Claire Stevens's Blog, page 44

Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard

I was really excited to read Red Queen, but sadly it didn’t work out for me. 
 
From what I’d heard, it was the ultimate book if you like a bit of courtly intrigue, superpowers, underdog rebellions and awesome characters.  Er, yes please!  Count me in!  From what everyone was saying, Red Queen sounded kind of a YA Game Of Thrones. 
 
I started reading it and the author gets to work quite quickly with some nice world-building.  At first I thought the world Red Queen is set in was a traditional fantasy setting - kind of mediaeval, big on social strata, magic, superpowers.  But I soon realised that actually it’s a future dystopia.  There was mention of tech - video screens, electricity and so on which promised to sit really uniquely and interestingly alongside the fantasy setting.
 
Good lord, I thought to myself.  A YA fantasy-sci-fi hybrid with intrigue, power-plays, monarchy and superpowers.  What could possibly go wrong?
 
Well ... Mare Barrow is what went wrong.
 
I honestly didn’t think it was possible to dislike a protagonist as much as I disliked Mare Barrow.
 
The first thing that struck me about Mare was how whiny she was.  Man, that girl could whine about stuff.  To begin with I thought, ‘Yeah, fair enoughski.  She lives waist-deep in dirt, in roaring poverty and is facing a future where she’s going to make very young bones indeed in her oppressor’s war.  The girl has reasons-a-plenty to complain.’  Even so, something in her attitude jarred.  I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, until it suddenly clicked.  Mare Barrow is hardly the first girl in YA fiction to come from inauspicious beginnings to undergo a massive life-change and possibly go on to lead a revolution.  The difference between Mare and her contemporaries (Katniss, Tris, Tally) was her attitude. Instead of getting on with it and making the best of her situation, Mare just whined.  And whined.  And bitched and then whined some more. 
 
She just didn’t seem to have any get-up-and-go about her; no spark, no wit, and I think this was what set her apart from other YA protagonists.  Even in the direst of situations, it’s possible to maintain a sense of humour.  Obviously, I’m not talking about belly-laughs, but I like to see a bit of fire about a protagonist that says, ‘Things may be shit now, but I’m trying damn hard to turn things around, to claw my way up out of the crap.’  And I just wasn’t seeing that about Mare.  She was glumly accepting of her (probably short-lived, and not in a good way) compulsory career in the army, content to wander round moaning about it, until it looked like her friend was also about to be conscripted.  Upon hearing this, she formulated a plan for them both to avoid conscription in about three seconds.  Why didn’t she do this before?  I didn’t get why she didn’t do this before.  Why did it take Kilorn being conscripted for her to get her act together?
 
And stupid.  My god, that girl was as dumb as paint.  In fact, all the characters were.  You don’t need a university education to work out that if you’re in a secret rebellion society and the son of the king you’re trying to overthrow comes up and says he’d like to join and that he honestly, honestly wants to overthrow the king (again - his DAD), you need a bit of a better selection criteria than:
 
‘But what if you’re LYING?’
 
‘I’m not lying!’
 
‘Oh, that’s okay then.  Come on in.’
 
Like, I know virtually nothing about how to run a secret organisation or be a spy or whatever, but even I know that if you’re in a situation where people’s lives and the fate of a rebellion depend on not being betrayed, what you need to do is test everyone’s loyalty on a regular basis.  You send out little red-herring secrets that can be traced back to one person if they fall into the wrong hands.  Or something.  What you don’t do is sit your new recruits down (like the SON of the KING) and tell them all your huge rebellion secrets.
 
This could have been a solid four-and-a-half star book, but unfortunately, Mare’s lack of wit and interest and her attitude in general affected my enjoyment of the whole book.  I just couldn’t get interested and that’s why I’ve only given it two stars.  Her narrative was so tiresome that I found myself skim-reading for a lot of it.
 
Another issue I had was the pace of the book.  It felt very slow indeed and while I understood what the Reds were fighting for, I didn’t really care that much.  There were huge swathes where nothing much seemed to happen, or if it did, I was so put off by Mare’s character that I skimmed and missed it.
 
Which brings me back to another point about Mare, which was her habit of italicising whole sentences, most often at the end of a paragraph.  Like what she was saying was so profound, she had to highlight it in case I, the reader, should fail to pick up on the importance of what she was saying.  And the thing was, the sentences she was italicising didn’t need it.  They weren’t saying anything particularly noteworthy, as far as I could tell, and the story would have flowed miles better without it.
 
