Claire Stevens's Blog, page 43

Changers by T Cooper and Allison Glock-Cooper

I went into Changers with some preconceptions about what it would be like, and I’m pleased and surprised to say that those preconceptions were unfounded.
 
First, I thought that because this is a body-swap novel, it would be borrowing heavily on an already well-populated (at least, in the movies) trope.  Body-swap movies are okay, but even the ones with a slightly-funny script (e.g. the one with Zac Efron, can’t remember what it’s called) tend to look a bit tired.  This book, however, works on the basis that Ethan/Drew isn’t the only body-swapper, but one of a whole breed of body-swappers and that they’re all part of a big, secret society.  It lifted the story into something a bit new and interesting.
 
Second, I thought that because Changers is the story of a boy who wakes up as a girl, it would be chock-full of boob gags, like some 300-page Inbetweeners episode.  While I think The Inbetweeners is comedy gold, I didn’t know how well that brand of humour would work in a YA novel.  Apparently, I was doing both the author and fourteen-year-old boys in general a great disservice, though.  Obviously, Ethan does have an ‘Oh my god, I’ve got BOOBS!’ moment, but the author doesn’t over-egg the story with fourteen-year-old-boy-in-hot-girl’s-body jokes.
 
So the story revolves around Ethan, a fourteen year old boy who wakes up on the first day of high school to find he’s been transformed into a girl, Drew.  Not only this, but his parents spring on him that he’s part of a secret breed of humans who transition their bodies every year for four years as adolescents in order to grow spiritually and hopefully save humankind and the world.
 
Drew obviously has some serious adjusting to do, not just in terms of finding out she is really part of a separate breed of humans, but also in the boy-to-girl transition.  While this isn’t strictly a transgender novel (certainly not in the style of Lisa Williamson’s excellent The Art of Being Normal, anyway), it does definitely pick up on some transgender issues.  Up until his first day of high school, Ethan was a boy - he had a male body and identified as male, too.  Suddenly, he’s in a girl’s (Drew’s) body, but he still identifies as Ethan.  He misses being in a boy’s body and now suddenly has to deal with a girl’s body.  Gradually this changes until he identifies largely as Drew and the transition of his viewpoint was interesting and managed to have a lot of humour, too, although I think I can say with absolute certainty that if I, a cis woman, suddenly woke up with a penis it would take considerably longer than a few months to reconcile myself to this turn of events.
 
I did have some questions about the whole concept of Changers, which the book didn’t really answer (although maybe these questions will be answered in future books?)  Changers seem to be really up on procreation and very heterosexual as a group, so I was wondering how homosexuality was viewed in this paradigm?  If it turns out that they’re like No Gays Allowed, then I’ll not only be very upset, but also kind of confused as it doesn’t seem to fit with the whole Changers ethos.  Also, I didn’t really understand why they would put a load of Changer teenagers in a room together (at the mixer) but also tell them that they’re not allowed to have romantic attachments with each other.  Are they just trying to torture the poor kids, or something??
 
All in all though, this was a really good read and I’ll definitely be carrying on with the series.

4 stars

I received a copy of Changers in return for an honest review.  Many thanks to Little, Brown and Netgalley.

Broken Dolls by Tyrolin Puxty

This was a really unusual story about a living doll, Ella, who lives in the attic of the Professor, the man who made her.  She wears tutus and spends her days dancing and she’s really pretty happy, but then the Professor makes another doll, a goth doll called Lisa.  Lisa is angry and mean and she upsets Ella, who can’t understand where Lisa’s rage is coming from. 
 
I have to say, I don’t think I’ve ever read a story like this one!  It was slightly steampunky, which is obviously cool, slightly sci-fi, a little bit dystopia, so in the nicest possible way, it's a bit of a mash-up.
 
The plot itself is told through Ella’s viewpoint and she watches as Lisa just goes around disrupting her previously placid life and making all sorts of discoveries that make Ella question what the Professor is really up to.  There aren’t that many twists and turns – it’s more like a slow build towards the ultimate climax.  I was glad we got a resolution to the story and I would be quite interested to read the sequel, Shattered Girls, to see where the story goes next.
 
The characters were the most interesting thing about the book, I found.  My favourite was Lisa – she really seemed to have her wits about her and wasn’t about to just sit around and accept the way things were.  Ella, by contrast, seemed very keen to preserve things exactly the way things were (although I don’t really know why – being a doll sounds pretty sucky), so the points where she and Ella clashed were pretty funny!  I also really liked the author’s writing style.  There was a really nice flow to it and Ella seemed to have a very definite voice.
 
