Guest Review: Wild Hearts (Jessica Burkhart)

Title: Wild Hearts
Series: If Only..., Book 4
Author: Jessica Burkhart
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA Childrens
Release Date: May 5, 2015
Genre: Young Adult Contemporary Romance
Content Rating: Teen (kissing, minor violence)
Format Read: ARC (publisher)
Find On: Goodreads
Summary:

Brie Carter's father's land development business has taken her family all over the world, but as soon as they arrive at their new home in Lost Spring, Wyoming, the town turns out to protest. They don't want a new hotel if the resident mustang population will be displaced or hurt as part of the deal. Then Brie meets Logan, a gorgeous local who has a special connection to the mustangs, and she is immediately drawn to him . . . and the horses. However, with Logan's father leading the protests and Brie's father refusing to budge, it's clear that their parents are heading towards an all-out war. Can Brie and Logan find a way to save the mustangs and be together? Or is their love doomed from the start? 

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Review copy provided by publisher for an honest review. Thank you, Bloomsbury!

Guest Review by Brett

In a Nutshell:

I wanted to love this book - I really did. I love the idea behind Bloomsbury's If Only... series, and I've really enjoyed the others that I have read. Unfortunately, Wild Hearts didn't quite live up to my expectations. The plot itself was good, but it wore thin a few times. The characters were good, though they occasionally did things that I didn't think felt true to their characters. And the writing was good - except when it wasn't. There are only so many things that you can blame on it being an ARC. And while it wasn't as bad as some other books I've read, there was definitely some insta-love going on. 

The Characters:

Our main character, Brie, was a bit of a rebel. She went from being perfect, working with her father in his office and never really getting into trouble, to running around and hiding her new boyfriend, Logan - in only a few chapters. While there was some inner monologuing about how she hated to have secrets from her parents, it never really felt like she was actually sorry about it. In the end, she and her parents were good again, but in my eyes, she never really redeemed herself. 

Logan, the love interest, is supposedly one of the boys that all of the girls at the local high school swoon over - but the only other teenager we ever see in the book is Amy, who conveniently becomes Brie's best friend. While I thought Brie and Amy's friendship itself was pretty realistic, I couldn't get past how perfectly everything fell into place. Logan and Amy themselves were decently well rounded characters - maybe it's because they weren't POV characters, so I wasn't as critical of them. Logan is a dreamy book boyfriend, perfectly sweet to Brie. Amy is the best girl-friend I've always wanted to have. Logan and Amy were two of the redeeming points of this book for me.

The Story:

Like the rest of this book, the plot was just so... convenient, for lack of a better word. The obstacles were solved too easily and the characters were always exactly where they needed to be. While you expect certain things from a book like this - a cute romance with a happy ending - things shouldn't be so easy. Without conflict a story is boring, and the conflict that was there wasn't enough to make it compelling for me.

The Writing:

Oh, the writing in this book. First of all, it felt more MG than YA in my opinion. Second, there were brand names everywhere, which kept pulling me out of the story as I tried to figure out whether this was an actual brand name, or a made up one - there were both. (By the way, if you're writing a contemporary book, don't come up with your own social networking site called Space-book.) Third, I know that it was an ARC, but the amount of typos, formatting errors, and grammar mistakes were really throwing me off. I don't know if those were fixed in the final version, but there were just so many of them. 

The Horses:

The horses were the biggest redeeming factor of this book for me. I love horses, and it seemed like the author really knew what she was writing about. The horse parts were the few parts where I could forget how convenient everything else was and just enjoy the romance and the horses.

Conclusion:

I may not have loved this book - the issues were too much for me to ignore - but I didn't hate it either. If you're okay with insta-love and a super convenient plot, then I'm sure you'd love this book. For me, it was a solid three star read. I will most likely not be re-reading this book, but I look forward to the next book in Bloomsbury's If Only... line, and hope that it will meet my expectations a little more than this one did. 

For Fans Of: horses, cowboys, insta-love

Note from Skye: I originally requested this title to review myself. I love horses and thought I would enjoy it, but I had many of the same problems with it as Brett did and was unable to finish. As I only got 56 pages in, I wanted Wild Hearts to get an honest review on a full read - thank you, Brett! :)

Scribble Rating: 

3 of 5 Scribbles

Brett Jonas is a writer, reader, Christian, lover of chocolate, and over-user of smiley faces. After being homeschooled her whole life, she's now taking classes at the local community college and working in her family's business, Goat Milk Stuff, with her seven younger siblings. In the rare moments when she's not writing, reading, working, or doing homework, you can find her wasting time on Twitter as @BookSquirt, where she loves making friends, and using too many exclamation points.

