Claire Stevens's Blog, page 11

The Belles by Dhonielle Clayton

This book did not work for me on many levels and I'm gutted because I wanted to like it so much.

I want to start by saying that I think a lot of people really will like this book, in the same way that a lot of people liked Red Queen, which was another book I didn't get on with.  I just didn't enjoy it myself and I'm glad it's over.  The only reason this isn't a one-star review is because of the representation.  There aren't enough books with a non-white lead and it was good to see one here.  Plus, the gorgeous cover (I'm a tart for beautiful book covers).

So.  I found The Belles to be a pretty boring, shallow book with nothing I haven't read before, a load of characters that didn't get developed one iota and a whole bunch of telling-not-showing.

The central message of this book is, 'Society is dangerously obsessed with a narrow view of beauty and this is a bad thing'.  Well, yes.  I know.  I don't need 450 pages of fluff to tell me that.  What I wanted to see was a society dangerously obsessed with a narrow view of beauty AND AN MC WHO WAS GOING TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.  And this was not what I got.

Camellia was boring.  She had literally no thoughts in her head other than about people's appearances.  She had no interests other than in beauty products and treatments.  She seemed utterly clueless that the world she lived in, where people went for monthly Mystical Plastic Surgeries was bad.  In the end, when she does try to bring about change, it's not against the toxic society she lives in but against a ridiculous comic-book baddie.  Her narrative is filled with observations on what people and things look like and what people and things smell like and hearing her asinine thoughts for 450-odd pages was like being stuck inside the head of an extra off of TOWIE.   Until the end of time.

She was also weak.  She gets asked to do something about halfway through the book - it's a pretty big, important something and it's painfully obviously the morally right thing to do, only she dithers and delays her decision on whether to do it because if she gets found out she would be in a world of pain.  Coward.

And if Camellia was dull, the supporting characters were paper-thin.  Didn't really get a handle on them.  Didn't care about them.  The romance was cheesy, like a personification of the YA Brooding Hero (Twitter: @YAbroodingHero).  It was no surprise that Orleans society placed such emphasis on external beauty when all the people living in it were utterly shallow and utterly hollow.

It's incredibly derivative of lots of other YA dystopians out there - The Jewel and The Selection spring instantly to mind.  You know, the thing where the world looks really nice and fluffy, and the girls wander around in huge Gone With The Wind dresses but underneath it's all pretty rotten?  In fact, take a look at the cover of the French version of The Belles - remind you of anything?

The writing was okay and I did get a feel for what the world looked like (steampunk Cypress Gardens) but the dialogue was clunky and there weird nouns with no explanation as to what they actually were.  Things like a Belle-bun, Belle-trunk, Belle-rose.  We don't actually get told how a Belle-bun differs from, you know, a normal bun.  Or how a Belle-trunk differs from a normal trunk, other than a Belle-trunk is owned by a Belle.

I wanted to like this book so much, but I didn't enjoy it at all.  Boo.

2 stars

Eve and Adam by Michael Grant and Katherine Applegate

In the beginning, there was an apple—

And then there was a car crash, a horrible injury, and a hospital. But before Evening Spiker’s head clears a strange boy named Solo is rushing her to her mother’s research facility. There, under the best care available, Eve is left alone to heal.

Just when Eve thinks she will die—not from her injuries, but from boredom—her mother gives her a special project: Create the perfect boy.

Using an amazingly detailed simulation, Eve starts building a boy from the ground up. Eve is creating Adam. And he will be just perfect... won’t he?

​This was an okay thriller about a girl who gets run over and makes a miraculous recover in her psycho mother's creepy underground science research facility.

I could kind of see where the story was going from the beginning as there were a few heavy-handed pointers to the 'twist', but I still enjoyed it. It was fun and engaging enough and I liked the two MCs. 
One thing I wasn't a fan of, though, was the stupid names the MCs were given: Evening and Solo. Made me twitch my head around, like, 'What? What??' 

