Claire Stevens's Blog, page 48

99 Days by Katie Cotugno

99 Days is a contemporary romance about Molly, a girl who destroyed her relationship with her boyfriend Patrick by hooking up with his brother.  Facing the anger of her entire hometown, she fled to boarding school but now she’s back for the summer and has 99 days to get through until she leaves for college.

This novel had a really interesting concept.  When I first picked it up, I thought it might be a bit like The Summer I Turned Pretty by Jenny Han.  It most assuredly is not.  It’s a lot darker and a bit more twisted and the author’s writing style is a lot more dramatic.

I liked what the author was trying to do with the plot (although I think that if I were Molly, I’d have just emotionally blackmailed my awful mother into paying for me to travel around Europe for the summer instead of having to come back to a town full of wankers who hate me) and even though it was a love triangle I could see how it worked and I liked that things were left hanging a little bit at the end.

My main problem with this book was that I disliked every single character.  Every single one. 

Molly, the hero of the piece, is the one who comes across best.  She accepts the disdain of pretty much everyone she’s ever met with dignity (for the most part) and although I wanted het to wake up to the fact that what she did was none of anyone else’s business, I liked her.  Until the bit where she can’t make up her mind which brother to shag next.  Holy cow, girl.  Pick a brother.  Just pick a brother.

Gabe started off being a bit skeevy and then got okay.  Patrick started off okay (wronged by his girlfriend and justifiably annoyed) and then got skeevy.  Then at the end there’s this big reveal about Gabe’s and Patrick’s motivations for liking Molly and they just both come off as really unpleasant.

The townsfolk.  It was weird - is this book supposed to be a modern re-working of The Scarlet Letter?  Because I seriously couldn’t see why everyone in the town was in any way interested in whether Molly had cheated on Patrick or why they thought it was any of their business, other than if (a) they had literally nothing else going on in their lives, or (b) they were living in the 1850s.  They were really into slut-shaming, and I don’t think the author made enough of the fact that Gabe should have been implicated as much as Molly.

And Julia.  Gabe and Patrick’s sister spends most of the book waging war on Molly - she keys Molly’s car, throws beer on her, eggs her house.  I understood that Molly had been her friend and that she felt betrayed on Patrick’s behalf, but seriously, if I ever get that invested in my brother’s sex life, just shoot me in the head.  Why?  Because it’s none of my business and it would be kind of weird of me to get involved.

I did enjoy reading this book, but I think other people will enjoy it more if they’re able to get behind the characters a bit more than I did.

3 stars

Waiting On Wednesday - Silence Is Goldfish by Annabel Pitcher

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 upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week, my Waiting On Wednesday pick is Silence Is Goldfish by Annabel Pitcher.  Here's the blurb:

My name is Tess Turner - at least, that's what I've always been told.

I have a voice but it isn't mine. It used to say things so I'd fit in, to please my parents, to please my teachers. It used to tell the universe I was something I wasn't. It lied.

It never occurred to me that everyone else was lying too. But the words that really hurt weren't the lies: it was six hundred and seventeen words of truth that turned my world upside down.

Words scare me, the lies and the truth, so I decided to stop using them.

I am Pluto. Silent. Inaccessible. Billions of miles away from everything I thought I knew.

Tessie-T has never really felt she fitted in and after what she read that night on her father's blog she knows for certain that she never will. How she deals with her discovery makes an entirely riveting, heart-breaking story told through Tess's eyes as she tries to find her place in the world.

Now, I've gotta say, that blurb isn't telling me much.  Is it contemporary?  Sci-Fi?  Fantasy?  We just don't know.  What we do know, however, is that it's by Annabel Pitcher.  I read one of her other books, Ketchup Clouds, earlier this year and it was really rather superb, so I'm definitely going to take a punt on this one as well.

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

The Future Of Us by Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler

The website says ‘Facebook’ at the top.  It’s disorganised, with graphics and writing all over the place.

