00012994

I've been meaning to read a Wendy Mass book for a while, and this was a suitable introduction. It was very enjoyable, with likable characters, a smidge of fantasy (the kind you hope really exists in the world), and a touch of romance. I will be recommending it to 10-13 year-olds who are ready for more nuanced stories about friendships, but not quite ready for the raw world of YA. ( )

I really need to express the need on this site for a half star, this book was almost perfect, but not my favorite. I really win to give it 4 and a half stars, but I will give it 5, because it's better than most of my 4 books. ( )

This review is also available on my blog, Read Till Dawn.

My copy of this book is very special to me: it was the first arc I ever received. A kind librarian gave it to me a short while before its release date, and I was in awe at this strange and magical idea that you could read a book before it came out. I had no idea how to get an arc on my own power and figured that I wasn't important enough to get one - but I cherished my copy of 13 Gifts and have taken care of it for years.

All right, let's get going! This is the third book in the Willow Falls series. Click here to read my review of 11 Birthdays, and here for my review of Finally (links go to my blog). This is one of my favorite series; a comfort read I fell back on when I felt miserable after surgery. I decided to review the entire series so others could discover it.

This is the first book in the series that really leans on the ones before it, making it much more enjoyable if you've read the earlier books. Tara, our latest heroine, comes to stay with her cousin Emily (from Finally) and becomes friends with characters from the other books. I'm sure you could make it through this one without having read the others, but it would spoil the first books and would be a lot less fun. One of my favorite things about this book is that it is full of nods and references to the first two books. Inside jokes, old friends, and past mishaps all make appearances throughout the book - and poor Tara is completely befuddled by them!

For many years I cherished this book because of the way it felt like a culmination of the others. Tara is actually the least relatable of the main characters, because I would never steal a comic book from my uncle, no matter how much I needed the money. It's not that I don't like her, and in most of the book she's great. I just don't find her particular predicament relateble. The story is fun, though, and I've reread it numerous times. This is the book that really solidified my love for the series, because while a first book doesn't affect the books that come after it, and the second book that's also a standalone can be an anomaly, by the time you get to the third book in the series and you love that one you know that without a doubt you love the entire series. After reading this one, I hunkered down and started counting the days until the next one came out.

Have you read this series? How do you like it? And if you haven't, do you think it looks interesting? Next week is my review of the fourth and last (published) book in the series. ( )

This book was pretty good because I really liked how the author spread the book out in to pieces and it was really funny. ( )

After a failed attempt to steal a stuffed goat from the vice principal's office ends in the vice principal getting pepper-sprayed and soon-to-be-thirteen-year-old Tara suspended for the final two weeks of the year (in an attempt to fit in with other kids her age, Tara refuses to give up her accomplices), Tara is exiled to the small town of Willow Falls to spend her summer. This is instead of going with her parents to Madagascar to study the lemur, something she had been looking forward to doing.

Tara's luck goes from bad worse to when she's robbed of the money her parents gave her for the summer and her mother's prized iPod while on the train to the Willow Falls. Not wanting to admit the failure to her parents or her aunt and uncle, Tara takes matters into her own hands, stealing a rare issue of The Fantastic Four from her uncle's collection and trying to sell it at the local curiosity shop. The mysterious proprietor refuses to buy it because she can't pay what the comic is worth and she's the one who sold to her uncle. Instead, Tara is forced to accept a deal where she collects 13 different items from the people of the town and brings them to the store before her thirteenth birthday. If she does that, all will be forgotten. If not, her uncle will be made aware of her theft.

Until this point, Tara has been the kind of girl who is willing to shrink into the background. Since her only experience of trying to fit in involved the theft of a goat, she's not exactly eager to try fitting in again. But she soon finds a group of friends in Willow Falls who are not only willing to stand by her but also to help her find all thirteen items on the list and even to pull off something a bit more magical for the small town and Tara.

13 Gifts is a fun young adult novel with an intriguing first-person narrator and some interesting twists and turns. I listened to this one as an audio book and it helped the miles go by a bit more happily as I jogged and helped pass the time as I did chores around the house. Wendy Mass throws in some intriguing mysteries to Tara's visit to Willow Falls and pays all of them off by the novel's end.

