Something to do…

I was at the library last week browsing through shelves with my 14 yr old and I had a thought.  

Instead of randomly walking up to shelves and finding books I'm going to take a systematic approach to it!  

I went to the first row of the first shelf at our closest library and found a book I wanted to read this week. I finished it last night and I'm now going back to return it and find a book on the next shelf down.  I'll keep doing this until I hit a section that I just don't want to read cover to cover (cookbooks, textbooks…), I'll skip those shelves and go to the next.  I'm going to do this in the children's books every week as well, it will give a variety of summer reading for the boys.  

I'll TRY to remember to blog about the book I read and what I thought of it, I used to be so much better about blogging!

Here's the first book I borrowed… 

Dark Companion by Marta Acosta

I will start with the positive.  You have Jane, a teen girl with a tragic childhood that left her growing up in the foster care system and a group home.  Jane is guided by an older boy to be her best, study hard and not let life take her down and she does it.  She has an incredible work ethic and is accepted into a prestigious private school on full scholarship and free room and board.  

She moves into a quaint cottage in the woods and makes friends immediately, which has never been her strong point.  She is so loved and accepted in this new environment that she begins to question everything.  

I won't go any further into the details because there are spoilers, I will be vague now.  Jane starts out as an amazing role model on how to keep yourself separate yet still be a part of something.  She made great decisions and then all of the sudden was so caught up in being loved and accepted that she forgot herself.  She went down a winding road of bad decisions that left me scratching my head and saying… What is she doing??  It was so unlike her character.  

This is a book that I will remember and am still thinking about today and going over it in my head, thinking about Jane.  In a way it is a different twist on Jane Eyre, about companionship that has a girl stuck in a tough decision between dependence financially and wanting freedom to follow her own dreams.

Overall I would give this one a 3.5 out of 5 for the fact that it's a YA supernatural book that teetered on the line of romance without being silly or inappropriate and had a new and interesting take on the supernatural.  I was captivated by the writing style and the ease of reading this story even though the second half had me wanting to grab Jane and shake her.   

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