Imagine if you could look fifteen years into the future and see what your future self is getting up to.  Now imagine you make some tiny, tiny alterations to your current life and then look into the future again only to see that huge changes have taken place.  Wouldn’t you be tempted to just keep making those tiny changes until you ended up with a future you were satisfied with?

That’s basically the central conceit of The Future Of Us.  It’s the mid-nineties and Emma and Josh are best friends, or at least they were until Josh tried to kiss Emma and Emma freaked out.  Now, six months down the line they’re hardly speaking, until Josh’s mum sends him over to Emma’s house with a CD-ROM disc to get onto this new-fangled internet thing that’s all the rage.  Only, when Emma loads the disc onto her (Windows 95) computer, she manages to log into Facebook.  That’s the Facebook that doesn’t get invented for another ten years.

This book was really readable and I rattled through it at a fair old pace.  I liked Emma and Josh well enough and the dual POV narrative gave a good insight into their situations - they had nice, distinct voices, which I think is in part due to the fact that this book has two authors.  Some of the chapters were really short which made it feel a bit choppy and disjointed at times.  Only a bit though.  The story is divided into two strands - Josh and Emma’s growing obsession with their futures as viewed through Facebook status updates, and the possibility that they might or might not end up getting together (which it’s obvious that they ought to).

The plot is kind of fluffy and sweet.  It deals with chaos theory without actually mentioning chaos theory and deals with pre-determinism, self-determinism and causal chains without getting all existential and up-its-own-bum and stays really, really readable.  It also deals with Emma and Josh’s friendship and how it may or may not develop into something more if only they’d just both (a) wake up to what’s right in front of their faces, and (b) stop dicking around on Facebook all day long.

And that’s a lesson I think we can all take away with us.

3.5 stars

Orange Is The New Black by Piper Kerman

When Piper Kerman was in her early twenties, bored and fresh out of college with no sense of direction, she started dating a girl with a lot of money and an exciting lifestyle, who just happened to be a drug-trafficker.  Piper never really got involved with the drugs side of things, but she did courier money from America to Europe for her girlfriend.

Years later, Piper has settled down and is in a happy relationship and is enjoying her career in TV production.  Then, one day, there is a knock at her front door.  It’s the feds, and her ex-girlfriend has been arrested and is busy bringing down every single one of her former comrades with her...

Orange Is The New Black is the autobiographical account of what happens next (spoiler alert: she goes to prison) and how Piper manages to survive.

I liked Piper in this book, which was a surprise because as a rule I’m not fond of spoilt WASPs or of people who facilitate the drug trade.  She came across as an interesting character with a spicy past and she manages to navigate her year in prison and come out the other side moderately unscathed.

What I particularly liked about this book was that Kerman never tries to sugar-coat the poor decisions she has made.  She readily paints her younger self as naive, lazy and selfish and she doesn’t try to portray her current, prison-dwelling self as some kind of saint or badly-wronged girl.  She never tries to justify what she did to get thrown in jail or to argue that her sentence was unfair, other than to say ‘Yeah, I did a really dumb thing.’

The plot gets a little repetitive towards the middle of the book.  I guess when you live in a prison, you’re not going to get a whole lot of variety in your life, but it did feel a little flat after the excitement of the first third of the book.  It wasn’t enough to make me want to stop reading, though, and it picked up a lot towards the end.

I think the flatness in the middle of the book stems in some part from Kerman’s survivalist nature.  Before she goes to prison, she reads a lot of How To Survive Prison books (yes, such things exist!) and clearly decides that she’s going to keep her head down, do her time and offend no one.  She doesn’t raise her head above the parapet, and she treads carefully, both amongst the screws and her fellow prisoners.  I can totally see why she does it - it’s probably the tactic I would use - but it doesn’t make for terribly exciting reading.

The wife of a friend of mine used to be a prison officer in a women’s prison in northern England, and some of the stories she used to come out with would make your hair curl.  I guess I was expecting Orange Is The New Black to be more like that - more gritty, more scandalous - but I guess you don’t get to dine out on stories of the prisoners who don’t give you any trouble.

