melting

So this week we found and signed a contract for an apartment which I am rather stoked about. Our car also announced it's impending death which I'm not so excited for. Guys, being an adult kind of sucks sometimes. The temperature has also been steadily rising this week, topping out today around 98 and we're supposed to be over 100 all weekend, which basically means it will take great incentive to even get me out of the apartment. There's a long-lived debate about where summer is worst between Utah and New York and while NY has humidity at least it has these cool things called clouds and trees. I swear, there are no clouds in the summer here. Going outside is like being under a constant and inescapable heat lamp. My body is not equipped to handle this gracefully  : P

I found out today at work that our library is doing a summer reading program/competition with weekly prizes and a grand prize at the end of the summer. I cannot express the childish glee I felt when I was told that, yes, I could enter. You just have to report books you've read [they have to be over 100 pages] and I immediately reported the last 6 books I've read which is not cheating, by the way, because I finished them all within the last week. I have seriously missed reading this much.

One of the books I've inhaled recently is Ruby Red by Kerstin Gier and Anthea Bell [Anthea is the translator as the book was written in German]. Our heroine Gwyn suddenly discovers that she has inherited her family's time-traveling gene instead of her cousin who was expected to have the ability. Gwyn must now navigate the dangers of uncontrolled and, slightly better controlled time travel without the benefit of the life-long training her cousin received and, to top it off, she must do it in the company of a really obnoxious but, obligatorily good looking guy. All in all, I enjoyed this book for the most part. It has many of the usual pitfalls of a YA romance with fantastical powers thrown in. There's even a pretty intriguing mystery thrown in that Gwyn must get to the bottom of which makes her question the motives of the people she is being told to trust. I felt like I was able to see past the unnecessarily repetitious descriptions of Gwyn's extended family and the many ways in which they are annoying. I even managed to shove down my indignant disbelief when Gwyn puts off telling her mother about her sudden genetic revelation for two days based on really flimsy excuses. The one thing that really got to me and may well prevent me from reading farther into the series is the romance. The premise is classically predictable with Gwyn and her man loathing each other at first and then suddenly finding that they love each other passionately. If it's so average, what's so bad about it? This whole transformation occurs in the three days the first book covers. Three days. Now, if anyone's read farther into the series please feel free to insert delicate hints here about how Gideon's feelings might not be completely honest, with the potential of serious betrayal hiding in the wings. Such a hint would be redeeming as, at this point, the unrealistic turn around involved in this relationship is making me gag on my adolescence.