Review: Obscura Burning by Suzanne van Rooyen

Obscura Burning by Suzanne van Rooyen
Format: eBook
Published by Etopia Press on 7th December 2012
Pages: 300
Genre: YA, Sci-fi
Rating: 
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The world's going to end in fire… and it's all Kyle's fault.

Kyle Wolfe's world is about to crash and burn. Just weeks away from graduation, a fire kills Kyle's two best friends and leaves him permanently scarred. A fire that Kyle accidentally set the night he cheated on his boyfriend Danny with their female friend, Shira. That same day, a strange new planet, Obscura, appears in the sky. And suddenly Kyle's friends aren't all that dead anymore.

Each time Kyle goes to sleep, he awakens to two different realities. In one, his boyfriend Danny is still alive, but Shira is dead. In the other, it's Shira who's alive... and now they're friends with benefits. Shifting between realities is slowly killing him, and he's not the only one dying. The world is dying with him. He's pretty sure Obscura has something to do with it, but with his parents' marriage imploding and realities shifting each time he closes his eyes, Kyle has problems enough without being the one in charge of saving the world...

Ah, this book had so much promise...

The Kindle sample had me hooked from the beginning! The premise is just horrifically fascinating. Kyle, our protagonist, can remember very little about the night of the fire-- the fire that killed his best friends Danny and Shira. Ever since that night, he has been living out his days alternating between a reality where Danny is dead and Shira alive, and one where Shira is dead and Danny alive. And Kyle is struggling to figure out whether the fire was his fault or not, while at the same time trying to make sense of what is happening to him.

Review: Ask the Passengers by A.S. King

Ask the Passengers by A.S. King
Format: Paperback
Published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers on 10th September 2013 (first published 23rd October 2012)
Pages: 293
Genre: YA, Contemporary
Rating:
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Astrid Jones desperately wants to confide in someone, but her mother's pushiness and her father's lack of interest tell her they're the last people she can trust. Instead, Astrid spends hours lying on the backyard picnic table watching airplanes fly overhead. She doesn't know the passengers inside, but they're the only people who won't judge her when she asks them her most personal questions... like what it means that she's falling in love with a girl.

Oh man, I really wanted to like this book.

Well, first things first: this is my first post on this blog! I've just resurfaced after spending a term at university frantically revising for some dreaded exams (33 hours of exams in 10 consecutive weekdays, whoo!), and while I was revising for these exams, I decided I really needed to have something to look forward to doing after they finished. So I thought, why not get back into reading? Ever since I started uni a year and a half ago, I've been reading for pleasure significantly less than I used to; instead, as a Classicist, I just got buried under mountains and mountains of translating from dead languages. I spent months and months reading the Iliad in Ancient Greek.

While I still have two years and a bit of my uni degree left to go and I will no doubt soon return to being as busy as ever after this brief month-long break from uni ends, I thought I'd challenge myself and start a book blog. So here I am.