I love A Wrinkle in Time. It's one of my all-time favorite books. Yet, I never thought "I so need this to be a movie." So when the news came out one was being made, I got more than a little nervous. Credit Because of the fan contract, I went to see it over the weekend with Bestie Danielle. People I knew who saw it loved it, but the reviews in general were not good. This didn't color my opinion either way. For the first time ever I went into a movie with no preconceived notions and was just along for the ride. The movie wasn't a total aberration but it wasn't really true to canon either. There's a reason why they say "based on" and not "exact replica." Instead of a true movie reviewer style write up, I'll break this down by what they got right and was they didn't. What Was Right Charles Wallace. OMG, I loved Charles Wallace. He was precocious and adorable and slightly off just like the book version. The actor delive...

Ever since having Munchkin, I've struggled with clothing. This has to do with my post-preggo body which still has all the baby weight plus more fluff in the front than before. I wore a mix of leggings, maxi skirts, oversized shirts, and maternity clothes for the first nine months post-partum. Even now seventeen months after giving birth, I still have at least four maternity tops in rotation* and will wear leggings and a hoodie any chance I get. One of the normal post-partum styles for me Despite my post-partum outfits being comfortable, I felt frumpy. A lot of my clothes didn't fit the same exact way they did pre-Munchkin since the fluff shifted to different areas which made wearing my old clothes pretty much awful. If I went clothes shopping, I'd come home with more leggings and oversized shirts. I needed to change my style to something a little more in line with how I used to dress and find things that defined me. Enter Stitch Fix . What you should know: Stitch...

I'm so excited to be a part of the Something Strange and Deadly ARC tour*! Haven't heard of this book yet? Read the blurb below. Goodreads blurb : Eleanor Fitt has a lot to worry about. Her brother has gone missing, her family has fallen on hard times, and her mother is determined to marry her off to any rich young man who walks by. But this is nothing compared to what she’s just read in the newspaper— The Dead are rising in Philadelphia. And then, in a frightening attack, a zombie delivers a letter to Eleanor…from her brother. Whoever is controlling the Dead army has taken her brother as well. If Eleanor is going to find him, she’ll have to venture into the lab of the notorious Spirit-Hunters, who protect the city from supernatural forces. But as Eleanor spends more time with the Spirit-Hunters, including their maddeningly stubborn yet handsome inventor, Daniel, the situation becomes dire. And now, not only is her reputation on the line, but her very li...

With a few exceptions, March was nonfiction/research month for me and with my internet hiatus, I wasn't able to contribute to last week's Road Trip Wednesday and share them with you. Good thing April is only three days old. First up, DON'T KNOW MUCH ABOUT MYTHOLOGY by Kenneth C Davis. What I Liked About It: This book gives you a broad overview on world myth starting with Ancient Egypt and working around the globe until we learn a teensy bit about the Pacific Rim. If your knowledge of mythology ends with Classical Mythology, Davis' book is a nice introduction to other cultures and stories. What You Should Know: It reads like a college text where the author periodically intrudes to give a pop culture reference with a smarmy attitude. If this wasn't a free ebook offer from Barnes and Noble, I wouldn't have bothered purchasing it. One nonfiction book should be enough, right? No. While I was reading the Davis book, I was reading another nonfiction title...

Every Wednesday, YA Highway asks their readership a simple question to answer on your blog. Once you answer, you link your blog in the comments for other readers to hop on board. This is Road Trip Wednesday. Today's topic : What was the best book you read in February? I didn't have many books to choose from this month and I totally blame John Green. The Fault in Our Stars totally destroyed me and all I wanted to do afterwards was read something that wouldn't leave me a weepy mess. Sixteen , edited by Megan McCafferty took care of this for me. Blurb from Goodreads: Remember what it was like to be sixteen? Whether it was the year your teeth were finally free of braces or the year you were discovered by the opposite sex, that magical, mystical age is something you will never forget. Edited by Megan McCafferty, author of the runaway hit novels Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings , Sixteen: Stories About That Sweet and Bitter Birthday is a compilation of short ...

