Claire Stevens's Blog, page 38

Bird Box by Josh Malerman

Holy flippin’ hell.  This is the scariest book I think I’ve ever read.

So I can’t actually remember who recommended Bird Box to me.  I think there was a spate of everyone reading it on Goodreads, so I just popped it on my TBR list (on Amazon) and then bought randomly with a Christmas Amazon voucher.

Bird Box opens with Malorie deciding to take her two children up the river on a boat journey.  Aah, nice, you think.  Except it’s not nice at all.  The boat journey is Malorie and her children’s last chance to reach a safe haven away from the creature that have caused the majority of the world’s population to kill themselves.  One look at these creatures is enough to send you stark, staring mad - so mad that you’ll immediately kill yourself by whatever means you have available, so Malorie  and her children have spent the last four years indoors, blankets pinned up at the windows, only venturing outside to get water and even then they keep their blindfolds tightly secured.  

So Malorie and her kids have a tough journey ahead of them up the river.  And they don’t really know where they’re going.  And they can’t look at anything for the whole time they’re outside.

The story of how Malorie and her children try to work their way up the river to relative safety is interspersed with chapters filling the reader in on the events leading up to their boat journey - from the initial outbreaks of madness and suicide in Russia through to the collapse of the world as we know it.

This book is possibly the creepiest story I’ve ever read.  Recently I moaned about The Exorcist and how it relies on shock value to keep the reader interested.  This wasn’t the case here.  There’s really very little in the way of shock value in Bird Box.  It’s all about hints and wondering and never really knowing what’s outside.

It plays on classic human fears: the unknown and the dark.  There are a few gruesome bits, but very few details are given - you don’t get lines and lines of description, just a few well-chosen words.  You’re left to fill in the details with your imagination, and it really does allow your imagination to run wild.

And the finale.  Holy crap.  My hands were shaking as I read it.

I don’t usually go for scary books (although coincidentally this is the second scary book I’ve read so far this month), but I really enjoyed it.  I don’t think it’s enough to turn me onto the horror genre permanently (there was an unfortunate incident the other night where I’d been reading Bird Box at the gym and had to drive home convinced that one of the Creature was in the car with me and then slipped over on my driveway while I was running for my front door) but if you’re a horror aficionado (or even just a Good Story aficionado) then I would definitely recommend this.

4.5 stars

Waiting On Wednesday - Ivory and Bone by Julie Eshbaugh

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've been eagerly anticipating.  This week, my Waiting On Wednesday pick is Ivory and Bone by Julie Eshbaugh.  Here's the blurb:

A prehistoric fantasy—with allusions to Pride and Prejudice.

Hunting, gathering, and keeping his family safe—that’s the life seventeen-year-old Kol knows. Then bold, enigmatic Mya arrives from the south with her family, and Kol is captivated. He wants her to like and trust him, but any hopes of impressing her are ruined when he makes a careless—and nearly grave—mistake. However, there’s something more to Mya’s cool disdain…a history wrought with loss that comes to light when another clan arrives. With them is Lo, an enemy from Mya’s past who Mya swears has ulterior motives.

As Kol gets to know Lo, tensions between Mya and Lo escalate until violence erupts. Faced with shattering losses, Kol is forced to question every person he’s trusted. One thing is for sure: this was a war that Mya or Lo—Kol doesn’t know which—had been planning all along. 

This sounds so interesting.  I honestly can't think of any other YA stories set in prehistoric times (does The Croods count??) and I think I'll defiinitely be putting this one on my TBR list!

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

The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty

Huh.  I don’t really know what I was expecting from this book, but whatever it was I still don’t know if I got it.
 
The Exorcist is famous for being one of the scariest films in history, but I didn’t realise until recently that it was a book first.  I’ve not seen the film as I hate scary movies, but bizarrely I quite enjoy scary books so I decided to give it a go.
 
The plot is pretty famous - girl gets possessed by demon.  Priest comes along to help.  Regan is the daughter of a famous film actress and one day she starts behaving weirdly - talking to an imaginary friend, sleepwalking.  Then her behaviour deteriorates further and further until her mother has to physically restrain her and call in help.
 
