Claire Stevens's Blog, page 60

Forever by Judy Blume

When I was in Year Ten, the friend I sat next to in English slid a book across the table to me and nudged me in the ribs.  ‘Here,’ she hissed.  ‘You’ve gotta read this.’  I looked down at the book she’d passed me.  It wasn’t Death of a Salesman, which was what we were supposed to be reading.  It was Forever.  ‘I’ve dog-eared the mucky bits for you,’ she grinned.

So I read the mucky bits.  Of course I did.  I read the rest of the book, too, and recently I thought I’d have another look at it.

Forever tells the story of Katherine and Michael, who meet at a fondue party (it’s set in the seventies) at a mutual friend’s house.  They start dating, fall in love and very soon Michael starts pushing Kath to have sex.  They do, but then they are separated over the summer holidays when Katherine goes off to work as a camp counselor and Michael has a job back home.  Katherine meets Theo, an older camp counselor who is more worldly and starts thinking that maybe first love doesn’t last forever...

Judy Blume wrote some really relevant ‘issues’ books in the seventies and eighties:  Blubber (the bullying book), Deenie (the masturbation/body image book), Tiger Eyes (the bereavement book) and Forever (the sex book).  I remember reading somewhere that Forever came about after Judy Blume’s daughter complained to her mum that sex in YA books was always shown as having negative consequences (teen pregnancy and the clap).  And I think really that’s what Forever will always be remembered for.  It was the book that told everyone, ‘You know what?  Teenagers do have sex.  It doesn’t mean they’re morally corrupt and as long as they’re sensible it doesn’t always end badly.’

Forever was groundbreaking, there’s no doubt about it, and it broke down some taboos in writing that paved the way for a lot of the excellent YA books that are around today.

I had some major issues with this book, though.

At points it seems like the whole message of the book is, ‘First love never lasts.  Get over it.’  Which is, you know, pragmatic, but not terribly romantic. 

The plot doesn’t really do much; it’s just centred around teenagers deciding whether or not to have sex.  The writing is a bit flat and the conversations are cheesy and stilted.

Katherine seems like a nice enough girl, albeit a little boring, and she is sensible enough to tell Michael that she is not ready to have sex with him.  He, however, sulks and continues to pressure her and she eventually capitulates.  When they do have sex, it’s consensual, but she didn’t really seem that into it and I really didn’t like the way he pressured her and just kept going on about it.  Not cool.  It’s like the message is, ‘Girls: boys are horn dogs.  It’s their thing.  They’ll wear you down eventually, no doubt about it.’

Michael is also reluctant to use contraception, so again the message is, ‘Girls: you’re the ones who need to take responsibility for contraception, because boys never bother with that sort of thing’, when in fact contraception should be the responsibility of both parties. 

I also forgot one crucial element of Forever.

“Katherine...I’d like you to meet Ralph.”

Ralph is Michael’s penis.  He named his penis. 

So, yeah.  Michael’s a dick.  He’s just basically this lust-consumed, hormonal, emotionally manipulative idiot.  His obsession with getting into Katherine’s knickers is the only thing we really know about him, so he comes across as really one-dimensional, which in turn made me wonder why Katherine was with him.

All in all, a big ‘well done’ has to go out to Judy Blume, on so thoroughly pushing the envelope as far as YA content is concerned.  For the time she was writing (1975), this was a major advance in YA literature.  Forever is still one of the most controversial books in America, but it seems that the controversy stems more from its sexual content rather than how flat the story is, the general unpleasantness of the characters and its outdated messages.

4/10

Feature and Follow Friday - How do you organise your books?

The Feature & Follow is hosted by TWO hosts, Parajunkee of Parajunkee's View and Alison of Alison Can Read.

Feature & Follow gives you the chance to get to know and follow more book bloggers. This way you can make not only followers, but friends!  Every week the hosts will give the bloggers one question to answer.  This week's question is: 

How do you organize your books? Either at home on your bookshelves or on your reading-device, or on your bookish platform like Goodreads, Leafmarks or Booklikes. - Suggested by Unconventional Book Views. 