I haven’t watched the Netflix series of Orange Is The New Black, but I’m kind of tempted to now.  By all accounts it’s a bit different to the book, but I reckon it would be worth seeing.


4 stars

Waiting On Wednesday - Daughters Unto Devils by Amy Lukavics

Waiting On Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Jill over at Breaking The Spine and it's a chance for us to highlight upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.  This week, my Waiting On Wednesday pick is Daughters Unto Devils by Amy Lukavics.  Here's the Goodreads blurb:

When sixteen-year-old Amanda Verner's family decides to move from their small mountain cabin to the vast prairie, she hopes it is her chance for a fresh start. She can leave behind the memory of the past winter; of her sickly Ma giving birth to a baby sister who cries endlessly; of the terrifying visions she saw as her sanity began to slip, the victim of cabin fever; and most of all, the memories of the boy she has been secretly meeting with as a distraction from her pain. The boy whose baby she now carries.

When the Verners arrive at their new home, a large cabin abandoned by its previous owners, they discover the inside covered in blood. And as the days pass, it is obvious to Amanda that something isn't right on the prairie. She's heard stories of lands being tainted by evil, of men losing their minds and killing their families, and there is something strange about the doctor and his son who live in the woods on the edge of the prairie. But with the guilt and shame of her sins weighing on her, Amanda can't be sure if the true evil lies in the land, or deep within her soul.

I'm going to be honest here - I don't often go for a horror book, preferring instead to read about sunshine and kittens and two destined souls finding love with each other after some kind of misunderstanding.  However, this one caught my eye with its vaguely Ring-like cover and when I read the blurb I was hooked.  The combined spookiness of isolation, murder, paranormal goings-on and losing one's sanity is going to make for a roller-coaster of a plot.

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

Alienated by Melissa Landers

I’ve been trying to get hold of a copy of Alienated for ages, but every time I looked on Amazon, it still hadn’t been released on Kindle.  Then I read a note somewhere saying that no, it isn’t on ebook format and probably wasn’t going to be either.  So, intrigued by the cover and premise, I decided to go old school and get a copy from the library.

Alienated is the story of Cara, a high school senior who is chosen to play host to an alien boy (who’s hot!) in the first ever Earth-L’eihr student exchange.  Excited by the prospect of material that every budding journalist would die for (plus free college tuition) she readily agrees to the exchange.  When her home town gets more and more swept up in anti-L’eihr sentiment she and Aleyx grow closer, but Aleyx is hiding secrets of his own...

I thought the writing was superb in this book, so imagine my surprise when I read the author’s notes at the back and discovered that this was her NaNoWriMo project!  For those of you unfamiliar with NaNoWriMo, it stands for National Novel Writing Month and it takes place every November.  The idea is to get at least 50,000 words of your novel down over the course of the month and you get loads of community support from people all over the world who are doing the same thing.

Melissa Landers wrote this whole book as her NaNo project.  Like, she wrote a book in a month.

I mean, she probably had the outline written beforehand, and NaNo is just about getting words on paper so I’m sure there was plenty of editing afterwards, but still!  I can’t believe she bashed this out in a month!  So fab to hear a NaNo success story.

The book is written from both Cara’s and Aleyx’s POV, and the author does a good job of making their voices sound really different.  When we are first introduced to her, we’re told that she’s really competitive and an overachiever, so I wondered how much I’d like Cara, but actually she’s not as highly strung as you think she’s going to be and I liked her a lot.  Aleyx is this emotionally-barren, Sheldon-Cooper-esque guy and I liked watching him gradually let his guard down and become more emotionally attached.

I also really liked reading the romance between Aelyx and Cara.  It was really skillfully done: considering they fall in love over the course of just one book it didn't feel rushed or instalovey.  It was very gradual and sweet.

The plot basically charts the weeks and months after Aleyx arrives on Earth.  There are some slightly infodumpy scenes where Aleyx tells Cara all about life on L’eihr, but they weren’t too badly done and the L’eihr worldbuilding was pretty cool.  And it totally set up the storyline for the next book!

