Claire Stevens's Blog, page 28

November 30th, 2016

Waiting On Wednesday is a weekly meme run 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 One Wednesday pick is How To Make A Wish by Ashley Herring Blake.  Here's the blurb:

Grace, tough and wise, has nearly given up on wishes, thanks to a childhood spent with her unpredictable, larger-than-life mother. But this summer, Grace meets Eva, a girl who believes in dreams, despite her own difficult circumstances.        One fateful evening, Eva climbs through a window in Grace’s room, setting off a chain of stolen nights on the beach. When Eva tells Grace that she likes girls, Grace’s world opens up and she begins to believe in happiness again.        How to Make a Wish is an emotionally charged portrait of a mother and daughter’s relationship and a heartfelt story about two girls who find each other at the exact right time.

Sounds good, n'est-ce pas?  What about you?  What's your Waiting On Wednesday pick this week?

Heartless by Marissa Meyer

Unless you literally live under a rock at the bottom of the sea, you will have heard of Marissa Meyer’s new offering, Heartless.  Meyer is the author of the much-feted (by me) Lunar Chronicles, so imagine my impatience when I heard this book would not be released until next year (boo) and then my delight when I received an ARC from the publisher (yay).
 
So, Heartless is the Red Queen’s (from Alice In Wonderland) back story.  It’s what she did before Alice fell through the rabbit hole and how she got to be the mad monarch we all know and fear.  Catherine (the Red Queen) is a young girl who loves baking and is a favourite of the king, who is looking for a wife.  Then she meets Jest, the enigmatic court jester and starts seeing him secretly while her parents try their hardest to throw her into the path of the king.
 
I enjoyed Heartless.  It had good bits, and plenty of them.  And the good bits reminded me of what I love about Meyers’ writing.  It doesn’t exactly have bad bits either, but there were points where, like with Winter, I felt it dragged a bit.  The pace would slow right down and I’d start to drift a bit.
 
Although Alice In Wonderland is a great book, I’m not super fangirly over it.  However it was really cool to see what Meyer had done with the back stories of all the characters in Wonderland, not just the Red Queen.  For a book based on someone else’s work, it had an awful lot of imagination.
 
And I liked Catherine.  She was fun, although was possibly a bit too obedient.  And I had problems with the baking.  Because seriously, we had the Lunar Chronicles where the girls were all about their STEM subjects and saving the world and suddenly we appear to be in the 1950s because now we have an MC who aspires to baking pretty cakes and is seemingly incapable of saying to her parents, ‘No, I don’t want to marry the king, because he’s an idiot.’  The baking thing annoyed me less than the lack of gumption did, by the way.
 
And - please don’t flame me - I had problems with Jest.  More specifically I had problems with his hat.  I just can’t get behind a love interest that wanders around looking like a ninja with a festival hat on his head.  Jangly bells equal a big no-no in my book and it took the shine off what could otherwise have been a heart-thumping romance.
 
Terrible hat notwithstanding, I did like the romance between Catherine and Jest.  It was paced well and had enough twists and turns to keep it interesting.  And the denouement was good.  I mean, anyone who knows the story of Alice In Wonderland knows she ends up married to the king, but you’re still left guessing to the end as to exactly what happens with her and Jest.
 
So, this was a good book all in all, but if the pacing had been a bit tighter and the hat - oh my god, the hat, the hat, the hat - hadn’t existed, it would have been outstanding.
 
3 stars

Night Owls by Jenn Bennett

This was another book where I knew very little about it going in.  In fact I couldn’t even remember whether it was contemporary, sci-fi, fantasy or what (it’s contemporary).
 
Meeting Jack on the Owl—San Francisco's night bus—turns Beatrix's world upside down. Jack is charming, wildly attractive...and possibly one of San Francisco's most notorious graffiti artists.  But Jack is hiding a piece of himself. On midnight rides and city rooftops, Beatrix begins to see who this enigmatic boy really is.
 
There were parts of this book that I loved.  I really liked Bex and Jack - they were both a bit manic pixie-ish but were very artistic and quirky.  Bex has a thing for anatomical drawings and looks a bit like Wednesday Addams.  Jack is a tattooed, Buddhist, rockabilly graffiti artist.  I know.  It’s almost like it’s too much, but it *just about* works.  And one of the things that makes it work is how sweet they are together.  It’s a tiny bit instalovey, but I think I can forgive them.
 
