Book Nerds Across America

I've read Lauren Oliver's Delirium series and Panic, so I am well aware of her YA books.  I knew this was an adult book when I tried to pick up a copy at BEA a couple of years ago, but I obviously forgot in the meantime.  I downloaded the audio book and started listening to it on a road trip with my ten-year-old son and quickly discovered that it is NOT appropriate for younger readers.  After a couple of "bad words" and some content he hopefully didn't understand, I had to pull the plug for the rest of that trip.  

Rooms is told from multiple character's points of view, which I found to be very entertaining.  Alice and Sandra are both ghosts who were former residents of the home they "haunt", for lack of a better word.  Richard Walker was the most recent owner of the home, but he recently passed away and his ex-wife, Caroline, teenage son Trenton and adult daughter Minna are there to settle his affairs.

Trenton and Minna haven't been to their childhood home in years, so their return stirs up a number of old memories.  In addition, Trenton was involved in a car accident prior to the start of the book that nearly killed him.  He believes it was this near death experience that is causing him to hear ghosts in the house.  Caroline, Trenton, and Minna are all battling their own demons, but hearing ghosts is even a stretch for them.

The majority of the book is an unraveling of the lives of the ghosts as well as the living.  There are a number of finely woven details that link the past with the present and several surprising revelations.  I don't think I was quite as close to the edge of my seat as I was reading Panic, but this was still an excellent ghost store and a solid debut into the world of adult fiction for Lauren.

The only negative that I perceived was the somewhat crude language that was dispersed throughout the book.  I read a lot of YA and NA, so I'm definitely not used to it.  Some adult content and language is fine, but I thought it was excessive in places and could have been toned down.  

Jacque's Review:

I have read several of Levithan's collaborations (Dash & Lily's Book of Dares, Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, and Invisibility) and really enjoyed them, so I decided it was time to read one of his solo books.

Boy Meets Boy tells the story of a high school boy named Paul who has known and embraced the fact that he is gay since kindergarten.  While I have lived in a very accepting area near Columbus, Ohio for sixteen years, which received a brief mention in this book, I don't think I have ever experienced a town or school like Paul's.  For example...the starting quarterback is a drag queen as well as the homecoming queen.  It seemed like most of the town was openly LGBT, or perhaps that is just the side of things that is presented from Paul's point-of-view.  Everyone seemed so supportive and accepting until we meet Tony's parents.  Tony is Paul's long time friend, but he is a sharp contrast to Paul.  His parents are very religious and believe Paul is the devil's influence on their son.  It was great to see how Tony slowly asserted his independence and stood up to his parents.

The remainder of the story is a love story.  Paul first meets Noah at a book store and quickly discovers he is a new student at his school.  It takes a few days for Paul to reconnect with Noah, but their relationship soon escalates until Paul manages to botch everything up.  Now he has to figure out how he can earn back Noah's trust.

I honestly didn't realize this book was written in 2003.  I added it to my TBR list in March 2014, so I guess I was assuming it was written shortly before then.  If that were the case, I don't think this story would have been such a far reaching piece of fiction.  With the legalization of gay marriage and other recent events, I don't think Boy Meets Boy is that far from today's reality.

Overall, this was a short and very entertaining story that kept me engaged from start to finish.  It was a very eye opening read that I will not soon forget.

About the Book:

The legacy of the Black Dagger Brotherhood continues in a spin-off series from the #1 New York Times bestselling author…

2015 was a good year! I read 130% of the books I challenged myself to read. *pats self on back* And, luckily, I enjoyed the majority of them! For this hop, I'm giving away an ARC of Seriously Wicked by Tina Connolly. Remember when I did this thing?

Book Nerd Jacque also shares this over at her blog, so be sure to check that out as well! But here's what I got this week. 

What sparked your interest in a story set in Nagasaki? Of the two cities targeted by the atomic bombs, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, why did you choose Nagasaki?

I’m going to have to take you back to 1993. I was 21 years old. I’d graduated from university with a degree in English and had no idea about what I wanted to do in terms of a career. As I trawled job advertisements at my parents’ home, a friend who was working at a school in Japan wrote out of the blue: “Come here. You’d love it. You can teach.”

In that weird synchronicity of life, an advert appeared in a newspaper looking for graduates to apply to GEOS, at that time one of the world’s biggest English language schools. I got the job and was allocated, at random, the city where I’d be teaching: Nagasaki. Fate, I guess, or luck, led me there. I loved my own small piece of Nagasaki: the curious ramshackle home I rented with the hole in the floor in lieu of a flushing toilet, the tatami mats and paper sliding doors in the bedroom, the tailless cats that loitered on my doorstep, the lack of street names that left me lost on my first night, the temples and shrines and foreigner cemeteries, the food, and the sheer adventure of being dropped into a world so alien I had my own “alien registration” card.

I knew I wanted to set my first book in Nagasaki but I was wary about tackling the atomic bomb. It was too big a topic, the devastation real and not imagined, the aftermath still felt by generations of families. However, every time I wrote about the city, the plot—or rather the characters—took me back to the Second World War. And so reluctantly, and cautiously, I began to feel my way towards a story about an elderly woman called Amaterasu Takahashi who had lost her daughter and grandson when Bockscar dropped Fat Man over Nagasaki—and who had lived with that loss for forty years.

During my two years living in Nagasaki, I attended the 50^th anniversary of the atomic bomb at Nagasaki Peace Park, alongside 30,000 more people who gathered together in the stifling heat to remember the dead. I watched a small boy eat ice cream by a fountain built to commemorate the fatally injured who had cried out for water. I stored the memory of that boy away and later he turned into Hideo Watanabe, the seven-year-old child seemingly killed on August 9, 1945.

Decades pass in the book, and a man going by the same name arrives on the doorstep of Amaterasu’s home in the US to declare he is the grandson she thought dead. The adult Hideo has a type of retrograde amnesia and I wanted his condition to reflect a certain historical amnesia that we have in the West with regards to the atomic bombs. Nagasaki was the second city hit. When we talk about nuclear war Hiroshima is more often cited. That’s quite a thing, to have second billing but to have shared the same horror.

Beyond inspiring my first novel, Nagasaki has had a huge impact on my life. It gave me my first job as a teacher, later my profession as a journalist—and wonderful memories.

On my first night in the city, a sushi restaurant owner, who also happened to be a former boxer, declared: “For as long as you live in Nagasaki I will protect you.” I feel the book is my way of repaying my debt to all the kind people who looked after me when I lived there. They protected me when I was young and a long way from home.

Read the rest of the interview after the break.