Where the &$%# is the RAIN!?

My skin is crawling with anticipation - yet I have a feeling there won't be a storm.  This whole monsoon season has been weak.  Today I got in the car after my shower - mostly because my favorite way to dry my hair is to drive around with the windows down - and I drove around in circles so that I could drive toward the storms as much as possible.  There's just no point in hoping anymore... The big storms aren't coming.

Last night I had a very real dream.  It was evening, and I was walking around the UA campus with Oliver.  Everything was yellow-tinted, like fall, but it was still summer.  It was sprinkling just a little.  Everything smelled like wet pavement and wet desert...it was so calming.  I felt at home.  I woke up to Oliver...and the shadow of the dream hung over me for a few minutes.  It was a nice dream :)

Anyway... I came here with a point that had nothing to do with a failed monsoon season or my yellow dream.  For the second time this summer I have read something that was REALLY good.  And I mean...kind of genius.  If you're at all a fan of YA (and you'd need to be, because it's just a day in the life of a sort of shallow teenage girl), you NEED to read Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver.  It was a stretch for me to stray from fantasy/sci-fi/dystopia...I'm usually terribly disappointed by "normal" books.  I'm so glad I took the risk, though...this book is really well-written and really touching.  At first, I really hated all the characters, because they were such teenage girls.  They were mean and shallow and thoughtless and just...teenage girls.  I didn't even like teenage girls when I was one.  It took a while for them to become people, but the writing was just so good that I started to get absorbed in their little world.  I had read a review or 10, and there was just so much praise that I had to read the book, but by the time I got it, I'd forgotten what it was about.  It's about a dead girl reliving her last day over and over...some parts of it are so unbelievably sad, and some funny, and some loving...most bittersweet, though.  I hoped all the way through for some kind of change.  Every day did change, sometimes good...sometimes not.  It was just a purely genius idea... a whole novel of one day.  It was pretty great.  I remembered from the inside of the book jacket of the author's second book that this book was supposed to have a shocking end.  It didn't.  For a long time I knew where it was going, but it was ok...it didn't hurt the story at all.  In the context of the characters and the expectations they'd have, the end would have been a shock... and I suppose if I was 16 it might have been a shock (but when I was 16 I was obsessing over 1984 and Anthem and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test...even if I didn't understand it).  Anyway... if you like YA, read the book.  :)