Four by Veronica Roth | Rating: ★★★★★“Dead people can be our heroes because they cant disappoint us later; they only improve over time, as we forget more and more about them.”
What's the first word that comes to mind when I think of Four? Four as in both this collection and the character? Swoon. Swoon, I think about swooning. Actually, come to think about it I do more than think about swooning, I swoon the heck on out of this Popsicle stand and before you know it, my icy exterior has melted to the sidewalk like that ice cream cone I wept over as a child. But that's neither here nor there and I'm soooo not bitter about it or anything.
Honestly, though. Four--Tobias Eaton, if you prefer--is one of my top ten book boyfriends of all time and frankly I loath the term book boyfriends but a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do, you know? And Four is completely worth the silly hair twirling (which, admittedly, I found myself doing in the more romantic scenes of his) and that's a pretty high compliment from me.
Typically I'm not one for collections of short stories. None of my favorite series have little bonus stories in their line-up (that's a lie; The Darkest Minds and Splintered have done so and those were fantastic, too) so I tend to sprint in the opposite direction when I do see installments as such. While many authors and publishers do so only to bank on the success of their series and make that $$$$ (get that money, y'all!) Roth, instead, uses to build onto the series we already know and love. I love, love, love the collections that I listed above but Four goes above and beyond that.
