Claire Stevens's Blog, page 66

All Fall Down by Ally Carter

I received a copy of All Fall Down courtesy of Hachette via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

It’s been quite a while since I started and finished a book in the same day and okay, it helps that it’s half term this week, so I basically just slobbed on the sofa reading while everyone moved around me speeded-up style, but still.

All Fall Down was a great book!

Grace is a teenager with a troubled past.  Three years ago, she saw her mother murdered by a man with a scarred face.  Trouble is, everyone else keeps telling her that her mum died in a house fire.  Grace knows she’s not crazy and she knows what she saw, so when she’s sent to live with her grandfather, the U.S. ambassador to Adria, and she finds the Scarred Man living in the same city, then what’s a girl to do?  Why, rope all her new friends in for a huge teenage investigation, of course!

Yeah, Grace is one of those protagonists who rushes in without thinking (following a man who you suspect is a trained killer through miles of underground tunnels with no torch and no one knows where you are) but actually her actions didn’t make me want to shout ‘You should be running out the door, not going upstairs to investigate a suspicious noise!’.  All the way through, her motivation is to find her mother’s murderer and to prove to everyone that she isn’t crazy, so that made it slightly more believable than the random actions of characters in other books.

The plot itself slows down a bit in places, but there’s still plenty of action to keep you hooked.  The fact that I was reading it on my Kindle whilst stirring a saucepan of beans this evening says something.  Ally Carter’s writing is great.  She deals with sensitive issues like mental health, PTSD and bereavement with a light touch that keeps you reading but without downplaying their seriousness.

If I could change anything about this book, I would have liked to see Grace’s relationship with Alexei developed a bit more, but I understand that this is the first book in a new series, so I guess there’s plenty of time for that further down the line.

All in all, I was pleasantly surprised by All Fall Down. Definitely recommended.

9/10

 

Stones by Polly Johnson

Stones is the debut novel by Polly Johnson.  It originated on Authonomy and Harper Collins picked it up and published it back in November 2013.

Stones tells the story of Coo, a teenager living in Brighton with her parents.  The family is struggling to get their lives back on track after the death of Coo’s older brother, an abusive alcoholic.  Coo is gradually slipping into a downward spiral, isolating herself from her parents and truanting from school, until an encounter with an alcoholic tramp, Banks, sparks up an unlikely friendship.

The writing is very good and Polly Johnson obviously knows her craft.  The story is set in Brighton, a city I know quite well, and her writing was so evocative that at times it was like I was actually there.  I felt the subject matter was very original and was dealt with sensitively.  There are a lot of YA books that deal with bereavement, but very few that feature a protagonist in a situation like Coo, with her accompanying sense of guilt and relief.  Coo was an interesting character and you got a real sense of her grief mixed with guilty relief at her brother’s death.

I did have a couple of issues with this book.  Firstly, I felt her parents weren’t very well fleshed out.  There’s a scene where Coo is reminiscing about one horrible afternoon where her brother tried to throttle her in front of their dad, but their dad just sat and did nothing to stop it.  This didn’t ring true for me.  No matter how much you are trying to save one of your children from a horrible disease like alcoholism, you wouldn’t stand by while they attacked your other child.  No way.

I also had problems with the tramps.  Where I used to live, there was a tramp who’d sit on the park bench all day drinking Special Brew and shouting at people.  Every morning when I passed him, he’d shout ‘Lady on a bike!’ at me (because I am a lady and I was riding a bike).  I’d always shout ‘Morning!’ back at him and be on my way.  Then one morning, instead of shouting ‘Lady on a bike!’ at me, Special Brew Tramp threw a rock at me.  I fell off my bike and had to have five stitches in my scalp.

Tramps are unstable.  This is what you might call a Fact.

The tramps in Stones are miles more horrible than Special Brew Tramp, but Coo keeps going back to them and hanging out with them, even after they threaten her with violence and she suspects that one of them might be behind a spate of attacks on young women in the area.  She keeps trying to save Banks, even though he clearly doesn’t want to be saved.  He uses her as a source of money and food and steals her mother’s ruby ring when she invites him into her house for a bath.  I get that the guilt over her brother’s death is the driving factor behind her behaviour, but I just kept wanting to shake her and tell her to give it up.

In the end, for me, the writing was what saved Stones and helped me to ignore the issues I had with it.  I will certainly be looking out for more work by Polly Johnson in the future.

7/10

To All the Boys I've Loved Before by Jenny Han

I'm still smiling from reading this book.

