Review: The Fire Sermon

The Fire Sermon
Author: Francesca Haig
Publication Date: February 23rd 2015             
Publisher: HarperVoyager   
~A copy was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review~ 

When Zach and I were born our parents must have counted and recounted: limbs, fingers, toes. We were perfect. They would have been disbelieving: nobody dodged the split between Alpha and Omega.
Nobody.
They were born together and they will die together.
One strong Alpha twin and one mutated Omega; the only thing they share is the moment of their death.
The Omegas live in segregation, cast out by their families as soon as their mutation becomes clear. Forced to live apart, they are ruthlessly oppressed by their Alpha counterparts.
The Alphas are the elite. Once their weaker twin has been cast aside, they're free to live in privilege and safety, their Omega twin far from their thoughts.
Cass and Zach are both perfect on the outside: no missing limbs, no visible Omega mutation. But Cass has a secret: one that Zach will stop at nothing to expose.
The potential to change the world lies in both their hands. One will have to defeat the other to see their vision of the future come to pass, but if they're not careful both will die in the struggle for power.  

I will not comment on the whole The Hunger Games meets ______(insert whatever other popular book series  that may or may not relate to this actual book, here).  I will not. You could say it has an essence of it, barely, but when you come down to it, no. You're not in districts, yes, you're separated in terms of 'class' which, is only two forms of it. Alpha or Omega. The Omega lands are not that bad either, not like District 12,  I finished reading Finnikin of the Rock by Melina Marchetta before starting this, and even that is more Hunger Games than this.  

Review: A Thousand Pieces of You (AKA: Can I stab it with a basilisk fang?)

 A Thousand Pieces of You
Author: Claudia Gray
Publication Date: November 4th 2014        
Publisher: Harper Teen
~A copy was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review~

Every Day meets Cloud Atlas in this heart-racing, space- and time-bending, epic new trilogy from New York Times bestselling author Claudia Gray.

Marguerite Caine’s physicist parents are known for their radical scientific achievements. Their most astonishing invention: the Firebird, which allows users to jump into parallel universes, some vastly altered from our own. But when Marguerite’s father is murdered, the killer—her parent’s handsome and enigmatic assistant Paul—escapes into another dimension before the law can touch him.

Marguerite can’t let the man who destroyed her family go free, and she races after Paul through different universes, where their lives entangle in increasingly familiar ways. With each encounter she begins to question Paul’s guilt—and her own heart. Soon she discovers the truth behind her father’s death is more sinister than she ever could have imagined.

A Thousand Pieces of You explores a reality where we witness the countless other lives we might lead in an amazingly intricate multiverse, and ask whether, amid infinite possibilities, one love can endure

I'll let you into a little secret, I'm not an optimist. I look for the bad in books first before looking for the good,  so when I love a book despite its faults, that's when I know I truly love a book. Even if I do dislike it or have some issues with it, I usually can find redeemable qualities. Now, this isn't like with debuts where it can go either way, I wasn't worried about A Thousand Pieces of You at all, it's Claudia Gray, you guys, I had no doubt I would love it. I haven't finished the Evernight series, I've read up until the third I think, but I liked them, I read Fateful and loved that-because hello, Titanic-and I've started the Spellcaster series and loved the way the magic is represented, so A Thousand Pieces of You was a must read. Which is why I'm so disappointed that I absolutely hated it. The only redeemable quality I can find is the fact we jump to different times and different countries dimensions, but even then, I was too pissed off with the characters and their actions to actually enjoy it, and for most of it, it just felt like we were just given the run around.