Review: A Midsummer's Nightmare by Kody Keplinger

A Midsummer's Nightmare
Kody Keplinger
Publisher: Poppy
Publish Date: June 5, 2012
Hardcover {p.291}
Source: Publisher
Genre: Contemporary, Young Adult
Whitley Johnson
Challenge: 100+
Buy the Book: Amazon

Whitley Johnson's dream summer with her divorce dad has turned into a nightmare. She's just met his new fiancee and her kids. The fiancee's son? Whitley's one-night stand from graduation night. Just freakin' great.

Worse, she totally doesn't fit in with her dad's perfect new country-club family. So Whitley acts out. She parties. Hard. So hard she doesn't even notice the good things right under her nose: a sweet little future stepsister who is just about the only person she's ever liked, a best friend (even though Whitley swears she doesn't "do" friends), and a smoking-hot guy who isn't her stepbrother...at least, not yet. It will take all three of them to help Whitley get through her anger and begin to put the pieces of her family together.

Filled with authenticity and raw emotion, Whitley is Kody Keplinger's most compelling character to date: a cynical Holden Caulfield-esque girl you will wholly care about.

Whitley has a bit of a reputation for being an easy party girl, and it doesn't seem to bother her. After a night of too much drinking she wakes up to a one-night stand she hopes to never see again, and he hopes becomes more than the one night. Only they find out they are to be future step-siblings.

Whitley was a bit difficult to warm up to at first because I was put off by her "loose" behavior. But looking past that, I did like her the majority of the time. The only time I truly did not like her was when she took her 13 year old soon-to-be stepsister to a house party and got her wasted.

Her relationship with her parents is a whole other story. Both parents were pretty selfish and hardly ever knew Whitley existed. Her mother just complains to her about her father, and her father completely ignores her when he's not using her as a drinking buddy. Plus her brother was always too busy with his new family to really have anything to do with her either. On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, I felt at first that her stepmother was trying too hard by always checking up on her. As I got more into it, it became clear that her stepmother was the only real adult/parent in the book.

Nathan, her one-night stand stepbrother, was a great influence on Whitley. I feel he played a large part, along with his mother and sister, in Whitley getting her act together. It felt like those three plus her new BFF Harrison were the only people who truly cared about her.

This book will have you feeling a wide range of emotions throughout. It has it all and if you loved The DUFF, then you won't be disappointed. Plus there's an appearance from Wesley and Bianca.

Book Obsessed Spotlights {16}

I thought I would return a feature I used to do every Monday spotlighting a recently discovered book that I found interesting from its blurb.

This time around I've changed it up a bit. Instead of posting every week about books I haven't read, I'll post about books that I have read and loved, that I want to share with you.


Shut Out
Kody Keplinger

Most high school sports teams have rivalries with other schools. At Hamilton High, it's a civil war: the football team versus the soccer team. And for her part, Lissa is sick of it. Her quarterback boyfriend, Randy, is always ditching her to go pick a fight with the soccer team or to prank their locker room. And on three separate occasions Randy's car has been egged while he and Lissa were inside, making out. She is done competing with a bunch of sweaty boys for her own boyfriend's attention.

Lissa decides to end the rivalry once and for all: she and the other players' girlfriends go on a hookup strike. The boys won't get any action from them until the football and soccer teams make peace. What they don't count on is a new sort of rivalry: an impossible girls-against-boys showdown that hinges on who will cave to their libidos first. And Lissa never sees her own sexual tension with the leader of the boys, Cash Sterling, coming.


Breaking the Rules
Suzanne Brockmann

Sometime in the not too distant past, the once torrid romance between Eden Gillman and her Navy SEAL husband Izzy Zanella took a drastic cooling turn. Both seem permanently wedded to mutual disdain, but then something happens that changes the chemistry: Eden discovers that her younger brother Ben is the victim of abuse by his stepfather. To rescue him from the tyrant's custody, she knows that she must reconstruct her tattered relationship with the man that she had most cherished. What she doesn't yet realize is the full saving strength of that lovers' reunion.


Embrace the Highland Warrior
Anita Clenney

When the powerful demon that left Shay for dead discovers her empty grave, he comes seeking retribution, believing she possesses an ancient book he has sought for centuries. Knowing she can't fight the demon alone, Shay returns to her clan and the Scottish Warrior who betrayed her...the only man she's ever loved, where she discovers that betrayal isn't always what it seems. Sometimes it's far worse.

Review: Shut Out by Kody Keplinger

Shut Out
Kody Keplinger
Publisher: Poppy
Publish Date: September 5, 2011
Hardcover {p.273}
Source: Publisher
Genre: Young Adult
Characters: Melissa Daniels, Cash Sterling
Challenge: 100+, YA Romance
Buy the Book: Amazon

Most high school sports teams have rivalries with other schools. At Hamilton High, it's a civil war: the football team versus the soccer team. And for her part, Lissa is sick of it. Her quarterback boyfriend, Randy, is always ditching her to go pick a fight with the soccer team or to prank their locker room. And on three separate occasions Randy's car has been egged while he and Lissa were inside, making out. She is done competing with a bunch of sweaty boys for her own boyfriend's attention.

Lissa decides to end the rivalry once and for all: she and the other players' girlfriends go on a hookup strike. The boys won't get any action from them until the football and soccer teams make peace. What they don't count on is a new sort of rivalry: an impossible girls-against-boys showdown that hinges on who will cave to their libidos first. And Lissa never sees her own sexual tension with the leader of the boys, Cash Sterling, coming.

Lissa is in a relationship with Randy, who she's not exactly in love with, more like comfortable. Her family loves him, or at least likes him, so I think that's what keeps her with him. So when he goes a bit to far with the rivalry he and the rest of the football team has with the soccer team, she decides a sex strike is in order.