A couple of years back, I converted from being a lifetime paperbacks-only girl to being totally Kindle-is-the-way-forward.  I resisted it for so long, but yeah, now I'm all about the Kindle.  You can talk to me all you like about the smell of books and the feel of paper pages, and then I'll show you some pictures of my overfilled 

The only way a Kindle falls down is by organisation of books.  There's no easy way to do it (I have an old school Kindle, not a Kindle Fire), so I mostly just keep the books I've not read yet at the top of the huge, long list so I don't forget about them.  

I use Goodreads shelves to organise the books I've already read and I organise my TBR list on my Amazon wishlist.  That way I can check every now and then to see if any have gone down in price.  Ta da!

How about you?  How do you organise your reading shelves?

This feature is a Blog Hop!

Witch Hunter by Virginia Boecker

I received a copy of The Witch Hunter in exchange for an honest review.  Many thanks to Hachette Children’s Books and Netgalley.

Elizabeth Grey is a Witch Hunter, one of the best in Anglia.  She can take out a room full of necromancers with a bag of salt and a sword and kill a man using only her thumb.  In an alternative version of Tudor England, anyone found using magic is dicing with death because if Elizabeth or one of her witch hunter buddies finds you, you go straight to Fleet and from there to the stake. 

However, when Elizabeth is caught in possession of magical herbs she’s burned.  In the spy way, not the fire way, although that’s on the cards too.  In Fleet and dying of a fever, she’s visited by Nicholas Peverill, a famous and dangerous wizard, who makes a deal with her: he’ll get her out of prison if she agrees to help him break a deadly curse.

I had literally no idea what to expect from this book when I started it, other than it might be, you know, about someone who hunts witches.  It took me a couple of goes to get started, but once I’d got into it (and it really only took a few pages) it really grabbed me.  The author’s done some really nice world-building: I loved that all the countries - Anglia, Iberia, Gaul - had Latin (I think) names and the anachronism of a mediaeval setting, but with modern speech and values.  Hey, it’s an alternative history.  The author can do whatever the hell she likes.

The plot wasn’t as twisty as it could have been and there were no huge surprises, but it still flowed well and the pace kept going throughout.  I could have done with a bit more of an idea of why the general population were so against magic users, especially considering all the witches and wizards we meet are so nice!  Was it just because it was the law, or was there something else?  I got why Blackwell hated them, but was that enough to convince the whole country?  Not sure.

Elizabeth was a fun MC - snarky and resourceful but still relatable - and  I liked the journey she had to go on to reach her ultimate goal: how she developed as a character, and learned to think outside what she’d been brainwashed to believe.  Her relationships with the other characters developed nicely too, especially with John (who I imagined as Jon Snow from Game of Thrones - yum!).  There were lots of sighing and tortured glances but I was glad things seemed to resolve in the end.

This was a really interesting start to a new series and I’ll definitely be looking out for the sequels.

8.5/10

Waiting On Wednesday - Kissing In America

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.  This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:

Kissing In America by Margo Rabb

In the two years since her father died, sixteen-year-old Eva has found comfort in reading romance novels—118 of them, to be exact—to dull the pain of her loss that’s still so present. Her romantic fantasies become a reality when she meets Will, who seems to truly understand Eva’s grief. Unfortunately, after Eva falls head-over-heels for him, he picks up and moves to California without any warning. Not wanting to lose the only person who has been able to pull her out of sadness—and, perhaps, her shot at real love—Eva and her best friend, Annie, concoct a plan to travel to the west coast to see Will again. As they road trip across America, Eva and Annie confront the complex truth about love. 

Expected publication: 26th May

This book came up on my radar ages ago and went instantly on my TBR list.  It's about all sorts of love, and from the reviews I've read the romantic love actually doesn't feature all that much.  It's also a road trip book and I've got a jones for those at the moment (see my reviews of Amy and Roger's Epic Detour and The Edge of Never).  It's also contemporary and standalone, two categories I'm trying to read more of, so it's really ticking all the boxes.  Plus, that cover rocks!

What about you?  What are you waiting on this week?

