Claire Stevens's Blog, page 14

Something Not Related To Books

So, I've found myself in the Secret Santa thing at work.

For anyone unfamiliar with Secret Santa, (1) Where do you live?  Under a rock? and (2) You lucky, lucky thing to never have to go through this ordeal.  Secret Santa is this group gift-exchange where a bunch of people (often work-based) decide that you really can't be arsed buying gifts for everyone and that you'd rather pull names out of a hat to see which lucky, lucky human being you will be bestowing a present upon.

It's supposed to be anonymous, but there are only five people in our Secret Santa and we all work in the same room.  So it doesn't take much to guess who your present came from. 

And here's the rub:  technically I'm everyone's boss.  So I need a nice present for around the £10 - £15 mark, that isn't a humorous gift and that doesn't say 'I'm the FUN boss', or make me look like a wanker.  Just something ... nice.

Now, when I say 'something nice', obviously I mean 'books'.  But I don't even know if my Secret Santa recipient reads (*assumes Victorian fainting lady position*).  Or if she does, what genre(s) she reads.  Also I got kind of burnt last year when I bought ACOTAR and ACOMAF for my Secret Santa  before realising on the 27th December that books containing graphic sex scenes might not be appropriate in a workplace gift-exchange.

I've just looked on the Boots website in their Christmas gift section and literally everything is toiletry-based.  Everything.  I mean, I know they're Boots the Chemist, but fuck me.  Not every woman thinks Christmas begins and ends with bloody bath bombs.

So here's my Christmas plea:  

Dear Internet

Please suggest what I can get for my secret Santa.  It can't be chocolates or wine as she is on Slimming World.  Not sure if she reads (likely does, but possibly not YA).  Nothing work-based, as I don't want to remind her about work during the Christmas holidays.  Nothing humour-based as I don't want to look like a tosser.  Not sure if she supports sport teams.  Not sure what music she likes.  (You'd think I'd know more about the person I've spent almost a whole year sitting opposite to).  She enjoys baking and runs a small cake-making business in her spare time, but I'm assuming she already has a bunch of recipe books and stuff.  She has a young son.

Any suggestions gratefully received.

Yours

Book Blog Bird.

We Come Apart by Sarah Crossan and Brian Conaghan

Nicu has emigrated from Romania and is struggling to find his place in his new home. Meanwhile, Jess's home life is overshadowed by violence. When Nicu and Jess meet, what starts out as friendship grows into romance as the two bond over their painful pasts and hopeful futures. But will they be able to save each other, let alone themselves?

So.  I did really like this book and I rattled through it in a morning.  I'm not saying I didn't like it.

I don't really know why this didn't blow me away *quite* as much as Sarah Crossan's other books.  It had excellent writing (free verse, which, as I've mentioned before, I don't like as a rule, but with Sarah Crossan's writing it just really, really works), it's UKYA, slow-burn romance and massive social issues (racism, bullying, domestic violence, child abuse), but it didn't leave me bug-eyed and gasping for breath like the author's other books do.  The only reason I can come up with  is that she collaborated with another author, so I wasn't getting pure, unadulterated Sarah Crossan.

Still.  Please don't think that this wasn't a good book.  It really was.  I loved the characters, who were very real and human in their failings and I loved the situation, which was horrific and something I didn't think the authors would be able to write their way out of.

And they kind of do and kind of don't .  One thing I've found about Sarah Crossan's books is that she never gives a neatly-wrapped ending, because her stories are about life, and life doesn't have neatly-wrapped endings.

In conclusion, this was a good book.  Really good.  not my favourite Sarah Crossan book, but still a country mile better than a lot of other books out there.

4 stars

Waiting On Wednesday - Recipe For Hate by Warren Kinsella

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly meme that gives us all a chance to highlight the upcoming releases that we’re eagerly anticipating.  This week my Waiting on Wednesday pick is Recipe For Hate by Warren Kinsella.
 
Here’s the blurb:

The X Gang is a band led by the scarred, silent, and mostly unreadable Christopher X. His best friend, Kurt Blank, is a hulking and talented punk guitarist living in the closet. Sisters Patti and Betty Upchuck form the core of the feminist Punk Rock Virgins band, and are the closest to X and Kurt. Assorted hangers-on and young upstarts fill out the X Gang’s orbit: the Hot Nasties, the Social Blemishes, and even the legendary Joe Strummer of The Clash. Together, they’ve all but taken over Gary’s, an old biker bar. Then over one dark weekend, a bloody crime nearly brought it all to an end.

Based on real events, Warren Kinsella tells the story of the X Gang’s punk lives — the community hall gigs, the anti-racist rallies, the fanzines and poetry and art, and what happened after the brutal murders of two of their friends.

Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman

Oh no.  I was not a fan of this book.  Which is sad because I really liked the film and the film was one of the reasons I picked this up.

While the story is fairly similar to the film, the whole tone of the book irked me like a cat having its fur rubbed the wrong way.

The author has no concept of the difference between love and lust.  Like no idea at all.

No one in the book has any idea how to form a functional relationship that doesn't revolve around sex.

There is a general theme that runs through the book that some women can bewitch a man so that they will do literally anything to have sex with them and can't be held responsible for their actions because the women are just so darn pretty.  Well that just sounded a bit too rapey for me, especially when I read passages like this one, during a scene where a couple have been making out in a car and the woman stops things:

"At this moment, Gary wishes he could grab her and force her, at least until she gave in.  He'd like to make love to her right here, he'd like to do it all night and not give a damn about anything else, and not listen if she told him no."

Well, that just sounds peachy.  

In another scene, one of the sisters in the book turns down a guy who she actually loves but knows she would ultimately make unhappy.  She keeps telling him she doesn't want to have anything to do with him but instead of respecting her wishes and backing off, he phones her constantly like a creepy stalker, and the author tells us how he wanders round town sporting a massive boner for her, which just made me cringe.

The whole tone of this book is that men fall so helplessly in love with women that they can't help themselves and therefore can't be held responsible for their actions.  That it's somehow romantic to ignore a woman when she tells you she doesn't want to have anything to do with you.

Wrong.  Just wrong.

0 stars (I know!)

Holding Up The Universe by Jennifer Niven

***This review contains spoilers***

*sings* My love will save you ......   My lo-o-o-ove will sa-a-a-a-a-a-a-ave you!

This was an okay book, but it suffered immensely from the My Love Will Save You trope and just a bit of general Not Much Happening.

Meet Libby Strout.  She holds the unpleasant title of 'America's Fattest Teen'  Except, she's turned it around and she's losing the weight she gained after her mum died.

Now meet Jack.  He's full of swagger but behind the facade he is struggling with a neurological disorder called prosopagnosia, or face-blindness.  Like he literally cannot remember anyone's faces, not even his parents'.

Libby and Jack meet and of course they gradually fall in love.  And Jack discovers that Libby's is the only face he can remember.

Aaaah.

Or bleeugh.  Depending on how schmaltzy you like your YA.

For me, it was more bleeugh than aaaah.  The whole tone of the book was a bit too navel-gazey for me.  It was okay, I didn't throw it across the room in annoyance, or DNF, but not enough happened by a long chalk and what did happen was so over-analysed it got a bit tedious.

I really liked Libby, I thought Jack was a knob to start with and although I didn't like him that much at the end he at least developed and changed a bit as a character, so that was good.  The writing wasn't atrocious but it suffered from being a bit purple-y, but it just needed more happening with the plot.

Also the thing where Jack can only remember Libby's face?  FML.  

Now I'm not a neurologist, and I don't have a medical degree,  but I'd be willing to wager that falling in love can't cure a neurological disorder that's been caused by trauma.  It just felt shoehorned in and yet I could also see it coming from the very first time Jack tells us he has prosopagnosia.  It was so glaringly obvious that Libby's face would be the one he recognises, the author might as well have hung a big neon sign on it.

Also, how does any six year old manage to hide severe face-blindness from his family?  And carry on hiding for twelve years?  No, sorry.

And there was the mean girl trope.  Jack's super-attractive ex-girlfriend fat-shames Libby and is generally evil for no discernable reason.  Because, hey.  That's just how attractive folk roll.

I know this book has come under a lot of fire for insensitive portrayal of characters who are neurodiverse and overweight, but I didn't find it offensive as much as shallow.  I just didn't see that the author had thought much about these conditions while at the same time making them her characters' defining characteristics.  I was a little bit pleased when I reached the end of this book and when I thought about it, like really thought about it, I realised that all I'd read was a navel-gazey, angsty romance.  And not a very charismatic one at that.

2 stars

Waiting On Wednesday - Plague Land by Alex Scarrow

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly meme that gives us all a chance to highlight the upcoming releases that we’re eagerly anticipating.  This week my Waiting on Wednesday pick is Plague Land by Alex Scarrow.
 
Here’s the blurb:

The reports start slowly at first: an outbreak in Africa at the end of the evening news, as a headline at the bottom of a website. They’re easy to ignore, and most people do just that. Except for Leon. His mom shakes off the concerns , sure that they shouldn’t be worried about some illness on a distant continent. Until one week later, the virus hits England and chaos ensues, dotting the English countryside with the haunting remains of liquefied victims.

But what scares Leon the most is the way the virus moves- like it’s adapting. Like it has an agenda. If Leon’s going to fight back, he’ll need a plan. But first, he needs to stay alive.

