WHAT HAPPENED TO CASS MCBRIDE by Gail Giles

Last night I snuggled up in bed around 7 p.m. (yeah, I know) with the intent of going to bed early (so I'd be refreshed to attack my mountain of papers). I found a stack of books I'd bought a while back, and so I grabbed CASS with the intention of reading a chapter or two before I went to sleep.

Talk about hooked! At the beginning of the book (stop reading here if you don't want spoilers for the first couple of chapters) you find out a girl is BURIED ALIVE. The rest of the book is a combination of finding out what the hell happened and whether she'll make it out. Yeah. So I finished the book in a couple of hours and still fell asleep in time to not be a total wench to my kids today.

Good book. Seriously. Anyone who can hook you like that has got to be talented. Her prose was cool in a Laurie Halse Anderson-type way, although I don't think she quite lives up to Laurie. Sometimes the sentence constructions were a bit confusing. I know she had to cultivate a little ambiguity, but sometimes I couldn't figure out who she was talking about.

She uses three or four different POVs, which I didn't really enjoy. I was always skipping forward to the Cass chapters. It's kind of funny because in DTY, I went to two POVs, and I'm using three in THE PURPOSE. Hmm. Guess that can frustrate readers. But it's also a cool structure. Anyway, it really did work.

So tomorrow I swear I'll make the rounds and catch up with everyone. This week has just been insane. I'll also post more details about my thesis and the books I'm using for it.

Yay! Have a good weekend!