This month's selection for the YA Book Club was John's Green's The Fault in Our Stars .When I found this out, I twitter-yelled at YA Book Club's brainchild, Tracey Neithercott. That conversation sounded a lot like this: Me: Why are you making this happen NOW? I'd like to get through a month without crying. Tracey: I wish I could send tissues through Twitter. I'm not sure if it's hormones or age or my mortality is showing, but my eyes began watering on page one and did not stop until the end. TFIOS is one of those books where you just know it's going to end badly. You're reading about teens with cancer-- of course it's not going to end well. But this isn't a cancer book. It just happens that the characters have cancer. It also just happens that I still can't think about it without getting misty-eyed. In fact, I'm still processing it. What I liked best about TFIOS is that, despite the sad factor, it was a very uplifting book...

Holy hell, Lurkdom! How did it become February ??? I don't know either, but time needs to learn to slow down. I have things to do, you know? Of course, I'd probably get them done faster if I didn't read freaking 13 books. Out of all these books, only one stood out as five star material. EVERNIGHT by Claudia Gray. Blurb from Goodreads:   " Bianca wants to escape. At the eerily Gothic Evernight Academy, the other students are sleek, smart, and almost predatory. Bianca knows she doesn't fit in. When she meets handsome, brooding Lucas he warns her to be careful--even when it comes to caring about him. But the connection between them can't be denied. Bianca will risk anything to be with Lucas, but dark secrets are fated to tear them apart...and to make Bianca question everything she's ever believed. " I know, it doesn't say much. But! It was definitely worth it. What I Liked About It: The twist. It seriously shocked me out of readin...

Every Wednesday, YA Highway asks their readership a simple question to answer on your blog. Once you answer, you link your blog in the comments for other readers to hop on board. This is Road Trip Wednesday.  Today's topic : What was the best book you in October? Funny thing about today's topic: what I considered the best book I read this month was not the one I rated the highest. Allow me to explain... Silence by Becca Fitzpatrick got the highest rating and there's a two-fold reasoning for this. One, I love paranormal and urban fantasy, so they generally rate higher* than other things. Two, it was leaps and bounds better than Crescendo, which had a shitty cover and a cop out cliffhanger that made me throw the book. So while the highest rated, not the best of the month. That honor goes to Will Grayson, Will Grayson.  Blurb from Goodreads : One cold night, in a most unlikely corner of Chicago, two teens—both named Will Grayson—are about to cross paths. As ...

I promised to review Fill-in-the-Blank Plotting more than once, but never got around to it for some reason. My apologies for that. Fill-in-the-Blank Plotting by Linda George is the easiest book on writing ever. She explains how to combine The Hero's Journey and the Three Act Structure into a tighter, more cohesive plot. If you're not familiar with either of these plot structures, it's time for a quick breakdown. The Hero's Journey was made famous by Joseph Campbell. The Hero's Journey is universal with myth and folklore. There are 12 big steps within the journey. The story of Hercules, for example, follows the Hero's Journey. Wikipedia gives a good explanation of all the steps if you want to learn more now. The Three Act Structure is what most of us know when we talk about plot structure. It's what we learn when we're in school. Within the Three Act Structure, there are key items that have to happen: inciting incident, climax, turning points. If...

Every Wednesday, YA Highway asks their readership a simple question to answer on your blog. Once you answer, you link your blog in the comments for other readers to hop on board. This is Road Trip Wednesday. Today's topic : What's the best book you read in September? Unlike last month where I couldn't up my book count because of Camp NaNoWriMo, this month I devoured ten books. This has everything to do with the fact my plot ran away from me and I haven't been able to figure it out yet. 80% of what I read was awesome with four or five star ratings. You can see the winners below. I know what you're thinking, with all this awesome how can a best be picked? So simple. Only one of these got five stars--When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead. Blurb from Goodreads : By sixth grade, Miranda and her best friend, Sal, know how to navigate their New York City neighborhood. They know where it's safe to go, and they know who to avoid. Like the crazy g...