From my understanding this is the third in a series of novels set in Willow Falls. And while there are callbacks to previous novels, the novel is self-contained enough that you can read it without feeling lost if you missed the first two. I will say that having listened to this one, I'm intrigued enough by the characters and the setting to want to try another in the series. ( )

A third book in Wendy Mass' Willow Falls series that intertwines characters from her other two books with Tara, a teen who has been sent to her parents' hometown as a punishment when she gets into trouble at school. ( )

As the other two in the series, this is a fun story to read. I enjoy how much each birthday girl learns as she has to complete the jobs in her birthday assignment. It is not necessary to read the other books in the series to enjoy this book ( )

http://joriesreads.wordpress.com/2012/12/26/wendy-mass-willow-fallsbirthdays-ser... ( )

Tara's family has always moved constantly and Tara has never developed any friends. In attempting to connect with some girls at school Tara gets caught in a school caper and her mom sends her off to live with her Aunt, Uncle and cousin who live in her parents' hometown while her parents leave the country on a research project. Tara finds herself repeating her mistake in a big way in Willow Falls and in the process she meets a strange woman named Angelina D'Angelo who demands retribution. She sends Tara off on a scavenger hunt to repay her debt and it must be completed before Tara turns 13. But in Willow Falls there are people her age who are interested in her and like her and are willing to help her with this very strange assignment. In fact, they know Angelina and accept the importance of her search even when they don't know why she has to do it. Tara finds relationships and friendships that she never imagined possible and also manages to help some people and herself and amazingly her parents. It is a fun read with good characters.

I listened to this without knowing it was the third is a series, but I didn't notice any strange gaps, it all felt like part of the weirdness of Willow Falls.
Tara's parents, who rarely let her out of their sight, suddenly send her to stay with barely known relatives for the summer. This seems like a realistic story, but a mysterious woman blackmails Tara to find thirteen objects before her thirteenth birthday, and Tara finds the the town of Willow Falls becoming odder by the moment.
With its gentle magical realism, I enjoyed Tara's story, and even though the events of the book were unrealistic, her responses and actions felt true to me. ( )

The book "13 Gifts" by Wendy Mass is an amazing book. It's all about a girl named Tara who has to brake into her school and take her principal's goat in order for her to sit at the "popular" table at lunch. She gets caught and is supposed to leave for Madagascar in a few days. She ends up getting sent to a strange little town called Willow Falls. She stays with her aunt, uncle, Emily, and their butler Roy. Tara finds herself in the hands of an old women named Angelina. She makes Tara find thirteen random items all around town. If she doesn't find them within a month, it leads to some bad things. Tara does run into a lot of bad things but always makes it through.
"13 Gifts" is a good fun book to read. It's all about growing up and facing problems no matter how bad. You can make it through with friends or without. It's all about growing up and getting through the hardest problems in life. It's a fun interesting book for everyone and everyone to enjoy. I recommend it to everyone that is into mysterious adventures. ( )

I listened to 11 Birthdays, the first in this series, in audiobook version. At the time, I enjoyed it, but I didn't plan to read any follow up titles. So I passed on Finally, and planned to give away my Advance Reader Copy of 13 Gifts. Instead, I opened it to read a few pages, found the following passage, and was hooked:

"Since the telegram arrived, Mom's been really distracted. She's even stopped asking if I've finished my homework or made any new friends (usually her two favorite topics). Whenever I try to strike up a conversation, she mumbles something and wanders out of the room. This morning I found her keys in the freezer next to the ice cream sandwiches.
Her normal approach to mothering has always been to smother and overprotect. While I was still in my crib she taught me that talking to strangers would cause my tongue to turn green. (I believed this until I was eight.) I've never been allowed to sleep over at anyone's house, and my cell phone has a GPS tracker in it that links up to her computer. Mom promised me she'd only activate the tracker if I went missing, but when I stopped to buy gum after school last month, she texted me to get a quart of milk. Coincidence? I think not."

In a strange turn of events, Tara's overprotective mother and her dad (the devoted husband), have decided to leave Tara with relatives in Willow Falls while they travel to Madagascar, where Mrs. Brennan will be studying the mating habits of lemurs. Tara barely knows her relatives, and is bewildered by her mother's ironclad decision; but she soon finds out that this may be the least bewildering thing she encounters during her strange summer in Willow Falls.

Due to the loss of her iPod and cash,Tara becomes beholden to a mysterious, old woman named Angelina (who features prominently in the two earlier books). Angelina operates a curiosity shop, which curiously, cannot be seen by all of Willow Falls' inhabitants. Angelina tasks Tara with finding thirteen items before her 13th birthday, and Tara, normally a loner, is forced to seek the help of the strangely cooperative kids of Willow Falls.

In Willow Falls, everything happens for a reason, and most reasons are unapparent. In her search for the items on Angelina's quirky list, Tara finds much more than duck canes, frayed shawls, and misprinted books! But all the mysteries of Willow Falls and its families, are not revealed in 13 Gifts. Clearly, there are more to come.

A melding of realistic fiction and fantasy, 13 Gifts is a humorous coming-of-age story, but it's part of a much broader picture of a magical small town that, in conjunction with its oldest resident, Angelina, promotes harmony and healing - but not without a price. A fun and unconventional book.

A word of advice: it's best to read these books in order. Normally, it's fairly easy to pick up a series in midstream, but I often found myself wishing that I had read Finally, the second book in the birthday series. Things would have been a bit clearer (or at least as clear as they can be in the magical town of Willow Falls).
www.shelf-employed.blogspot.com ( )