CHLOE BY DESIGN: Making the Cut (Books 1-4)

I adore a good thrift store find. The colorful spines of this book and the other one I bought from the same series caught my eye in Goodwill today. I learned that they're volumes 1 and 3 with no 2 in sight, but I got them anyway. And promptly ordered 2 off Amazon after reading a single chapter.

Now you wouldn't think an eldergoth (Yeah, there's even a term for us older goths that have been part of the scene for eons.) like me would enjoy Project Runway, but I DO. I don't watch it religiously, but I love seeing the designs people come up with. I used to draw a lot of my story characters and designing their clothing was super fun, but that's where my fashion design ability ends. I can't sew for shit.

Anyway! Making the Cut is about 16-year-old Chloe, who's in a teen fashion design competition a la Project Runway. The book is chock full of cool fashion art, which I love, so it was an easy decision to purchase it.

When I got home and looked the series up on Amazon, I was immediately confused, because I was seeing a LOT of different titles. Making the Cut is over an inch thick, so I was kind of amazed that there was that much to write about a teen in the fashion design world. Then I read some of the blurbs in the listings and realized they sounded like the book I had.

It turns out Making the Cut is a compilation of the first four books in the series. I'm adding their covers here so you can see them, but if you're interested in the series, buy the three compilation volumes. The individual ones are really overpriced because a lot of them only came in library binding.

I'm going to talk about them by their individual names to make things a bit easier.

I do have to guess where each book ends and the new one begins though, because they're not divided up in the compilation, nor is there a number of chapters divisible by four to make things easier for me.

Design Diva is the first book. You get to meet Chloe, her not at all into fashion best friend Alexis (Alex), her parents, her rival Nina, and Mimi, the lady who runs the fabric/thrift store.

Chloe spends the first book not being sure of herself, but then getting her shit together and making the three outfits needed for the first audition. Nina, who's been stealing her ideas since they were kids, is her competition. Naturally, both girls make it past the first round of auditions.

I'm really not sure where the break between 1 and 2 is. The 9th chapter ends at a good point, but the Amazon listing for Design Diva says it's 96 pages, so that would include the 10th chapter. The 10th chapter also starts immediately after the 9th. Like obviously it does, but 9 ends with "And I know I'll be ready" and 10 starts with "Did I say ready?" Like they really flow together. But there is no other place to have the book break that makes any sense, so I'm going to say it's there.

Gah, this really doesn't matter, but I'm anal.

So the second book is The First Cut. Chloe's past the first audition and now has to enhance one of her three looks with an accessory. She gets inspiration at an art fair and meets her very, very casual love interest, Jake. Then she has to design a rodeo-inspired look for the final audition. She meets Jake's mother at that audition and she turns out to be one of the past winners of the regular Design Diva show. Chloe makes it into the real televised competition...but so does her rival, Nina.

In Unraveling, the third book, Chloe is now in New York City and the competition is under way. This one clearly starts at chapter 20 of the compilation. Here's where I started getting a bit frustrated, because the short format of the books doesn't give New York enough screentime and it doesn't give the characters enough screentime. It's pretty much just the competition with a couple extra scenes thrown in, but it could have been so much better! Chloe struggles at first, but then scores some wins.

Design Destiny is the fourth book and I cannot freakin' tell where it starts in the compilation. My guess is chapter 33. But it doesn't matter. There's no break in the narrative. The third and fourth books are solidly about the competition. As contestants are eliminated and the challenges get harder, each contestant receives a mentor from one of the past seasons of the adult version of the show. Who does Chloe get? Jake's mom, Liesel, who she already met. It sounds like Liesel asked for her, which I'm not sure would have been allowed in an actual reality show. Chloe's rivalry with Nina comes to a head, because Nina's mentor is a woman who sabotaged her fellow contestants on her season and is now getting Nina to do the same thing. In a completely unrealistic plot twist, Chloe watches an episode of the show while on the phone with her best friend Alex, and sees that Nina really did sabotage her in one challenge and the cameras have caught her plotting with her mentor. Nina mentions how she gave Chloe an ugly necklace before the main televised competition in the hopes that she'd use it and get eliminated. Chloe ends up using it as a belt on her final look...and wins. Of course she does. I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to watch the show you're on though. I feel like that's against the rules.

Silly things like that aside, this is a really fun series. Sometimes it gets a bit too fashion-detaily for someone like me who doesn't know much about sewing, but overall, I enjoyed it enough to zip through the entire compilation and now I'm stuck waiting for the second volume to arrive so I can read it and the third. There are 12 books total with 3 compilations that are the most affordable way to check them out.

I'll be back next week with reviews for the rest!

24 Hours in Ancient Rome

I actually came on here to do a completely different review, saw my last one for 24 Hours in Ancient Egypt, and realized I never did one for the Rome version.

