And here I am, your slightly insane, mostly friendly neighborhood dimension-jumper having briefly returned from recent travels to offer you...

Interdimensional Travels: Log Two

Alexa Mintah

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And here I am, your slightly insane, mostly friendly neighborhood dimension-jumper having briefly returned from recent travels to offer you my thoughts on them. I’ve been some pretty cool places recently, so let’s go ahead and get started. :)

Sabotaged by Margaret Peterson Haddix

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I will never not say “sabotage” in Hacker’s voice.

Anywho.

Rating: 3 stars out of 5.

Review: Interesting story, but not nearly as fun as the last. It was more like the first one, Found, where things took forever to get going and there were NO answers until the end. Now, I’ll admit, sometimes that can be done really well, like with Ted Dekker’s Eyes Wide Open. But with Sabotaged... it didn’t work for me. I just ended up kind of annoyed with everything as I tagged along behind the characters, not so annoyed that I ended my visit early, but irritated enough that I didn’t engage with this one as well as I think I could have.

As far as other elements, like the characters and writing, everything was just kind of... okay. Maybe because I didn’t engage as much, I couldn’t get the full effect of the characters’ coolness or the writing’s wonderfulness, but... I don’t know. For me, this book just didn’t work so well. It wasn’t bad persé, but I’m afraid it won’t end up on any of my favorites lists either.

The Wishing Spell by Chris Colfer

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Rating: 4 stars out of 5.

Review: I liked this world a lot: the storyline was fun and intriguing, there are a lot of great one-liners (both funny and philosophical), the characters were cute and well-developed, and Connor consistently made me chuckle.

One thing I found particularly interesting about this one was the siblings’ dynamic. Since Alex was all smart and logical and Connor was kind of a goofball, it seemed like their whole fairytale views and their reactions to being tossed into The Land of Stories should’ve been reversed: Connor should’ve been the one running around. wanting to do everything, and Alex should’ve been the logical one focused on getting the items and getting home. But since the roles were switched--Alex was kind of a not-so-logical fangirl, and Connor was the one eager to complete the quest and get the heck outta there--it added a lot more depth and complexities to their characters, and that was really cool and fun to follow.

Quick note for younger readers: there are a few curse words and some “passionate” kissing, but besides that, it’s pretty clean. A nice, interesting fantasy read.

The Revised Life of Ellie Sweet by Stephanie Morrill

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Rating: 5 stars out of 5.

Review: So generally when I take travels to other parts of our contemporary world, I don’t enjoy them as much. I mean, not to say that I dislike contemporaries, cuz that would be totally untrue, but they normally don’t hold the same appeal for me that, say, a fantasy or a sci-fi world does.

Not so with Ellie Sweet.

I LOVED THIS TRIP. By far my favorite one of the summer (besides Hacker). The plot was interesting, the characters’ dynamics were fascinating and engaging when they totally could’ve come off as cheesy and cliche, the charries themselves were SUPERB and CUTE and freaking GORGEOUS. (I mean, Chase. Just Chase.)

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I especially loved how much Ellie sounded like a teenage writer. I completely related to her struggle, everything from the way her mind processed things to the way she handled rejection to her general tentativeness to enter the big, bad publishing industry. The whole thing was just great and glorious and OH MY GOODNESS I JUST HAD SUCH AN AMAZING TIME WITH THIS ONE.

This is basically the way I feel about this book.

Anyways. I highly recommend it :D

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And that’s it for this month! I have visited a few other worlds since my last Travels Log, but I already reviewed them either on Verbosity or my Goodreads, so you can check those two out if you like. :)

Question time! Which of these dimensions looks the most intriguing to you? Visited any of them before? What kind of armchair adventures have you had lately and--one last one--do you also say “sabotage” in Hacker’s voice every stinking time? Comment me!

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