Top Ten Tuesday - Ten Authors I'd Really Like To Meet

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.  Each week they post a new Top Ten list which we all try to answer, because, hey, everyone likes a good list, don't they?

This week's list is:

Ten Authors I'd Really Like to Meet

10.  Marissa Meyer  She's just become my new favourite author, purely off the back of Cinder.  I want to shrink myself down and live in her pocket so she can tell me stories about cyborgs and androids and princes and evil queens all day long.  (Marissa Meyer, if you're reading this, don't be alarmed.  I'm not a psycho)

9.  Richard Adams.  Author of Watership Down, the book that spawned a film that was so scary it devastated my childhood.  I'd like to meet him so that I could poke him in the eye and say, 'Thanks for making me frightened of rabbits, Mr Childhood-Wrecker!'

8.  Amanda Hocking  The girl who made self-publishing cool.  Seriously, though, she's written about a dozen really good books and she's, like, twelve years old or something.  Awesome.

7.  Stephen King  I'd like to find out where those crazy-scary ideas come from.

6.  Tammara Webber  Author of Easy, Breakable, Between The Lines...  I don't really go for romances, unless it's romance mixed with something else (fantasy, dystopia) but her romances are just superb.  She can really write a leading man.  Sigh.  

5.  Margaret Atwood  I have a secret passion for Margaret Atwood books.  She's a lady with ideas and principles and I would just love to meet her.

4.  J.K. Rowling  I remember a friend  telling me ages and ages ago about this book she was reading called Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.  I distinctly remember thinking, 'Pfff.  Sounds rubbish.'  The person who spawned an entire canon of books and films before neatly and successfully stepping over to adult fiction has got to be worth talking to.

3.  Ira Levin  Wrote some truly scary books.  In some ways he was the anathema of Stephen King - his writing was understated and left a lot to the imagination, but his stories are just as scary.  And he was not a fan of Happy Ever Afters.

2.  Jane Austen  One of my favourite authors of all time, proto-feminist and social satirist.  I think it would be awesome to sit in Starbucks with her and see what she had to say about all the people passing by.

And my top author I'd love to meet is....

1.  Terry Pratchett  Sadly it will never happen now as he passed away a couple of months ago.  He wrote the incredible Discworld series, which was basically the reading soundtrack of my mid-teens and I would have loved to have met him.  Sigh.  

What about you?  Who are the top ten authors you'd love to meet??

Cinder by Marissa Meyer

Okay, I’m really aware that I am, like, literally the last on the bandwagon for this series.  I put it off and put it off for ages.  I saw some awesome reviews for it, but fairy tale retellings really don’t do it for me.  In fact, I’m not even a fan of fairy tales at all, unless they’re the proper, creepy ones, where the fairies have daggers for teeth and wishes always come with a horrible caveat.

So yeah, I gave the Lunar Chronicles a wide berth.  I don’t like giving negative reviews so it makes sense to steer clear of books I have a fairly good idea I won't like.

How wrong I was.

This book!  This flippin’ book!  Seriously, so far it’s in top spot for Claire’s Book of the Year.  It was seriously that good.  Because when a book starts with the following line, you know you’re on to a winner:

The screw through Cinder’s ankle had rusted, the engraved cross marks worn to a mangled circle.

Cinderella has a screw through her ankle.  That doesn’t happen in the Disney film.

And the book just gets better from there.  Marissa Meyer has crafted a cast of incredible characters, completely recognisable from the original story, but more fleshed-out and interesting and in most cases subverted.  Cinder is still a second-class citizen, but it's because she's a cyborg.  Her fairy godmother analogue is a slightly psychopathic research scientist.  Her pumpkin coach is an antique orange car.

And that leads me on to my favourite thing about Cinder.  I have a very special sort of hatred for the whole Disney Princess thing - Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Belle simper out from backpacks, lunch boxes, colouring books across the country, like a triumvirate of sappiness, representing everything that is bad about the patriarchal society we live in and of the three I consider Cinderella to be the worst.  She’s a girl with a brain and a healthy body and yet sits around waiting for everyone else to save her and her ultimate redemption comes when she manages to snag a rich husband, as if this is the very best thing a girl can aspire to do.  Cinderella has always been a drip and a bore and someone I’d happily slap.

