Claire Stevens's Blog, page 23

Waiting on Wednesday - Countless by Karen Gregory

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly meme that was created by Jill at Breaking the Spine and it's a chance for us all to highlight the upcoming releases we're eagerly anticipating.  This week, my Waiting on Wednesday pick is Countless by Karen Gregory.  Here's the blurb:

'Is there anything that's concerning you?’ Felicity says. ‘College, home, boyfriends?' Though she's more or less smiling at this last one.

I don't smile. Instead, I feel my face go hot. Silence stretches as wide as an ocean.

When I look up, Felicity has this expression on her face like she's just seen Elvis. Slowly, she leans forward and in a gentle voice I've never heard her use before she says, 'Have you done a pregnancy test?'

When Hedda discovers she is pregnant, she doesn’t believe she could ever look after a baby. The numbers just don’t add up. She is young, and still in the grip of an eating disorder that controls every aspect of how she goes about her daily life. She’s even given her eating disorder a name – Nia. But as the days tick by, Hedda comes to a decision: she and Nia will call a truce, just until the baby is born. 17 weeks, 119 days, 357 meals. She can do it, if she takes it one day at a time …

Heartbreaking and hopeful by turns, Karen Gregory’s debut novel is a story of love, heartache and human resilience. And how the things that matter most can’t be counted.

What about you?  What's your Waiting on Wednesday pick this week?

Weightless by Sarah Bannan

When 15-year-old Carolyn moves from New Jersey to Alabama with her mother, she rattles the status quo of the junior class at Adams High School. A good student and natural athlete, she’s immediately welcomed by the school’s cliques. She’s even nominated to the homecoming court and begins dating a senior, Shane. When a video of Carolyn and Shane making out is sent to everyone, Carolyn goes from golden girl to slut. Gossip and bullying hound Carolyn, who becomes increasingly private and isolated.

This book was nothing like I thought it would be.  Even though it's a fairly depressing subject matter, I really enjoyed it and rattled through it in less than a day (can you tell I'm on my Easter break??)  It had been on my reading list for a while and when I finally got around to picking it up I'd kind of forgotten what it was about.

I've pasted an abridged blurb above as it pretty much encapsulates the story.  However, I would point out that the video that was circulated wasn't of Carolyn and Shane making out (unless making out means something different these days!) but actually of them having sex.  Hence the slut-shaming.

So you can probably guess that this is a high school bullying book, but there are actually more layers to it than that.  It also deals with eating disorders and how unhealthy attitudes to food arenormalised in society.  It's about culpability.  It's about parental neglect.

I'm actually glad I hadn't read the blurb on Goodreads before I read the book because there is actually a bit of a spoiler in there.  Basically, throughout the book the narrator (and more of the narrator later) alludes to an 'incident' that happened with Carolyn involving some kind of official investigation, but we're not told until the end of the book what actually happens.  So my advice is: don't read the Goodreads blurb!

The story is narrated by a first-person plural narrator.  It's a really interesting choice and it really worked well.  When you're talking about bullying, the guilty parties aren't just the bullies themselves.  Anyone who doesn't call the bullies out on their behaviour is culpable, too.  The narrator(s) give their reasons why they never did anything to stop the bullying - they had their own problems to deal with, if you stick your head over the parapet the chances are you'll get fired at too - and their defensiveness makes them sound super guilty.

Interestingly, the setting for the book, the deep south of America, almost comes across as a character in its own right.  You get such a feel for the small-town-ness of it, the social mores, the emphasison religion.  I also got the impression that the author doesn't care much for the south,or people who live there, as there's also a lot of hypocrisy, bigotry, small-mindedness and ignorance on display.

All in all I thought this was a really great book.  Definitely recommended.

4.5 stars

Captive by Aimee Carter

For the past two months, Kitty Doe's life has been a lie. Forced to impersonate the Prime Minister's niece, her frustration grows as her trust in her fake fiancé cracks, her real boyfriend is forbidden and the Blackcoats keep her in the dark more than ever.

But in the midst of discovering that her role in the Hart family may not be as coincidental as she thought, she's accused of treason and is forced to face her greatest fear: Elsewhere. A prison where no one can escape.

I read the first book in this series a couple of years ago and really enjoyed it (as I had Aimee's other books - the Goddess Test series) but for somereason it fell off my radar until the two follow up books went on sale for 99p on Kindle.  I skim-reread Pawn and dived straight back on.

This was a good sequel, but it wasn't as good as Pawn.  There's plenty of betrayal and angst, which was fine, but the actual plot just seemed to consist of Knox warningKitty not to dosomething, her doing it anyway and then suffering the consequences from which Knox has to rescue her.  I wanted to shake her - she was pretty stubborn and pig-headed at times.

During Captive, Kitty is sent to Elsewhere - the prison where undesirables are moved to.  There was some really decent world building and I really got a sense for the horror and despair of the place.  There's a whole lot of bait and switch and you never really know who to trust (but a good place to start would be: no one) or what's going to happen next.

I liked the growing relationship between Kitty and Knox and seriously, if she ends up with Boring-Arse Benjy, I'll cry.  Benjy was so tepid - like room-temperature porridge.  I wanted to poke him in the eye!

