Claire Stevens's Blog, page 25

Sliver by Ira Levin

Eh. This wasn't great. Not totally apalling, but not great.

So - background. I've read most of Ira Levin's books (Rosemary's Baby, A Kiss Before Dying, Stepford Wives, The Boys From Brazil) and have really enjoyed them. He's a master of saying a lot without using many words, of building tension through innocuous events and of writing strong female characters who live in situations where female strength isn't encouraged.

So, yeah. I'm a bit of a fan.

Sadly, I was not a fan of Sliver.

The premise is that a hotshot publishing executive moves into a sliver (very thin) apartment block in New York that is, unbeknownest to her, fittedout with hundreds of video cameras that record the movements of all its inhabitants.

I found it really hard to like the protagonist - she was super whiney and I really didn't like the romatic relationship she enters into. The guy shehooks up with openly tells her he's attracted to her because she looks like his mother and she thinks that this is A-OK. Like, not a problem that you have a boner for your mum, Oedipus, let's jump into bed and declare our undying instalove for each other. So bizarre.

Unfortunately, where Levin's other books use a minimum of words to express a whole lot of feelings, plot and tension, this book does the complete opposite. I didn't need to know about Kay going furniture shopping - it had no relevance to the plot. A whole lot of the side-characters could havebeen cut out - they added nothing. In fact, I think this whole book could have been carved down to a long-ish short story.

Actually, I think Levin's editor might have asked him tothink about paring down the word count at some point, because he does this really weird thing that I've never seen in any of his other books - he misses out a whole bunch of pronouns. Like this:

She hung up [the phone].
Sat reading.
Scratched her neck.
Took a shower.
Saw movement beyond the steamy glass.

This happens a lot in the book, and it really irritated me.

The reason Sliver is a two-star rather than a one-star is because (a) the premise was pretty cool and (b) I'm in a good mood today.

If you want a creepy read, go for (in this order):

Stepford Wives
Rosemary's Baby
A Kiss Before Dying
The Boys From Brazil.

Don't bother with Sliver. It's really not representative of Levin's work.

2 stars

Angel Catbird by Margaret Atwood

Wow. This was really bad.

I'm really careful about giving out one star reviews, but this was definitely one star.

I'm gutted I didn't like this more than I did. I've read a few Margaret Atwood books before and have really enjoyed her narrative style, sharp characterisation and social commentary. Sadly none of that was present here.

The premise is is that the winner of Worst Comic Book Name Protagonist 2016, Strig Feleedus, has been headhunted to start on a top secret gene-slicing project at a research facility. Very quickly, he comes up with the solution only to accidentally administer it to himself, only to turn into ... Angel Catbird!

My main problem with this graphic novel was how unrealistic it was. I don't mean in the whole man-turns-into-cat-bird-hybrid thing - if anything, that was the most realistic thing in the book. I mean every single conversation, the characterisation, the pace and construct of the plot. You know, little stuff like that.

The exposition was was the kind of level you'd expect to see in a seven-year-old's story - clunky, awkward and over the top. Who randomly goes up to the new person in the canteen at work and asks if they're working on a secret project? Or, after two minutes of conversation with said newbie, reveals their theory that newbie's predecessor was murdered? Actually, I'm imagining this happening at work for real (especially as we have a new person starting next week) and it's kind of making me laugh.

The art isn't good. I don't read many comic books or graphic novels, but it looks derivative. And the artist manages to catch the characters pulling some really odd faces, like when you photograph someone when they're just about to sneeze.

Boring plot. Really boring. Wasn't interested in what was going on and it definitely didn't read like the first volume of a graphic novel, which is the issue when you're trying to draw the reader in and get them interested in buying subsequent issues.

Plus - and this really pissed me off - this issue was in hardback format and it's quite thick. The story is only seventy pages though. The rest of the book is just padding with loads more examples of the crap art.

In conclusion, this was shit. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

1 star

Waiting On Wednesday - Everything Beautiful Is Not Ruined by Danielle Younge-Ullman

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 Everything Beautiful is not Ruined by Danielle Younge-Ullman.  Here's the blurb:

Ingrid has made a deal with her mother: she gets to go to the school of her choice as long as she completes a three-week wilderness programme.

But when Ingrid arrives, she quickly realizes there has been a terrible mistake: there will be no marshmallows or cabins here. Instead, her group will embark on a torturous trek, with almost no guidance from the two counsellors and supplied with only the things they can carry. On top of this, the other teen participants are "at risk youth", a motley crew of screw-ups, lunatics and delinquents.

But as the laborious days go by, and as memories of her complicated past come flooding back, Ingrid must confront the question of whether she shares more in common with these troubled teens than she's willing to admit.
 
 What about you? What’s your Waiting on Wednesday pick this week?
 
 

The Potion Diaries by Amy Alward

When the Princess of Nova accidentally poisons herself with a love potion meant for her crush, she falls crown-over-heels in love with her own reflection. Oops. A nationwide hunt is called to find the cure, with competitors travelling the world for the rarest ingredients, deep in magical forests and frozen tundras, facing death at every turn.