Remember how I complained about the terrible lack of editing and the constant repetition in the Egypt book?

Not an issue here.

This author, who is a different person, doesn't constantly say "a couple of."

The chapters were even better tied together than the Egyptian ones. Quite impressively so. And the use of original source material was fabulous.

My only criticism of the book is that sometimes it gets a little textbooky and takes you out of the "day in the life" sense. While very informative, some of the chapters had so much factual detail that you forgot who the character was that you were supposed to be following along through that hour of the day. But that's a very minor criticism in comparison with what I had to say about the Egyptian book!

I am pleased to conclude that this same author will be tackling 24 Hours in Ancient Athens, which is the next book in this delightful series, due out on August 1st.

24 Hours in Ancient Egypt

I follow the Egyptian Museum on Facebook and they advertised this book. It sounded quite interesting, so I pre-ordered it on Amazon.

Within the first chapters, I knew I wanted to read this whole series, so I purchased the first book, set in Rome, and it's next on my reading pile.

A third, set in Greece, comes out in August.

The book is divided into 24 chapters, each representing an hour of the day. Each chapter focuses on a different character with a different job. So you get to meet: a midwife, the pharaoh, an embalmer, a retired soldier, a priest, a farmer, his wife, an overseer, a fisherman, a potter, a scribal student, a priestess, the vizier, a fan-bearer, the Great Royal Wife, a professional mourner, an architect, a carpenter, a brick-maker, an upper class housewife, a jeweler, a dancing girl, a physician, and a novice tomb robber. 


A lot of the characters are linked together. Sometimes this is in a literal sense. The chapter about the farmer is followed immediately by the chapter about his wife, and the fan-bearer's chapter follows the vizier's and continues the same story. Others are linked differently. The midwife is delivering the fisherman's child. The chapters on the embalmer, carpenter and mourner all have the same funeral. The scribal student is the physician's son. The dancer is the mourner's daughter (and a fellow professional mourner).

I really love this concept and the linked stories. They were well-told and fun.

However, the editing was TERRIBLE. The author kept tense-shifting and he LOVES the phrase "a couple of." Almost every chapter, if not every one, had at least one "a couple of." Like dude, you're writing fiction here. Just pick a fucking number or say "two."

From Chapter 2: "The startling crash that follows alerts a couple of guards, who pull back the chamber's curtains and rush in with a couple of lit lamps."

Even multiple times within the same sentence.

Stuff like that takes me out of the moment of the story and that was really disappointing. It was still a fun read overall. I've never read anything like it. But man, did this editor suck. If it was even edited at all!

The Roman and Greek books are written by a different author. I've read the introduction and one chapter of the Roman book, and it's much better so far.

I'd still recommend this as a good read, but I can't deny that it's also painful if you're used to better editing.

GIRLS SURVIVE Series

It's been many months since my last review! I've been reading, of course, but nothing really reviewable. Until now!

The Girls Survive series debuted on February 1st with four books. They're short books, each with only 112 pages and black and white illustrations.

Being a lover of children's historical fiction, I had to check these out, although I only recently got them.

Overall, I enjoyed them, but definitely some more than others.

Ann Fights for Freedom is the obvious Underground Railroad book. It's not as well done as Addy's first book from the American Girl line and nowhere near as good a look at slavery as Clotee's from the Dear America line, but it has decent characters and a fast-paced storyline that gives a good, if quite brief, look at the situation. I find the Underground Railroad bit a tad misleading though, because a main part of the plot is that they're NOT officially on the Underground Railroad.

Emmi's book was quite good and my second favorite of the line. Emmi is a German immigrant in Chicago who came over from Europe with her toymaker father. The story quickly moves into the events of the fire and it's very fast-paced.

Emmi's book did make me wonder something: whether or not the authors were instructed to include some sort of prejudice in each volume. Obviously, the slavery book and Pearl Harbor book featuring a Japanese character are going to have this, but the Chicago fire and the Titanic? Not necessarily and yet, there it was. Emmi has to run around the city with a pair of Irish twins that have bullied her for being German. The disaster quickly brings them together and they end up having a happy ending. I didn't mind including this aspect of Chicago life in the story, but it also made me want to read more. It seemed unrealistic to have the twins and Emmi come together so easily and forget all their past animosity. I suppose in times of great duress it does happen, but with a story this short, it felt rushed.

The language at the beginning of the book is a bit odd. The writer in me wanted to edit quite a few things, but I quickly became caught up in the story and looked past it.

Written by the same author as Ann's book, Noelle's lead character is half-Haitian, half-French. So here we go again with the prejudice side story. This time though, the story suffered for it. The instances of racism just felt tacked onto the already dramatic story of the Titanic disaster and the main character's point of view as a biracial girl in the early 1900s wasn't fleshed out like it should have been. This was a topic meant for a much longer book where it could have been explored in greater detail and given proper attention.

