Claire Stevens's Blog, page 5

So Lucky by Dawn o'Porter

This.  Book.  Was.  Awesome.

Dawn o'Porter has become a bit of an autobuy author for me because she writes about real life in such an unflinching way.  She says the things the rest of us all think.  Contemporary adult fiction isn't really something I particularly go for - I have no interest in white people sitting at dinner parties moaning about school catchment areas or the impossibility of getting reliable cleaning staff - but this author's work always goes for the societal jugular.  And by that I mean she writes about sex a lot.  And raw, mucky, real-life sex.  Not a weird, sanitised, throbbing-member-aching-core version of sex.

So Lucky is written from the viewpoints of Beth, Lauren and Ruby, three women who on the surface look like they have it all when the truth isn't quite so simple.  The plot starts off amorphous and random and gradually coalesces into something a bit more specific, the lives of the three women start to cross over and intersect until the grand finale.  And it's pretty grand.

The three characters are so real, with real-life faults; even Lauren, who for 90% of the book we only see through Instagram posts.  They do good stuff and dumb stuff.  They have problems and neuroses and love.

Also, this book is so funny.  Like, I was listening to it in the garden on audiobook and I kept bursting out laughing.  There is a whole section on dogging that the author manages to make sound hilarious and kind of hot, instead of seedy and gross.  Mind you, the character observing the dogging has been starved of sex for a long time, so I think you'd find a pencil sharpener erotic in that situation.

All in all, this was a really great book.  Definitely recommended.

5 stars

How Sweet The Sound by Evelyn Dar

​Man, this was not a good book.  I was going to give it two stars, but no, bollocks to it.  It's one star.

This was the story of Si Si and Kat, two girls who meet for the first time as children and become best friends before Si Si is taken into care and they lose contact.  Thirteen years later, Si Si and her foster mum move back into town and the two girls reconnect.  There's the usual thing about how they hate each other first of all before being thrown together for a school project and becoming friends.  Woop!  Woop!  YA cliche alert!

So first, the positive.  I actually quite liked the two MCs.  They were fully-formed characters and I liked them, especially Si Si/Liz.  She was really fun and kind of wild.

Anyway, that's all the positive.  Now on to what I didn't like.

Let's start with the writing style.  I get that this was a self-published number and I'm always more generous with self-published work, but the writing tended towards the rambling and there was a real lack of clarity.  In addition there were a lot of spelling and punctuation errors that made the writing just not flow properly.

As mentioned, the plot was cliched, but I could probably forgive the uninspiring plot, if it wasn't for all the other bizarreness crammed into this book.  

Some of the things that happened in this book were just weird and disturbing.  So, Kat's mum is dying of cancer in hospital.  It's really sad, but she is in hospital with all the medical care paid for by the military and, you would assume, access to pain relief.  Imagine my surprise, therefore, when Kat goes into the hospital and shoots her mum up with heroin.  Yes, heroin.  And it's dealt with in a 'yeah, this isn't a big deal' way.  Just an every day occurrence for a teenager to obtain heroin, bring it into a hospital, shoot her mum up and for her mum to not die of an overdose when the heroin mixes with all the other opiates she's taking.  I rubbed my eyes and re-read the passage because I couldn't quite believe what I'd read.  Does that really happen?  I'm fairly sure it doesn't.  

Then there's the bit where Si Si gets totally off her face and a guy has sex with her and she can't remember anything about it the next day.  I mean, that's rape, isn't it?  Having sex with someone when they're too out of it to consent is still called rape, isn't it?  But this rape is just brushed under the carpet.  Similarly, when Kat's brother invites Si Si into his room under the guise of showing her his video games, tells her to close her eyes and puts his penis in her hand.  It was just weird and wrong and gross and, oh yeah, SEXUAL ASSUALT.  And neither of these scenarios get addressed, other than in a 'Well, boys will be boys' way.  This is bullshit and scenarios like these in YA books are EXACTLY the reason why girls don't go to the police when they've been assaulted. It feeds into this horrible societal narrative that says it's OK for dudes to assault women.

OK, let's talk about sex now.  There was some odd, odd sex in this book.  So the first time there's any sexual contact is where the two MCs are laying on a bed watching TV, one of them falls asleep and inadvertently rolls on top of the other one and jams her thigh between her legs.  The other girl then has an instant orgasm.  I'm not ...  I just ... I don't really know how to describe it.  It just felt like the most unrealistic representation of Something That Would Actually Happen that I've ever read.  They hadn't been fooling around (in which case I could almost believe the instant orgasm, just about), they'd just been watching TV.  Normal TV, not porn.  And later in the book was a sex scene in a hotel that had no build-up to make it sexy and awesome, it was just grabby and hard and ended up with one of the girls crying.  I think it was supposed to be hot, but it really, really wasn't.