Guest Review: The Forgotten Sisters (Shannon Hale)

Title: The Forgotten Sisters
Series: Princess Academy trilogy, Book 3
Author: Shannon Hale
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA Childrens
Release Date: March 3, 2015
Genre: Middle Grade Fantasy
Content Rating: Middle Grade (kissing, fighting)
Format Read: ARC (publisher)
Find It On: Goodreads
Summary:

After a year at the king's palace, Miri has learned all about being a proper princess. But the tables turn when the student must become the teacher!

Instead of returning to her beloved Mount Eskel, Miri is ordered to journey to a distant swamp and start a princess academy for three sisters, cousins of the royal family. Unfortunately, Astrid, Felissa, and Sus are more interested in hunting and fishing than becoming princesses.

As Miri spends more time with the sisters, she realizes the king and queen's interest in them hides a long-buried secret. She must rely on her own strength and intelligence to unravel the mystery, protect the girls, complete her assignment, and finally make her way home.

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Guest Review by Indigo

In a Sentence: I love this book so much because it is fun, it has adventure, and it has romance - basically, all of the stuff I like.

Series: This is the last book in the Princess Academy trilogy. I love the Princess Academy books so much I wish Shannon Hale wrote ten books in the series, but there are only three.

Writing: I’ve always loved Shannon Hale’s writing. I love the way she puts the words together and knows exactly where to put this word and where to put another word, so all the words fit into the exact right place and make her books amazing. There were some times when I could not picture what was happening, but it was pretty easy to picture most things. I had a very hard time putting this book down because at the end of almost every chapter there was something new that was really exciting, and so I just kept reading more and more. I read through the whole book in about two days, which is really fast for me!

Series End: After The Princess Academy and Palace of Stone (Books 1 & 2), I was very interested in seeing how Miri’s story would end. I think Shannon Hale did a great job of ending the series, especially Miri and Peder’s story, and I liked the ending better than I thought I would. I just didn’t like how she made it look like they just forgot about King Kaspar and the princesses, because they were a very important part of the story.

Characters:  Miri is one of my favorite characters because she goes places where the King tells her to go, even when she doesn’t want to, because she loves adventures. Peder is also one of my favorite characters because he’s always romantic and always energetic. He’s always pretending to be clueless around Miri, and yet Miri knows he’s not really clueless and sees right through him. He saves as many people as he can, but mostly he tries as hard as he can to protect Miri by going with her. Sometimes Miri will tell Peder that he can’t protect her, and he will listen, but he can’t help wondering if she is safe. Peder is just totally awesome. As for the princesses, Astrid is not at all tame but usually she’s pretty calm and I loved how she is always taking care of her sisters. Felissa is very emotional but she is almost always smiling which I love, and Susana is always hyper and I am sort of hyper myself, so I really liked her. When she meets a kid with a sword, she wants to swing it around like he does. I liked the princesses because they always work together to get stuff done. They don’t wait around for someone else to do it, because nobody would. They have to do stuff themselves.

Romance: There is a lot of romance throughout the book, but it is a happy romance, and after two books already it’s good to see Miri and Peder happy. When they are together, they sometimes forget that people are around them, and when they do that, sometimes they kiss right in front of people. Or they might be in their daze and not notice they are talking so quietly that they have to have their foreheads almost touching so they can hear each other. It’s really cute.

Conclusion: This book is probably my favorite Shannon Hale book ever, even though so far, all of her books that I have read are amazing. I’d really hoped that there would be more Princess Academy books, and I was really sad to hear that this was the last one. But it’s okay, because I still have other Shannon Hale books to read!

For fans of: romance, adventure, tutoring, swamps, princess, bandits

Scribble Rating: 

4 1/2 out of 5 Scribbles

Indigo is nine years old and lives on her family’s farm with her seven siblings, making goat milk soap and shipping it around the world. When she’s not running the retail store, making bracelets to sell, or doing her schoolwork, you can find her curled up on the couch reading her latest favorite book. It will most likely involve princesses, magic, or dragons, and will always have a kick-butt girl in it.