so this is how superweak my life is: on friday i rushed home from work in the rain to get some homework done. whee... but then i ended up writing that wuthering heights review, inspired by the rain and the clouds etc. and i did some work, but not a ton. and i thought to myself, what do i really want to be doing? and the answer was - put on my pajamas, eat peanut butter pretzels and read unchallenging children's books. so i did. and you can all suck it, with your parties and balls and galas. 'cuz i had myself a nice time. 
 i didn't like it as much as the hunger games; which is teen fiction, not juvie, so maybe i'm not as developmentally stunted as i thought. look, i'm growing up before your eyes! she has a real knack for pacing, which is way more important in children's literature than adult, just because of attention-span, particularly now, when the options for children are increasingly electronic and faster-paced - a book really has to capture the imagination in order to hold a child's attention, and i think this does a good job of that. i also appreciate her very low emphasis on sentimentality. it is less pronounced than in the hunger games, because of the younger audience, but it's an adventure book, life's hard, things die. and i think that's a good element in children's literature; her lack of prettifying realities. i will probably read the other books in the series, providing my social life doesn't improve, but i don't feel the same urgency to read them that i do for the teen series. it may be the subject matter/younger audience thing, or the lack of a true "cliffhanger" at the end of the book,but i probably will get to them. it was enjoyable, and if you have children, you should probably pick these up and pretend you are reading them together because your kids enjoy them. 
 and now i can give greg back his copy, and that gets one more book out of my house. which means there's room for one more book, basically. this is how the problem exacerbates...