There were points where I wondered how well it actually worked as a YA book.  Ella doesn’t really have an age as such – she thinks she’s been a doll for a long time, but doesn’t really know – although the way she speaks and her view of the world comes across as fairly childlike and her friend Gabby is eleven, so in some ways this might work more as an MG book.  But then, the themes the book deals with are better suited to a slightly older audience, so I don’t really know how else it could have been classified.
 
In some respects, I would have liked to have read the same story from Lisa’s viewpoint.  I think it would have been really spooky and interesting to have read about her waking up as a doll and trying to solve the mystery of the Professor’s work while trying to contend with Ella, who is happy with the status quo.
 
Really that was the only mildly negative thing I picked up on.   Other than that, this was a quick, fun read.

 4 stars

​I received a copy of Broken Dolls in exchange for an honest review.  Many thanks to Curiosity Quills and Netgalley.

I'll Give You The Sun by Jandy Nelson

Well, can I just say how nice it is to kick 2016 off with a super book?  I’m ridiculously pleased.  It bodes well for the rest of the year.  Hopefully.
 
I’ll Give You The Sun is the story of twins, Jude and Noah.  They used to be incredibly close but the death of their mother when they were thirteen drove them apart.  Now, Noah is living a life that isn't really his and Jude looking down the barrel of getting kicked out of school.  What Jude and Noah don't realise is that they both only have half the story and if they can mend their relationship they might be able to remake their world.
 
So first I want to talk about the characters.  Like The Sky Is Everywhere, I’ll Give You The Sun is a characters study.  Told in a dual POV across two timelines, Jude and Noah’s voices come across just perfectly and I couldn’t help but fall in love with them both.  They both experience so much pain, not just from the death of their mum (although obviously that’s a big part) but also from other things that happen to them.  Noah is gay and although he feels comfortable with who he is, he falls for a boy who isn’t ready to openly acknowledge their feelings for each other.  His relationship with his dad is strained and he is far closer to his artist mum.  Jude feels neglected by her mum and retaliates by acting out. 
 
There are also some really well-written secondary characters, who are also suffering in their own way.  You have all these characters who, at the beginning of the book, don’t seem to have that much of a connection.  Even the people who are related, like Jude and Noah, are drifting along in this kind of grown-apart silence.  Then, as the present-day and the three-years-ago stories unfold, you start to see the connections and the way their narratives interweave.  The unhappy narrative strands pull tighter and tighter together until you just know that everything is going to end up exploding.
 
And okay, there wasn’t really the cataclysmic explosion I was expecting, but Jandy Nelson did this really cool thing where she prolonged the climax over a few chapters, gradually dropping revelations and opening up secrets until you seriously wonder how she’s going to manage to give us any resolution.
 
But here’s a spoiler: we do get resolution.  The ending was good and all the loose ends got tied up nicely.  In fact, I think pretty much everyone got an HEA and while that can sometimes annoy me (because I’m mean) in this case it worked because all the characters had spent three years being put completely through the wringer.  I think they deserved a bit of happiness at the end!
 
And in fact, it’s not just the ending that’s good - the whole plot is great.  Considering it’s a character-driven book, the plot doesn’t suffer one iota.  I didn’t feel like there were any lulls, no bits where I’d put the book down and find something else to do.  And she not only uses two voices, but also two timelines.  When you look at it objectively, what she has done is pretty impressive.
 
Finally, the writing.  God, Jandy Nelson is talented.  Her writing style is almost intimidatingly sublime.  I was reading this book and letting her perfectly-chosen words wash over me and seriously, it was like I was in northern California, a place I know virtually nothing about.  And not to sound like a stalker, but I’ve decided I want to curl up into a little ball live in Jandy Nelson’s pocket, having her read me stories all day.
 
So yes.  A great start to 2016.  Well worth a read.
 
5 stars

Waiting On Wednesday - Summer Days and Summer Nights edited by Stephanie Perkins

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 all anticipating.  This week, my Waiting On Wednesday pick is Summer Days and Summer Nights, a short story collection edited by Stephanie Perkins.  Here's the blurb:

Maybe it's the long, lazy days, or maybe it's the heat making everyone a little bit crazy. Whatever the reason, summer is the perfect time for love to bloom. Summer Days & Summer Nights: Twelve Love Stories, written by twelve bestselling young adult writers and edited by the international bestselling author Stephanie Perkins, will have you dreaming of sunset strolls by the lake. So set out your beach chair and grab your sunglasses. You have twelve reasons this summer to soak up the sun and fall in love.

