The Carus Chronicles

I like Young Adult Novels. They teleport me back to an age of innocence and possibilities. Along with TV cop shows, singing along to Miley and Brittney in the car, and eating chocolate, reading YA is one of my not-so-secret guilty pleasures. My pet peeve with YA's is the inevitable scene where the culmination of teenaged angst and playing hard to get results in the main character swooning into the arms of the handsome bad-boy love interest and losing her virginity to him. Now let's be honest, these books are fiction. They're not realistic in many ways, including the intuitive nature of seventeen year old boys, but the area I find them most unrealistic is in the bedroom. The deeply knowledgeable and skilled love interest will ruthlessly demolish the innocence of the main character...and she'll LOVE it. Some, the sensitive and considerate boys, will briefly pause and ask if she's okay, but the scene will predictably result in him jackhammering his way to the ...

One of my biggest pet peeves as a reader is seeing a line where a character at some point "tastes bile." because he or she is confronted with something that grosses them out, or is so grotesque they are nauseated by the idea or sight.  It's often the ultimate expression of supreme disgust, only to be one-upped by actual vomiting. Reading this description repeatedly for one or more characters throughout a book is what really bothers me. It's not normal to constantly be tasting one's bile. Here's why: Bile is an emulsifier. It is produced in the liver, stored in the gallbladder, and released into the upper section of your small intestine (called the duodenum) to break down fats into smaller fats. It is extremely bitter tasting and the vapours from excessive bile secretion can travel to the mouth for you to taste. In order for it to do so, it has to travel through TWO sphincter muscles (the pyloric and the cardiac), which act as one-way gates, the highly ac...