Happy Birthday To Me and Happy Birthday To Me Again

Happy Birthday To Me and Happy Birthday To Me Again
Brian Rowe
175 and 174 pages respectively
Publisher: the author
Source: the author
★★★★☆ and ★★★★★

You can read the Goodreads summaries here and here.

So these books hit my inbox at a pretty good time, considering my own birthday is coming up in just over a week.  These books were great, but oh boy, I hope I never have a birthday like those Cameron has in these books.

In the first book, Cameron is just your typical high school senior who likes to play a little trick when he goes out to eat - in his quest to get as many free desserts as possible, it's always his birthday.  He's pretty sure the waitstaff, particularly waitress Liesel, is catching on but he continues.  Suddenly he's again way too fast, about a year a day and he's rapidly becoming an old man, befuddling his friends and his doctors.

In the second book, Cameron seems to have the opposite problem.  Things are back to normal and he's in love with Liesel, in fact he just proposed!  But then, suddenly he's aging backwards, losing a year a day.  With significantly less time to figure this out than the last time he had this problem, he's got to figure out what to do and fast.

These books were great!  They were fast, light reads that really entertained.  The characters were all unique and well developed - my favorite character from the first book is probably Mrs. Gordon - the mean, horny librarian at the high school; she was such a hoot!  I hesitate to say Hannah was my favorite character in the second book because she was so evil, but I think she is.  A lot of imagination went into her and I think it's her character that's going to drive the rest of this series.

Happy Birthday to Me was great, but I thought Happy Birthday to Me Again really took it up a notch, which is why I gave it five stars.  We see more of the paranormal stuff in the second book and it ends on a cliffhanger/twist of events that really sets the reader up for the third novel, which I suspect will be even better than the second.

I just want to take a second and say I really, really enjoyed these two novels.  They're probably the best self-published novels I ever read.  Thank you for sending them to me, Brian!  If you like YA, you should definitely check these out!  They're short so you can read both in one afternoon.  As for me, I will definitely be checking out the third book in the trilogy, Happy Birthday to You, when it comes out.