Enter Samantha Kemi - an ordinary girl with an extraordinary talent. Sam's family were once the most respected alchemists in the kingdom, but they've fallen on hard times, and winning the hunt would save their reputation. But can Sam really compete with the dazzling powers of the ZoroAster megapharma company? Just how close is Sam willing to get to Zain Aster, her dashing former classmate and enemy, in the meantime?

And just to add to the pressure, this quest is ALL OVER social media. And the world news.

No big deal, then.
 
Eh.  This was okay, but only okay.
 
The thing I liked most about The Potion Diaries was the world.  It was completely original and fun - a world where there was magic, but only accessible to ‘talented’ people, but there’s also cool stuff like teleportation and alchemy and the inclusion of wide-scale social media gave it a really fun, contemporary feel.
 
The plot itself was okay, and it centred around the hunt for the ingredients to counteract the love potion that the princess has accidentally taken.  I never quite worked out how she managed to take the potion herself and I somehow skated over the explanation of how the alchemists knew which ingredients they should be looking for, but it was fun all the same.  There’s also a romance subplot, but mostly the book was all about the hunt for ingredients.
 
I didn’t really buy into the romance.  It felt a bit tame.  Zain seemed nice enough, and Samantha was nice enough, but it was kind of like when a friend of a friend gets together with a guy she likes.  You’re pleased for them and everything, but you’re not really invested.  You know?  They could get together or not and it wouldn’t make a whole lot of difference to your life.  Samantha and Zain’s relationship was like that for me.
 
I think the whole book had a nice feel - it was fluffy and light, like a strawberry mousse and  it reminded me of a modern-day fairy tale - but it lacked the tension to keep me properly hooked.  I’d recommend it, but only if you tend to go for YA at the lower end of the age scale.  To be honest, I would have no qualms recommending this for an MG audience.

3 stars

Waiting On Wednesday - A Tragic Kind of Wonderful by Eric Lindstrom

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 A Tragic Kind of Wonderful by Eric Lindstrom.  Here's the blurb:
 
How can you have a future if you can’t accept your past?

Mel Hannigan doesn’t have it easy. Mourning the death of her firework of a brother, facing the loss of three friendships that used to mean everything to her and struggling to deal with a condition that even her closest friends don’t know about. To protect herself and everyone else, Mel tries to lock away her heart, to live quietly without pain – but also without hope.

Until the plight of an old friend, and meeting someone new, shows her that the risk is worth taking, that opening up to life – and who you really are – is what can make everything glorious… And that maybe Mel can discover a tragic kind of wonderful of her very own.

A beautiful, captivating story about living with mental illness, and loving – even with a broken heart.
 
What about you? What’s your Waiting on Wednesday pick this week?
 
 

Twisted Palace by Erin Watts

Warning: spoilers for the first two books ...
 
These Royals will ruin you…
 
Blimey.  This trilogy has absolutely knocked my socks off.  I guess I must really been in the mood for a trashy romance/soap opera read and this has really hit the target.
 
The story so far ...
 
Ella, an orphan who started her career as a stripper at fifteen years old, has been rescued from a life of having dollar bills tucked into her g-string nightly by the best friend of the father she never met, who recently died in a handgliding accident.  This guy, who happens to be a billionaire, has five insanely-hot, over-sexed sons who attend a prep school that makes Dante’s Second Circle of Hell sound like an OAP’s garden party.  And guess where Ella’s going to school?  Despite a rocky start, Ella strikes up a love affair with one of the five sons, Reed, (despite the other sons referring to Ella as their sister, which is kinda icky when you think about it) much to the annoyance of the Pretty Mean Girls at school and his dad’s girlfriend and Ella walks in to find her new beau in bed with the dad’s girlfriend.  Ella runs away, so the guys all have to track her down across country and drag her kicking and screaming back home.  Throw in blackmail, pregnancy scares and a whole bunch of rich-kid angst and in the cliffhangeriest ending I’ve ever read, Reed gets arrested for murder and Ella’s bio dad, Steve, literally comes back from the dead.
 
Did I miss anything?
 
I shouldn’t like these books as much as I did, but damn.  It was like they were made of crack, or something.
 
Ella and Reed have virtually nothing in common, other than intense physical attraction.  They have no conversations worth mentioning, and he’s a complete alpha male, and yet I found myself really rooting for them.  The plot is like something the Hollyoaks writing team chucked in the bin for being too implausible and yet I couldn’t stop turning the pages.
 
The roller-coaster melodrama follows Ella and Reed as they try to get Reed’s arrest for the murder of Brooke overturned.  At the same time, Ella is uprooted from the Royal mansion to go and live with Steve, her bio dad, and his Charmsville wife, Dinah.  Steve turns out to be kind of a wanker, but Ella feels compelled to give her relationship with him a go, what with him being her only living relative and all that.  Dinah is just as delightful as she was in the first two books, but we also get to see a bit more of her character and understand her a bit better.
 
The identity of the real murderer kept me guessing right to the end and in true Royal style everything gets revealed with a huge bang.
 