I'm sure there are other things I disliked about this book, but I can't face re-reading any of it to list them.  Suffice to say this was not a good book and you shouldn't read it.

1 star

Reaping the Benefits by E J Noyes

Sigh. I’ve been looking forward to this book coming out for a long time, and it didn’t disappoint. 

Morgan is one of Death’s minions. She runs her operations from a plush downtown office complex and takes pleasure in doing her job well and occasionally perving over the office IT manager.  Jane is an IT manager.  She knows that at some point one of Death’s minions will approach her so that she can officially choose her afterlife options, but she’s kind of surprised when the minion turns out to be her hot boss. 

So this is half supernatural fantasy and half steamy romance. I’ve never seen a world built like this one and actually the world building was done really well. Not too infodump-y but still had enough information to give me a good idea of what the deal was. 

This is an alternate universe where Death isn’t a skeleton in a robe with a scythe, but a hot chick.  Her minion is a hot chick and so is the IT manager. The book is full of hot chicks, which is fine by me.  I imagine some people might say that the hotness quotient is not representative of reality, but really we’re talking about a book where Death is a person and you pick your afterlife options using an iPad. So yeah. 

The supernatural element was done really well. I think the reason for Morgan wanting to help Jane with her bucket list was super flimsy but I was so keen for them to get together that I was willing to overlook it. The romance element was done well also. There was plenty of slow burn and emotional engagement. Honestly, there wasn’t quite enough sex for me and a bit too much discussion as to why they couldn’t be together, but this is only a small complaint and didn’t detract too much. 

There was one passage that really made me laugh when Jane and Morgan are in the English countryside:

If she lived here, she’d probably do nothing but walk around staring or spend her days lying down in the fields of thick grass.

This was hilarious because I live in the English countryside and I would NEVER spend the day lying in the grass because (a) it’s always either raining or has recently rained, (b) adders and (c) dog poo.  Sorry to burst everyone’s romantic bubble of what the countryside here is like. 

For me, EJ Noyes is an auto-buy author. She has absolutely reeled me in with her other books. I think If The Shoe Fits and Turbulence are still my favourites, but this is a welcome addition to my library!

I was given a copy of Reaping the Benefits in exchange for an honest review. Many thanks to the author, the publisher and Netgalley.

5 stars

Difficult Women by Helen Lewis

This was such a great book.  I 'read' it on audiobook and it was narrated by the author, which I think really made it.  

Throughout history, feminism has been fought by difficult women.  Difficult in the sense that they have been awkward and annoying (according to the patriarchy) in order to achieve their aims because when you're fighting for a cause, you don't really get anywhere by being liked.  People like the status quo - it's comforting, even if you're not really benefiting from it - and when someone tries to change it, a lot of people get upset.

The women Helen Lewis focuses on are also have also been difficult to like by fellow feminists.  Lewis makes a really salient point in this book, in that one cause cannot hope to speak for 3.5 billion people.  My experience of the world, as a woman, is going to be totally different from how a disabled, black woman experiences it and what I need from feminism will be different too.  There's no one single aim in feminism, but there is crossover with fights for equal rights for other marginalised groups.  She also points out areas where feminism has clashed with fights for other rights (e.g. transgender rights).

Although the chapters each focus on are different aspects of the feminist movement (time, abortion, sex etc) I'd never heard of most of the women mentioned.  I now want to go out and find out more about them!

Lewis's writing style reminded me of that of Caitlin Moran and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - intelligent and incisive and approachable.

Have the women in Lewis's book been effective?  Undoubtedly, yes.  Are they nice people?  Not always, no.  Feminism isn't about being nice, though.  That's the point.  It's an imperfect fight for the right to be imperfect.

5 stars

Forte by Manon Heugel

 This was a gentle, hopeful graphic novel about a girl who grows up in the favela of Belem in Brazil and  gets introduced to the piano by the guy her mum housekeeps for.  Through hard work and talent she gets a scholarship to a prestigious music school in Paris.

The characters she meets are diverse in their backgrounds, but all have the same passion for music.  Flavia works hard and has to sacrifice a lot and make difficult decisions to keep going with her studies.

I liked Flavia a lot - her determination was impressive and her temper made her more human.  the art work was lovely too -- very clean lines which brought the characters to the fore ground.

I found the story really quite lovely.  The only thing I would say is that it does paint Flavia's journey as quite simple.  She does work hard, but she doesn't seem to come up against many obstacles.  I really doubt that this is the kind of future that many kids from the favela can hope for.  

