist, and the kids become ever more desperate to get Pierre Anthon down. And what if, after all these sacrifices, the pile is not meaningful enough?

Interesting, right? But again, it's the cover the drew me in at first. I really hope this one is as good as it sounds!

Fallout by Ellen Hopkins

Hunter, Autumn, and Summer—three of Kristina Snow's five children—live in different homes, with different guardians and different last names. They share only a predisposition for addiction and a host of troubled feelings toward the mother who barely knows them, a mother who has been riding with the monster, crank, for twenty years.

Hunter is nineteen, angry, getting by in college with a job at a radio station, a girlfriend he loves in the only way he knows how, and the occasional party. He's struggling to understand why his mother left him, when he unexpectedly meets his rapist father, and things get even more complicated. Autumn lives with her single aunt and alcoholic grandfather. When her aunt gets married, and the only family she's ever known crumbles, Autumn's compulsive habits lead her to drink. And the consequences of her decisions suggest that there's more of Kristina in her than she'd like to believe. Summer doesn't know about Hunter, Autumn, or their two youngest brothers, Donald and David. To her, family is only abuse at the hands of her father's girlfriends and a slew of foster parents. Doubt and loneliness overwhelm her, and she, too, teeters on the edge of her mother's notorious legacy. As each searches for real love and true family, they find themselves pulled toward the one person who links them together—Kristina, Bree, mother, addict. But it is in each other, and in themselves, that they find the trust, the courage, the hope to break the cycle.

Told in three voices and punctuated by news articles chronicling the family's story, FALLOUT is the stunning conclusion to the trilogy begun by CRANK and GLASS, and a testament to the harsh reality that addiction is never just one person's problem.

This sounds so good I could pass out.