Manga Review: Priceless, Volume 3, by Young-You Lee

Rating (Out of 5): ~3

Publisher: Tokyopop

Release Date: 2006.

Volumes: 3.

Spoilers?: No.

Buy it here: Amazon. Barnes and Noble. Rightstuf.

Volume: 1. 2.

Goodreads Synopsis:

When Jimmy begins attending Lang-bee's school, he decides to take Dan under his wing--but more for his own selfish reasons. Jimmy tells Dan that he's training him to become the type of man that Lang-bee would want, but he's really using Dan as his own personal servant! From Young-You Lee, the creator of Kill Me Kiss Me, comes the final volume of the romantic love triangle that's filled with delicious gossip, a false alarm, and one important basketball shot...in a word: Priceless! 

Review:

Meh. That’s mostly how I feel about this series.

Lang-bee is living on her own after her mother runs off, leaving her with debt and finding odd jobs to pay it off and her living expenses. When a guy her age shows up claiming to be her mothers new guy, he proves only to be more of a hassle. Then there’s Dan, who has somehow fallen for Lang-bee and is very protective of her.

I do think the ending was nice, I suppose. I liked that a romance didn’t form between Lang-bee and Jimmy, and that she does kind of get with Dan, in an odd way. But mostly I didn’t grow attached to the characters, I didn’t love them, and the ending felt a little meh, like there should have been more.

It was okay in the end.

Novel Review: Hello, I Love You by Katie M. Stout

Rating (Out of 5): ~1.5-2

Genre: YA Contemporary Romance; Korean

Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books (St. Martin's Press)

Release Date: June 9, 2015

Spoilers?: Some.

Buy it here: Amazon. Barnes and Noble. Books-A-Million. Indie Bound. iBooks.

Blog Tour.

Goodreads Synopsis:

A teen escapes to a boarding school abroad and falls for a Korean pop star in this fun and fresh romantic novel in the vein of Anna and the French Kiss.

Grace Wilde is running—from the multi-million dollar mansion her record producer father bought, the famous older brother who’s topped the country music charts five years in a row, and the mother who blames her for her brother’s breakdown. Grace escapes to the farthest place from home she can think of, a boarding school in Korea, hoping for a fresh start.

She wants nothing to do with music, but when her roommate Sophie’s twin brother Jason turns out to be the newest Korean pop music superstar, Grace is thrust back into the world of fame. She can't stand Jason, whose celebrity status is only outmatched by his oversized ego, but they form a tenuous alliance for the sake of her friendship with Sophie. As the months go by and Grace adjusts to her new life in Korea, even she can't deny the sparks flying between her and the KPOP idol.

Soon, Grace realizes that her feelings for Jason threaten her promise to herself that she'll leave behind the music industry that destroyed her family. But can Grace ignore her attraction to Jason and her undeniable pull of the music she was born to write? Sweet, fun, and romantic, this young adult novel explores what it means to experience first love and discover who you really are in the process

The Cover:

I really like this cover. I don't know if it really fits the book, given that I didn't feel all the happy feelings the cover shows. But the color is so pretty, and I love the pose of the couple. Plus, the couple actually looks like the characters!

Review:

I knew, going into this book, that it was going to either be amazing or horrible. I was hoping it would go the way of an extremely enjoyable contemporary romance, fun and cute, instead of being badly written, one dimensional, or annoying. And I’m surprised to say that it wasn’t really either?

Grace, running away from a tragedy in her family, decides to go to boarding school in Korea, leaving her famous and rich family in southern America.

My first problem is the Korean part. Now, this appeals hugely to all Kpop and Kdrama fans, of which I am one. And I was thinking, I don’t know, that Grace would be a fan? Instead, Grace doesn’t even like listening to the Koreans talk. Watching Korean television and listening to their music sounds dreadful to her. She grumbles and groans and is very superior American, about all of it, and even refuses to learn Korean. Which, after living there for a full school year, surrounded by the language, watching and listening to it, and even taking classes to learn it, she barely learns a word? How does she not absorb even a little, and still pass her classes?

