Second Star (Alyssa B. Sheinmel)

A twisty story about love, loss, and lies, this contemporary oceanside adventure is tinged with a touch of dark magic as it follows seventeen-year-old Wendy Darling on a search for her missing surfer brothers. Wendy’s journey leads her to a mysterious hidden cove inhabited by a tribe of young renegade surfers, most of them runaways like her brothers. Wendy is instantly drawn to the cove’s charismatic leader, Pete, but her search also points her toward Pete's nemesis, the drug-dealing Jas. Enigmatic, dangerous, and handsome, Jas pulls Wendy in even as she's falling hard for Pete. A radical reinvention of a classic, Second Star is an irresistible summer romance about two young men who have yet to grow up--and the troubled beauty trapped between them.

I tried to read this book.

I really did.

I thought, Peter Pan retelling?

Awesome!

A younger, sexier Hook?

Awesomer!

A love triangle between Peter Pan and Hook...

Anyway, the story opens just after teenage Wendy Darling has graduated. She lives on the coast of California with her parents, her dog, Nana and her missing brothers, John and Michael. Her brothers are twins and surfers who disappeared one pregnancy nine months ago. (Haha, that's all I could think when she said nine months.) She has a best friend named Fiona, who doesn't go, do or think without her boyfriend at her side. This part of Fiona's cardboard character really bothered annoyed me.

Anyway, Wendy soon meets Peter Pan's Second Star counterpart, Pete. Pete is a surfer and former foster care teen who lives with a bunch of other runaways (all teens; no kids in this world) in a abandoned mansion on a cliff. Pretty soon into meeting him, Wendy falls for Pete, who kisses her, although he has this complicated relationship with a blonde named Belle.

They spend the night together, the night they meet, just kissing. Not even making out, just kissing. Pete seems nice and boring enough. Soon after meeting him, Wendy lies to her parents that she is going on a road trip with her best friend and like typical YA parents, they're all like, Sure, honey, whatever you like. We're barely around anyway!

Then she enlists the help of her best friend into lying to her parents and tells Fiona that she's going on a trip
Wendy doesn't go to Neverland. Instead, she goes to Kensie Cove or Kensington (a allusion to the Kensington Gardens in which Peter Pan lived before Neverland) and meets this guy named Pete. He is a former foster care kid who lives with  a bunch of runway teens in abandoned mansions in the cove. He takes Wendy in and teaches her to surf which is something her brothers never did.

However, Pete is also a liar because he knew John and Michael, but lies to Wendy about it early in the novel. From what I learned from skimming and skipping around, the twins used to live with Pete and his gang until he found out they were using fairy dust and kicked them out.

Belle later reveals that she saw what happened. John and Michael were high on 'dust' and tried to surf a forty foot wave. She doesn't say it out loud, but alludes to their death after they wiped out.

The other half of the Kensie belongs to his former partner, Jas (aka Hook) who now deals a drug called fairy dust and has a gang full of dusters who live with him. Jas and Pete used to be surfing buddies (think Plankton and Mr. Krabs) until Jas started dealing and Pete excommunicated him from his house.

Angry about Pete's lies, Wendy leaves and goes and joins up with Jas' crew. However, to get into his house to look for him she has to take some dust. That's the price to get in. She does and the stuff messes her up so bad that she ends up on Fiona's front step. Fiona calls her parents who take her home and send her too her room to "re-establish authority."

This is especially funny because while she is locked away in her room, Jas shows up and they run away to try to look for her brothers. It was around here that I just couldn't take anymore and gave up reading this book. Now I understand the term DNF (Did Not Finish) when it should be called CNF-Could Not Finish.

At the end, Wendy is with Jas, Pete and Belle as this famous waved called Witch Tree shows up. Something happens as the the wave hits and her last memories are of Jas. Then she wakes up in the psych ward of a hospital with her parents.

They tell her she wasn't on a boat with Jas, Pete, Belle and crew.There were no boats out on the sea during the storm because Coast Guard shut the area down. Instead, she tried to swim out into the sea during a storm on Pebble Beach. And no one brought Wendy to the hospital because she was alone. Basically, the girl is crazy.Her brothers are still missing at sea (aka dead) and she imagined everything. Fiona is the only one who has realized that she has gone crazy.

She either went went off the deep end due to her grief and started doing the combination of drugs that make up dust or the drug cocktail made her lose her mind. Either way, she's off her rocker, they say. So she goes through therapy and starts saying everything's fake to convince her parents no matter how wrong it feels to her.

Until it doesn't anymore.

She gets out the crazy house and slowly bides her time until everyone trusts her again. Then, Wendy eventually goes back to Kensington Cove to see if it really wasn't real. Apparently, the place was once called Kensington Beach before all the mansions in the area were abandoned. The houses are empty and rundown without any trace of Pete or Jas or their crews. The beach doesn't even exist. There's no white sand just a bunch of waves and rocks.

I'm sure this novel would be better if the author hadn't tried to connect the story to Peter Pan. I might've even enjoyed it more. I mean, I kind of understand the connection. Wendy (and her brothers) run away with Peter Pan to Neverland because they weren't ready to grow up at the moment. Peter Pan offers that escape.

Eventually, however, Wendy comes to the realization that she has to and is ready to grow up and she and her brothers go home.

