Giveaway: LEGEND by Marie Lu

I just got back from four amazing days at the beach with my haul of sandy clothes and saltwater taffy :D Though I'm definitely going to miss it, I have to admit that I don't write as well or as much outside of an environment that I'm familiar with. Therefore, I'm excited to be back to reading and writing in the comfort of my room.

I'm ALSO very excited to say that while I was away, my Amazon order of books I've read in the past year and that I would like to collect and my summer to-reads arrived on my porch. Like the careless person I am, I ordered two of Marie Lu's LEGEND, the first of a trilogy. Apparently I am "valued customer" and Amazon was kind enough to allow me to keep the extra book and the refund. Guess what that means?

GIVEAWAY!

Here's an overview of LEGEND from Goodreads in case you haven't heard of it/read it:

What was once the western United States is now home to the Republic, a nation perpetually at war with its neighbors. Born into an elite family in one of the Republic’s wealthiest districts, fifteen-year-old June is a prodigy being groomed for success in the Republic’s highest military circles. Born into the slums, fifteen-year-old Day is the country’s most wanted criminal. But his motives may not be as malicious as they seem.

From very different worlds, June and Day have no reason to cross paths—until the day June’s brother, Metias, is murdered and Day becomes the prime suspect. Caught in the ultimate game of cat and mouse, Day is in a race for his family’s survival, while June seeks to avenge Metias’s death. But in a shocking turn of events, the two uncover the truth of what has really brought them together, and the sinister lengths their country will go to keep its secrets.



I LOVED this book (hence why I wanted to collect it) and am dying to read the last and final book of the trilogy, CHAMPION. Marie Lu's story to publication is inspirational as well--she's been writing novels since her childhood! So go on and enter the giveaway below :D You have until June 30th. Good luck!

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Where art thou, character?

Every writer takes on a different challenge. For some, it might be a super complicated plot. Others, it might be multiple POVs.

For me, its my characters. When I write characters, I don't think about mini-flaws that I could give them to make them more "round". I also don't think about whether or not the traits that are taking form will make them relatable and sympathetic to the reader. I write the character whose voice speaks to me, who will best carry the story (because character and plot go hand in hand), and who will undergo the most development as said plot unfolds. 

Just as I love the challenge of writing my characters, one of my favorite parts of reading is meeting the characters. Here's my break-down of the protagonists I've seen in YA.

Protagonists that I've seen a lot of:

(As you can see, these tropes are female characters since protagonists of the YA genre are still predominantly female)

The tough-as-nails-I-will-beat-the-brains-out-of-you-kick-ass girl

      -I-will-protect-everything-dear-to-me girl often falls under this category

The stubborn-as-a-mule girl

The witty, cheerful girl with a hidden Past 

The doesn't-know-how-to-have-fun-studious girl until she meets a guy

And of course, the normal girl who is nice enough

Protagonist that I would love to read:

The Bully

       -Lauren Oliver came close to crafting a Bully Protagonist in her debut, BEFORE I FALL. Now, I love BIF for many reasons (the writing, the theme, the characters), but I wouldn't call Sam a real bully. More often, she's a follower of the main bully, and *spolier* after she dies, she makes an effort to turn for the better pretty quickly.

The Dense One 

Exactly how it sounds. And really, I've never read a YA novel with a dense protagonist. Usually, the protags are about as intelligent as the reader (unless the book is badly written--then you have an unintentionally dense protag). Though she was kind of dense around the boys, even Bella Swan was pretty up-to-date on her classical reading and had a praise-worthy vocabulary. I'm talking about an all around dense character here. Maybe it'd be too annoying if the reader were always a step ahead of the character leading the story, but I'd still love to see a protagonist of lower intelligence take me by the hand and show me a different world. This 

       -FLOWER FOR ALGERNON's protag, Charlie Gordon, starts off with an IQ 68, but very quickly he undergoes a procedure that bumps him off the scale.

       -FORREST GUMP (yes, there's a novel!) basically fits the dense protagonist, but you could easily argue that Forrest is actually a prodigy. 