The ending Captive was really good - a right cliffhanger and I was glad I had the next book in the series already lined up on my Kindle.

3.5 stars

Waiting On Wednesday - Meg and Linus by Hanna Nowinski

Waiting On Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Jill over at Breaking the Spine and it’s a chance for us all to highlight the upcoming releases we’re eagerly anticipating.  This week, my Waiting on Wednesday pick is Meg and Linus by Hanna Nowinski.  Here's the blurb:

Can friendship, Star Trek, drama club, and a whole lot of coffee get two nerdy best friends through the beginning of their senior year of high school?

Meg and Linus are best friends bound by a shared love of school, a coffee obsession, and being queer. It s not always easy to be the nerdy lesbian or gay kid in a suburban town. But they have each other. And a few Star Trek boxed sets. They're pretty happy.

But then Sophia, Meg's longtime girlfriend, breaks up with Meg. Linus starts tutoring the totally dreamy new kid, Danny and Meg thinks setting them up is the perfect project to distract herself from her own heartbreak. But Linus isn't so sure Danny even likes guys, and maybe Sophia isn't quite as out of the picture as Meg thought she was. . . .

From crowdsourced young adult imprint Swoon Reads comes Meg & Linus by Hanna Nowinski, a fun friendship story about two quirky teens who must learn to get out of their comfort zones and take risks even if that means joining the drama club, making new friends, and learning how to stand on your own.

 
What about you? What’s your Waiting on Wednesday pick this week?

After by Morris Gleitzman

After the Nazis took my parents I was scared
After they killed my best friend I was angry
After they ruined my thirteenth birthday I was determined
To get to the forest
To join forces with Gabriek and Yuli
To be a family
To defeat the Nazis after all.

Jesus.  I feel like I've been properly through the emotional wringer with these books.

So at the end of Now, we knew that Felix had survived the war and had emigrated to Australia with Gabriek.  We know that Felix survives, so it made me wonder how he would continue to maintain interest and tension in the final two books.

He does it by serving up lashings of Nazi brutality and terror, that's how.  Gleitzman writes with a sledgehammer, which is not a style I generally enjoy but because of his subject matter I think it's actually quite appropriate.  He never once pulls his punches, which is a brave thing to do, considering this is a MG/lower YA book.  But then, when you're writing about the holocaust you really can't beat around the bush of gloss things over.

And that ending.  Bloody hell.

The thing that prevents this book from being a complete misery-fest is Felix's delightful narration and inspiring optimism.  It's like, holy shit, the kid has has had literally the worst childhood it's possible for someone to have, but he never throws his hands in the air and gives up (which he'd be perfectly entitled to do).

Like the other books, I listened to this on a Bolinda audiobook and it was narrated by the author.  This really added to the whole experience.

4 stars

Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

This morning, Kady thought breaking up with Ezra was the hardest thing she’d have to do. This afternoon, her planet was invaded.

Illuminae is one of those books that's been on my radar for bloomin' ages - ever since it came out, pretty much.  I wanted to wait until my library got a copy though, because I'd heard that it's full of documents and graphics and that kind of layout doesn't always translate that well into Kindle format.

The book is in a kind of epistlatory format, but it's emails, IM chats, official documents and so on instead of letters.  The  format is really cool and it obviously took a lot of time and effort to put everything together, but it did feel like you were never really sure what was going on.  the twists at the end (yeah, course there were twists) didn't help on this score (although they made me want to read the next book!).  I think this book borrowed quite heavily from Firefly - it's kind of a back story for the Reavers. 

So the story revolves around Kady and Ezra, two seventeen year olds on an illegal mining planet, who've just broken up.  They're both moping around, licking their wounds, when BAM!  Their planet gets attacked by a rivel mining corporation.  The  first dozen or so pages are non-stop action as everyone at the mining centre scrambles to get evacuated off their planet, which was ace.  Things quietened down a bit after that, but there were a lot of horrific scenes and grisly action as Kady and Ezra try to find out what's going on aboard the ships they're now living on.  (Spoiler Alert: it's not good).

If I'm being totally honest, I'd say this book was about 200 pages too long.  The action could have been easily condensed into about 400 pages and it would have made for a more breathtaking  ride.  As it was, there were bursts of action but actually a lot of waffle in between.  I didn't feel like the extra padding helped me to know the characters better, or added anything to the plot.

In all, I thought this book was good, but it's length let it down.  I'm still planning on reading the follow-up book, though.

3.5 stars

Now by Morris Gleitzman

Sometimes facing the past is the bravest act of all...

ONCE
I didn't know about my grandfather Felix's scary childhood.

THEN
I found out what the Nazis did to his best friend Zelda.

NOW
I understand why Felix does the things he does.

At least he's got me. My name is Zelda too. This is our story.

Now is the third book in the Once series, charting the way one Jewish boy manages to survive the Second World War, against incredible odds.

***Spoilers ahead for the first two books***

At the end of the second book, poor Felix has just seen his foster mother and friend hung in the town square for what amounts to 'looking at the Nazi officers a bit funny'as far as I could tell.