Every Wednesday, YA Highway asks their readership a simple question to answer on your blog. Once you answer, you link your blog in the comments for other readers to hop on board. This is Road Trip Wednesday.  Today's topic : What's the best book you read in August? With Real World Cape Cod at the start of the month, I expected to read more books than I did because who doesn't love reading while baking on the sand? Alas, it was also Camp NaNoWriMo, so my reading suffered a bit. This month I only read six books. Six is impressive anyway . Thanks. What's awesome is that I had a good run of reading material. Wanna see what I read? Of course you do. So many plots... Out of the six, Kody Keplinger's sophomore novel, SHUT OUT* was the best by far. Blurb from Goodreads :   Most high school sports teams have rivalries with other schools. At Hamilton High, it's a civil war: the football team versus the soccer team. And for her part, Lissa is...

Every Wednesday, YA Highway asks their readership a simple question to answer on your blog. Once you answer, you link your blog in the comments for other readers to hop on board. This is Road Trip Wednesday. Today's topic: What's the best book you read in July? Oh, this one is sooo easy. Goodreads blurb: Anna is looking forward to her senior year in Atlanta, where she has a great job, a loyal best friend, and a crush on the verge of becoming more. Which is why she is less than thrilled about being shipped off to boarding school in Paris - until she meets Etienne St. Clair: perfect, Parisian (and English and American, which makes for a swoon-worthy accent), and utterly irresistible. The only problem is that he's taken, and Anna might be, too, if anything comes of her almost-relationship back home. As winter melts into spring, will a year of romantic near - misses end with the French kiss Anna - and readers - have long awaited? What I Liked About It...

During Weekend of Awesome, we shared our favorite writing resource. Erinn brought in Writing and Selling the YA Novel by KL Going. So I borrowed it and read it on the botched plane ride home*. What I  liked about it : It was easy to read. Most books on craft lean toward the dense side, but KL Going's writing is easy on the brain. It paired well with the book's chapters, which were broken up by school subject. For example, the one titled "math**" is all about the business end of writing. What you should know : The book covers all writing basics but gives them a "how to write YA" spin. If you write YA (which I'm pretty sure most of the writers in the Lurkdom do), think of this as a refresher course. If you're curious about writing a novel for the YA market, this should be the first thing you should read. Because contrary to what people think, writing for teens is just as much work as writing literary fiction. (I'm looking at you, Katie Crouch...

Every Wednesday, YA Highway asks their readership a simple question to answer on your blog. Once you answer, you link your blog in the comments for other readers to hop on board. This is Road Trip Wednesday. Today's topic : What's the best book you've read this month? For the record, I'm excited that this topic has come back. Like, wicked excited. Knowing this topic happens monthly, ensures I complete at least one book a month*. I gave half of the eight I read this month four stars, but there's only two I'm still thinking about. Crank by Ellen Hopkins What I liked about it: Surprising, I enjoyed the novel-in-verse format. This made for a fast, engaging read. The subject matter is handled well and I was totally rooting for Kristina throughout the novel**. After reading it, I understand why so many places ban this book. I don't agree with it, but I get where they're coming from. (That's an entirely different subj...

During Weekend of Awesome, Erinn arranged a Skype chat with YA author Brendan Halpin. As I said in my WOA recap post, he was totally funny and smart. Our chat with him gave us insight on the industry we're all pushing our way into*. Talking with Brendan cemented the fact I need to read all his books. Now. Turns out I had already planned on reading Jenna and Jonah's Fauxmance. I planned on it for two reasons: I loved the premise and the last book I had read of Emily Franklin (Brendan's co-conspirator co-author) I enjoyed. It's a win, right? Right. If you haven't heard of Jenna and Jonah's Fauxmance, allow Goodreads to tell you all about it: Fans of romance don't need to look any further than the fauxmance brewing between teen idols Charlie Tracker and Fielding Withers—known on their hit TV show as Jenna and Jonah, next-door neighbors flush with the excitement of first love. But it's their off-screen relationship that has helped cement their fa...