Featuring stories by Leigh Bardugo, Francesca Lia Block, Libba Bray, Cassandra Clare, Brandy Colbert, Tim Federle, Lev Grossman, Nina LaCour, Stephanie Perkins, Veronica Roth, Jon Skovron, and Jennifer E. Smith.

Okay, I know it's kind of early to be marking out my beach reads for next summer, but I've just finished My True Love Gave To Me and adored it, so I'm super excited for this one!  If there's one thing I love more than a christmas romance, it's a summer romance!

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

What I'm Reading In January

So I have some great books lined up for 2016.  Yes!  This is going to be a good reading year, I've decided.  I've got review copies, library books from my awesome, awesome local library and £65 (!) in Amazon vouchers that I got for Christmas.  So.  Many.  Books.

So, review copies first.  I was having a poke around on Netgalley the other day and two titles caught my eye.  They are:

When Everything Feels Like The Movies by Raziel Reid

And

Changers Book One: Drew by Allison Glock-Cooper

So I did the requesty thing and woo hoo!  Little Brown have sent them to me.  Thanks so much!  Both of these books are already out in the US, but they're both due for publication here in the UK this year and they both look pretty interesting.  When Everything Feels Like The Movies takes a high school and kind of transposes the characters into a sort of movie set by the look of it.  I think.  The blurb is a bit ambiguous, but it sounds really original and cool so I'm excited to give it a go.

Changers is a body-swapping book and while this has been done lots of times before in movies and books, I still really enjoy this kind of story, even the  one with Zac Efron (because, hello?  Zac Efron?).  Plus, this book is a boy-to-girl body swap, which offers unlimited comedy opportunities ("Oh my god, I've got BOOBS!").

So my local library (and in fact Essex Libraries in general) are complete stars.  I sometimes think I'm the only person who uses the online reservation system, because two days ago I ordered Winter by Melissa Meyer.  Only just released, I'd have thought I'd be waiting about three months for a copy, but it came in today.  It's waiting for me to pick up.  Two days.  I'm leery of telling people I know about this service, because I don't want an influx of the hoi-palloi to dilute the service, but I still think they deserve a big shout out.  Two days!

Along with Winter (two days!), I've also got Amy and Matthew by Cammie McGovern, Audrey,Wait! by Robin Benway and Anatomy of a Misfit by Andrea Portes waiting for me.  Essex Libraries for the win.

And lastly, I've got my massive Amazon voucher to spend.  Bwah hah hah!  Okay, so I do a slightly obsessive thing with my TBR list, in that I keep it on Amazon instead of Goodreads (I'm a Kindle girl).  I've currently got about two hundred titles on it and I check it every day to see if any of the books on it are on a 99p deal.  If they are, I snap them up.  I got The Giver by Lois Lowry for 99p the other day, a book I've been meaning to read for god-knows how long, but didn't really want to spend a whole fiver on it.  By my calculations, my £65 voucher should buy me 65.66 books.  

If you have any comments about the books I have lined up, I'd love to hear them!   

The Grownup by Gillian Flynn

I read The Grownup at the end of last year as an end-of-year-bump-my-reading-total-up thing.  It’s a short story about a sex worker who gets carpal tunnel syndrome and is forced to make a career detour into clairvoyance (insert your own gag about screwing people for money).
 
Our narrator is a bright young woman, but hasn’t had a great start in life.  She’s had some petty convictions for fraud and will never be able to get herself a ‘proper’ job.  So she’s a sex worker turned clairvoyant and makes money be reading people and telling them what they want to hear.  Until one day Susan walks into her shop.  Susan is having trouble at home with her teenaged stepson in their possibly-haunted house.  The narrator agrees to investigate and gets drawn into their toxic home life.
 
Considering it’s a very short book, Flynn manages to pack an awful lot of characterisation and plot twists in.  You never know, even at the end, who’s lying and who’s being lied to and I never once knew what was coming next.  It was a very quick read - I finished it in about an hour - but it definitely left me wanting more.
 
So, the reason it’s four stars and not five?  At the very very end of the book in the acknowledgements, Gillian Flynn says ‘Thanks to George R R Martin who asked me to write him a story’.  She might just as well have written, ‘George R R Martin thinks I’m awesome!  Woo hoo!’  because it amounts to the same thing.  Much cooler if she’d just referred to him as ‘George’.
 
So yeah.  Sorry Gillian; you’ve lost a star for being a show-off.  

4 stars

Only Ever Yours by Louise O'Neill

Only Ever Yours is a dystopian novel and probably one of the most unsettling I’ve ever read.  I’m so bored of reading books that call themselves dystopian, when all they manage to show me is a bog-standard totalitarian government.  It’s like, I already know totalitarianism is bad.  Show me something new.
 
Only Ever Yours does just that and manages to show a truly chilling version of an all-too-plausible future and it’s a future that you can see starting right now as we speak, in those crappy magazines you see where there’s a big Circle Of Shame around a celeb’s slightly-dimply thighs, in size-zero models, in the majority of women on TV being gradually phased out once they hit forty, in rape culture, victim-blaming, glass ceilings and a billion other little things that make women and girls realise that no matter how much we contribute, we’re still going to be judged primarily on our looks and shagability.
 
The premise is that in the future, global warming and the rise of the sea has forced a much-reduced humanity onto a restricted landmass.  Girls are now bred in labs and raised in convent-type institutions for the young generation of men who are seeking wives to bear them sons and concubines to give them a good time.  The girls are ranked according to their looks and size.  Eating disorders are encouraged and the girls judge each other constantly.
 
Within this nightmare, frieda and isabel (female names are not capitalised to show their inferiority) are waiting for the chance to be selected.  The pressure is getting to isabel, and she starts to sabotage her looks, thereby jeopardizing her future by damaging the only asset she has.
 
For me, the message that this book is trying to get across and the writing style were five stars.  The plot and characterisation were three star, so I’ve rounded my rating out at four stars overall.
 
So firstly the message.  It’s powerful and raw.  Only Ever Yours is a feminist satire and portrays a world where women are nothing more than sex objects.  It’s as creepy as hell, because O’Neill highlights many things we take for granted and puts a pin in them, showing how they all contribute to a society where women are subjugated.  It’s like she’s saying, ‘Here’s a terrifying future.  And here’s how the things that make that future so terrifying ARE ALREADY HERE.’
 
Just when you think things can’t get any worse, O’Neill casually drops in another brutal scene.  But the thing is, the brutality comes from it’s believability.  I can totally see a society emerging where girls live their entire lives just worrying about their own looks in order to please men, judging each other’s looks and updating their statuses on social media.  Brrrrr.  Chilling.
 
I’ve already said that the plot and characterisation were three stars.  When you show women as being seeded in a laboratory and raised in a cloistered community by nuns, where they’re not allowed to read, where the only aspiration they have is to please men, where they are encouraged to think only of their looks, well then, you’re going to come out with some very shallow, vapid characters.  And because their interactions with the outside world are so limited, they have no opportunity to grow or develop.  The little amount of personality the girls have is explored well, and a lot of emphasis is placed on the horrors of living in a society where a woman’s only asset is her looks, but because they are all so limited as people, they don’t make terribly interesting characters. 
 
When I read, I want strong female characters.  Ones who stick two fingers up to The Man (or The Woman) and say ‘Bollocks to you.’  Strong female characters make my inner Reading Beast growl. 
 
There were no strong female characters in this book.
 
And I get why there weren’t.  I really do.  But it still made my Reading Beast pout.
 
Similarly, the plot.  freida and the other girls are never allowed outside of the school.  The only interactions they have are with each other and with the chastities, and to a limited extent, with the Inheritants they have been designed to service.  Their days revolve around looking after their appearances, judging other girls on their appearances, and learning how to please men, so while this makes for very uncomfortable reading (again, because it’s so believable) it doesn’t provide much opportunity to deepen the plot or provide twists and turns.
 
I just want to stress that the lack of character development and lack of depth to the plot aren’t really the author’s fault.  I really got the feeling that she was a good writer.  It’s just that in choosing this particular scenario for her novel, she painted (wrote) herself into a corner and there was nothing more she could have done with her plotline or her characters.
 
What I didn’t get, though, (and this may just have been me) is exactly why women were phased out in the first place. The author explains (briefly) that boys were valued higher than girls, but why?  Sorry boys, but it’s the digital age: we girls no longer need you for clubbing dinner on the head and dragging it back to our cave.  Literally all we’re keeping you around for these days is your sperm.  That’s it.  And in the event of a global catastrophe where one sex is going to be prized higher than the other from a survival-of-the-species perspective, girls are going to win.  We just are.  It’s got to be easier to create fake sperm than it is to create a fake egg and uterus.
 