The Coward

I'd just love to sink my teeth into a character in an epic story who is a coward through and through. 

And of course the character doesn't have to stay in one of these categories for the entire story. In fact, these kind of protagonists have so much potential for growth. How you do the growth will be crucial. Good character development should slowly come up to a boil, and if it doesn't, there should be a clear event or trigger incident that causes the sudden change.

Okay, I'm done being pretentious now. Thanks for humoring me because come on, I'm no agent. So obviously, the characters I'd love to see may not be the ones hot on the market now or acceptable to a mass of readers. 

What characters would you like to see more of in novels? (I focused on YA here because that's usually what I read but any umbrella genre is game). 

All These Feels

In the span of five minutes, I just finished Silver Linings Playbook for the first time and got a rejection on a full that I had some moderate hopes on. Now all these feels are twisting inside of me. SLP has got to be one of the most accurate portrayals of mental illness and letting go and finding love again that I've ever seen. And that rejection kind of made me down for a moment. Which reminded me of the reason why I usually don't place any expectations on queries or partials or fulls because it would be downright pointless to feel this way 40 times over.

The sting is fading now and I'm still basking in the awesomeness of the movie. It definitely deserved its Oscar. Now back to the query board for me :)

What movies have really touched you/changed your perspective on life? (Please answer! I'm trying to catch up on movies this summer :D)

Book Review: TIGER FORCE

(Not my usual spastic self because A. It's a somber book and B. It's a formal book review).

 My review can also be found on Goodreads. Link to the book.

Sallah, Michael, and Mitch Weiss. Tiger Force: A True Story of Men and War. New York, NY: Little, Brown, 2006. Print.

                                             * * *

            Tiger Force throws no curves; it is a straightforward book that delivers what Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss promise to deliver right from the front of the cover. The “true story of men and war” presents itself in a simplistic, chronological structure that nevertheless does justice to a highly disturbing story.

The book begins with a prologue that sets up the after-story of one of the most notorious killers on Tiger Force (a reconnaissance platoon of the 1^st Battalion/327^th Infantry developed for the largely guerilla nature of the Vietnam War)—Sam Ybarra. In 1975, following the anticlimactic conclusion of the Vietnam War, Ybarra, an alcoholic suffering from PTSD, is living with his mom on the San Carlos Indian Reservation. An agent from the CID called Gustav Apsey has arrived for an interview, but Ybarra turns him away.

Flashback to 1967; the signs of mental cracking are already beginning to manifest. Replacements fill in for the two killed and the twenty-five wounded Tigers after the Mother’s Day Massacre. In addition to Ybarra and his best friend Kenneth Green, the reader is introduced to the surviving and new members of the platoon. There is happy-go-lucky surfer Kerrigan, tough-love sergeant Doyle, idealistic medic Bowman, and many more. Later on, these succinct profiles melt away until only the killers and the anti-killers remain.

The book is essentially divided into three phases: The Song Ve Valley, Operation Wheeler, and the post-war investigation. In the South Ve Valley portion, Tiger Force receives the mission to relocate villagers living in the fertile, rice paddy, which feeds the Viet Cong. Despite the many leaflets and the promise of food and shelter at the relocation camps, the Tigers are met with resistance. By the end of the South Ve Valley, ten unthreatening farmers are killed; elderly men are beaten until their brains come out; hamlets are torched; and ears are cut off and collected for trophies and necklaces. The killings only escalate with Operation Wheeler, a search and destroy missions during which the entire area of Quang Tin becomes a free fire zone. The most grotesque of atrocities, one that is repeatedly underscored during future investigations, is the beheading of a baby by Ybarra.

The third phase of the book, the investigation, opens in 1972. The reader follows the diligent and relentless CID agent Gustav Apsey. In order to get the reluctant ex-Tigers to talk, Apsey faces long hours in the office, numerous flights to track down Tigers who have scattered to other outposts in the army or to civilian life, and even gunpoint at the home of an unstable veteran. Then, just as his work comes to fruition, he is shipped away to Korea. The case is closed. No one receives justice.

For a book of this moderate size, Tiger Force packs in a hefty blow of information to the gut. It leaves the reader at once reeling and numb from the sheer amount of information and the horrid nature of the events described. Its inconclusive ending may drive the reader to look up more information on Tiger Force. As the book would suggest, however, an Internet search on Tiger Force turns up an unfortunate dearth of information. As a result, it is only more incredible that Sallah and Weiss were able to write in the third person narrative, fleshing out details of events, backgrounds, and in-the-moment actions.

As expected from Sallah and Weiss, both of whom received the Pulitzer for their journalism detailing Tiger Force, the writing is streamlined, frank, and at times, dry. The dryness, however, serves the story well, for what takes the stage in the book is what happened. Though it brushes on some of the psychology of war and men, Tiger Force is not by any means a book unraveling the beauty of life and the ugliness of war. Any flowery language would detract from its mission: why did the atrocities happen? Why did nobody stop them?

            However, in asking the question why? Sallah and Weiss flaunt the weakest point in the book.

While an empathy link between the reader and the soldier in any book of war is incredibly difficult—even foolish—to establish (after all, no amount of living vicariously through words will truly recreate that fine tightrope between life and death), sympathy toward men of war can and has been achieved in other war books. Tiger Force, however, vacillates between portraying the Tigers as men who committed the atrocities because they were frayed to the quick and men who committed atrocities because a factor in their psyches and backgrounds made them susceptible to becoming bloodthirsty, twisted killers who beheaded babies. At times, Sallah and Weiss seemed to favor the latter explanation, tossing out hypotheses not limited to abusive parents and rocky childhoods. In addition, the clear distinction made between Tiger Force’s story and My Lai’s make it harder for the reader to attribute the killings to “madness” brought about by weeks of being picked off by snipers and booby-traps (which seemed to be the favored explanation in the beginning). In particular, the reader may be confused as to how to view Sam Ybarra. His post-war days are tragic, flooded with alcohol, nightmares, and guilt, but Sallah and Weiss do not expand that into point about personal punishment versus punishment by justice.

The problem with Tiger Force is that it is minimally biased in details, word choice, and tone. That is all very well—for journalism. Tiger Force, however, is not journalism. As a book, it should be doing more than to inform; it should offer a unique perspective from the authors themselves on the subject matter. The problem with Tiger Force is that it suspiciously resembles a collage of news articles from the authors’ work in the Toledo Blade’s Tiger Force series.

Thus, the praise of Edward Nawokta serves as a double-edged sword:

“Tiger Force is a shining example of how journalism can fulfill its most noble aims: informing and, consequently, empowering the public.”

Perhaps the point of the authors is there is no answer to the why.

Perhaps the point of the authors is that it all happened. And not a thing was done about it.

Summer and Books and Stuff

A few matters to disclose!

My summer vacation begins soon! Very soon, as in two days. I am beyond excited, because that means four things:

1. I will have unlimited time in the world to sleep.
2. I will have time to write more of my WIP.
3. I will have time to write non-WIP related stuff, too. Like, this blog. And tweet. Yes, I am miserably failing at twitter (AKA I tweet maybe once a week.)
4. I will have more time to read.

Essentially, I will have time. Who knew that time could be so valuable?

In addition to the usual stuff that goes on this blog (my writing process, my WIPs, my musings), I hope to do more posts on books. Summer is the best time to catch up on new titles of the year and reread the old favorites and I'd love to share with you some of my to-reads, my favorites, and my go-to list for inspiration.

Speaking of books, you're wondering about that nonfiction book on the Vietnam War that I was talking about, right? Well, turns out that we DON'T have to take notes on it, but I DO have a book review that I will post tomorrow right here and on Goodreads. Tiger Force by Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss was eye-opening, informative, and gruesome. If you know about the My Lai Massacre that occurred during the war, then you might not be surprised. If not, I would brace yourself before reading this. It delivers what it promises--a story of men and war--but it also goes much deeper than that, digging into the psychology and platoon politics on the field. I do have some criticisms, but that will all be in the book review.

Do you usually have more time in the summer to do writing/reading related activities?