Genuine Fraud by E Lockhart

I really enjoyed this book.  I felt it was exactly the right balance of entertaining and thought-provoking, it was suspenseful and it kept me reading into the night.

I think it really helped that I didn't know anything about the book going in.  I saw it on Netgalley, requested it (because it's E Lockhart) and then totally forgot about it until it popped up in my emails.  I didn't read the blurb or any other reviews, so I had no clue about the background of the characters or the structure of the plot.  Everything was a surprise so the twists the author had built in came as a total surprise.

I loved the structure of the book - it's written in reverse, like Memento.  I guess it was a bit of a gimmick, but it was fun and interesting.  There were a few small hints in each chapter about what had just happened (and would be coming up in the next chapter, which kept things suspenseful.

The plot itself is lifted by the fact that the story is written in reverse.  It's kind of a retelling of The Talented Mr Ripley and the big draw for me was that I started off with one set of expectations and an image of Jule in my head and gradually my whole perception changed, which wouldn't have been the case if the book had been written chronologically.

All in all this was a pretty decent book and I'm glad I read it.

I received a copy of Genuine Fraud in exchange for an honest review.  Many thanks to Netgalley and Hot Key Books.

4 stars

Waiting On Wednesday - Ready To Fall by Marcella Pixley

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly meme that gives us all a chance to highlight the upcoming releases that we’re eagerly anticipating.  This week my Waiting on Wednesday pick is Ready To Fall by Marcella Pixley.
 
Here’s the blurb:

When Max Friedman’s mother dies of cancer, instead of facing his loss, Max imagines that her tumor has taken up residence in his brain. It's a terrible tenant—isolating him from family, distracting him in school, and taunting him mercilessly about his manhood. With the tumor in charge, Max implodes, slipping farther and farther away from reality.

Finally, Max is sent to the artsy, off-beat Baldwin School to regain his footing. He joins a group of theater misfits in a steam-punk production of Hamlet where he becomes friends with Fish, a girl with pink hair and a troubled past, and The Monk, an edgy upperclassman who refuses to let go of the things he loves.

For a while, Max almost feels happy. But his tumor is always lurking in the wings—until one night it knocks him down and Max is forced to face the truth, not just about the tumor, but about how hard it is to let go of the past. At turns lyrical, haunting, and triumphant, Ready to Fall is a story of grief, love, rebellion and starting fresh from acclaimed author Marcella Pixley.

Alex, Approximately by Jenn Bennett

This wasn't a bad book and there were some really cool aspects.  Ultimately though, it was a fun summer romance but not much else.

It's basically a pastiche of The Shop Around The Corner, the old film, or You've Got Mail, the remake.  Two people correspond online and end up meeting in real life where they first of all hate each other and then find that they're falling for each other.  It's fun stuff, but nothing that hasn't been done before and not a whole lot was added to it to set it apart from similar stories that have been told before.

I really liked:

Bailey (she was cool)
Bailey's motor scooter
The museum
Bailey's dad
The town it was set in

I was not a fan of:

Bailey's mum (I never did find out why she spent an entire summer not contacting her daughter *who had recently been shot*)
Porter

Liking Bailey but not really liking Porter made me kind of ambivalent about the whole romance, but on balance I liked it more than disliked it. 

Also, I've known surfers in real life and they were all dickwads, so the inclusion of so many surfers in this book did nothing to warm me to it.

It was quite an easy read but I found it hard to stay properly engaged with it and as a result it took me about a week to finish.  I preferred The Night Owls (Anatomical Shape of a Heart)

3 stars

Every Heart a Doorway by Seannan McGuire

Children have always disappeared under the right conditions; slipping through the shadows under a bed or at the back of a wardrobe, tumbling down rabbit holes and into old wells, and emerging somewhere... else.

But magical lands have little need for used-up miracle children.

Nancy tumbled once, but now she’s back. The things she’s experienced... they change a person. The children under Miss West’s care understand all too well. And each of them is seeking a way back to their own fantasy world.

Yup, I really liked this book.  It had been recommended to me by lots of people whose opinions I trust and I love it when my expectations (hopes) for a book match my enjoyment.  

It's kind of a short book - almost a novella really - but it still packs plenty of world building and action in.  In essence, it's the story of what happens to all those children who have wonderful adventures through looking glasses or dimensional portals when they have to return home again.  Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children is where despairing parents send children who stubbornly and persistently talk about being the friend of a spider queen, or having lived for a decade in the halls of the dead.

Mixed in with this interesting premise is a murder mystery (of course) and some really excellent and well-developed  characters who are all looking for the way back into the worlds they were forced to leave behind.

I raced through it in a couple of sittings and I now want to go and find other books in this series.

4 stars