Wendy in Second Star goes to Pete and Kensie Cove to find her brothers... Although, if she's truly crazy then she went to Kensie Cove because she isn't quite ready to face her brothers death. Which is also representative of the escape Pete provides her. However, eventually she allows herself to come to terms with it (aka when Belle tells her she witnessed). See, that's soo interesting. It just would've been a lot better if the story wasn't connected to Peter Pan. I just wasn't feeling it.

I especially felt like What the fuck? because at the end Wendy receives some mail. It's a picture inside a envelope without any address or stamps because someone just slipped it in the mailbox. And the picture is of Jas and Pete with surfboards and their arms around each other. Suddenly, Wendy starts wondering if the Witch Tree wave could've washed out the beach, messed up Pete's house and literally swallow her memories. She isn't crazy, she decides. Jas must've pushed her in the right current then saved the others then he and Pete went off the surf the world together. But someone wanted her to know it was all real.

...or maybe she's just crazy after all and put that picture in her own mailbox.

And if that's true, then what was the point of the story? Either way, I sure was disappointed.

Splintered [Splintered #1]

the premise:

Splintered is a novel, the first of a series or a trilogy, I'm not sure. About Alyssa Gardner, one of the illegitimate American descendants of Alice Liddell, the girl who inspired Alice in Wonderland. However, ever since then, the female descendants of Alice all go crazy. They believe this is due to a curse bestowed upon Alice after she caused mistakes in Wonderland, but they couldn't be more wrong. When Alyssa decides to go to Wonderland in order to save her "crazy" mother from a electric shock treatment, she takes her best-friend-and-secret-crush, Jeb although part of her reason for going is to find the boy from her lost memories.

Yes, , it's another love triangle. 

Although I don't even believe that it should be such. Jeb is Alyssa's best friend and although there were times in the novel that he seemed a little sexist and annoyingly Edward-from-Twilight-y, he wasn't as bad as Morpheus. 

I cannot understand why people are Team Morpheus. The guy is not a good guy. He takes all the bad boy, mysterious guys from all other YA paranormal novels and turns them on their heads. He's a selfish, manipulative jerk who has been manipulating Alyssa and her family members for centuries and manipulates Alyssa throughout the novel until the end!

...But more about that later.

I thought the idea of the plot was semi-interesting, a girl who can hear bugs and flowers talk until I actually experienced it through the book and realized I thought it was quite stupid. Why would flowers or bugs say half of the things that Alyssa claimed she heard. But as the novel went on it made more sense.

Morpheus (whose name comes from the Greek God of Dreams) is the boy from Alice's childhood that her mother forced her to forget in her quest to save her from going to Wonderland. Only it turns out everything Alyssa and her past family members thought was wrong. This was actually one of the most annoying parts about this book. Every time we were told something, it turned out that it was wrong and we learned the "real story" ten more times! 

It turns out that the Alice who returned to Earth after her adventures in Wonderland isn't the real Alice Liddell. The real Alice had been locked up in a cage in Wonderland for 75 years while the Red Queen stole her life, married, had children and had grandchildren. Ha! How's that for an evil plan? Morpheus, who is the basically the Caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland wakes up as a moth, (he was turning from a caterpillar into a moth for apparently the last 75 years-who does that?) and switches the Red Queen and the real Alice's places for the last time. 

But when the Red Queen died, she forced him into making a promise that he has to abide by (another Wonderland tradition that is called Deathspeak) or he loses his soul. This is the reason that Morpheus manipulates the whole novel and Alyssa's existence. He trained her from when she was little (the only childhood he claims to have and this is the reason he claims to "love" Alyssa) until her mother caught wind of what was happening and forced him to leave her alone which works...until Alyssa comes looking for him. 

This is how the novel's events gets started. 

Everything that Alyssa does in the majority of the novel in Wonderland is to right Alice's wrongs (this is before she realizes that her Alice was not the real Alice) when she came to Wonderland the first time so that the crazy-curse and the bug and flower curse will disappear from their family. 

But it turns out that Morpheus is really training her to complete the tasks she has completed which is the only way she can become Queen-his Queen. At this point, the history we've come to believe is disputed again as we learn yet another version of what really happened when Alice came to Wonderland. I was confused and still don't understand what I learned. 

Anyway, Jeb dies and Alyssa uses a wish to wish that he had never came with her to Wonderland, the ghost of her crazy fake-Alice ancestor, Queen Red tries to take over her body but she fails, Morpheus seemingly dies and Alyssa goes home. There she and Jeb get together, Morpheus appears to say he's not dead and he hasn't given up on her and Alyssa's mom gets released from the crazy home.

Although I originally thought I would like this book, the writing in it was a little too disconnected for me and the novel was written in present-tense. But then the talking-flowers-and-the-bugs started to annoy me and so did the whole love triangle too. Alyssa should not even consider being with Morpheus, the guy is crazy and deceitful, but seeing how there is sequel coming out next year to this book called, Unhinged, I fear that the author will break the YA rule and stick Alyssa with Morpheus instead of Jeb. Or, actually since she met Morpheus as a kid then she met him first...

I'll probably read the next book in the series and finish it. I don't think it was a bad idea but the changing background story confused me immensely and I wasn't really invested in the main character due to the writing. Actually, and her own characteristics. I forgot that in the beginning of the novel, she steals almost $300 from Jeb's girlfriend and immediately describes it as borrowing the money and feels no remorse except once. That was completely unrealistic to me for the character we were supposed be sympathizing with. I didn't even get any sense of remorse when she starts making out with the girl (Taelor's) boyfriend, aka Jeb, later on in the book. 

But at least she's from Texas. :)