Ash Reads Stuff

Saint Anything by Sarah Dessen Publication Date: 2015 Pages:   417 (Hardcover)   Genre: Young Adult My Goodreads Rating: 4.5 Stars Goodreads Synopsis: Peyton, Sydney's charismatic older brother, has always been the star of the family, receiving the lion's share of their parents' attention and—lately—concern. When Peyton's increasingly reckless behavior culminates in an accident, a drunk driving conviction, and a jail sentence, Sydney is cast adrift, searching for her place in the family and the world. When everyone else is so worried about Peyton, is she the only one concerned about the victim of the accident? Enter the Chathams, a warm, chaotic family who run a pizza parlor, play bluegrass on weekends, and pitch in to care for their mother, who has multiple sclerosis. Here Sydney experiences unquestioning acceptance. And here she meets Mac, gentle, watchful, and protective, who makes Sydney feel seen, really seen, for the first time. My Rev

Tiger Lily by Jodi Lynn Anderson Publication Date: 2012 Pages:  292 (Paperback)  Genre: Young Adult My Goodreads Rating: 4 Stars Goodreads Synopsis: Before Peter Pan belonged to Wendy, he belonged to the girl with the crow feather in her hair... Fifteen-year-old Tiger Lily doesn't believe in love stories or happy endings. Then she meets the alluring teenage Peter Pan in the forbidden woods of Neverland and immediately falls under his spell. Peter is unlike anyone she's ever known. Impetuous and brave, he both scares and enthralls her. As the leader of the Lost Boys, the most fearsome of Neverland's inhabitants, Peter is an unthinkable match for Tiger Lily. Soon, she is risking everything—her family, her future—to be with him. When she is faced with marriage to a terrible man in her own tribe, she must choose between the life she's always known and running away to an uncertain future with Peter. With enemies threatening to tear them apart, the l

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein  Publication Date : 2012 Pages: 336 (Paperback)  Genre: Young Adult My Goodreads Rating:  5 Stars Goodreads Synopsis: I have two weeks. You'll shoot me at the end no matter what I do. That's what you do to enemy agents. It's what we do to enemy agents. But I look at all the dark and twisted roads ahead and cooperation is the easy way out. Possibly the only way out for a girl caught red-handed doing dirty work like mine - and I will do anything, anything to avoid SS-Hauptsturmführer von Linden interrogating me again. He has said that I can have as much paper as I need. All I have to do is cough up everything I can remember about the British War Effort. And I'm going to. But the story of how I came to be here starts with my friend Maddie. She is the pilot who flew me into France - an Allied Invasion of Two. We are a sensational team. My Review: I walked by this book in my local Barnes & Noble multiple times

Don't Get Me Wrong  by Marianne Kavanagh Expected Publication Date: August 25, 2015 Pages: 336 (Paperback)  Genre: Adult Fiction My Goodreads Rating: 3 Stars Goodreads Synopsis: For fans of Jojo Moyes, David Nicholls, and Sophie Kinsella, here is a Pride and Prejudice for the modern era: Londoners Kim and Harry can’t see eye to eye...until the life of the person they both love most hangs in the balance. Kim and Harry are total opposites who happen to have the same favorite people in the world: Kim’s older sister, Eva, and her young son, Otis. Kim has never seen what her free-spirited big sister sees in a stuck-up banker like Harry and has spent her childhood trying to keep him out (must he always drive the most ostentatious cars and insist on charming everyone he meets?), while Harry’s favorite occupation is provoking Kim. Both Harry and Kim are too stuck in their prejudices to care about what’s really going on beneath the surface of each other’s lives. The

Charm & Strange by Stephanie Kuehn  Publication Date: 2013 Pages: 224 (Paperback)  Genre: Young Adult My Goodreads Rating: 4 Stars Goodreads Synopsis: He's part Win, the lonely teenager exiled to a remote Vermont boarding school in the wake of a family tragedy. The guy who shuts all his classmates out, no matter the cost. He's part Drew, the angry young boy with violent impulses that control him. The boy who spent a fateful, long-ago summer with his brother and teenage cousins, only to endure a secret so monstrous it led three children to do the unthinkable. Over the course of one night, while stuck at a party deep in the New England woods, Andrew battles both the pain of his past and the isolation of his present. Before the sun rises, he'll either surrender his sanity to the wild darkness inside his mind or make peace with the most elemental of truths--that choosing to live can mean so much more than not dying. My Review:  This book