To All the Boys I've Loved Before tells the story of Lara Jean Song Covey, the middle of three sisters.  Bereaved of her mother when she was just nine, her sister Margot, the sister who has always looked after her and been her surrogate mum, is now leaving for college and Lara Jean 

Added to this, the love letters she wrote but never sent to all the boys she's had crushes on since middle school, letters she really only wrote for herself, to help her get over them and move on, have started popping up all over school.  And when one of them falls into the hands of Peter, the boy Lara Jean fell in love with a few years ago, things start to spiral out of control.

I really enjoyed To All the Boys I've Loved Before.  It had a perfect balance of screwball comedy and romance, it was lighthearted but still realistic and it left me with a really warm fuzzy feeling.  The scenes where Lara Jean and Peter are pretending to be dating are like something from a Katherine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy movie.

Lara Jean came across as a tiny bit naive, a little bit twee, a bit innocent at first, but soon it became clear that this was just her personality and a result of her upbringing and I really warmed up to her.  Her family were delightful and Peter was just dreamy.

I think I read somewhere that Jenny Han has the sequel coming out this year.  Note to the publishers: if P.S. I Still Love You is anything like To All the Boys I've Loved Before, send me a copy, because you are guaranteed a genuine, fangirly, squeeee review.

9/10

The Man in the Picture by Susan Hill

Woop woop!   Book Club Alert!

A couple of years back, a friend of mine started up a book club.  She had noticed that Amazon’s algorithms - the ones where they flash up ‘because you bought books A, B and C, you might also like books X, Y and Z’ - were funneling her down such a narrow path that she was soon going to be in danger of reading the same book over and over for the rest of her life.  Hence, the book club.  The idea is that once a month we all read something that a huge corporation hasn’t pre-decided for us, like in some weird, literary future dystopia (hmm, good idea for a book...).

So this month, someone decided on The Man in the Picture by Susan Hill.  I don’t really do horror books.  At all.  I figure there are enough scary things in the world without being additionally terrified by the book I’m reading.

The Man in the Picture is narrated by Oliver, a Cambridge alumni who returns to his old college to see a tutor of his who is elderly and in ill health.  The scene is set nice and creepily on a cold January evening with the fire roaring in the hearth and Oliver’s tutor starts to tell the story of a painting he has in his possession, a Venetian carnival scene.  When Oliver inspects the picture closely, he notices some out of place characters.  He thinks this is odd, but as his tutor recounts the history of the painting, Oliver realises the strangest part is yet to come...

The Man in the Picture was okay.  Only okay.  The writing was good and the plot was creepy enough to spooky me out, but not so creepy that I lost sleep.  The problem I had with it was all the unanswered questions I had at the end.  Who was the man illuminated in Theo’s window?  If the woman in white was the jilted fiancée, then how was it she was in Venice when she was supposed to have died decades ago?  Was she a ghost?  Possessed by a demon?  Why did the woman in white target Oliver instead of Theo?  It felt like the book finished too quickly.  Maybe it was the author’s intention to keep us guessing and frustrate us with unsolved clues, but it actually ended up annoying me.

Susan Hill also wrote The Woman in Black, and I’d be tempted to give it a go purely based on the strength of her writing, but unfortunately the plot holes in the Man in the Picture were too much for me to ignore.

6/10

Finding Cinderella by Colleen Hoover

Finding Cinderella is a companion novella to Colleen Hoover’s book Hopeless and the follow-up Losing Hope.  I read Hopeless a couple of years ago and loved it, so I had high hopes for Finding Cinderella.

It tells the story of Six, Sky’s best friend, and Daniel, Holder’s best friend.  They meet in a broom closet in school and neither knows who the other is.  They end up having sex (of course) and afterwards Daniel tries to find his mystery girl but to no avail.  Skip forwards a year and they meet at Sky’s house and - whaddya know - they’re instantly smitten with each other.

I’m not a fan of instalove and although Colleen Hoover is a great writer and makes a really decent fist of it, Finding Cinderella is still instalove and made me go a bit squinty-eyed, like the bit at the beginning of Frozen, when Anna meets Secretly Evil Prince Hans and they dance all around the rooftops professing their deep, enduring love for the person they met five seconds ago.

Although Love Is an Open Door is a top song.

I digress.

Despite the instalove, I’d still recommend Finding Cinderella.  It’s well-written, realistic, the story arc fits neatly into the hundred-or-so pages and it left me with a nice hopeful, fluttery feeling at the end.  Six and Daniel are great characters and although ninety pages isn’t really enough space to do a huge character analysis, Colleen Hoover still manages to make you care about them.

8.5/10

Not a Drop to Drink by Mindy McGinnis

This is the second outstanding book I've read this week.  I feel so spoilt!