And who’s to say one sex has to disappear in any case?  I am absolutely not disputing that sexism, both visible and invisible, is bloody rife in our society and that attitudes need to change, but I also genuinely think that in the event of an extinction-level event such as the one O’Neill describes, humanity would band together, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, race, religion or whatever.
 
I dunno.  Maybe I’m too much of an optimist.  Maybe this wasn’t the point of the book.  In fact, I know it wasn’t the point of the book.  The point of the book is to show how easily the current obsession with judging women on their appearance could escalate into this nightmare.  But still.  If you’re going to show me a dystopia, I want back story and I want to believe it.
 
Despite this, Only Ever Yours is still a four-star book and definitely worth a read.  I understand that O’Neill has recently brought out another book that deals with rape and the culture of victim-blaming.  I’m definitely going to read it.  I bet she’s got LOADS to say on that topic!
 
4 stars

The Best of 2015

2015 has been such an awesome year for reading!  After many years of being an avid reader and banging on about the great books I’ve read, I finally got my act together and set up a blog so that I can tell lots more people about the great books I’ve read.
 
I’ve been very lucky this year to have been given ARCs to review from publishers and authors as well as discovering the online ordering system at my local library (a lifechanger) and I’ve found some absolute gems.
 
So here are the top ten books I read in 2015.  I’d recommend any of them to anyone. 
 
Fire Colour One by Jenny Valentine
One by Sarah Crossan
Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon
The Martian by Andy Weir
My Life Next Door by Huntley Fitzpatrick
The Sky Is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson
The Accident Season by Moira Fowley Doyle
Monsters by Emerald Fennell
Cinder by Marissa Meyer
Firecracker by David Iserson
 
In addition to this, I completed my Goodreads reading challenge and read 142 of the 100 books I pledged.  Okay, some of those were shorter books, but some were pretty long, so I think it all averages out in the end! 
 
I’m really looking forward to the books I’ll discover in 2016.  Happy new year everyone!

Waiting On Wednesday - Don't Get Caught by Kurt Dinan

Waiting On Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Jill over at Breaking The Spine and it's a chance for us to highlight the upcoming releases we're eagerly anticipating.  This week's Waiting One Wednesday pick is: Don't Get Caught by Kurt Dinan.  Here's the blurb:

Ocean's 11 meets The Breakfast Club in this entertaining, fast-paced debut filled with pranks and cons that will keep readers on their toes, never sure who's pulling the strings or what's coming next.

When Max received a mysterious invite from the untraceable, epic prank-pulling Chaos Club, he has to ask: why him? After all, he's Mr. 2.5 GPA, Mr. No Social Life. He's just Max. And his favorite heist movies have taught him this situation calls for Rule #4: Be suspicious. But it's also his one shot to leave Just Max in the dust...

Yeah, not so much. Max and four fellow students- who also received invites- are standing on the newly defaced water tower when campus security "catches"them. Definitely a setup. And this time, Max has had enough. It's time for Rule #7: Always get payback.

Let the prank war begin!

I love books about pranks.  Love them, love them, love them.  If this is done well - and it looks like it might be - it will definitely be on my TBR list!

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

My True Love Gave To Me edited by Stephanie Perkins

This was an absolutely adorable Christmas read!  I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this book as much as I did.  And I really did!
 
I saw My True Love Gave To Me doing the rounds last Christmas, but never got around to reading it.  But then I was in the library a few days before Christmas and saw it right there on the shelf.  I don’t read many short story compilations as in the past I’ve found them a bit patchy, quality-wise, but his collection was excellent.  Each story had just enough plot and character development not only to engage my interest, but also to provide a satisfying conclusion.
 
I think one of the things I enjoyed most was how very different each of the stories was, considering they’re all set around the same theme - a Christmas romance story.  I think this was because the twelve authors each have very different styles.  You have Holly Black sandwiched between David Levithan and Gayle Forman and other offerings from Laini Taylor, Ally Carter, Jenny Han and others.
 
I think my favourite story was Krampuslauf by Holly Black.  It was an urban fantasy about the Krampus, Saint Nicholas’s creepy companion.  I also really liked The Lady and the Fox.
 
This was a perfect read for the run-up to Christmas and I’d thoroughly recommend it to everyone for next year!
 
(And actually, it’s only as I write this review that I’ve realised why there are twelve stories - for the twelve days of Christmas.  Honestly, I worry about how my brain works sometimes.)
 
4 stars