Zombie Thursdays is a weekly feature with guest blogger, Miranda. You can read more about her here . To be honest, I feel like a zombie today. I don't know why... change in weather? Not enough sleep? Too much sleep? The "excitement" of having to go to work in fifty minutes? I'm really just not sure. But usually when I'm feeling like this, I like to surf the interwebs for some good zombie material. Today I stumbled upon the Zombie World News website. The website is very interesting-- part news reporting, part collective writing project, part social commentary, with lots of other parts thrown into the mix. The majority of the page seems to be an archive for various news articles from around the world and chronicles the outbreak of a zombie virus known as necro-mortosis. The articles begin around 2006 (although these are back dated, the site isn't that old) with the first signs of the virus emerging in Haiti. The rest of the news stories come from differen...

If you follow me on Twitter, you might know I blog about math as part of the day job*. Every week I struggle to find a math topic that excites me enough to write three complete paragraphs on it. Thank goodness for the internet. If it wasn't for that, I'd never realize that there's a whole subset of math fiction . So with the help of the Boston Public Library, I had a copy of Sir Cumference and the First Round Table in my hot little hands when I should've been revising**. Image from Charlesbridge Publishing . Sir Cumference and the Round Table is a cute story that takes place in Arthurian England. King Arthur and his knights have a meeting to discuss potential invaders to Camelot but have problems talking with a rectangular table in the way. Through a series of trial and error , they try different shaped tables but each shape poses their own problems. What I liked about it: The character names and how they relate to circles. The naming conventions do rem...

Before I talk about books, let me redirect you to Help Write Now . This writing auction goes live today to help the South after Mother Nature kicked the shit out of it. If you want a more in-depth explanation, YA Highway explains it better . Myself along with a few blogging friends will be part of the auction in the form of a kick-ass crit package, so look out for that. Onto the daily deal... It turns out I haven't talked about a best of the month since February. This is in part because the series Sandman ruled my life for a month and a half, so I figured a quarterly review was in order*. After devouring books 1-3 of The Mortal Instruments series in the last few days of December, I had hit a literary wall. Almost nothing I picked up resonated with me. I got bored easily. It's amazing I read as many books as I did**. My top three books for the first quarter of the year are: 3. Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare, which I talked about here . 2. Dream Country, Sandman #...

The Breakfast Club. Sixteen Candles. Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Weird Science. Pretty in Pink. Who hasn't watched any of these movies and go "damn, that's me"? Image courtesy of 123nonstop . Don't You Forget About Me is a documentary about John Hughes' impact on teens worldwide. The documentary follows four directors as they road trip in search of John Hughes. Throughout we get bits of interviews with people who Hughes' influence has touched. This includes the actors he had worked with during the making of these films plus directors of today. What I liked best was the interviews they did with kids who were currently in school. Every one interviewed spoke to how the "teen films" that Hughes wrote spoke to them more than the current teen films today. This is because movies like the ones I mentioned on top tackle things we all went through without glamorizing it. (How many teen flicks have the perfect boy and/or girl driving the lates...

Zombie Thursdays is a weekly feature with guest blogger, Miranda. You can read more about her here . **Today's entry discusses mature themes and isn't acceptable for readers under the age of 18. So don't read on if you're underage or easily offended by sex or published smut. If you choose not to read on, go enter our Race to 150 Contest! It is kid friendly.** Since most of the readers of 'The Pie' seem like writerly types and well-read individuals, none of you are shocked to know that a bunch of Borders bookstores are closing down. I don't really know anyone who doesn't have "their" Borders closing. Even the huge Borders on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, close to where I work, is shutting down. It's a sad day for book readers and buyers and even a sadder day for me because all those Seattle's Best coffee shops are closing and my company, Starbucks, owns them... and well, I'm about ready to sell my stock, so I need it to not go down. B...