We get told a *lot* about how gorgeous Jack is (although his gorgeousness is often referred to in the same sentence as his pompadour hairdo, which seemed a bit odd to me as pompadours are basically the work of the devil) but luckily he has some personality to go with his dashing good looks (and ridiculous hair).  The book also talks frankly and openly about sex, which is a good thing,
 
There was an HEA, which I liked but I could probably have done with a bit more tension within the story.  Bex and Jack’s relationship goes very smoothly and while there are some confrontations with their parents, it didn’t really have me on the edge of my seat.  The story was still fine, but it was sweet rather than emotional.
 
There were a couple of things that niggled.  Why does the boy always have to be the rich one?  Why, as a society, are we still so hung up with this Cinderella fascination?   And the pompadour.  No, sorry, Jack - you need to get  a different haircut if you want to stand a chance of going on my Book Boyfriend list.
 
4 stars

18 Months by Samantha Boyette

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, myWaiting On Wednesday pick is 18 Months by Samantha Boyette.

Alissa Reeves came out for Hannah Desarno. Hannah is smart, beautiful, and has just gone missing. Worse, she isn’t Alissa’s first girlfriend to disappear. Eighteen months ago, Alissa was caught kissing bad girl Lana Meyers. Too scared to admit her feelings for Lana, Alissa let her friends blame Lana. Weeks later when Lana disappeared, no one in their small town thought much of it until months later when her body was found.

With Hannah gone, Alissa finds herself following clues that will help her discover what happened to both girls, and the truth will change everything.

I like a good mystery, me.  And this looks like a good'un.  What about you?  What's your Waiting On Wednesday pick?

Magonia by Maria Dahvana Headley

This has to be the most bizarre book I’ve read this year.
 
I bought it ages and ages ago, but it’s been sitting on my Kindle for so long that I’d totally forgotten what it was about.   Like, completely forgotten.  I didn’t read the blurb before I started it, so I just went into it blind.  And I think this is the best way to read Magonia.
 
So the book starts off by introducing us to Aza Ray, our protagonist.  She is snarky and sarcastic and - bummer - suffers from a life-limiting lung condition.
 
I know.  There I was thinking, ‘A book about a sarcastic girl with lung problems.  Haven’t I already read this book?’ (and yes, I have, and it’s called The Fault in our Stars)
 
Except fairly soon in, Magonia takes a massive swerve off the dying-teen plotline and makes a dramatic u-turn into BizarroWorld.
 
I kind of want to talk about it, and I kind of don’t.  I really think the best way to read Magonia is to know nothing about it on the way in.  Ultimately it wasn’t my favourite read of the year, but the ‘Say - WHAT??’ part was really what kept me turning those pages.
 
The absolute best thing about this book is its imagination.  It’s absolutely bonkers.  And while the author lifted part of the premise of the book directly from Bishop Agobard’s work ‘On Hail and Thunder’, she chose a pretty obscure text to model her book on and she introduced enough bizarre stuff of her own to make me lift my eyebrows in impressed-ness.
 
I want to say it’s a unique book, but I just can’t make myself get over the fact that she lifted the concept of Magonia from someone else.  If that hadn’t been the case, this book would have got a whole extra star.
 
I thought Aza Ray and Jason were okay protagonists.  Aza Ray is a bit moany (and okay when she’s on earth and drowning in her own lungs then she’s maybe got something to moan about) and her narrative is a bit rambly but I liked that she made decisions and moved the plot along instead of just letting stuff happen to her.  Jason was okay.  I finished this book a couple of days ago but already I can’t remember much about him other than vague thoughts that he was quite a nice guy and super intelligent.
 
I’ve read some reviews where people have been thrilled about how beautiful this book was and how moving.  I’m glad they thought that way, but it’s not really something that I picked up on.  The narrative was a bit drifty and wander and I never really understood things like the ((({{{[[[ ]]]}}})))  brackets thing.  Some people love that stuff; I’m not so much of a fan.
 
It’s hard to know who to recommend Magonia to.  I’ve seen lots of reviewers whose opinions I’ve always agreed with differ wildly in their opinions of it.  I thought it was fine.  It didn’t blow me away, but I really appreciated the crazy imaginativeness of it.
 
3 stars

The Sun Is Also A Star by Nicola Yoon

I was really looking forward to The Sun Is Also A Star.  I adored Nicola Yoon’s first book, Everything Everything so I was really interested to see what she’s come up with next.
 
The Sun Is Also A Star is the story of Natasha, a scientific pragmatist who is twelve hours away from being deported to Jamaica.  Then she meets Daniel, a romantic poetry guy who is finding it hard to live to his parents’ expectations of him. 
 
The bulk of the book takes place over the course of half a day.  Interesting choice, because there’s not much you can convincingly do with character or plot development over such a short space of time.  However, Nicola Yoon makes a good job of it - neither of the characters change radically, but they do develop, and the plot manages to throw in enough twists to keep it interesting.
 