I thought The Exorcist was okay, but only okay.  The plot details the gradual deterioration of Regan’s physical and mental health after her possession.  The deterioration mostly consists of projectile vomiting and copious amounts of swearing.  There’s a bit of psychic phenomena, but I think this could have been built up a bit more to make the book spookier.  Probably when the book was released (1971), the swearing would have had a lot more of an impact than it does today, but as it was it didn’t really frighten me.
 
The book seems to rely on shocking the reader rather than spooking them out.  And it is very shocking.  For instance, there’s a bit where Regan masturbates with a crucifix.  It wasn’t spooky or creepy, just gross and, I don’t know, it felt a bit heavy-handed.  Truly creeping a reader out is a fine art, and one that you don’t see very often.  Stephen King manages it in some of his books and Ira Levin was a master, but this book was more profane then blood-chilling.
 
The main characters in the book were interesting.  The priest who gets involved is having a bit of an existential crisis, and he is also a psychiatrist, so the juxtaposition between science and religion was an interesting aspect.  We didn’t get to see much of Regan before she is possessed, but we got to know her a bit through her mother’s account of her.  Chris (the mother) was okay, but a bit weak and flappy, although the inclusion of her three assistants was interesting as I was constantly trying to guess which one of them (if any) was behind the possession.
 
For me, the plot felt like it was paced a bit bizarrely.  It starts off slow, then the possession happens and it speeds up a bit as Regan’s behaviour deteriorates.  Then there’s a whole section where Regan is being restrained and no one really seems to know what to do, when the pace slowed right down again.  Then, at about 90% (I read this on my Kindle), the action speeds right up, a character from the prologue is re-introduced, and there’s a resolution.  So yeah, odd pacing.
 
I’m quite glad I read The Exorcist and all in all this was an okay book, but if you’re looking to be properly spooked out I’d probably watch the film instead.
 
3 stars

Don't Get Caught by Kurt Dinan

So two things I love almost more than anything else are heist movies and knob gags.  Ocean’s Eleven and Knocked Up sit side by side on my DVD shelf.  Imagine my delight, therefore, when I got sent Don’t Get Caught for review.  This book had both of those things in spades, and it was all the better for it.
 
Don’t Get Caught is the story of Max.  Just-Max as he is known at school. He’s Mister Average and although he does okay, he’s not super popular and he doesn’t do too well with girls so when he receives an invitation to join the Chaos Club, a prank society so secretive that no one knows who they are or how they operate, he jumps at the chance.  Unfortunately the meeting goes horribly wrong and soon Max is in a whole bunch of trouble.  He manages to extricate himself and he and the other four students caught up in the prank vow revenge on the Chaos Club.
 
Man, I loved this book.  You know when an author just seems to have exactly your mentality?  That’s what I had here.  The pranks in this book were brilliantly original and the humour was just spot on (like I said, knob gags).
 
The characters were really fun - I think they were supposed to mirror the five personality types in The Breakfast Club and although this is a bit of a trope in YA fiction it totally worked.  Max was a good MC but there’s plenty of time given over to developing the other four characters as well.  The only thing I found difficult to believe was that someone as funny as Max had never had much luck attracting girls.
 
There was a little bit of romance in the book, but it wasn’t romancey-romance - it was mainly just Max lusting after a girl and her not reciprocating.  It tied in well as a sub-plot and didn’t overwhelm the action.  Although that would have been difficult anyway, because there was masses of action!  Sometimes an author will start off a book with a really good idea or scene but can’t seem to sustain it throughout the whole book, but that wasn’t the case here.  Kurt Dinan starts off with a hilarious scene and the humour and action continue right through the book.  It was great and it had me reading well past the time I should have been going to sleep.
 
The book ends on a big reveal (which I won’t spoil) and even though I suspected that this reveal would happen, it was still fun to read and left me clamouring for a sequel (come on, Kurt, there’s got to be a sequel, hasn’t there?)
 
I would thoroughly recommend this book.  It was so funny and considering it is a debut novel, it promises great things in the future from the author.
 