Evening's mum was stereotypical bad guy. She very nearly had a twirly villain moustache. I did like the way the storyline with her mum was tied up, though.

All in all this was okay. Not outstanding, but worth a look.

3 stars

Clean by Juno Dawson

Wow.  I really enjoyed this book.  It was a dark, gritty read that didn't shy away from shining a light on all manner of issues: drug abuse, sexual abuse, mental health, gender identity, toxic relationships

Lexi Volkov is uber-rich and utterly spoilt by her billionaire parents, so when she gets thrown into an exclusive rehab facility for heroin addiction she has literally hit rock bottom and surely from there the only way is up?

I didn't think I'd like Lexi to begin with, but she grew on me quite quickly and you quickly see that the only reason she behaves like such a nightmare is because of her addictions and the toxic relationships she clings onto.  By about halfway through the book I really liked her and was totally rooting for her and believe it or not the author actually managed to make me feel sorry for the poor little rich girl.

I've never had to come off heroin myself, and I'm glad because it sounds absolutely horrific.  Can't speak for the veracity of what Lexi goes through, but it sounded realistic enough and certainly kept me reading.  Also, I don't follow the tabloids or reality TV or whatever, but even I could see that there were plenty of parallels to people in the public eye who suddenly check themselves into a clinic for 'exhaustion'.

the story isn't just about Lexi coming off heroin, but also the bit after, where she has to come to terms with her addiction and make the changes in her life that will let her stay clean.  That, for me, was the really interesting bit.

In fact, this was a five star read until the last 5% or so, where I think the author just tried to cram too much resolution into too few pages.  It felt muddled and disjointed from the rest of the book and it would have worked better if we were left guessing about what happened to Lexi after her second bout of treatment.

I've not read anything of Juno Dawson's before, so this was a really good intro into this author's writing.  Recommended.

4 stars

Waiting On Wednesday - Sunflowers In February by Phyllida Shrimpton

Waiting On Wednesday is a chance for us to highlight the upcoming releases we're eagerly anticipating.  This week, my Waiting On Wednesday pick is Sunflowers In February by Phyllida Shrimpton.  Here's the blurb:

Lily wakes up one crisp Sunday morning on the side of the road. She has no idea how she got there. It is all very peaceful. and very beautiful. It is only when the police car, and then the ambulance arrive, and she sees her own body, that she realises that she is in fact . . . dead.
But what is she supposed do now? Lily has no option but to follow her body and see her family  - her parents and her twin brother start falling apart.
And then her twin brother Ben gives her a once in a deathtime opportunity - to use his own body for a while. But will Lily give Ben his body back? She is  beginning to have a rather good time . . .

The Loneliest Girl in the Universe by Lauren James

This was a really good book about a girl who lives alone on a spaceship, hurtling towards Earth II, a planet that is humanity's hope for galactic colonization.

So with a premise like that, what could possibly go wrong?

Not much, as it turns out.  This was a really gripping, interesting book that had me guessing the whole way though and ultimately left me breathlessly wishing for more. I'm trying to think of anything that went wrong with it at all and I'm coming up blank.  It was just a really good read from beginning to end.

The MC, Romy, has lived in space her whole life.  Her parents were the caretakers of a colony ship and had her while aboard before dying when she was eleven.  So now Romy is literally the lonliest girl in the universe, on track to Earth II with hundreds of embryos that will grow into the people who will start to populate the new planet.

I liked that there was no big dystopian reason for humanity to be travelling to another planet.  Things on Earth seemed just fine when Romy's parents left.  NASA is still a thing.  Technology has moved on, but not massively.  It all felt really real and believable.

Then Romy is contacted by another space ship, also headed to Earth II.  The (young, hot) commander makes contact with her and over time-delayed emails they fall in love.

And this is basically the bit that made my flesh creep.  The book is a fantastic sci-fi adventure, but it's also a metaphor for every toxic / abusive / gaslight relationship I've ever heard about.  You have someone who is incredibly vulnerable latching on to literally the first person they see no matter the cost to themselves.  It's also a metaphor (although not that much of a metaphor) on children being groomed over the internet.