This Raging Light by Estelle Laure Expected Publication Date: January 5th, 2016 Pages: 288 (Kindle Edition) Genre: Young Adult My Goodreads Rating: 4.5 Stars Goodreads Synopsis: The novel follows a teenager and her younger sister as they try to deal with their mother’s sudden disappearance. Things become further complicated when older sister Lucille falls for her best friend’s brother. The publisher said the book is a “luminous portrait” of two young girls enduring hardship. My Review:  This book is...something else. It gets you where it counts.  Lucille is a seventeen-year-old girl whose mother has up and left her and her nine-year-old sister to fend for themselves. You don't find out what happened to their dad for a while, but it's pretty bad too. It's bad enough that it drove Lucille's mom to abandon her children. Right off the bat, Lucille's life is pretty terrible.  While things are looking pretty bad for Lu and her sister

Now that I'm on summer vacation not much has changed as to my reading habits. I still plan on filling my days being lost in other people's words, only now I don't have to do it little spurts of time. Now, it's just me and my books until August.  YAAAAAAY!  I have a pretty big TO BE READ list on Goodreads. It's kind of sad actually and some of them have been there since I joined GR in, oh, December 2011. (I'm going to read them, I swear I am.) In the meantime here's a list of books I actually have within my grasps and am putting first on my TBR list. Okay? Okay. Something about this book really intrigues me. Maybe it's the name or the whole "Snow White" vibe. It's my current library read, so I hope it doesn't disappoint.  Will Grayson, Will Grayson  is probably one of my favorite John Green books and it introduced me to David Levithan, whose books I adore. I'm sure this is going to be crazy, but I'm e

What You Left Behind by Jessica Verdi Publication Date: August 4, 2015 Pages: 320 (Hardcover) Genre: Young Adult My Goodreads Rating: Four Stars Goodreads Synopsis: It’s all Ryden’s fault. If he hadn’t gotten Meg pregnant, she would have never stopped her chemo treatments and would still be alive. Instead, he’s failing fatherhood one dirty diaper at a time. And it’s not like he’s had time to grieve while struggling to care for their infant daughter, start his senior year, and earn the soccer scholarship he needs to go to college. The one person who makes Ryden feel like his old self is Joni. She’s fun and energetic—and doesn’t know he has a baby. But the more time they spend together, the harder it becomes to keep his two worlds separate. Finding one of Meg’s journals only stirs up old emotions, and Ryden’s convinced Meg left other notebooks for him to find, some message to help his new life make sense. But how is he going to have a future if he can’t let go of the

Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon Publication Date:  September 1, 2015 Pages: 307 Genre: Young Adult My Goodreads Rating: Four Stars Goodreads Synopsis: My disease is as rare as it is famous. Basically, I’m allergic to the world. I don’t leave my house, have not left my house in seventeen years. The only people I ever see are my mom and my nurse, Carla. But then one day, a moving truck arrives next door. I look out my window, and I see him. He’s tall, lean and wearing all black—black T-shirt, black jeans, black sneakers, and a black knit cap that covers his hair completely. He catches me looking and stares at me. I stare right back. His name is Olly. Maybe we can’t predict the future, but we can predict some things. For example, I am certainly going to fall in love with Olly. It’s almost certainly going to be a disaster. My Review:  I'll start out simple. I loved this book. I loved the whole idea of it. I loved everything, everything about it, if you

Olivia Christakos and Her Second First Time by Dani Irons Publication Date:   June 1, 2015 Pages: 244 Genre:  New Adult My Goodreads Rating: Three Stars Goodreads synopsis: My perfect life… True, I’m in the hospital waking up from a coma, but my loving parents and adorable boyfriend, Wyatt, are here by my side. It’s weird that I don’t remember them—thanks, amnesia! Wyatt’s an amazing person. He’s a Big Brother, volunteers at soup kitchens, delivers food to the hungry—your basic angel. Your basic filled-out-in-all-the-right-places, naughty-thoughts-inducing angel, that is. Might be the perfect lie… In fact, the more I get to know Wyatt the harder it is to believe he’s my boyfriend. The more I find out about my life before the accident, the more I don’t like who I used to be. I can’t understand what a guy like that—kind, considerate, generous—would see in a girl like me. I don’t know what’s worse, living in the darkness of amnesia or discovering the despicabl