So yes.  Alienated is a really great book.  Read it.

4.5 stars

If You Find Me by Emily Murdoch

If You Find Me is the debut novel of Emily Murdoch.  It’s the story of Carey, a fourteen year old girl who lives deep in the woods in a caravan with her meth addicted mother and mute six-year-old sister.  Her mum goes missing for weeks at a time, and one day a man claiming to be Carey’s father and a woman from social services turn up at the caravan and bring Carey and her sister back to civilisation.

I thought this book was really well-written.  The pace and the style of the story kept me reading long past my bedtime and I was always keen to pick it up.  It touched on some really difficult subjects, such as sexual abuse, drug abuse and paedophilia, without being sensationalist and gave the reader just enough information to be suitably shocked but without being overly graphic.

The plot was really interesting.  You have a kid who was taken into the woods aged five and has had nothing to do with civilisation since then.  The possibilities as far as a plot is concerned are almost endless and the author does a really good job of exploring them.  Okay, there were some bits that had me raising an eyebrow in disbelief (would someone who is as voracious a reader as Carey really never have heard of contact lenses?), but in all this aspect of the plot was really well explored.  Carey and Nessa’s re-integration into society were really interesting to read about and at times my heart just went out to them.

Actually, the plot as a whole was well done.  There were enough flashbacks into Carey’s life in the woods to provide a nice contrast with her current situation and although I thought the plotline with Carey’s mum needed some resolution I really enjoyed it.

What let this book down, I felt, was the MC.  Although I loved Carey’s loyalty to her sister and the way she fought to protect her (in fact, I really liked the relationship between Nessa and Carey - it was beautiful), in all other respects she was a complete Mary-Sue.  Possibly the most Mary-Sueish Mary-Sue I’ve ever read about.  Here’s how much of a Mary-Sue she is:

1) She’s beautiful (but never realised it before)
2) Great figure
3) Kind to everyone she meets
4) Super talented on the violin
5) Two years ahead of her peers academically
6) Crazy survival skills
7) Best-looking boy in school falls instantly in love with her

GAH!  She desperately needed some dark to provide contrast to all this awesomeness. Even when her stepsister is openly nasty to her (and I wasn’t keen on this relationship either - Delaney was pretty one-dimensional and her nastiness felt really gratuitous) she turns the other cheek.

And when we find out that she did do something really bad (and it was really bad) when she lived in the woods, she had a really good, noble reason for doing it.  Again - gah!

All in all, though, this was a good story and if you can get over a too-good-to-be-true protagonist, it’s worth a look.

3.5 stars

If You Find Me by

If You Find Me is the debut novel of Emily Murdoch.  It’s the story of Carey, a fourteen year old girl who lives deep in the woods in a caravan with her meth addicted mother and mute six-year-old sister.  Her mum goes missing for weeks at a time, and one day a man claiming to be Carey’s father and a woman from social services turn up at the caravan and bring Carey and her sister back to civilisation.

I thought this book was really well-written.  The pace and the style of the story kept me reading long past my bedtime and I was always keen to pick it up.  It touched on some really difficult subjects, such as sexual abuse, drug abuse and paedophilia, without being sensationalist and gave the reader just enough information to be suitably shocked but without being overly graphic.

The plot was really interesting.  You have a kid who was taken into the woods aged five and has had nothing to do with civilisation since then.  The possibilities as far as a plot is concerned are almost endless and the author does a really good job of exploring them.  Okay, there were some bits that had me raising an eyebrow in disbelief (would someone who is as voracious a reader as Carey really never have heard of contact lenses?), but in all this aspect of the plot was really well explored.  Carey and Nessa’s re-integration into society were really interesting to read about and at times my heart just went out to them.

Actually, the plot as a whole was well done.  There were enough flashbacks into Carey’s life in the woods to provide a nice contrast with her current situation and although I thought the plotline with Carey’s mum needed some resolution I really enjoyed it.