I have to say, Lauren James is such a good writer.  She just sits down and tells a story and makes it look so easy.  She doesn't use loads of flash-bang, or lyrical metaphor or whatever, because she doesn't need to.  The words she uses speak for themselves and she just tells the hell out of that story.

I've read Lauren James' Next Together duology and the attached novella, and like that series this was science-based but without being infodumpy or going into masses of unnecessary, boring, incomprehensible detail.  It's like, we don't need to know exactly how a spaceship works.  We just need to know that it does.  And that's what Lauren James does.

It was cinematic, too.  I could totally see this being picked up and made into a film.  Maybe not a massive summer blockbuster, but definitely a really good, competent film.

The plot was really solid, with a good arc, twists and a decent ending.

Yeah, I'd definitely recommend this to pretty much anyone.  It was fab.

5 stars

Alex and Eliza by Melissa de la Cruz

This was a mildly okay historical romance about two people I'd never heard of.

So, because I'm British I don't really know much about the American Revolution, even though I have a history degree.  The thing is, we have so-o-o much history to cover that the Revolution, although it caused political upheaval and nearly bankrupted us, and although it was a massive thing for America, is just one aspect of Colonialism, which is one of dozens of units you can choose to study at degree level.

So I Googled Alexander Hamilton and found out that he's the guy from the Broadway show and suddenly everything made a lot more sense.  And then I read that Melissa de la Cruz had written Alex and Eliza because her daughter had seen the show and wanted to know more about the characters.  (Although this didn't sound quite right.  Because if the Broadway show had been a flop, there's no way she'd have bothered writing a book about Alexander Hamilton.  No way.  No matter how desperate her daughter was to hear more about him.  And why didn't she just tell her daughter to Google him?  No, she wanted to ride the successful coattails of the show.)

So the story was okay.  Just okay.  The writing was a bit clunky and veered constantly from a starchy, pseudo-historical style of narration to weirdly anachronistic.  The plot didn't have much going on except for Alex and Eliza falling in love and a lot of detail about the dresses everyone wore.  However, it was totally readable and really quite sweet.

Plus, I found out who Benedict Arnold was, whose name I've heard hundreds of times without ever really knowing what he was famous for.

Also, it made me Google the American Revolution and find out a bit more about it, so that was good.

I think the reason this didn't really resonate with me was that effectively it was just a fairly simple historical romance with no real bite, centered around two people named Alex and Eliza.  Neither of them had achieved the great things Wikipedia tells me they went on to achieve, so they were just a bit bland.  Eliza was feisty, Alex was smitten but that was about it.  Usually in romances, the MCs have a few more character traits injected into them, but the author hadn't done that here.  Maybe she'd relied on them being real life characters and everyone knowing what they were famous for, or the fact that there's a hugely successful Broadway production featuring them and so left the reader to fill in the blanks, but obviously for me that didn't work.

So yeah.  Probably recommended for Americans or people who have seen Hamilton.

3 stars

The Mermaid's Daughter by Ann Claycomb

This was a gentle, interesting book about a curse that had been handed down from mother to daughter for over a century.  

Kathleen's mother killed herself when Kathleen was a baby and Kathleen has grown up with the same searing pain in her feet that her mother endured all her life, as well as the sensation that her tongue has been cut out.  She's a soprano in an opera programme at college and her girlfriend Harry worries about her constantly, but when they take a trip back to Kathleen's home country of Ireland they find out that Kathleen's malady is far older and stranger than they could have imagined.

The story is told from four viewpoints - Kathleen, Harry, Robin and the Sea Witches - and usually this number of narrators might feel like a jumble, but here it actually worked.  I think it was because the book was so long - each narrator had a chance to tell their story fully and the reader had plenty of opportunity to grow accustomed to their voice.

I really loved the two main characters in this book - Kathleen and Harry - and I thought their relationship was really strong and sweet. 