This has been such a fun trilogy - I’d totally recommend it.

5 stars

Waiting On Wednesday - Wishbones by Virginia McGregor

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 Wishbones by Virginia McGregor.  Here's the blurb:

 Feather Tucker has two wishes:

1) To get her mum healthy again

2) To win the Junior UK swimming championships

When Feather comes home on New Year’s Eve to find her mother – one of Britain’s most obese women- in a diabetic coma, she realises something has to be done to save her mum’s life. But when her Mum refuses to co-operate Feather realises that the problem run deeper than just her mum’s unhealthy appetite.

Over time, Feather’s mission to help her Mum becomes an investigation. With the help of friends old and new, and the hindrance of runaway pet goat Houdini, Feather’s starting to uncover when her mum’s life began to spiral out of control and why. But can Feather fix it in time for her mum to watch her swim to victory? And can she save her family for good?
 
What about you? What’s your Waiting on Wednesday pick this week?

Broken Prince by Erin Watt

*Spoilers for Paper Princess*
 
So, literally the second I finished Paper Princess I bought Broken Prince.  After *that* ending, I couldn’t wait to see what was going to happen next.  I was also intrigued because I knew Broken Prince would be a dual-viewpoint novel.
 
I wasn’t disappointed.  The action picks up just before Paper Princess finished - just before Ella walked in to see Reed in bed with Brooke.  Ew.  So yeah, there’s that and the fall-out from Ella discovering that her maybe-boyfriend is hooking up with his dad’s girlfriend.
 
The whole books is like ‘some kind of misunderstanding’ world, with a detour through ‘I have to keep secrets from you for your own good’.  It had me absolutely hooked from the first page to the final page.  And what an ending!  It had me open-mouthed with shock-horror and I immediately downloaded the third book in the series.
 
I just don’t know why I loved this book (and its predecessor) so much, but I did.  It has everything I usually hate about books (alpha males, token mean girls, no diversity, a load of rich people being mean to each other and whining about their first-world problems) but I still lapped it up.  And I’m not even the sort of person that likes soap operas (because this was massively like a soap opera). 
 
The only thing I can put it down to is the characterisation.  Don’t get me wrong: the characters aren’t particularly nice, but they don’t half jump off the page at you.  And even though their faults are legion, the Royal boys try so hard to keep their fragile family together that you just can’t help liking them.  They don’t exactly learn and grow as the story progresses, which would usually be a problem, but this book has the ability to turn off all rational thought in my head.  I just had to keep reading the pages.
 
Brooke gets even more poisonous in this book, which is kind of fun and only narrowly escape crossing the line into Pantomime Villain.  Her whole storyline is pretty icky in this book and the way everything ends up is pretty screwy.  It takes a massive suspension of disbelief, but there’s something in the writing that allows you to turn off your Reality Checker and just go with the flow.
 
So, I’m reading the last book now.  It’s just as crazy as the previous two and just as improbable and I’m loving it just as much.  I guess I’ll never really be able to explain coherently why I like this series so much.  There’s so much to dislike, but I just can’t seem to stop myself.
 
 5 stars

Apple Tree Yard by Louise Doughty

This was an okay book, but it was really only okay.  There's a massive amount of hype around it at the moment (because of the BBC adaptation) and I think that's why one of my book club friends chose it  as our book of the month, and I think my meh-ness stems from the hype.  When everyone is raving about something, it's really hard for the thing to live up to expectations.  I had this before with The Girl On The Train, and conversely I've had the opposite with books I've heard nothing about and have no expectations of.

The book opens with the protagonist, Yvonne Carmichael, in the dock being prosecuted - we don't know what for.  then we flash back

The narrative was second person, which hardly ever works, but here wasn't too bad.  However, the tone of the first few chapters were so self-absorbed that I almost gave up.  Yvonne doesn't stop going on about her achievements, her academic career, how she manages to juggle her life.  It really didn't endear me to her.

Then, around the 30% mark, it all started to get a bit more interesting and by 50% I was really enjoying it.  I dislike books where people say, 'If you get through the first third, it gets really good' (*casts side-eye at Captain Corelli's Mandolin*) as I think *all* good books should be good all the way through.  If you have to struggle to get past a section, then it stops being a good book.  And that's why Apple Tree Yard only got three stars.

3 stars

Waiting On Wednesday - The Edge of Everything by Jeff Giles

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 The Edge of Everything by Jeff Giles.  Here's the blurb:

 Every day, Zoe struggles to keep going. The cruel winter took her father’s life and left her angry and brokenhearted. As she carries her little brother through a snowstorm that could kill him in minutes, her only thought is finding shelter. The cabin beyond the woods is far from the place of safety she hoped it would be, but it is there that she meets a man whose muscular body marked with strange and primitive tattoos hints at an extraordinary story. He has the power to light up the lake, and with it, Zoe’s world.


Zoe calls the stranger X. He is a bounty hunter, tormented by the evils of his victims that course through his veins. X has never felt anything but hate, until he meets Zoe. She shows him what his heart is really for, and if they can find a way to be together, just maybe his pain can help Zoe forget her own.

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