In Now, we jump straight to modern day Australia, which kind of surprised me.  It's also narrated by a young girl, instead of Felix.  It quickly turns out that the girl is Felix's granddaughter and her name is Zelda too.  Zelda has come to live with Felix while her parents are in Africa and she's having a hard time with bullies at school.

If you've read Once and Then, you'll know that Felix also has some experience of bullies.  The people that bullied Felix were six million times more deadly than the bullies  who are being mean to Zelda, but Zelda's bullies still sound pretty awful.

So obviously we find out that Felix survived the war and we also find out how he managed to survived
and what he did after the war.  I was really glad because holy shit, did that  kid have some evil crap thrown at him in the first two books, so it was nice to see that  Felix had managed to rise above the things that had happened to him (as much as anyone can) and had made a success of his life.

As the book progresses, we see that maybe the things that happened to Felix in the war are still affecting him today and when a natural disaster strikes he and Zelda have to work out what's most important. 

I'm not sure if I enjoyed this book as much as the first two.  I preferred Felix's narration to Zelda's and Zelda's situation, although horrible, couldn't really compare to the horror of what Felix went through.

I guess Morris Gleitzman initially meant for this to be the final book in the series.  It has a lot of closure about it.  So when I found out that there were two further books, it kind of spoiled them a little for me.  After all, the majoity of the tension in the first two books comes from not knowing whether Felix will survive.  I think I'm still going read the next two books though - the writing and characters are so good as I really want to see what will happen.

3.5 stars

Waiting On Wednesday - Get It Together, Delilah by Erin Gough

Waiting On Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Jill over at Breaking the Spine and it’s a chance for us all to highlight the upcoming releases we’re eagerly anticipating.  This week, my Waiting on Wednesday pick is Get It Together, Delilah by Erin Gough.  Here's the blurb:

Seventeen-year-old Delilah Green wouldn't have chosen to do her last year of school this way, but she figures it's working fine.

While her dad goes on a trip to fix his broken heart after her mom left him for another man, Del manages the family cafe. Easy, she thinks. But what about homework? Or the nasty posse of mean girls making her life hell? Or her best friend who won't stop guilt-tripping her? Or her other best friend who might go to jail for love if Del doesn't do something?

But really, who cares about any of that when all Del can think about is beautiful Rosa who dances every night across the street. . . . Until one day Rosa comes in the cafe door. And if Rosa starts thinking about Del, too, then how in the name of caramel milkshakes will Del get the rest of it together?
 
 What about you? What’s your Waiting on Wednesday pick this week?

March 24th, 2017

Everybody deserves to have something good in their life. At least Once.

Once is the heartbreaking, harrowing but ultimately hope-filled story of Felix, a ten year old Polish Jewish boy living through the Nazi occupation of Poland and the Holocaust.  He lives in an orphanage in the Polish mountains - his parents, who are booksellers, left him there when they went off to solve all sorts of book-related emergencies (according to Felix).

Life in the orphanage sounds pretty sad and desperate - the conditions are pretty basic, there's notmuch food and thenunsare pretty strict - but very gradually you learn the truth - that the nuns doing all they can to keep the Nazis away from the orphanage so keep the children (including a number of Jewish children) safe.

Gradually, Felix comes to realise the truth about the Holocaust and the Nazis and what is happening to the Jews in Poland (spoiler alert: nothing nice).  We're shown some of the atrocities of the Holocaust through the eyes of a ten year old child which somehow makes them all the more horrifying.

One of the most heartbreaking things I found about the story (apart from the whole Holocaust thing, which obviously gets top spot) is the way Felix makes up stories in his head as a way of trying to explain away the awful things that are happening around him.  It's just so sad.  And his horror and bravery when he realises what's going on - you really forget that this is just a little kid.

Even though there have been a lot of stories written about the Holocaust, this book ought to be required reading.  It was one of the biggest (if not the biggest) atrocities of the twentieth century and I don't think it's the kind of subject that will ever be 'done with'.  And that's the whole point.  As long as we keep reminding ourselves about what happened, then maybe we stand a chance of not repeating our mistakes.

4 stars

Waiting On Wednesday - Pretty Fierce by Kieran Scott

Waiting On Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Jill over at Breaking the Spine and it’s a chance for us all to highlight the upcoming releases we’re eagerly anticipating.  This week, my Waiting on Wednesday pick is Pretty Fierce by Kieran Scott.  Here's the blurb:

An action-packed, edge-of-your-seat novel about a teen who, when backed into a corner, fights back, from the author of What Waits in the Woods

Kaia has been on the run her whole life. The daughter of professional assassins, she knows danger-and she'll do anything to survive. After her parents vanished during a job gone bad, Kaia's spent the last year in hiding, trying to blend in as an ordinary teenager, and there's no one who makes her feel more normal, more special, than her boyfriend, Oliver.

But when she's jumped by a hit man and Oliver catches her fighting back, Kaia's secret is exposed. In a split-second decision, she flees her small town, taking Oliver with her. With hit men stalking their every move, can Kaia and Oliver protect each other long enough to uncover the mysteries of her past?
 
 What about you? What’s your Waiting on Wednesday pick this week?