What let this book down, I felt, was the MC.  Although I loved Carey’s loyalty to her sister and the way she fought to protect her (in fact, I really liked the relationship between Nessa and Carey - it was beautiful), in all other respects she was a complete Mary-Sue.  Possibly the most Mary-Sueish Mary-Sue I’ve ever read about.  Here’s how much of a Mary-Sue she is:

1) She’s beautiful (but never realised it before)
2) Great figure
3) Kind to everyone she meets
4) Super talented on the violin
5) Two years ahead of her peers academically
6) Crazy survival skills
7) Best-looking boy in school falls instantly in love with her

GAH!  She desperately needed some dark to provide contrast to all this awesomeness. Even when her stepsister is openly nasty to her (and I wasn’t keen on this relationship either - Delaney was pretty one-dimensional and her nastiness felt really gratuitous) she turns the other cheek.

And when we find out that she did do something really bad (and it was really bad) when she lived in the woods, she had a really good, noble reason for doing it.  Again - gah!

All in all, though, this was a good story and if you can get over a too-good-to-be-true protagonist, it’s worth a look.

3.5 stars

Underwater by Marisa Reichhardt

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Jill over at Breaking The Spine.  It's a chance for us to highlight any upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week, my Waiting on Wednesday pick is Underwater by Marisa Reichhardt.  Here's the Goodreads blurb:

Morgan didn’t mean to do anything wrong that day. Actually, she meant to do something right. But her kind act inadvertently played a role in a deadly tragedy. In order to move on, Morgan must learn to forgive—first someone who did something that might be unforgivable, and then, herself.

But Morgan can’t move on. She can’t even move beyond the front door of the apartment she shares with her mother and little brother. Morgan feels like she’s underwater, unable to surface. Unable to see her friends. Unable to go to school. 

When it seems Morgan can’t hold her breath any longer, a new boy moves in next door. Evan reminds her of the salty ocean air and the rush she used to get from swimming. He might be just what she needs to help her reconnect with the world outside. 

Underwater is a powerful, hopeful debut novel about redemption, recovery, and finding the strength it takes to face your past and move on.

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

What about you?  What book are you going to queuing at Waterstones at midnight to get??

Denton Little's Deathdate by Lance Rubin

This book is a hard one to rate.  There were aspects of it that I thought were really awesome.  Really cool and original and well-executed.  There were also bits that I thought weren’t so great and just didn’t work. 

The writing style was brilliant.  The book skipped along in a really fun way and the author had a nice lighthearted touch, which is quite something considering the book is about Denton’s impending death!  There was a lot of dialogue - I don’t know anything about the author, but maybe he’s a screenwriter because it flowed really well and had a lot of humour.

I liked the characters well enough - Denton and Paulo had a really fun bromance going on and the banter between them made me laugh on numerous occasions.  The girls were a little bit more one-dimensional, but they were okay.  

The biggest issue I had was that the plot doesn’t really seem to do much.  We’re introduced to Denton at the beginning and told about the whole death date thing and we find out fairly soon in that Denton is going to die in the next couple of days.  All good.  From then on, we’re just kind of watching and waiting for him to die.  Or not.  There’s plenty of humour thrown in, but it just ends up feeling like a sitcom; the situation being ‘Will Denton die?’ and the comedy being gags about getting high and shagging people’s sisters.

The other problem I had, and one I didn’t really manage to get over, was the whole concept of being able to tell when someone is going to die based on their DNA sample.  It just didn’t work for me.  I could get on board with the concept of using someone’s DNA to deduce their death date from natural causes - heart disease, cancer, old age - but in this book DNA is also used to predict your death date from random acts - stray gunshots, car crashes and so on.

It throws the whole concept of chaos theory out of the window and I could never really get my head round it.  I’d have been happier if the author had said, ‘they do it with magic’, or ‘they found an old druid in a cave in darkest Wales who can do precognition’.

If I could have made that leap of logic, I would have enjoyed this book a whole lot more, but it just didn’t work for me.

I wouldn’t say ‘don’t read this book’; the writing is fun and it’s really readable, but the plot and the concept just left me scratching my head a bit.

3 stars