She manages to get all the girlfriends of both teams on board, but what she doesn't expect is for Cash Sterling to be the ringleader for the boys. These two obviously have major chemistry, but neither seems to want to be the first one to open up and tell the other how they feel.

Cash is a really great guy who genuinely cares for Lissa. Whereas Randy, he's just all about sex. He came across as a bit dense and caring only about himself. I was surprised to see Lissa with someone like him. It left me wondering how these two get together in the first place.

As far as secondary characters go, I loved Chloe. She said and did whatever she pleased and didn't care what others said or thought about her. Ellen too was a pleasant surprise. She wasn't at all what I expecting her to be. She was a strong one too, she just didn't express it in the manner in which Chloe chose to.

Another great read by Kody.

Review: The Duff: Designated Ugly Fat Friend by Kody Keplinger

The Duff: Designated Ugly Fat Friend
Kody Keplinger {Blog | Facebook | Twitter}
Publisher: Little Brown/Poppy
Publication Date: September 7, 2010
Audio Book {8 hrs}
Source: Public Library
Genre: Young Adult
Characters: Bianca Piper, Wesley Rush, Toby Tucker
Challenge: 100+, Whisper Stories
My Rating:

Seventeen-year-old Bianca Piper is cynical and loyal, and she doesn’t think she’s the prettiest of her friends by a long shot. She’s also way too smart to fall for the charms of man-slut and slimy school hottie Wesley Rush. In fact, Bianca hates him. And when he nicknames her “the Duff,” she throws her Coke in his face.

But things aren’t so great at home right now, and Bianca is desperate for a distraction. She ends up kissing Wesley. Worse, she likes it. Eager for escape, Bianca throws herself into a closeted enemies-with-benefits relationship with him.

Until it all goes horribly awry. It turns out Wesley isn’t such a bad listener, and his life is pretty screwed up, too. Suddenly Bianca realizes with absolute horror that she’s falling for the guy she thought she hated more than anyone.

From the beginning of this book, I instantly liked Bianca. She was me. The tag-along friend that’s sitting at the bar while everyone else is on the dance floor. Bianca is every girl at some point in their lives.

Bianca is the less attractive one of her friends, but she never realized it until Wesley pointed it out to her. Wesley is the high school playboy that will sleep with anything with a pulse, and he happens to have his eyes set on either one of Bianca’s BFFs.

The two are thrown together at the local teen nightclub, The Nest, when Wesley approaches her in an effort to get close to one of her prettier friends. So when Bianca starts going through some difficult things in her home life, she never expected Wesley to be the one she turned to, to get through it. She starts using him for sex as a way to escape, and Wesley being Wesley, he was oh so happy to oblige.

What started out as just a distraction for her, quickly turned into something more. But to her Wesley could never be interested in more than sex with her, because she’s The DUFF.

I really enjoyed the relationship between these two. When they weren’t fighting with each other they were having sex. The bickering between them, mostly from Bianca, and the banter, was hilarious to watch.

Wesley was totally misunderstood throughout most of the novel. Bianca was the only one that seemed to see the true Wesley underneath the playboy image. It was heartbreaking to see her walk away from Wesley in favor of Toby.

On the other hand, it was nice to see Wesley and Bianca falling in love with each other and not be the typical teenagers who are desperately in love. Some young adult novels are too un-relatable and unbelievable to even bother with. But this one was so relatable in the fact that Bianca could be any of us.

I will definitely have to get my own copy of this one for my keeper shelf. It was a great read!

Read by Ellen Grafton
Duration: 8 hours

Brillance Audio

The narrator did a wonderful job of capturing a youthful voice without being annoying or whiny. I have many incomplete ya audio books because I couldn’t deal with the voices of the narrator. Whiny and annoying are not the best traits to take on to express the youthfulness of the characters.

Musical Monday {6}: In Your Eyes

So what's Musical Monday? It's a weekly meme hosted by Tipsy Reader. With this meme, you pick the book you are currently reading, or just finished, and match it with it's musical mate. Think, "if this book had a soundtrack, what would be the theme song?"

The Book:

The DUFF: (Designated Ugly Fat Friend) by Kody Keplinger

The Song:

In Your Eyes by Peter Gabriel

Love I get so lost, sometimes
Days pass and this emptiness fills my heart
When I want to run away
I drive off in my car
But whichever way I go
I come back to the place you are

All my instincts, they return
And the grand facade, so soon will burn
Without a noise, without my pride
I reach out from the inside

In your eyes
The light the heat
In your eyes
I am complete
In your eyes
I see the doorway to a thousand churches
In your eyes
The resolution of all the fruitless searches
In your eyes
I see the light and the heat
In your eyes
Oh, I want to be that complete
I want to touch the light
The heat I see in your eyes

Love, I don't like to see so much pain
So much wasted and this moment keeps slipping away
I get so tired of working so hard for our survival
I look to the time with you to keep me awake and alive

And all my instincts, they return
And the grand facade, so soon will burn
Without a noise, without my pride
I reach out from the inside

In your eyes
The light the heat
In your eyes
I am complete
In your eyes
I see the doorway to a thousand churches
In your eyes
The resolution of all the fruitless searches
In your eyes
I see the light and the heat
In your eyes
Oh, I want to be that complete
I want to touch the light,
The heat I see in your eyes
In your eyes in your eyes
In your eyes in your eyes
In your eyes in your eyes

+ show lyrics

The Reason: The Duff, to me, feels like a modern day Say Anything. I don't know why I see Wesley in the role of John Cusack holding a boombox outside of Bianca bedroom window, but I do. My alternate choice would have been "I Want You To Want Me," because Bianca and Wesley did start out disliking each other just like Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger.