Raven: Carrie

A novel by Stephen King

Publication Date: April 5th, 1974

Pages: 290

Targeted Audience: 16+

Summary: Stephen King's legendary debut, about a teenage outcast and the revenge she enacts on her classmates.

 
Carrie White may have been unfashionable and unpopular, but she had a gift. Carrie could make things move by concentrating on them. A candle would fall. A door would lock. This was her power and her sin. Then, an act of kindness, as spontaneous as the vicious taunts of her classmates, offered Carrie a chance to be a normal and go to her senior prom. But another act--of ferocious cruelty--turned her gift into a weapon of horror and destruction that her classmates would never forget.

I hadn't really planned on reading this book. Yes, lots of people love Stephen King and his horror books, but I had given up on horror books a long time ago. The one horror book that I had read didn't faze me a bit. I had even tried reading it at midnight, but nada. But this book? I tried my best to avoid reading it at night but after the end of the book I had nightmares. 

Anyways, Carrie White is a bullied girl in Chamberlain. She has a good fashion sense and like every other girl she wants to be popular but it isn't possible because of her domineering ultra-religious mother, who makes up stuff about the things she does not like and goes around saying that it's written in the bible.

The story begins with Carrie getting her periods in front of the girls in the locker room. She is bombarded with sanitary pads and tampons by girls screaming her to "plug it up!" however, no one knows that it's her first time. She obviously knows about it but at the moment when she was being ridiculed like this she couldn't really think about what was happening. Just like this moment, there are many other moments where you have to think deep. It's kind of like poetry. The lines have been written but it's our job to figure out what it really means. 

The characters are well expressed. These kind of characters make me want to think more about them. Even after the book was over, I kept thinking about them like they were real people. About what made them who they were and how their life would have been so different if they hadn't done the pig blood thing. 

I absolutely love the ending. There is so much destruction that I was momentarily reminded of my favorite book-character-arsonist Jesse from My sister's keeper. But except for the fire there was no other similarity. 

For this book to be really horrifying you need to have a great imagination and a silent surrounding. The imagination to actually feel the horror and the silence... so that you can be freaked out by the slightest noise. 

Carrie is my first Stephen King book and I was kind of shocked when I realized that he had written this book waaaay before I was born!! Heck it is even before my mom was born!! And my dad must have been in elementary school. I can't imagine my dad in elementary, I wonder if he was a bully then... and I imagine that my mom was a flower in paradise if she wasn't born then. Hehehehe! Me so immature XD.

Back to the point. It is a great book. Maybe you will be scared and maybe you might not but that is no reason to not read an amazing book like this. I rate it a 4!

Stephen King Quote: True sorrow is as rare as true love.

Lots of Love & Pasta

Raven (Who will be smacked by her mom of she is found blogging)

Beez:- Twenties girl 

Sophie Kinsella

Lara Lington has always had an overactive imagination, but suddenly that imagination seems to be in overdrive. Normal professional twenty-something young women don’t get visited by ghosts. Or do they?

When the spirit of Lara’s great-aunt Sadie—a feisty, demanding girl with firm ideas about fashion, love, and the right way to dance—mysteriously appears, she has one request: Lara must find a missing necklace that had been in Sadie’s possession for more than seventy-five years, because Sadie cannot rest without it. 

Lara and Sadie make a hilarious sparring duo, and at first it seems as though they have nothing in common. But as the mission to find Sadie’s necklace leads to intrigue and a new romance for Lara, these very different “twenties” girls learn some surprising truths from and about each other. Written with all the irrepressible charm and humor that have made Sophie Kinsella’s books beloved by millions, Twenties Girl is also a deeply moving testament to the transcendent bonds of friendship and family. 

I have always felt that Sophie Kinsella's book are ridiculously fun which gives you immense fun and hysterics while reading but if you ever tell the story sound very lame and ridiculous. Its not a bad thing. I have no idea how she takes such an idea and fabrics such a fun tale from it. This is real talent. And her books will make you laugh in such ways and will result in people give you odd looks (I'm talking from experience). 

In this book we meet Lara, a hopeless headhunter who's life is in shambles. She's a mess. The book begins with her going to the funeral of her great aunt Sadie who she only once saw and that being when she was a baby. The book starts at such a funny note. It guarantees that its going to be good. Then Lara sees a ghost. Namely a ghost of her great aunt Sadie. And Sadie is well....

Not much like a ghost. 

She bossy and screams and pestering and opinionated. She gave me the hysterics. I couldn't stop laughing when she goes and yells at people to do something. And boy is she good. Shes also very lively and free spirited. She has vivid and crazy ideas and she makes you do what she wants you to do. Shes spontaneous, bubbly and adamant as hell. Quite a ghost huh?

Lara is not like Sadie. Lara is a softie. She's still hung up on her ex and refuses to move on or admit he doesn't love her. Lara is very weak willed. She easily does whatever Sadie yells at her to do. She doesn't realize she has the upper hand. She doesn't take the upper hand. Her best friend blatantly uses her and she falls for it and doesn't take any action. But Lara is determined. She has ways and she manages to do it however. Not bad ways. Just a different way. 

What makes this book all the more fun is the mystery. There is not quite a mystery in the starting but as Lara discovers stuff it gets so much fun. The book is a whirlwind. Its extremely fun. It has a funny twist. And yes there is a very cute guy. And the way she meets the guy will blow your mind. Sadie will make you laugh till you cry. Lara's actions will make you tut tut a lot. 

I felt this book was an amazing read and i don't regret it. I'd recommend it to anyone in fact I already convinced a friend to read it and so she is. I don't think everybody would like it but I'd say if you're a YA and teen fiction and comedy fan this is your cup of tea. Its a great way to chillax and vent out some air. In fact I'm going to tell Raven to read it too. (Read it R). 

This review is slightly shorter than my usual but thats not because I'm not so very enthusiastic about it. My keyboard is actually giving me a hard time. And I have to be some where. 

So till then.

P.S. For you to look forward for something- Looking for Alaska, John Green is coming up.

Lots of love and marshmallows

Beez.

Raven: Addition

A novel by Toni Jordan

Publication date: 2008
Publisher: Sceptre
Pages: 243
Targeted Audience: 16+

Summary: Grace Vandenburg orders her world with numbers: how many bananas she buys, how many steps to the café, how many poppy seeds on her daily piece of orange cake.

She always sits at the first available table, starting from the top left-hand corner and proceeding around the room and inwards in a clockwise direction.

Every morning she brushes her hair 100 times, brushes her teeth with 160 strokes of her toothbrush. She can remember the day she started to count, how she used numbers to organise her adolescence, her career, even the men she went out with.

But something has gone wrong. Grace used to be a teacher, but now she is living on sickness benefits; as the parent of one of her students put it, ‘she’s mad’. Her father is dead, her mother a mystery to her, her sister sympathetic but not finally able to understand.

Only her niece Hilly can connect with her. And Grace can only connect with Nikola—Nikola Tesla, the turn-of-the-century inventor whose portrait sits on her bedside table and who rescues her in her dreams. Then one day all the tables at the café are full. As she hesitates in the doorway a stranger invites her to sit with him.

First off, this book is about Grace's OCD. She's got a problem. She counts... everything. Her poppy seeds on her cake which determine the pieces she is going to cut her cake into, her steps to the café, the amount of time she is going to talk to her mom and sister, pieces of cucumber that go into her dinner and just about anything you couldn't possibly think of counting.

The beginning of the book is a little bland. At least it was for me because every page had way too many numbers than I would have liked. But it just defines her "number" problem better. She was living her calculated life as usual and then one fine day she steels a banana from a guy's basket in the market and that's where she meets Seamus Joseph O'Reilly. An Irish guy who works at the ticket counter in movie theaters. (I love Irish accent!)

They obviously don't click off at once, I mean she stole his banana for gods sake! But after sitting down with him at the café and being forced into a date. We finally get to see some romance... WRONG! On a side note, her obsession gets worse when she is nervous. 

But later on, they do fall in love and there are some really cute moments like when they both went out for dinner and he said: "Look, I know I shouldn't really be asking this. I mean it's none of my business but... why did you take my banana at the grocery that day? You had enough bananas." 

(Okay so the dialogue isn't exactly like this but it's somewhat similar I mean the banana part is definitely the same but I don't currently have the book to copy off of it)

Seamus finally makes Grace take psychotherapy for her OCD. And she does. But nobody in the group therapy has a problem like hers. So she ends up with a group of germophobics. And as they say, the people you be with influence you.

But I felt really sad for her. At first I used to dislike her habit of counting everything but after a few weeks of her therapy I began wishing that she would go back to her old self and count everything! But this wish came with a price! 

Now that's all I am telling you. The rest is up to you to find out. It's a great read. There are some parts that you can relate to and some parts that really make you wonder about certain things and make you feel all philosophical. My advice would be that you read it and I rate it a 3.75!

P.S: I know that usually our reviews are not like this... I mean it was kind of like this earlier but I don't really know what happened but everything just tumbled I guess and if it hadn't been for one of our classmates friend who saw our blog and told us (through our classmate) that our reviews need work. 

And thanks to this unknown girl we have finally realised our stupid/silly mistakes and we hope you guys (whoever reads these reviews on a weekly or daily basis) will not leave us. We promise you won't have to go through those atrocities again!

Lots of Love & Pasta

Raven