“No guilt. No moment of awakening. No tearful repentance. My eyes slid over the signs and my heart remained unaffected. I’d made my decision long before we arrived. Those signs were just words.”
Reading a book about a 17-year old on a road trip across state lines to get an abortion may not sound like the greatest story, but in Unpregnant, Jenni Hendricks and Ted Caplan take this topic and spin it into a fast-paced, funny-at-times novel that also deals with the topic at hand.
“What they will lose are concrete things: a place in college, maybe a future job. What I have lost can’t be seen. I’ve lost my courage, my confidence, my belief that I can have a good life.”
I finished reading Take It Back by Kia Abdullah this past weekend, and have been trying to gather my thoughts on the story. This book destroyed me though, and I’m still not sure what to do with myself!
This past weekend I had the pleasure of attending another Frenzy Presents event at the Harper Collins Canada office. For the Fall/Winter preview, the wonderful staff at HCC Frenzy were discussing 24 new middle-grade and young adult books that are hitting shelves over the next few months.
“Some people think I made JerkAlert as part of a malicious, premeditated scheme to humiliate men at large. But in truth, it was just a gut reaction to the futility of the status quo. I’d had a few really bad days, featuring a few really bad dudes. So I did what any disgruntled coder would do: I created an anonymous website where women could rate their dating experiences with the guys they met on Fluttr. Kind of like Yelp, but instead of reviewing restaurants or nail salons, you reviewed your dates.”
“Leaving does not stop the violence, and it doesn’t guarantee freedom. Why doesn’t she just leave? gets asked in living rooms and courtrooms across the country, when a better question would be, Why doesn’t he let her go? It took me a while, but I’ve finally figured out the answer. You’d sooner kill me than let me go.”
“I can see the dark things. They’re trying to hide, but I can spot them, hunched behind corners, pressed against walls. Shadows where there is no one to cast shadows. Nobody’s shadow would look like that anyway. Warped. Bony. Bent almost like branches. They are waiting. I can feel them. And they can feel me pushing back.”
Books With Friends is back, and this week I spoke with Alyssa from The Social Factory about the best thriller I’ve read so far this year: The Hunting Party!