It also seemed to take some of the fun, diverse effects out, when the two people that Grace gets to know, go by American names, and speak perfect English. That seemed like cheating.

Grace is a very judgmental person. It takes her forever to finally come around to watching Kdramas, and even though she finally starts to enjoy them, she does it for everything, every time--the music, the food, the people. Which makes it hard to believe that, with less than half way through, she’s all the sudden not judgemental about something that Jason does? Suddenly she’s Miss Understanding.

If the main character was anyone else, this would have been a better book. I just hated Grace, I think. She’s shallow, judgmental, runs from anything that scares her, is extremely biased. I didn’t even like the romance, the attraction between her and Jason. I felt like I barely got to know Jason at all, because she was always judging him, and that his actual feelings and emotions were never shown to the reader.

I liked the side characters enough, but I don’t feel like I saw enough of them, or got to know them well enough. Sophie seemed nice enough, and I liked seeing her relationship grow, but there wasn’t really any conclusion there. Yoon Jae was a sweetheart, but then he kind of just left. Jason seemed nice.

I will say that the surprise with Grace’s family was well done, and revealed with good timing. I understood some of her feelings and thoughts, then. That didn’t make me like her any more, though. 

I was disappointed with this book. I wanted it to be amazing, with all the Kdrama fun and feel. And it was pretty much the opposite of that.

A review copy was provided by the publisher, St. Martin’s Press. Thank you!

Review: A Step from Heaven by An Na

Rating (Out of 5): 3

Publisher: Puffin/Speak (Penguin)

Review:

I also read this for book club, and it was pretty good as well. (Maybe not as good, but still pretty good.) Better than I thought it'd be, for the most part.

It's about Young Ju, who moves from Korea to America when she's about four. She lives with her mother, who's sweet, mostly, if a little weak, and her father, who I did not like, and her little brother, who I kind of liked but who we don't see a lot of.

She takes it that they are moving to Heaven when they first move, and is disappointed when she finds out that this isn't true. It was interesting to see her struggles with America, and with her parents in America. I especially found it interesting how her parents said that she had more choices in America, and yet they didn't want much to do with the American people or even really tried to learn English. (This is mostly something that bothers me when people come here. How can you want to come here, and say it's so free, if you don't like the people?)

I liked Young Ju, mostly. I also liked most of what I saw of her brother, Joon. And, I guess we didn't really see more of him, because it's Young Ju's story, and perhaps she isn't too close with him? I just felt that there was more to him than we got to see. I mostly liked her mother, but didn't like that she let everything go on for so long, and really didn't like how she reacted to things to Young Ju later in the book. (But, I kind of empathize her reaction, because of how she'd been treated. I can sympathize, and empathize with it, but I don't truly understand why she didn't do something sooner. It's not like she was depending on him.) [Sorry if that was a bit spoilerous, I was trying not to be.]

I did not like her father at all. I'm not going to expand too much on this, because then I will give it all away, and it's a little obvious, but I don't think it's stated outright. So, I didn't like him. He was quite terrible and I hate how he treats his family and kids, and especially what he does later in the book.

I liked how it was written. It read very smoothly, and was pretty, and when she's younger, it's very easy to tell that she's a little girl, which I also liked. Some things I didn't like about it, is that sometimes, when people are talking, she uses quotation marks, but usually she didn't. It worked well for her not to, read very smoothly without them in the story, so it bothered me that she would put them in every once in a while, almost randomly. And I don't know if it was on purpose or not. Also, the Korean parts. She's from Korea, and so she knows Korea words, can speak it, and all that, which is to be expected. And I don't really know how it would have gone smoothly with translations in the book, but I was still bothered because I didn't know what the words meant, and had to deal with figuring it out by what was going on. But aside from that, I liked it.

I enjoyed the story, and the ending was pretty good. I rather enjoyed the book, overall.

Oh, sidenote: I did not put up a synopsis, because I figured that I summed it up enough, and I couldn't find one that suited me. The ones that I found were either too long, or they spoiled the ending, which I resisted from doing above, so I did not want to put them up.