Not a Drop to Drink is Mindy McGinnis's debut novel and tells the story of Lynn, a sixteen year old girl living alone on a homestead in Ohio with her mother.  It is set at some point in the future where oil has all but run out and the Earth's supply of fresh drinking water has all but run out.  Lynn and her mother defend the small pond on their land by shooting anyone who goes near it.  I know!  

Their self-contained lifestyle is turned upside down when a small group of people settle by the stream a little way away from Lynn's home.  The outsiders gradually insinuate themselves with Lynn and her similarly isolated neighbour, Stebbs until their way of life is threatened by a group of men who have settled in the next town over.

Lynn develops immensely as a character over the course of the book and goes from being hardened, gun-slinging and totally isolated from human contact to developing a sense of empathy and gaining  a small, loyal circle of friends.  There is a romantic sub-plot, but it doesn't overwhelm the book and mostly just shows how Lynn starts to develop her humanity.  

The theme is very much of survival against all odds and there's a really interesting juxtaposition between the city, which we are only told about second hand, where it seems very future dystopia, very military-controlled, people all crammed in together and reminded me slightly of Divergent, and the outer areas, where it is very much a frontier lifestyle, even down to the way people talk.  They shoot now and ask questions later and it reminded my a lot of the frontier moons on Firefly.

Mindy McGinnis has dropped a few neat little hooks into the story - one of the characters, Lucy, is a natural water diviner and there are rumours that California has its own desalinisation plants - that set things up nicely for the next book which, I understand, is set a decade in the future and tells Lucy's story.

The only thing I had an issue with was such a small thing it almost seems inconsequential.  *Spoiler Alert*  At one point, it is alluded to that Lucy's mother had been raped by the soldiers who arrested her family.  I didn't see that there was any reason for this: it did nothing to move the plot along - her subsequent grief and poor mental state could  be easily justified by the murder of her husband and stillbirth of her child.  Added to the fact that the men threatening Lynn's teeny little settlement are a bunch of rapist whoremongers, it came across as a bit 'All Men Are Rapists'.  


Honestly, though, that was the only criticism I had.  Other than that, it was an extremely well-written book with a really strong female protagonist who didn't need a man to weigh in and rescue her (yay!) and had plenty of evil meanies to hate (boo!).


9.5/10

The Martian by Andy Weir

Ho.  Ly.  Shit.

This was such a good book.

Let me set a bit of context for you.  I not a massive sci-fi fan.  I mean, I like a future dystopia or a post-apolcalypse, and I enjoyed The Reality Dysfunction and Asimov and Phillip K Dick and H.G. Wells, and I love Firefly and Serenity and Star Wars (although that’s more science fantasy) and Doctor Who and Back to the Future and Gravity and Alien...

So, do you see?  I like a bit of sci-fi, but not I’m not all about the hardcore sci-fi.

I loved The Martian, though.

Like, I loved it.

The Martian tells the story of Mark Watney, an astronaut who has been stranded on Mars.  I know.  Nightmare.   Luckily, Mark Watney is a resourceful chap and The Martian charts his desperate struggle for survival as the only human being in a barren, airless desert world with only the crap left behind from previous Mars visits to work with.

The Martian is told in a mixture of first-person diary entries and third-person narrative and the contrast works really well.  Mark Watney is a lively, engaging protagonist and Andy Weir manages to keep you guessing about his ultimate fate literally until the last few pages.  Truly nail-biting stuff.  I had about 8% of the book left to go on my Kindle and I took it to the gym with me to read while I was on the cross-trainer, so desperate was I not to put the damn thing down.

About halfway through, I was enjoying The Martian so much that I decided to go onto Amazon to see what the negative reviews were saying.  Not that I was being a pessimist or anything, I was just wondering what people could find that was wrong with it.  The most negative reviews came from people who were saying things like, ‘Well, it’s a bit too sciency for me’.  Well, duh.  It’s called science fiction.  And besides, it’s not really that sciency.  The author does explain how the protagonist manages to fix some equipment and create water and so on, but he doesn’t exactly go into pages and pages of textbook detail.  I was no fan of chemistry at school, and I was certainly no fan of physics, but I kept up just fine.  I would say the science is about as tricky as The Big Bang Theory, and it’s thanks to TBBT that I know what Schrodinger’s Cat and String Theory are.

The Martian was originally indie-published and I understand that Andy Weir is now the poster boy for the self-publishing movement.  Well done to him.  I reserve 10 out of 10 scores for truly remarkable books, and I really feel that The Martian is one of these.