The thing that really works is the alternating viewpoints of the story.  We alternate between Natasha and Daniel, but also other seemingly random characters and we see how Natasha and Daniel affect their lives and vice versa.  This was actually one of the things I liked most - it added an extra dimension to a story that could have felt a tiny bit flat otherwise.
 
So the main premise of the book is that Natasha and Daniel meet before she is due to be deported and fall instantly in ... if not love, then super attraction.  Instalove (because, come on, that’s what it is) is such a difficult sell and I really can’t think of any authors off the top of my head who have ever pulled it off with any degree of success.
 
I have to say, I didn’t really develop a huge attachment to either Natasha or Daniel.  I thought they were nice enough characters, but they didn’t bowl me over.  And I think when you’re trying to convince your audience of the existence of instalove, you need to have two blow-me-away characters, and that just wasn’t the case. 
 
The thing I liked most about Natasha and Daniel was their lives separate of each other.  I really felt for the predicament Natasha found herself in and for the pressure Daniel found himself under.
 
Nicola Yoon takes a huge gamble with this novel and for the most part I think it pays off.  One day is a tiny timeframe to set yourself and throw in some instalove and you’ve set yourself a real challenge.  I did enjoy The Sun Is Also A Star, but for me it didn’t have the emotional resonance of Everything, Everything.  Still worth a read though.

4 stars

Panic by Lauren Oliver

I’ve been a huge Lauren Oliver fan for a long time now.  I started off with the Delirium trilogy, then the sublime Before I Fall and more recently Vanishing Girls.  I’ve enjoyed them all and I honestly thought that she would be an auto-buy author for me.
 
Not so much after reading Panic, unfortunately.
 
So Panic is a dead-end town in the middle of nowhere.  Most people just want to leave and as a way of passing the time between the end of high school and getting the hell out of Carp, teenagers have devised a game - Panic.  Heather never wanted to compete in Panic, but she ends up entering anyway in order to rescue her sister from their neglectful mother.  Dodge wants nothing more than to compete in Panic because he thinks it will bring him the revenge he is desperate for.  But when it comes to Panic, everyone has something to play for.
 
So I went into this book with really high hopes.  Something that sounds slightly Hunger-Games-y but written by Lauren Oliver?  Sign me right up!
 
Unfortunately I never really got off on the right foot with Panic. It was really hard to get into and once I was into it, it moved too slowly.   I kept waiting for it to grip me, but it never really did.
 
I really loved the premise and some of the tasks the competitors had to do were really imaginative.  I felt that the book would have been better off in the hands of another writer, though.  Gah!  As a Lauren Oliver fan I feel like a complete splitter, but there it is.  Her writing is lovely, but doesn’t lend itself to this plot.  The plot didn’t do her writing any favours, or vice versa.
 
The characters were a bit of a mixed bag.  Heather was okay, albeit a bit meh.  I liked that she had some backbone, although some of her decisions were a bit random.  Natalie was deeply unlikeable.  Dodge was fairly obsessive, and not in an interesting way.  The one I liked the most was Bishop - he was really sweet and his involvement in Panic was done for all the right reasons.
 
So one of the problems I had with Panic was Panic itself.  It was basically a massive, summer-long game of Dumb Ways To Die.  I get that people with no options will be desperate for money, but seriously?  I don’t want to do the spoilery thing, but one of the tasks especially was just ... ridiculous.  Like, I was fairly reckless as a teenager and did some really dumb things, but there’s no way real people would do what happens in Panic.
 
The thing is, I still adore Lauren Oliver.  One duff book out of six isn’t a bad strike rate.  I mean, let’s face it, I’m still going to buy her books.  I just might download the three chapter sampler first.

2.5 stars

November 09th, 2016

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 Carve the Mark by Veronica Roth.
 
Here’s the blurb:

On a planet where violence and vengeance rule, in a galaxy where some are favored by fate, everyone develops a currentgift, a unique power meant to shape the future. While most benefit from their currentgifts, Akos and Cyra do not — their gifts make them vulnerable to others’ control. Can they reclaim their gifts, their fates, and their lives, and reset the balance of power in this world?

Cyra is the sister of the brutal tyrant who rules the Shotet people. Cyra’s currentgift gives her pain and power — something her brother exploits, using her to torture his enemies. But Cyra is much more than just a blade in her brother’s hand: she is resilient, quick on her feet, and smarter than he knows.