4.5 stars

Waiting On Wednesday - Julia Vanishes by Catherine Egan

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 Julia Vanishes by Catherine Egan.  Here's the blurb:

Julia has the unusual ability to be . . . unseen. Not invisible, exactly. Just beyond most people's senses. 

It's a dangerous trait in a city that has banned all forms of magic and drowns witches in public Cleansings. But it's a useful trait for a thief and a spy. And Julia has learned--crime pays.

Her latest job is paying very well indeed. Julia is posing as a housemaid in the grand house of Mrs. Och, where an odd assortment of characters live and work: A disgraced professor who sends her to fetch parcels containing bullets, spiders, and poison. An aristocratic houseguest who is locked in the basement each night. And a mysterious young woman who is clearly in hiding--though from what or whom?

Worse, Julia suspects that there's a connection between these people and the killer leaving a trail of bodies across the frozen city.

The more she learns, the more she wants to be done with this unnatural job. To go back to the safety of her friends and fellow thieves. But Julia is entangled in a struggle between forces more powerful than she'd ever imagined. Escape will come at a terrible price.

This sounds really good - it's already on my TBR list!

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

Solitaire by Alice Oseman

My name is Tori Spring. I like to sleep and I like to blog. Last year – before all that stuff with Charlie and before I had to face the harsh realities of A-Levels and university applications and the fact that one day I really will have to start talking to people – I had friends. Things were very different, I guess, but that’s all over now.

Now there’s Solitaire. And Michael Holden.

I don’t know what Solitaire are trying to do, and I don’t care about Michael Holden.

I really don’t.
 
Then why are you telling us about him?

Initially I was quite intrigued by this book.  I read quite a bit of contemporary YA and romance is nearly always a sub-plot.  So when I spotted a book with the strapline ‘This is not a love story’, I was immediately drawn in. 
 
The first couple of chapters were fine.  The writing style is very easy to read and flows really well and the idea of a potentially subversive group in an elitist school like Higgs was really interesting.  Tori was a gloomy introvert, but I thought maybe that involvement in this group might give her some passion or spark, or might reveal some character traits that would make her more of a three dimensional protagonist.
 
Spoiler alert - it doesn’t.
 
Victoria Spring is going right up there on my Protagonists I Love To Hate.  She, Mara Dyer and the blonde bint from the Half Bad series should set up a club together or something.
 
In a way, the strapline of the book is right: this isn’t a love story.  It’s a hate story.  Tori hates everything.  Just ... everything.  She doesn’t like a single thing in the world.  She just hates, and the overuse of the word ‘hate’ in this book is second only to the overuse of the word ‘smug’ in the Twilight series.  And yet her hate has no passion behind it.  It’s just a weary, bored sort of disgust.  And it turns out that weary, bored disgust is really weary and boring to read about.  Who knew?
 
As well as being hateful, she’s also deeply unpleasant.  She speaks to people like they’re well beneath her contempt and at one particularly horrible moment, she (in her internal monologue) sneers at an anorexic girl for reading The Hunger Games.
 
I feel like I’m missing the whole point of the novel somehow, and if someone reads this and thinks, ‘No, you’ve got it all wrong, this point of the book is xyz’, then please leave a comment at the bottom!  I did think at one point that Tori may have mental health issues - depression perhaps?  Nothing is specifically mentioned, but her apathy would suggest so.  But I didn’t really feel that her internal monologue had the feel of someone suffering with mental health issues (although I’m not an expert) - it sounded more like the spoilt ramblings of a judgey, spiteful little cow.  At one point, she has a huge go at her mum for  not ironing her school skirt.  When her mum points out that she could iron her school skirt herself, she flounces off in a huff, like Kevin the Teenager.
 
Don’t get me wrong - I like snarky, mean protagonists.  And characters don’t have to be fluffy and sparkly and heroic to get my vote, but I have to know what they’re passionate about.  What they love.  Even Patrick Bateman in American Psycho was better fleshed out than this girl.  At least we knew what he loved doing (murdering people).
 
At one point she actually enthuses about the film Garden State, saying it’s one of her new favourite films, but just as I started to rub my hands together in anticipation of some actually character development, she turned around and said ‘Actually, I don’t think I like it after all.’  It was at this point that I rested my head on the table and started weeping.
 