And of course, it's the Titanic. It's the only one without a happy ending. My least-liked of the four.

From least-liked on to favorite! Alice is the daughter of an American-born man of Japanese heritage and a Japanese immigrant woman. This is one of the only historical kids' fiction books I've read about Pearl Harbor that actually has the main character as Japanese.

I loved all the characters in this and the story really came alive. Despite it taking place over the most spread out amount of time, it felt like the most complete story. Although I still want to know what happened to everyone during the rest of their lives! This one didn't feel long enough, not because the writing wasn't done well, but because I got so attached to the characters, I wanted to read a full-length novel about them.

This series continues in August with two more books. One is a black girl spying during the Civil War and the other is the Triangle Shirtwaist fire.

ASK THE BONES

Like the previous book, these were on the list recommended for fans of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

Ask the Bones and its sequel, More Bones, both are short anthologies of "scary stories from around the world."

Sound familiar?

Yeah, it's the same as Robert D. San Souci's Short and Shivery series and I believe several of the tales repeat from there. I don't have them in front of me to verify, but I've definitely read some of these before.

I zipped through Ask the Bones when I got it and honestly wasn't very impressed. The only story I really liked was "Ask the Bones" itself. The opening tale "The Haunted Forest" doesn't even finish. It's one of those "you decide" stories, which I hate, because a story's literal job is to tell me what happened. The other stories either just didn't stand out to me or had endings on the down side, which gets tiresome after a while.

More Bones arrived yesterday and once again, I read it quickly. These stories were far better than those in the first book and held my attention a lot more. "The Prince's Fate" from Egypt was the best, being something Egyptian I've actually never read. (Minor points off for the use of "hieroglyphics" though.) A lot of them are also repeats from other books, but they're told enjoyably, so I didn't mind. 

Neither of these books are the best of their type. I recommend the Short and Shivery series far more than these, but if you have read all the Short and Shiverys and want something more, try these out.

Slasher Girls & Monster Boys

I read a list online of suggested books for fans of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and this was on it. I remember almost buying it in Booksamillion months ago, but I put it back in favor of a plush Niffler. But seeing it on that list made me order it and a few others that were suggested.

I'm not going to go too into detail, but this is a YA anthology of horror thrillers. Each was inspired by movies, TV shows, even songs and those inspirations are printed upsidedown at the end of each tale. There wasn't a single story I fully disliked, although don't expect a lot of happy endings. I do love a good revenge tale, so those were mostly my favorites, but my #1 was "Hide-and-Seek," which used "The Crow" as one of its inspirations.

If you loved 90s YA horror thrillers, you'll like these stories. They take things up a notch, I think. Even if you prefer straight-up adult horror, I think you'll enjoy these.

PEN PALS 3

Annnnnnnd Palmer's up to her old tricks again.

Shocking.

This time though, she's a bit provoked, although she's still a total Jessica Wakefield.

Simmie sends her rather sappy letters, which Lisa dismisses as possibly just leading her on and not being letters as genuine as what she gets from Rob. Palmer is understandably angry.

Shanon's Mars mentions secret societies at the boys' school and Lisa's Rob says he won't be able to write to her because he'll be busy for a couple weeks.

Then right after that, Lisa gets another letter from Rob, this one typed and with a lot of misspellings. That should have been a red flag right there, but nope, Lisa still thinks it's him. She finds herself stood up twice and the recipient of an ugly sweater instead of Rob's class pin.

Shanon and Amy figure out that Palmer is behind some of this and they confront her and force her to tell Lisa. However, they figure this out too late to stop Lisa from sending Rob a nasty letter. You see, Rob's not even at the school and Palmer admits it's been Simmie who's been writing Lisa, as his secret society initiation is to embarrass a roommate. She had nothing to do with the first prank, but she was in on the second, as a bit of revenge for Lisa badmouthing Simmie. Although how she thought this was going to make Simmie look better is beyond me. They're really two of a kind, although I think Palmer's got more conscience than Simmie.

So naturally, Lisa's both furious and upset, because she can't unsend her nasty letter to Rob. Then she learns not only is he off campus, but he's in the hospital. She freaks out to the point of trying to sneak out in the middle of the night to ride her bike to the bus station and go to Boston to visit him in the hospital. Thankfully, two of her teachers are returning from a date and catch her.

Lisa ends up writing a nice letter to Rob in the hospital and then calling him at home. They work out their problems and eventually, she does get his pin and they're closer than ever.

For once, there's only one drama and that was it. Amy and Shanon are quite the background characters in this one. It's dominantly Lisa's story. And once again, we get Palmer maybe learning a lesson? We'll see. The next book is about her and problems with Simmie. Gee, no one could see that coming.