One day I’m going to write a love letter to Jenny Han, but until then the above video will have to do. 😀

…yet the voice is very YA. I don’t want to yak too much about it, so here’s a video I made of my reflections on Sandy Hall’s A Little Something Different:  ...

Well, I learned from Amy Finnegan’s debut novel, Not in the Script, that a lot of drama happens over very little off the set. Yet somehow, I couldn’t stop reading! Without reading her bio, I knew that Amy is really familiar with the behind-the-scenes happenings when actors are filming. Then it turns out she has a brother who used to be part of the biz. That makes a lot of sense. The cover is cute and it doesn’t feature the divas of the story like I thought it would: They look like nice people right? The thing that makes this story successful is how real the characters are. They are actors and yes, maybe one or two of them love the publicity they get from being who they are, but when the cameras aren’t rolling, they are just like any other teenagers, except famous. This is just a taste of what life is like for them that the public has no clue and I like how Amy gives us a little peek in the window. You would think a model just wants to find any other opportunity to get his name out there and his face on billboards or buses or whatever, but here is one who wants to use the money he makes to help his mother with her health issues. He also wants to go to college for business. This all started with him selling all of his mother’s shoes when he was just a kid. You would think an actress just wants to pose for the cameras and find what new roles she can get. But here’s one who wants to start a charity foundation and found just the person who inspired it. Of course, the story would not be complete without a lot of miscommunication, teens not ready for serious relationships, head guessing games and tabloids. It makes dating your co-worker that much more difficult. This book is cute and oddly enough, some parts I related to so well I felt tears welling up. No...

It’s been about two years now since this book was released and I have recently put it down. I am rereading it already, though, in true AIA fashion. I have already calmed down since I first got excited about this book, but if you’re curious to see what that was like: I think I took a while to pick up this book because I was afraid it was going to be over-hyped. And when I first read what the book was about, I wasn’t sure I wanted to read a book about “sick people.” Then after watching tons of reviews on YouTube, or should I say, BookTube, it seemed that this book was classified as a cancer book. I haven’t read that many cancer books and I think The Fault In Our Stars (I’m tickled that fans call it TFIOS) would qualify as my first one. I don’t see how the others count as they were not as unique as this one. Well, I’m not going to say much more about this book. I’ve got to read it...

I know it has been forever and a day since I last updated and I really don’t have a good excuse, but I promise to give a quick update and hope to get back to updating this thing. First off, I have not stopped reading YA. If you want to see what YA I’ve been reading, check out my new Examiner page: http://www.examiner.com/young-adult-fiction-in-columbia-mo/yumin-ye As you know from my last post Xanga has changed. I have moved my blog to here: http://attheoutset.wordpress.com/ Those places will give you more of a detailed update than I can provide here. Now, on to Sisterhood Everlasting. Ann Brashares wrote four books that take place before this one does that are part of the sisterhood series. I’m not going to talk about those because I read those a while ago while I was still in school and I finished the fifth book recently so that’s the one I want to focus on. Speaking of which, I have another update I almost forgot about! I started a YouTube channel and while it is going to be on a variety of topics, any YA books I write about on this blog that I do a video on will be posted on here. So stay tuned! OK, so this fifth sisterhood book. It’s about ten years into the girls’ future. They are in their late 20s, but have grown apart. Lena is teaching art in Rhode Island, Carmen is this famous actress in New York about ready to get married to her boyfriend Jones, Bridget lives with Eric in San Francisco and Tibby is in Australia, last anyone heard. The first thing I noticed is on the cover, there are three girls and not four. I knew something was up. You spend a lot of time grieving throughout this novel and wondering what happened to Tibby. Miss Brashares makes it seem that Tibby drowned herself on purpose or something then she sucker punches you when it gets closer to the end of the book and it turns out she had Huntington’s and told no one. Each girl goes through her grieving process in her own way, thinking that Tibby simply wasn’t strong enough to go on, having no clue the truth behind...