Me Before You - Jojo Moyes

Title: Me Before You

Author: Jojo Moyes 

Pages: 482 pages (paperback)

Publication Date: January 5th 2012 by Michael Joseph (UK) 

ISBN 0718157834 (ISBN13: 9780718157838)

  

Me Before You revolves around Louisa or Lou Clark, a 26-year old girl who lives with her nuclear family in their small flat. She has to take care of her parents, her sister, and her niece. Lou lives her life without any aspiration, without the will to explore her life and push her boundaries – instead, she leads her life by waiting tables at The Buttered Bun Café, by being with her boyfriend who may-or-may-not-love-her-because-why-won’t-you-put-a-ring-on-her-finger.

Second Chance Summer - Morgan Matson

Title: Second Chance Summer

Author: Morgan Matson

Pages: 468 pages (hardcover)

Publication Date: 8^th May 2012 (US) by Simon and Schuester

ISBN 978-1-4169-9067-3

‘The thing is that people only get hurt – really hurt – when they’re trying to play it safe. That’s when people get injured, when they pull back at the last second because they’re scared. They hurt themselves and other people.”

“A thousand moments that I had just taken for granted, mostly because I had assumed that there would be a thousand more.”

The Disenchantments - Nina LaCour

Title: The Disenchantments
Author: Nina LaCour
Pages: 307 pages
Publication Date: February 16, 2012 by DUTTON Juvenile 
ISBN-10: 0525422196 
ISBN-13: 9780525422198

"What do you want to do after graduating?" my friend once asked. My other friend told me that she wanted to find a job for a year so she could go to college with her own money. Another one said that he wanted to go straight to college in another continent, start anew. The others had no idea; they didn't even know which major to take after graduating.

Colby and Bev, bestfriends since forever, have made plans to travel to Europe after graduating high-school. They decided to take a sabbatical year together; college can wait, but exploring the world while they're still young and free? This is an opportunity once in a lifetime, they think.

The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Euginides

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Before I go on and review this book (or preferrably, make a very long random post about anything but this book) I must say that I'm not a romance books reader. I'm not against romance and all that jazz, I just find some characters on romance books a bit oblivious and I always have to fight the urge to go inside the book to hunt down the characters and hit their head with a shovel. But I enjoy general fiction which adds romance and sweetness and cutesy couple and swoonable characters, as its sub-plot.

Paper Towns - John Green

When I finished reading Looking For Alaska, I eventually thought that I finally found the perfect kind of characters that I would dyingly (it doesn't even a word) see alive. 
After reading Paper Towns, I thought to myself, "MAN, I WAS WRONG! Paper Towns is definitely the best book of John Green that I've ever read!!" 
Not that I've read all of his books, actually. 

The plot evolves around Quentin or more likely to be called Q, who has fallen in love with his neighbor Margo ever since he was a kid. One day they found a dead body at a park near their houses, and that discovery impacts differently on both of them. Q only thought that it was nothing to be seriously thinking about, but Margo eventually wonders how fragile life is as she grows up. Margo has never been the same. 

"Margo always loved mysteries. And in everything that came afterward, I could never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much that she became one." 
Even though Q has known Margo for years, he still can not understand her. 
She has become a mystery. A paper girl. A Margo persona that Margo only wants to project. Margo is a popular girl next door (literally) and Q is just a geek.. Then one night Margo shows up at Q's window, looking for help to lead a wondrous night full of rebel, revenge--Margo as the ninja with blue spray paint, catfish and Veet, with Q as his sidekick. 
Q totally thinks that his time finally comes. He can start to understand her. He can show her that he is not a loser kinda geek that people may think.. But then she disappears. No, not just for hours or 2 days or 3 days. For weeks. 

Q has all kinds of speculation. What if she ends up in a damp in the middle of nowhere? What if she was kidnapped? Or worse, what if she kills herself, and her body is nowhere to be found? 
But Q believes that Margo left some clues to him. And it's his job to find her. 

Paper Towns is not an ordinary young adult book. It is full of geekyness and depths and metaphors and quirky people and jokes and sadness and depression. And I really love this book because of that. I actually could read the book within a day but no, I didn't do it because I didn't want this book to end. 
What I liked about this book is its characters. Margo is a depressed young girl who is too fed up with all the hypocrisy of people around her. Margo leads on this night of revenge with Q because her boyfriend cheats on her and she thinks her friends around her already know that fact--but still betray her. She is fed up with the whatnots on the future,and all about it is just a repetition; she will graduate high school, she will have a job, she will get married, have babies, have grandchildren, and she will die. She wants to live freely without wanting to know what's gonna happen tomorrow. 
Q is the exact opposite of Margo. He is smart, everything about his future is no longer a stressful thing to think about. But he doesn't have the nerve to live in spontaneity and he wonders why is that. 
Radar is a genius and reliable, whose parents owns the biggest collection of Black Santas in the world. Ben is a typical funny guy and everything that comes out of his mouth makes me laugh. Lacey is.. a girl. 

The last thing I loved from this book: 
“Maybe its like you said before, all of us being cracked open. Like each of us starts out as a watertight vessel. And then things happen - these people leave us, or don’t love us, or don’t get us, or we don’t get them, and we lose and fail and hurt one another. And the vessel starts to crack in places. And I mean, yeah once the vessel cracks open, the end becomes inevitable. Once it starts to rain inside the Osprey, it will never be remodeled. But there is all this time between when the cracks start to open up and when we finally fall apart. And its only that time that we see one another, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs. When did we see each other face to face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade, but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.”