4 stars

American Royals - Katherine McGee

So, I read Katherine McGee's Towering Sky trilogy and really enjoyed it, so when I heard that she was bringing out another series based on an alternative present where America has a monarchy instead of a presidency, I was intrigued.  I like re-imagined presents, so count me in, I thought.

This book had the author's trademark easy-to-read writing style, but unfortunately it really lacked plot.  Like, I was expecting some social commentary on how an elected presidency makes society totally different from a monarchy, but there was no information about the wider American society at all, as far as I could tell.  Such a shame - I think the author really missed a trick.

The characters were ok, but didn't really have enough bite to them.  They were a bit flat.  There was Beatrice, next in line to the throne, a typical, obedient good girl.  Nina was the 'edgy' charachter, a bit of a girl next door, but she had a nose ring and was latina, so you know, ticking the diversity box there.  Daphne was basically Regina George from Mean Girls.  Samantha was a party girl.  None of them really grew over the course of the book, none of them had any other aspects to them.  Shame, really.

The last few chapters of the book were quite fast-paced and the author was obviously building up to the sequel.  I'm kind of interested to see what happens, but at a predicted 320 pages I think I'll read the Wikipedia entry.

3 stars

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

​An absolute classic of a book.  I first read this when I was about fourteen (no idea who recommended it to me) and re-read it recently.  

In case you are in any way unfamiliar with Rebecca, it's the story of a girl who is on holiday with the rich old lady she acts as a companion to, when she meets a nice guy.  They hit it off and at the end of the holiday he proposes.  It turns out he's minted and they go off to live in his massive old house in Cornwall.  Trouble is, he was married before - his first wife died and no one seems able to forget her.  The housekeeper, Danvers, is especially mean and takes delight in gaslighting and pranking the new Mrs de Winter.  Her awesome new husband doesn't seem to think there's anything wrong with this, by the way.

This is the story of a repressed woman trying to find her identity and assert herself in a world where everything is stacked against her, of being judged against other women and found wanting.  In that respect, it can be taken as a metaphor for every woman in the world ever!

The description is what really stands out in this book - it really feels like you are there at Manderley, a creepy old house in the middle of nowhere.  Rebecca, although she is dead and doesn't feature in the book, feels like a real person.

This book is just genius - definitely recommended.

On Hiatus :-)

Work is going crazy and I'm finding less and less time to write reviews, so I'll be going on hiatus for a little while.  With any luck I'll get my mojo back in the new year some time, but for now ... byeeee!

My Best Friend, Maybe by Caela Carter

​Uh, this was only okay.  It was the story of a girl who fell out with her best friend a few years back and then all of a sudden her friend asks her to go on holiday with her.

This in itself is pretty unbelievable.  If someone I hadn't spoken to for five years suddenly asked me on holiday to Greece with them and their family, there would be red flags all over the place.  But our MC just agrees to it.

And okay, I could have probably overlooked this but there were quite a lot of other not-quite-believable aspects to t he book too.  The instalove (my pet peeve), the scary mean girl, the way everyone knows what the Big Secret is, except for our MC, the flakiness and apparent two-facedness of the ex-best-friend.

The romance was a bit of a turn-off.  The MC starts off the book with a total bell-end of a boyfriend and doesn't get rid of him soon enough and then the next guy she falls for was a bit one-dimensional and he did really annoying things like ordering the MC's dinner for her (because the current year is apparently 1852).  

This was an okay book for a quick read, but I wouldn't really recommend it.

2 stars

Ivy Aberdeen's Letter to the World by Ashley Herring Blake

Oh.  My.  God.  This was possibly the cutest, most beautiful book I've read this year so far.  I don't tend to cry at books that much, but this one had me totally welling up.

So, twelve year old Ivy Aberdeen likes to sneak up to her attic and draw pictures of girls (no, not that sort of picture, pervert.  This is a middle grade book)  The girls are always in a treehouse, holding hands.  She's never shown anyone these pictures before because she's trying to figure out what it means for herself.  (Spoiler Alert: Ivy is gay).

One night when she's up in her attic, a tornado hits her house and destroys her home.  And her drawing book goes missing.

That's about as much as I can tell without giving the story away, but suffice to say the plot is the most beautiful, winding story of how her family puts their lives back together after the disaster and how Ivy tries to figure herself out.

The characters are so beautifully rendered and they leap off the page.  The ending had me in bits, but I could see why the author decided to go down that path.

(I realise I keep using the word beautiful, but it really was).

I don't read MG, like at all, but  this is definitely a contender for Book Of The Year.

5 stars