Akos is from the peace-loving nation of Thuve, and his loyalty to his family is limitless. Though protected by his unusual currentgift, once Akos and his brother are captured by enemy Shotet soldiers, Akos is desperate to get his brother out alive — no matter what the cost. When Akos is thrust into Cyra’s world, the enmity between their countries and families seems insurmountable. They must decide to help each other to survive — or to destroy one another.

Whoah.  Love a bit of Veronica Roth, so I'm really looking forward to this one.  How about you?  What's your Waiting On Wednesday pick?

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist by David Levithan and Rachel Cohn

A couple of years ago, I read Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares by David Levithan and Rachel Cohn and I was absolutely captivated.  It has quickly become one of my favourite Christmas books.  Just lovely.
 
Since then, I have been chasing the same high with the writing duo’s other books and having finished Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist with a general sense of ‘meh’ I’ve sadly come to the conclusion that Dash and Lily is a one-off.  Nick and Norah didn’t excite me.  Naomi and Ely can do one.
 
So the premise is that Nick and Norah have both recently gone through bad break-ups.  They meet in a club one night and to escape Nick’s evil ex, he asks Norah to pretend to be his girlfriend for five minutes.  They end up spending the whole evening together, getting into all sorts of scrapes over Manhattan.
 
This was an okay book, but it was only really okay, given the monumental talent I know DL and RC are capable of.
 
It was a quick, easy read with lots of bad language, which is a big plus for me because I’m pretty foul-mouthed.
 
The action felt rushed and while I don’t have anything against Instalove as a literary trope, it somehow didn’t feel right.  I usually prefer books with a tight story arc, but the story, despite rushing, rambled quite a bit.
 
Nick and Norah were okay, but borderline obnoxious.  Norah felt quite belligerent and Nick felt like a bit of a drip.  I saw one reviewer liken their alternating chapters to excerpts from a cringey, best-kept-hidden-under-the-bed diary from when you were fourteen.  Like when you think you know literally everything there is to know about the world and everyone else is basically a cretin.  I think this is a really accurate description.  Norah was so jaded and cynical, and Nick’s narrative read like a bad Dashboard Confessional lyric.
 
Not great, considering what these two authors are capable of.
 
2.5 stars

How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff

So ... I don’t ... Huh? What was that?
 
How I Live Now is a riddle, wrapped up in a mystery, inside an enigma.  It had all the makings of a good book, and I did rattle through it fairly quickly, but there were just so many things I didn’t understand.
 
Daisy has come to live in rural England with her aunt and cousins.  They live an idyllic lifestyle in the countryside and her aunt is away on mysterious business regularly.  One day, her aunt goes to Oslo to deliver a lecture and the next day a series of bombs go off in London, as England is attacked by an unknown enemy.  Power fails, systems fail and the children become more isolated from the outside world. 
 
And that summary pretty much highlights the problems I had with this book.
 
So to start with the positives - I really liked Daisy as a character.  She had a frailty mixed with a survival streak a mile wide and I really liked that.  And the survival aspect of the story was gripping - Daisy had a lot to contend with and her resilience really shone through.
 
The story is told a few years after the action takes place and is reported as a series of memories rather than a verbatim recollection of events.  This was interesting and unusual, but had the effect of making the narrative really unclear, like trying to look through a misty window.  The style is accomplished, but unfortunately didn’t work for me.
 
Also, I needed more back story.  I know it’s a fine line between enough decent backstory and infodump, but I really needed more in this case.  There’s an amorphous war going on, or there might be because Daisy and her cousins live in the countryside and spend all their time shagging instead of, I don’t know, maybe looking at a newspaper once in a while to see if Armageddon is taking place on their doorstep.  How anyone could be that uninterested in World War Three happening is beyond me.
 
Mind you, nothing really seems pique Daisy’s curiosity.  Her cousins all seem to be psychic, but the discovery of their gifts doesn’t seem to surprise Daisy at all.  Like, ‘Oh, he can tell what I’m thinking.  But I’m not going to ask him about it, or wonder how he can do it at all.’
 
And the book has a confusing writing style, too.  The author spends 80% of the book using commas like they cost money, no speech marks at all (squints eyes) and Random Capitalisation Everywhere.
 
Honestly.  She does the Capitalisation thing for No Good Reason as far as I can tell.  Maybe it’s in place of quote marks?  Who Can Tell?
 
Gah.  I don’t know.  I did enjoy the story.  Dystopian road trips are a good thing (in fiction.  I imagine they would be fairly appalling in real life) what with the horror of a world gone mad and the terror of maybe not being reunited with your loved ones.  The style was offputting, though.
 
If you like Unreliable Narrators and Stuff Not Really Making Sense, then maybe you should Give This Book A Go.  (See what I did there?)
 
3 stars