Because Tori’s viewpoint is so self-centred, we don’t really find out much about the other characters in the book.  They felt very two-dimensional and I didn’t really care who Solitaire ended up being.  And when I found out, it turned out that Solitaire was pulling these pranks for a reason I couldn’t really get behind.
 
Lastly, I feel this book does teenagers such a disservice.  It paints them either as vacuous idiots or as pretentious, miserable wankers, when in fact the vast majority of teenagers (and people in general) are neither.  When I was sixteen, a friend and I caught the train up the coast to get involved in a series of demonstrations against the inhumane transportation of veal calves, while at the same time our peers were doing the Duke of Edinburgh Award, or babysitting younger siblings so their parents could work, or playing football, or volunteering, or reading books, or taking an interest in public affairs, or sitting around watching reruns of Friends with their mates.  Jesus Christ, at seventeen years old Malala Yousafzai was winning the bloody Nobel Peace Prize!  That is teenagers.  That is humanity.  And this book is representative of neither.
 
And obviously I’m not saying that all teenagers (or people) are always awesome, all the time.  Everyone has bad days, or makes poor decisions, or just does something mean or spiteful for no reason, but the balance of good and bad, our highs and lows, is what makes us interesting.  The characters in this book were not interesting.
 
So one bit in the book did actually make me laugh, although I suspect not intentionally. 
 
Fifteen minutes later, I push my way through a hedge to get into school because the main gates are locked.  I get a big old scratch on my face and, upon inspection using my phone screen, I decide I quite like it.
 
It made me laugh because it reminded me of a time when I was about sixteen and was having a good old crying jag because the boy I fancied liked someone else.  I remember feeling like nothing right ever happened to me and as I was crying I watched myself in my mirror, thinking how tragic I looked, like I was Cathy in Wuthering Heights or something, and I kid you not, I now look back and cringe at my wangsty behaviour.
 
Yeah.  Not my cup of tea, this one.  It could have been a really interesting treatise on youth culture, but it just turned out to be tedious and painful.
 
1.5 stars

Behind Closed Doors by B A Paris

So this was a book club book and, like many book club choices, wouldn't be the sort of book I'd usually pick up. It's a grown up book, there are no wizards or dragons or vampires, no teenage angst, no love triangles. So far, so not my cup of tea.

Indeed, the first chapter almost had me whimpering in potential weariness. The narrative was good, but it opens on a dinner party. A dinner party!  Three couples sitting around a beef Wellington, discussing golf courses and court cases.   They seem to be everything Bridget Jones dissected so fantastically well in her diaries - literally the sort of thing my nightmares are made of.

And yet in that first chapter you start to get the feeling that everything isn't as it seems. And that's what made me carry on reading. And I was so glad I did.

Behind Closed Doors is a modern cautionary tale, warning about the dangers of giving up ones identity after marriage.   To the casual observer, Grace and Jack Angel have it all: good looks, beautiful house, plenty of money. But the casual observer doesn't know everything about Grace and Jack and as the story unfolds we learn all about their twisted home life.

So that's basically all the clues I want to give away about the plot because one of the reasons this book worked so well for me was because I knew nothing about it going in although I will say that the plot is exciting and there's plenty of action and twists and it had me hooked quite early on.

I liked Grace, a woman who embodies the maxim 'marry in haste, repent at leisure' but I didn't love her. In my mind, anyone who would give up a job they love to become a fifties housewife (no children) and sign over complete financial autonomy to someone else needs a poke in the eye. Despite this, she does at least show some proper regret at her hasty actions and never gives up or accepts her fate.  And I liked how devoted she was to Millie.

This book is exactly the reason I go to a book club. It would never ever have popped up on my radar otherwise and I'm really glad I read it.

4 stars

Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor - Cover and Prologue Reveal

Laini Taylor, author of the Daughter of Smoke and Bone series and the Lips Touch collection, has today revealed the cover of her new book, Strange the Dreamer:
Ooooh ... pretty.  And not only that, but she's also sharing the prologue for the book:

On the second sabbat of Twelfthmoon, in the city of Weep, a girl fell from the sky.