Maybe I shouldn’t have let this bother me as much as it did, but to me it was the equivalent of using too many exclamation marks, or loads of brackets.  It was annoying and it pulled me out of the story every time it happened.  And it happened a lot.  On one page (and these were Kindle pages, so shorter than normal book-pages) it happened four times.  It made a narrative that I was already struggling with go even slower.

So yeah.  Unless the Glass Sword of the next book refers to a weapon used to decapitate Mare on the first page, I won’t be carrying on with this series.
 
2 stars

Monsters by Emerald Fennell

This book has to be one of the big surprises of the year for me.  I saw it at the library the other day and was drawn to it by it’s quirky cover.  By the time I’d got it home and was two chapters in, I knew I’d found something a bit special.  Chapter Two, for the record, ends with the following sentence:
 
Jean doesn’t approve of twelve-year-old girls drinking coffee, but truly, Jean can get fucked.
 
Monsters is the story of two children who you really wouldn’t want to meet on your summer holidays.  The girl (we never get told her name) who narrates the story is an orphan who lives with her Granny and spends every summer in Fowey, Cornwall, with her detestable uncle and quivering aunt.  She has a fairly obsessive interest in murder, which tends to disturb most other people and means that she has no friends.  Imagine her delight, therefore, when Miles and his mother turn up at her aunt and uncle’s hotel.
 
Miles is a sociopath, also with an unsavoury interest in murder.  He and the girl hit it off immediately and decide to investigate a spate of murders that has just sprung up in Fowey.
 
If I were to list all the things I loved about this book, it would be a very long, tiresome list and also wouldn’t make much sense because so much of what I enjoyed is taken within the context of the story.  Suffice to say that Emerald Fennell manages to make sociopaths sound like a right laugh, ordinary people sound like a bunch of hypocritical wankers and Fowey (which in reality is a beautiful town) sound utterly terrifying.
 
For me, this book has the Big Three: great plot, great characters and great writing.  The plot doesn’t let up for one second: it’s in turn a curious character study and a gruesome murder mystery.  Miles and The Girl are terrifying and the narrative itself had me laughing out loud.
 
Plus, never before has an author made a dead cat sound so amusing.  Jerome K Jerome came close with his description of a dead dog floating down the Thames, but Fucko the cat knocks Jerome’s dead dog into a cocked hat (box).
 
I can’t believe I’ve never heard of this book before.  Seriously, I can think of absolutely nothing about this book that I would change.  The humour is so sly, dry and dark and the plot is so intriguing.  Just brilliant.
 
Recommended for anyone with a taste for very dark comedies.

5 stars

Waiting On Wednesday - A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J Maas

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 Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J Maas.  Here's the blurb:

Feyre survived Amarantha's clutches to return to the Spring Court--but at a steep cost. Though she now has the powers of the High Fae, her heart remains human, and it can't forget the terrible deeds she performed to save Tamlin's people.

Nor has Feyre forgotten her bargain with Rhysand, High Lord of the feared Night Court. As Feyre navigates its dark web of politics, passion, and dazzling power, a greater evil looms--and she might be key to stopping it. But only if she can harness her harrowing gifts, heal her fractured soul, and decide how she wishes to shape her future--and the future of a world cleaved in two.

Oooh ... I can't wait for this one!  I read A Court of Thorns and Roses earlier this year, inhaling it in one dizzy sitting and I loved it so much!  I'm desperate to see what happens next and how Feyre's bargain with Rhysand is going to play out.  Saucily, I'll bet!

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

We'll Always Have Summer by Jenny Han

This review contains some spoilers.
 
I love Jenny Han’s books.  In the same way that I occasionally (very occasionally) enjoy dancing around my room to One Direction, I like reading Jenny Han books because I know they will be unashamedly fluffy and light and full of feelgood fun.  And in the same way that That’s What Makes You Beautiful never won an Ivor Novello Award, Jenny Han’s Summer books aren’t going to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
 
But do you know what?  I so don’t care.
 
We’ll Always Have Summer is the third and concluding book in the series about Isabel ‘Belly’ Conklin and Jeremiah and Conrad, the two brothers she has loved since she was a little girl.  Like the first two books, it’s set over the course of one summer.  This time, Isabel is just about to finish her freshman year of college.  She’s been dating Jeremiah since her senior year and although things aren’t always awesome (he can be kind of selfish and juvenile) generally they rub along like a house on fire.
 
Then Jeremiah reveals that when he and Belly were on a break he did something really, really bad and everything is thrown up in the air.
 
And I’ve gotta say, at this point the book took a bit of an odd turn.
 
I was on about page twenty when I looked, properly looked, at the cover.  ‘Wait a sec,’ I thought.  ‘Is that ... confetti??  Please, Jenny Han, please don’t try to get me to buy into a teen wedding.’  I’m so not a fan of teen weddings.  It’s weird. 
 
It was confetti.  And she did try to get me to buy into a teen wedding.
 
Basically, Jeremiah thinks the best way of atoning for his screw-up is by asking Belly to marry him.  Belly, even more astonishingly, accepts and from that point on the story explores Belly’s excitement and doubts about marrying (marrying!) Jeremiah and whether she might secretly still be in love with Conrad. 
 
Literally everyone she knows asks whether it might not be a good idea to wait until she’s finished college.  And her answer is no.  Because when your boyfriend cheats on you, do you:
 
(a)  Burn all his clothes on a bonfire?
 
(b)  Cut his knackers off with a rusty pair of scissors?
 
(c)  Dump him?
 
(d)  Agree to marry him?
 
Obviously the answer is (d).  What else would it be?
 
And the teen wedding/atonement marriage thing wasn’t the only odd thing Jenny Han asks us to buy into in this book.  I was very sad to see Jeremiah, who, up until this point, had been painted as such a lovely, kind boy, basically become a dickwad.  I was most unkeen on this turn of events.
 
Despite these reservations, I did enjoy this book.  It was a perfect bit of fun for the drizzly, grey evenings we’ve been having for the last week or so and made me feel toasty inside.  Jenny Han’s writing is just so lovely - it’s like the literary equivalent of eating toffee ice cream.  And I did like finding out the resolution of the love triangle.  I approved of the final resolution, as well.
 
All in all, I’d definitely recommend the Summer series - if you’re looking for a light, fun read, you can’t really go wrong.

3 stars

The Darkest Minds by Alexandra Bracken

I was disappointed with this book.  It's been recommended to me by dozens of people, all of whom I have very similar reading tastes to, and with an average rating of 4.30 I thought this would be a shoo-in for a wicked read.  Sadly, this was not the case.

The book started off interestingly enough.  The premise is that the whole of America has been subjected to a plague that has killed the majority of children between the ages of ten and seventeen.  The ones who remain have developed psychic powers that the adults in charge are terrified of and would seek to control/experiment on/exterminate. 

Unfortunately, once Ruby breaks out of the prison camp she has been living in for the last six years she just goes on a very long road trip during which nothing really seems to happen.  The plot, which had so much potential, seemed to fizzle and die a little and I spent a lot of the book waiting for it to get interesting again.

When it became obvious that I wasn't enjoying this book, I began to look for reasons why.  After all, if dozens of people I know adored this book and I didn't ... Well, maybe it was me.  I wondered what it was that I wasn't 'getting' about this book that had everyone else raving about it.

At first, I considered that maybe it's because I'm a Brit.  Maybe there's something in this book that's so inherently American that the full impact will always be lost on outsiders.  I couldn't see what it would be, but then I wouldn't be able to, would I?

Then I started wondering if the whole book was an allegory or a metaphor for something.  I toyed with the idea of the Psi kids being a parallel for America's struggle to break away from Britain back in the War of Independence.  That whole group of individuals looking to live their own lives away from their oppressors.  But I couldn't really see enough to draw parallels there, so I let that theory go.

Then I thought maybe the story was an allegory for the oppression of the Jews in World War II.  I felt on more solid ground with this.  There was the whole prison camp thing, rounding up of "undesirables" and locking them away, experiments on the Psi kids in the camps, the Psi Special Forces soldiers all dressed in black like the SS, the way the president came to power and then started changing all the rules in order to keep himself powerful ...  Yeah, there seemed to be a lot of parallels.

Then I realised ... I didn't matter.  It didn't matter if the story was an allegory or a metaphor or some nationalistic rhetoric.  I wasn't enjoying it.  It wasn't gripping me the way an awesome book should.

I contemplated DNF-ing, but in the end I didn't.  I guess I just wanted to keep reading in the hope that soon it would just 'click' and I'd suddenly get what everyone else had been raving about.  Sadly it didn't happen.

The writing was fine.  It was fine.  It didn't blow me away but it didn't annoy me either.

I never really connected with Ruby, and I think definitely didn't help my view of the book, especially as it's written in the first person.  I never really got a sense of who she was, what her passions were, how she would react in a certain situation.  I get that she'd been incarcerated in a prison camp for six years, and that's bound to put a bit of a crimp in your personal skills, but I found her too nothingy to care about.

Liam seemed like a nice enough boy, but again I didn't really connect with him or buy into Ruby's crush/love for him.  Plus, he was like the King of Moving Slowly when it came to romance.  He and Ruby obviously had the itch for each other, but neither of them bloody did anything about it.  There was just loads of hand-holding and brushing up against each other (and not even in an amusing way, like, 'We were doing the washing up, and he brushed up against me and he had a BONER!')  It was very, very tame considering how much they liked each other.  Guys, I'm gonna put myself out there:   when it comes to YA romance, I want lips, tongues and teeth, I want panting, I want racing hearts, I want boobs and possibly even sex.  Spoiler Alert - this book had none of those things.

Chubs and Zu were sweet enough characters, but they were secondary and therefore not enough to make me want to keep reading. 

As for the bad guys - they were just slimy.  I didn't feel horrified at the things they did.  Even when one of them mind-controls Ruby and assaults her, he just came off as a creepy, hormonal teenage horndog instead of a wannabe rapist.  Even the PSF soldiers and the prison camps didn't feel very horrific.  I wrote my bachelors dissertation on the Holocaust, so I know something about terrifying death camps, and the prison camps in The Darkest Minds just weren't that scary.

Also, there were things that were left unexplained that I really wanted to know and that I thought would have helped my enjoyment of the book.  It's hinted that America is the only country that the plague happened to.  Why?  Does this get explained later?

Now this is going to sound weird, but despite me just spending a lot of time trashing this book, I would still recommend it to people.  I'm completely aware that I'm in the minority here.  I'm not joking when I say that dozens of people I know have rated this as one of their favourite series of all time.  Of all time!  They love this book.  So on the basis that the majority rules, I would still say to anyone reading this to try the series out for themselves instead of just  going by my opinion.

One thing I would say, and that was the book definitely picked up in the last two chapters.  And no, I'm not being sarcastic.  The final couple of scenes were genuinely moving and I was touched at the sacrifice Ruby made despite not having connected with any of the characters so far in the book. 

Sadly, by this point, it was too late.  If the books were a bit shorter, I might consider carrying on with the series, but at nearly 500 pages and a two-week reading commitment, I really don't think it's going to be on the cards.

2 stars

Waiting On Wednesday - The Haunting by Alex Bell

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, my Waiting On Wednesday pick is The Haunting by Alex Bell.  Here's the blurb:

Some curses grow stronger with time… 

People say that all Cornish inns are haunted, but the Waterwitch’s history is particularly chilling.

Built from the salvaged timber of a cursed ship, the guest house’s dark secrets go further back than anyone can remember. 

Emma is permanently confined to a wheelchair after an accident at the Waterwitch which took place
when she was ten. Seven years later, she decides to return to the place where the awful event occurred. But the ancient inn still has its ghosts, and one particular spirit is more vengeful than ever… 

This one is appealing to me on a number of levels.  Firstly -  ghost story.  Secondly - the inn has a suitably creepy name.  Thirdly - in terms of spooky settings, there is no setting spookier than an inn in the West Country.  Think Jamaica Inn or The Pilchard Inn on Burgh Island in Devon (a place so spooky, I couldn't even bring myself to go into the toilets alone).  So yes, this one's going on my TBR list.  As soon as I'm feeling brave enough.

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

The Weight of Water by Sarah Crossan

I’ve never been attracted to books that are written in verse.  I like poetry and I like novels and I’ve always thought that the two should never be mixed.
 
But damn if Sarah Crossan doesn ‘t manage to pull it off.
 
Earlier this year, I was lucky enough to get an early copy of One for review and the depth of emotion told in so few words completely astounded me and had me hooked on Crossan’s work.
 
I didn’t realise The Weight of Water was another free verse book, but after reading One it wouldn’t have put me off.  And again, it completely works on so many levels: the lyrical descriptions of new life in England combined with her limited grasp of English ... it’s just spot on.
 
Briefly, The Weight of Water is the story of a Polish girl, Kasienka, and her mother who arrive in England to try to find Kasienka’s dad, who has abandoned them.  They head, rather inauspiciously, for Coventry ending up in a bedsit while Kasienka attends the local school.  She feels horribly out of place and is subjected to bullying and exclusion and the only place she feels at home is in the water, swimming.
 
Even though this is a book probably aimed at younger YAs (the protagonist is thirteen) it has a some themes and messages about bullying, outsiders and loneliness that are relevant to everyone.  As Crossan shows, bullying doesn’t have to be physical and it doesn’t even have to be words.  It can be deliberate exclusion, whispers behind hands and pointed looks.  I really liked how Kasienka grew over the course of what is a very short book (I finished it in one afternoon) and realised that her behaviour towards new people when she was socially secure back home in Poland wasn’t exactly exemplary. 
 
Totally going to be looking out for more work by Sarah Crossan. 
 
4 stars

My Life Next Door by Huntley Fitzpatrick

You know that thing when you look at the synopsis of a book on Netgalley or Amazon or wherever and think, ‘Okay.  That looks like a fun read.’   So then you buy it or request it and it sits on your Kindle for a bit until you remember it and start reading it and you’re like, ‘Oh my GOD!  This book is FANTASTIC!’

That’s what I had when I read My Life Next Door.

Samantha lives with her sister and their posho snob mum in a seaside town in Connecticut.  Next door live the Garretts, a loving, chaotic family who are the complete antithesis of Sam’s sterile family life.  Sam watches the Garretts from her roof until one day she meets one of them for real (a boy!) and a collision course is set in motion.

This book.  I just …   I just can’t even.  I enjoyed it so, so much.  I finished it like three days ago, and I’m still feeling all blushy and fangirly over it.

If you look at the plot alone, it’s fine but nothing groundbreaking and I mean that in the nicest possible way.  It’s a romance with some family-loyalty-type issues thrown in.  The kind of thing you’d pick up for a holiday read.  What lifts the plot above the run-of-the-mill contemporaries out there are the characters.

Fitzpatrick has created a cast of characters that I absolutely adored and want to get to know better.  Literally every scene had me either cheering or booing for them.  I even adored stoner Tim, and he was the kind of irresponsible character that usually gives me the cats-bum-mouth.

And the romance.  Don’t even get me started.  I am such a sucker for a boy-next-door romance, I can’t even tell you, and this one absolutely pushed my buttons.  Jase had my heart thrumming and his and Sam’s relationship was paced exactly right.  There was no instalove, no love triangle, just two people who adore each other.  And the author also has to get brownie points for including a relationship where the two protagonists make a mature (albeit lust-filled, crazy-about-you) decision to have sex and go about it in a responsible way.  Yes.  Correct.  We need to see more of this in YA, instead of having sex portrayed as something that is Shameful and Wrong.

I think ultimately what swung this book for me was the power of the writing.  If you look at the plot objectively it just reads like a standard YA contemporary novel.  Which is fine, obviously, but I didn’t go into it thinking, ‘Wow.  This book is going to rock my world.’  And yet that’s exactly what it did.  It’s rare that an author’s writing absolutely speaks to you, and not in a spiritual, yoghurt-weavery way, but more in a ‘Yup, I totally get where you’re coming from and I can picture it perfectly’ way.  Will everyone think the same as me?  No idea.  But this book is still definitely worth a read.

My Life Next Door is absolutely a five star effort for me.  I will absolutely be re-reading it (although next time it will be in the summer).

I received a copy of My Life Next Door in exchange for an honest review.  Many thanks to Huntley Fitzpatrick, Electric Monkey and Netgalley.

5 stars

Waiting On Wednesday - What I Thought Was True by Huntley Fitzpatrick

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 What I Thought Was True by Huntley Fitzpatrick.  Here's the blurb:

Gwen Castle's Biggest Mistake Ever, Cassidy Somers, is slumming it as a yard boy on her idyllic Nantucket-esque island this summer. He's a rich kid from across the bridge in Stony Bay, and she hails from a family of fishermen and housecleaners who keep the island's summer people happy. Gwen worries a life of cleaning houses will be her fate too, but just when it looks like she'll never escape her past--or the island--Gwen's dad gives her some shocking advice. Sparks fly and secret histories unspool as Gwen spends a gorgeous, restless summer struggling to resolve what she thought was true--about the place she lives, the people she loves, and even herself--with what really is.

Huntley Fitzpatrick delivers another enticing summer listen full of expectation and regret, humor and hard questions, and a romance that will make every reader swoon.

I've just finished a review copy of My Life Next Door, which is being published by Electric Monkey on the 7th January, and I absolutely adored it!  It was such a swoony read and I adored Sam and Jase.  More than this, though, I think Huntley Fitzpatrick is a super writer and I can't wait to read more by her!

What I Thought Was True is being published in the UK by Electric Monkey on the 7th April 2016.

What about you?  What's your Waiting On Wednesday Pick.

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

Outlander came on my radar because I’d been recommended it on Goodreads by a few people.  The only thing I knew about the book when I started reading it was that it is a young adult novel.  About five pages in, I realised that it isn’t, in fact, a young adult novel.  So actually I started reading Outlander knowing absolutely nothing about it.
 
It tells the story of Claire, a woman who is on holiday in Scotland with her husband Frank after being separated from him for a few years while they were both serving in World War Two.  One day on a walk in the countryside she starts mucking around a stone circle and gets sucked back in time two hundred years to the mid-seventeen-hundreds.  She is captured and taken to a local castle by some Scots who think she is an English spy.  To keep her safe and to find out if she really is a spy, she is manoeuvred into marriage with Jamie, the nephew of the local laird.  Luckily for Claire, Jamie is hot and likes her back.  Unluckily, he is an outlaw so they’re forced to be almost constantly on the run from the English.
 
I really enjoyed Outlander.  Like I said, I had no idea what to expect but it turned out to be a terrific read.  It’s a really good balance of romance and adventure and life-threatening situations and considering it was so long (900 pages) it held my attention well throughout.
I have absolutely no idea if it is historically accurate or not.  But do you know what?  It was such a good adventure-romance that I just don’t care.  My feeling is that you could probably plot Outlander right on the intersection of a Venn diagram where the two sets are ‘Well-researched historical fiction’ and ‘Smutty romance’.
 
One thing I would say is that if you’re not fond of sex in books, this definitely isn’t the one for you.  Literally all Claire and Jamie do is shag: they’re at it night and day for nearly the whole novel.  I guess they didn’t have television or the Internet in those days so people were forced to make their own amusements.  Maybe that’s why everyone had so many children.  On the whole, the sex scenes were well done, but one of them got a bit rapey which I wasn’t a fan of, although in the 1700s there was legally no such thing as a man raping his wife.
 
This aside, I really liked Jamie and Claire’s relationship.  Considering they were forced into marriage very quickly and had an instant physical attraction, the actual love side of things developed nice and slowly and they do spend a small amount of time talking to each other (in between all the sex scenes).  (Seriously, I’m not making this up: there is so much sex in this book!)  Jamie obviously really loved Claire and while his attitudes to women were a bit misogynistic at times, I was glad the author didn’t try and make him modern in his outlook: I thought this was a lot more representative of the times they were living in.  I was also glad that Claire had enough of a backbone to stand up to him.
 
So anyway, there was one bit of the book that made me do the raised-eyebrow emoticon thing.  Imagine this scenario:
 
You’ve just been reunited with your younger brother after not seeing him for a couple of years.  Almost immediately, you get into an argument and your brother isn’t listening to you while you’re trying to put your point across.  He’s being really annoying.  Do you;
 
(a) Tock him on the forehead with a handy teaspoon/pencil/book
 
(b) Shout, ‘Just shut the FUCK up for a minute, will you?’
 
Or
 
(c) Reach under his kilt and grab him by the bare bollocks.
 
See, I’d go with option (a).  Maybe (b).  Under no circumstances would I go for option (c).  My brother is a laid-back guy, but if I tried to pull shit like that, I think our relationship would be irreparably damaged.  In fact, just thinking about doing it is making me pull a grossed-out face while I’m writing this.
 
And yet, that’s exactly what Jaime’s sister does when they’re in the middle of an argument.  And no one seems to think it’s an odd thing to do.  Seriously, has society changed that much in 250 years that this used to be an acceptable way to get someone’s attention?  Your brother’s attention, in fact.  Who does that?  It’s just ... Eurgh!  Wrong, wrong, wrong.
 
Coincidentally, my brother lives in Scotland.  Next time I speak to him, maybe I’ll ask him if it’s a Scottish thing.  Or maybe I won’t, thereby avoiding the weird look he’s bound to give me.
 
Outlander, for me, was such a brilliant read.  I’m tempted to give it a full five stars, but I really only do that for books I’m planning on re-reading.  There are parts of Outlander that I’d re-read (yes, the sex parts), but at 900 pages, a full re-read would be a serious undertaking.  Especially when there are a further five books in the series.
 
Also the bollock-grabbing scene was just too weird.
 
4.5 stars