ABCs of ARCs

• Angsty
• Slow
• Bleh

I have a love affair with young adult fiction; I love the characters, the plots, the cheesy romances that are inventible, but let me make one thing clear, I love young adult fantasy/sci-fi. Reality young adult can be good too, I admit, but sometimes I come across one that is just too… whiney? Too teenager-y for lack of better words. It puts me off the genre, making me crave adult sanity, or at least a good fantasy read. Althea & Oliver was that book.

• Strange
• Not Thriller, Thriller
• Trigger Warning

To jump right in, All is Not Forgotten is a thriller—at least it’s supposed to be. I grabbed it off the ARC shelf in the backroom because of this very fact; thrillers tend to do well in terms of sales and customer liking, so it’s often handy to at least know about it. I haven’t quite read thrillers in the past, but I was looking forward to this one.

• Tedious
• Predictable
• Why?

You may be wondering why I wrote why above: simply put there was little point to this book. Now, I understand that books aren’t meant to have a point, they are books after all, just stories to entertain us, maybe teach us something, open us up to new ideas and places, but this book did nothing of the sort.

• Cute
• Light-hearted
• Quick Read

What a fitting book to start this off—a book inspired by the alphabet—and what a cute, wonderful book. I realize that many books shouldn’t be described as cute, but it’s the first word that comes to mind after finishing it. At first I expected it to be a young adult novel the way the cover looks (though with galleys they are never quite final until the printing) but it’s very much an adult novel with a bittersweet story of the only thing that seems to matter, love.