Her skin was blue, her blood was red.

She broke over an iron gate, crimping it on impact, and there she hung, impossibly arched, graceful as a temple dancer swooning on a lover’s arm. One slick finial anchored her in place. Its point, protruding from her sternum, glittered like a brooch. She fluttered briefly as her ghost shook loose, and then her hands relaxed, shedding fistfuls of freshly picked torch ginger buds.

Later, they would say these had been hummingbird hearts and not blossoms at all.

They would say she hadn’t shed blood but wept it. That she was lewd, tonguing her teeth at them, upside down and dying, that she vomited a serpent that turned to smoke when it hit the ground. They would say a flock of moths had come, frantic, and tried to lift her away.

That was true. Only that.

They hadn’t a prayer, though. The moths were no bigger than the startled mouths of children, and even dozens together could only pluck at the strands of her darkening hair until their wings sagged, sodden with her blood. They were purled away with the blossoms as a grit-choked gust came blasting down the street. The earth heaved underfoot. The sky spun on its axis. A queer brilliance lanced through billowing smoke, and the people of Weep had to squint against it. Blowing grit and hot light and the stink of saltpeter. There had been an explosion. They might have died, all and easily, but only this girl had, shaken from some pocket of the sky.

Her feet were bare, her mouth stained damson. Her pockets were all full of plums. She was young and lovely and surprised and dead.

She was also blue.

Blue as opals, pale blue. Blue as cornflowers, or dragonfly wings, or a spring—not summer—sky.

Someone screamed. The scream drew others. The others screamed, too, not because a girl was dead, but because the girl was blue, and this meant something in the city of Weep. Even after the sky stopped reeling, and the earth settled, and the last fume spluttered from the blast site and dispersed, the screams went on, feeding themselves from voice to voice, a virus of the air.

The blue girl’s ghost gathered itself and perched, bereft, upon the spearpoint-tip of the projecting finial, just an inch above her own still chest. Gasping in shock, she tilted back her invisible head and gazed, mournfully, up.

The screams went on and on.

And across the city, atop a monolithic wedge of seamless, mirror-smooth metal, a statue stirred, as though awakened by the tumult, and slowly lifted its great horned head.

So this is going on my TBR list for a number of reasons:

1) Hello?  Laini Taylor?

2) Huge coverly love.

3) That prologue.  It was, what, like two pages and already I can envisage Weep.

Strange the Dreamer is released in the UK in September by Hodder and Stoughton.

Waiting On Wednesday - The Progeny by Tosca Lee

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 progeny by Tosca Lee.  Here's the blurb:

Emily Jacobs is the descendant of a serial killer. Now, she’s become the hunted.

She’s on a quest that will take her to the secret underground of Europe and the inner circles of three ancient orders—one determined to kill her, one devoted to keeping her alive, and one she must ultimately save.

Filled with adrenaline, romance, and reversals, The Progeny is the present-day saga of a 400-year-old war between the uncanny descendants of “Blood Countess” Elizabeth Bathory, the most prolific female serial killer of all time, and a secret society dedicated to erasing every one of her descendants. A story about the search for self filled with centuries-old intrigues against the backdrop of atrocity and hope.

Sounds good!  It's definitely going on my TBR list!

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

Kindred Spirits by Rainbow Rowell

This was a really sweet story.  I mean, you have to expect sweet when you pick up a Rainbow Rowell story, but really, this gave me a toothache!

Kindred Spirits is a short story released for World Book Day and it's the story of Elena, a girl who decides to sit in line and wait for three days when The Force Awakens comes out at her local cinema.  She meets two other super Star Wars fans and they basically sit and shoot the breeze while they're waiting and learn something about themselves along the way (well, Elena does).

This really struck a chord with me because although I didn't wait in line for three days (because I don't want to get fired from my job) my family and I were incredibly excited when the new Star Wars film came out.  We're a whole bunch of nerds in my house.

Anyway, Rainbow Rowell somehow manages to spin out a story from basically three people sitting in a queue waiting for The Force Awakens to start.  Not sure how she did it, but it's totally, totally readable and I'd definitely recommend it if you've enjoyed any of her previous works.

4 stars