Until now.  Cinder is intelligent and resourceful and kind with a fun seam of snarkiness.  She manages to crush on a boy without letting it define who she is.  She turns the Disney Princess dumbcluckery on its head by being a mechanic and a cyborg (i.e. not traditionally beautiful).  It comes to something when you sit there reading a book and every time something new is revealed about a character, you end up wanting to applaud.

And the plot!  It doesn’t let up from the first meeting between Cinder and the prince in the very first chapter right up to the massive cliffhanger ending.  Again, Marissa Meyer has taken a plot that everybody knows and has made it into something new and interesting.  Let me say that again: everyone knows what happens in Cinderella, and yet I was still utterly hooked, reading this book with my eyes bugging out of my head, frantically thinking, ‘What’s going to happen NEXT?’

Christ, listen to me.  I’m gushing.

So yeah.  I left it a long time before reading this book.  Do I regret it?  Not a jot.  I’ve already got Cress, Fairest and Scarlet lined up on my Kindle and Winter’s due out in November.   Because if the rest of the series is as good as Cinder, I would’ve gone stark.  Raving.  Bonkers.  If I’d have had to wait a year between books.

God, there’s just nothing wrong with this damn book.  It’s gotta be a ten.

10/10 

Feature and Follow Friday #2 ... How Do You Decide What Books To Read?

Feature and Follow Friday is a weekly meme hosted by Parajunkee and Alison Can Read.  This is a chance to get to know fellow book bloggers and have them meet you.  Be sure to pop over and meet this week's featured blogger: Nicola Reads YA.

This week's question is...  How do you decide what books to read?

I totally judge a book by its cover.  It's so shallow, I know.  We're warned against it, but I can't help it.  I'll be in Waterstones and I'll get that feeling of coverly love just wash over me and I'm hooked!  After the cover, I read the blurb and maybe look on Goodreads to see what other people have thought about it.

As for prioritising books, I have loads of amazing-looking ARCs at the moment (yay!) which means I have to be super organised (boo!).  I try to get my reviews out as close to publication date as I can, so I have a big running tally of books and dates on a spreadsheet.  In between these, I slot in books that have been on my radar for a while.  At the moment, I'm reading an ARC The Witch Hunter by Virginia Boecker and also Cinder by Marissa Meyer, which I've been meaning to get to for about a year now!

What about you?  How do you decide what books to read?  Let me know in the comments section and feel free to follow me on Bloglovin' or Twitter (@cstevens25777). 

A Heart For Copper by Sharon Lynn Fisher

I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.  Many thanks to SilkWords and Netgalley.

When I was about eight or nine, I was really into Choose You Own Adventure books.  Like, really into them.  I think I read pretty much every single one until I came across one that featured space vampires.  It had some fairly graphic illustrations of post-vampire dead bodies that scared the living crap out of me and I never read them again.

Until now.  A Heart For Copper is basically a Choose Your Own Adventure story about an automaton girl called Copper, built by a young man and offered the chance at life.  You have to guide her through her decisions as she experiences a flesh body for the first time (or decides to stay an automaton).  It’s mostly romance, but with a self-discovery thread as well and some good messages about not letting your romantic interest define who you are.  

A Heart For Copper isn’t a long book and actually I was so pleased with the setting and the characters that I would have been happy to read a longer version. 

The general vibe is steampunk, but it’s set in the post-digital age where all earlier technology has been banned, so everyone wanders around in corsets and top hats.  Everything is clockwork and there are pedal-powered airplanes.  Very cool!

I never realised this kind of book existed for the YA/adult market  and I’m really glad I found it!

8/10

Top Ten Tuesday - Ten Books I Will Probably Never Read

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.  Each week they post a new Top Ten list which we all try to answer, because, hey, everyone likes a good list, don't they?

This week's list is:

Ten Books I Will Probably Never Read
Okay, I always hate to say never, but based on the premise alone I really can't see myself reading any of these books....