10/10

Fantasy of Frost by Kelly St Clare

I was given a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

It's not often you read a book and think to yourself, 'Well, I've never seen THAT done before', but Kelly St Clare's debut novel has made me do just that.  In a really, really good way.  

I've read a bit of high fantasy in my time, but I can honestly say I've never come across a setting involving two worlds, one stiflingly hot and the other icy cold, rotating around each other to create a habitable area only where the two worlds are closest.  Such a simple idea, but so clever and original and Kelly St Clare takes the idea and runs with it, weaving a story full of intrigue and politics but also plenty of characterisation and humour.

Olina is the Tatuma - the first in line to the throne - of Osolis, the hot world.  She lives in a migratory court (because you've got to stay fairly close to the cold world at all times.  See?) with her mother (evil), uncle (evil) and brothers (nice-ish) and despite the poor treatment she receives manages to retain some spirit and humour.  When her secret fiance, a prince from the ice world of Glacium, is killed in front of her she becomes the prime suspect and is whisked away as a hostage to Glacium.

Olina was a really interesting protagonist.  She came across as brave, but also aware of her own limitations, which is something you don't see too often.  As part of the cruel treatment she receives from her rotten mother, she is forced to wear a veil to hide her from the rest of the world and, like any prisoner, over time she has come to rely on it  to the point where she is now too afraid to go without it.  

Over the course of the book, I found myself constantly going, 'But why a veil?'  Because surely if her mother wanted to mistreat her, she could have given her a beating, disowned her, killed her even.  So why the veil?  Was she super-ugly?  Super beautiful?  And then, right at the end, the real reason for the veil gets revealed and it's like, 'Nice one.  Totally didn't see that coming.'

Kelly St Clare does a good job of marking out the differences between the societies on the two planets and the geopolitical difficulties they face, but hasn't equally she didn't do the scenario to death and she's left herself plenty of room for new developments and revelations in her subsequent books.  I'll certainly be looking out for them.

A well deserved....

9/10

Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli

I've heard a lot about Stargirl.  Like, a lot. 

Stargirl tells the story of Susan 'Stargirl' Caraway, a home-schooled free spirit who has just joined the local high school in Mica, Arizona.  She immediately draws attention with her eccentric ways.  She brings a ukulele into school and sings Happy Birthday to random strangers, she dresses differently and she does little random acts of kindness.  Gradually, her kindness and kookiness win over the school, including an introverted boy called Leo, until events occur that end up turning everyone against her.  

Stargirl is a touching and thoughtful book, a celebration of individualism and a condemnation of the kind of society that would stifle it.  I loved the concept and Jerry Spinelli's cast of characters leap right off the page at you.  The sheep-like school students are all recognizable: the cheerleaders, the vacuous himbo, the introverts, the mean girls and Stargirl is plunked among them all like an Alka-Seltzer in a glass of water.  The book itself drifts and meanders in a very pleasant way, much like Stargirl herself.

As much as I enjoyed the book, I’ll admit that there were points where I found myself idly wondering what it would be like to plant my hand over Stargirl’s face and give her a good shove backwards.  Don't get me wrong: I loved her quirkiness, her innocence and her caring nature, but sometimes she came across as just ridiculously naive.  Similarly, I liked Leo, but there were times when I wanted to kick him in the kneecaps for being so bothered about what other people thought.

At the bittersweet end of the story the town does seem to atone for their bullying behaviour and embrace their own individualism somewhat, but the moral does appear to be: if you don't conform, you will be bullied and ostracized until you and your family are forced to leave town.

8/10

Illusion by Lauren Eckhardt

I was given a copy of Illusion in exchange for an honest review.  A copy of this review can also be found on Goodreads.

Illusion is the first book of The Remedy Files by debut author Lauren Eckhardt.  It is a young adult dystopian novel set in a community called Impetus, where all the self-destructive mistakes of humanity have been eradicated thanks to a chemical cure called The Remedy.  People no longer feel, no longer control their own destinies and they're all the happier for it.

All except Evangeline.  By nature a questioner (and asking questions isn't encouraged in Impetus), she meets a young boy who lives outside the borders of Impetus.  She secretly meets up with him every day until the day of her eighteenth birthday, the day she is due to be Paired and the day that she finally decides to defy Impetus...

I found this book really interesting.  The plot was well thought out and it was really interesting to watch Evangeline learn and grow as a character.  Her interactions with the two male leads were fun to read - she's not the sort of protagonist who just accepts what she's been told and she fights for her right to know the truth about the world she has grown up in.

The sequel to Illusion is just about to be published on Kindle and I'll definitely be looking out for it.  I'd give Illusion a solid...

9/10