Sean Grizwold's Head

I recently read the incredibly cute YA romance Sean Grizwold’s Head by Lindsey Leavitt and I really can’t recommend it enough. Payton Gritas is a very high strung high school freshman who doesn’t know how to deal with her father’s diagnosis with Multiple Sclerosis. Her school counselor assigns her to keep a focus journal. In the focus journal she is supposed to write about a focus object each day, the idea being that writing about something like a pencil sharpener or a tube of toothpaste will lead her to also focus on the larger issues in her life.

But Payton doesn’t write about a pencil sharpener or a tube of toothpaste. She decides to write about Sean Grizwold’s head. Thanks to the alphabet gods, Sean has been sitting in front of Payton in almost every class since third grade. And the boy has a really big head. There's a lot to write about. Not surprisingly, it doesn’t take long for Payton to start noticing not only how Sean styles his hair, but also the things he says and does so her “research” extends to also include the things inside Sean’s head.

The thing that makes this book so great is that Payton doesn’t want a boyfriend. She wants her dad to be okay. And Sean turns out to be this totally sweet guy that’s willing to listen to Payton as she tries to cope with all her family issues. The romance that buds from their psych experiment is very organic and natural and just playing adorable. Sean Grizwold’s Head is a cute YA romance on every level. But it’s a romance between two kids whose lives aren’t perfect, and who care about a lot more than just finding love in the halls of their high school. If you don’t want to take my word for it, here is goodread’s description.

According to her guidance counselor, fifteen-year-old Payton Gritas needs a focus object-an item to concentrate her emotions on. It's supposed to be something inanimate, but Payton decides to use the thing she stares at during class: Sean Griswold's head. They've been linked since third grade (Griswold-Gritas-it's an alphabetical order thing), but she's never really known him.

The focus object is intended to help Payton deal with her father's newly diagnosed multiple sclerosis. And it's working. With the help of her boy-crazy best friend Jac, Payton starts stalking-er, focusing on-Sean Griswold . . . all of him! He's cute, he shares her Seinfeld obsession (nobody else gets it!) and he may have a secret or two of his own.

In this sweet story of first love, Lindsey Leavitt seamlessly balances heartfelt family moments, spot-on sarcastic humor, and a budding young romance.

Infinite Days

I decided to take a mental holiday and checked myself out of the whole blogging world for a couple of weeks. Now I’m refreshed and ready to check myself back in. Did you miss me?

And what better way to get back into blogging than to tell you about one of my favorite recent reads. Infinite Days by Rebecca Maizel is a great story that takes the whole vampire idea in a totally new direction. Yes, I said the V-word. This book is about Vampires, but you can relax. They don’t sparkle.

If you want to read a book about a human girl who falls in love with a blood sucking predator, there are about a million books for you to choose from, and Infinite Days isn’t one of them. Instead, this is a book about a blood sucking predator who dreams of becoming a human girl.

Lenah was transformed from human to vampire at age sixteen way back in the 1400’s. For more than five hundred years, she stalked the Earth as a terrifying predator. She loved the kill, because devouring a human was the closest she could get to actual feeling. She lived on strength and instinct, but she dreamed of humanity, of going back 600 years, of being human again.

Then Lenah learned about the ritual—a dangerous way to reverse the human to vampire transformation—a way to be human again. Miraculously, it worked. Lenah wakes up at a modern boarding school in a new fully human teenage body with an unbelievable second chance at life.

If you want another human/vampire love story, don’t read this book. But if you want to read something totally different, than Infinite Days is a great pick. And if you still aren’t convinced, here is what goodreads has to say about it.

Lenah Beaudonte is, in many ways, your average teen: the new girl at Wickham Boarding School, she struggles to fit in enough to survive and stand out enough to catch the eye of the golden-boy lacrosse captain. But Lenah also just happens to be a recovering five-hundred-year-old vampire queen. After centuries of terrorizing Europe, Lenah is able to realize the dream all vampires have -- to be human again. After performing a dangerous ritual to restore her humanity, Lenah entered a century-long hibernation, leaving behind the wicked coven she ruled over and the eternal love who has helped grant her deep-seated wish.

Until, that is, Lenah draws her first natural breath in centuries at Wickham and rediscovers a human life that bears little resemblance to the one she had known. As if suddenly becoming a teenager weren’t stressful enough, each passing hour brings Lenah closer to the moment when her abandoned coven will open the crypt where she should be sleeping and find her gone. As her borrowed days slip by, Lenah resolves to live her newfound life as fully as she can. But, to do so, she must answer ominous questions: Can an ex-vampire survive in an alien time and place? What can Lenah do to protect her new friends from the bloodthirsty menace about to descend upon them? And how is she ever going to pass her biology midterm?