10.  Pemberley by Emma Tennant
The whole point is that Darcy and Lizzie gallop off into the sunset for their Happily Ever After.  I don't want to know about their marital strife!  Plus, also, Jane Austen is like my great-great-great-great-great-great aunt, so I'm outraged on her behalf.

9.  The Fifty Shades Trilogy
I read the first one, so really I mean the last two books.  I was not a fan of the first one, and I just can't see how I'm going to suddenly come round to the idea that being some rich dude's bitch is a lot of fun.

8.  Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
I read the first three pages of this round someone's house once, and it made not one iota of sense!  Not one!

7.  Anything from the Tragic Lives section of the book shop
I'm glad these people have found some kind of catharsis to their troubled pasts, but books about child abuse aren't going to be finding their way into my shopping basket.

6.  Crank by Ellen Hopkins
It's supposed to be amazing, but I cannot get my head around books written as verse.  Too weird.

5.  Lord Of The Rings
Don't flame me.  I know it's the grandfather of all fantasy novels, but I've tried so many times to read it and it's just.  Too.  Boring.  And don't get me started on the films.

4.  War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Have you seen the size of it???  It's massive!  And even people who profess to love it, call it 'challenging'.  No, thanks.  Not when there are so many other truly awesome books being published every single day.

3.  Ulysses by James Joyce
I'm told that if you manage to get through to the end, you have a huge sense of achievement.  I think that says a lot.

2.  The Road by Cormac McCarthy
I love a dystopia, but from what I hear this is like the most horrible future anyone could possibly imagine.  Including the eating of babies.  No, thank you.

And the number one book I will never, ever, ever read is....

1.  Watership Down by Richard Adams
When I was eight, my nan rented me the video of Watership Down, thinking that because it was an animated film about rabbits, I'd like it.  I didn't.  It's a horrible, horrible film and incredibly scary and I know that if I read the book I'll start getting flashbacks!


Any of these ring a bell with you?  What are your Top Ten Never-Reads?

A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J Maas

I received a copy of A Court of Thorns and Roses in exchange for an honest review.  Many thanks to Bloomsbury Publishing and Netgalley.

Feyre’s family are slowly starving to death.  After they lose their fortune, Feyre leaves their hovel every day armed with her hunting knife, her bow and a quiver of arrows.  On one such hunting trip, Feyre is stalking a doe when she comes across a faerie disguised as a huge wolf.  She kills the enchanted beast, but the repercussions stretch further than she could possibly imagine.

I was so surprised at how much I liked this book.  It drew me in from the very first chapter and didn’t let go until the explosive ending.

A Court of Thorns and Roses is based on the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale and while there are definitely parallels, Maas injects a lot of new and interesting plot points and gives it a really interesting twist by making it high fantasy and making the beast of the fable a faerie.

Feyre is a very strong heroine.  She literally does everything in her power to protect her family (who are all a bit selfish and lazy), including offering up her life to the faerie who comes seeking retribution for the life she took.  She has tough decisions to make, and although she makes some odd choices at times (like visiting the Fire Night celebrations or capturing the Suriel after she’s been warned not to), I could see why she did those things and it certainly made for an interesting plot!

Tamlin was a strange love interest.  He was totally hot and really witty (when he forgot to be grumpy), but the fact that he had claws was a bit off-putting.  I mean, I know he’s The Beast, so he has to be bestial, but yeah.  The claws were weird.  Having said this, I did really like the way his and Feyre’s romance was built up quite slowly - no instalove, thank god - until they were totally passionate for each other.  And there was no love triangle, which was a major plus point!

The worldbuilding is exquisite.  The faeries are the proper sharp-toothed, iridescent-skinned evil little blighters.  There’s good description of the different races and social strata of faeries and they are characterised really well.  There is an immense amount of description in this book, but it is all done cleverly so that it never detracts from the plot. 

I’ve only read one other book of Sarah J Maas’ before: The Throne of Glass.  It didn’t do a lot for me, I thought it was kind of meh, and I didn’t carry on with the series.  When this book popped up on my radar I wasn’t going to bother reading it, but I saw so many rave reviews that I thought ‘Why not?’ and gave it a shot.  And I’m so, so glad I did.

9/10