In some areas it felt a bit over-long for the amount of plot that was included.  There were some long descriptions about the process of composing music and there was so much narrative about the pain in Kathleen's feet.  I mean, I get that chronic pain affects your life constantly, but this was a LOT of talk about Kathleen's feet.  

I liked the ending to Kathleen's story.  I think it worked.  I wasn't too sure about the Hans Christian Anderson sub-story that was included at the end.  It was okay, but it didn't really add anything to the main story and I think it would have worked better as a separate novella.

All in all this was a sweet book.  not overly taxing, but an interesting read.  Recommended.

4 stars

Waiting On Wednesday - Your One And Only by Adrianne Finlay

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly meme that gives us all the chance to highlight upcoming releases we're eagerly anticipating.  This week, my Waiting on Wednesday pick is Your One and Only by Adrianne Finlay.  Here's the blurb ...

Jack is a walking fossil. The only human among a sea of clones. It’s been hundreds of years since humanity died off in the slow plague, leaving the clones behind to carry on human existence. Over time they’ve perfected their genes, moving further away from the imperfections of humanity. But if they really are perfect, why did they create Jack?

While Jack longs for acceptance, Althea-310 struggles with the feeling that she’s different from her sisters. Her fascination with Jack doesn’t help. As Althea and Jack’s connection grows stronger, so does the threat to their lives. What will happen if they do the unthinkable and fall in love? 

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

​This was a really interesting novel about Alison Bechdel's awkward, tense relationship with her father, who died when she was in college, and how his repressed nature affected her and her brothers.

I'd heard of Bechdel before as the inventor of the Bechdel or Bechdel-Wallace Test (which asks whether a work of fiction features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man) and that was literally all I knew about her. This autobiographical graphic novel pulls precisely zero punches when describing Bechdel's childhood and adolescence. It wasn't an abusive upbringing as such, but her father's repressed homosexuality colours every aspect of their home life.

There was a section on James Joyce's Ulysses which I could have done without (can't stand Joyce), but other than that this was a really interesting book. Definitely recommended.

4 stars

Nina Is Not Okay by Shappi Khorsandi

Nina is seventeen and likes to have a drink with her mates when she goes out.  Who doesn't?  Everyone drinks, don't they?  Except not everyone drinks quite as much as Nina, and then one night she comes home with her knickers in her hand after being booted out of a nightclub with no real recollection of what happened, but a sneaking suspicion that it was something not good.

I was really interested to read this book - I've seen Shappi Khorsandi do stand up before and she's bitingly funny, so I was keen to see what she'd be like as an author.  I wasn't disappointed.

Nina was a superb MC - she wasn't particularly pleasant, because people on a self-destructive spiral generally aren't.  She did have good aspects, though, like her love for her younger sister.

The story was a lot darker than I thought it would be - all the things Nina got up to and happened to her when she was drunk were pretty awful.  I kind of went away from the book thinking I'd never drink again.  It was also really emotional - it sucked me in, chewed me up and spat me back out again once I'd finished.

As well as tackling alcoholism, Nina Is Not Okay also tackles social media and living in a society where all your mistakes can be published online for everyone to see and where nothing really ever goes away. Another issue tackled is rape culture and at first I thought the author was trying to downplay the effects of rape culture, which would just have been weird, but then she comes down like a hammer on it at the end and I could see that all along she was talking about how rape culture is just so ingrained in society that we don't even acknowledge it half the time.

The only thing that bothered me about the whole story was Nina's mum's reaction to her addiction.  She knew that Nina was drinking too much (stealing booze, getting drunk in the daytime on her own) and had lived with an alcoholic for years, but still moved all the way to Germany and left Nina to fend for herself.  Obviously, this doesn't go well and it really confused me because yes, there are obviously parents who would do this but in all other respects Nina's mum was pretty engaged so it didn't really ring true.

In all other areas though, this was a stellar book and a really worthwhile read.

4.5 stars