Claire Stevens's Blog, page 8

Our Chemical Hearts by Krystal Sutherland

I was really disappointed by this book. I'd heard really great things about it and I read it - stupidly - because I'd heard it was similar to John Green and Rainbow Rowell. Well, sign me up right now, I thought.

Unfortunately, it read like a book trying really, really, really hard to sound like John Green. I would have had a lot more respect (and enjoyment) if the author had just used her own voice.

But more than the John-Green-wannabe-ness of the writing style, this book suffers with the inclusion of the MC, Henry.

Henry is literally the creepiest MC I've ever read about. He's creepier even than the many and varied sociopaths, stalkers and murderers I've read about in fiction over the years because I actually think that the author meant for him to be this romantic hero when he's actually that stalker who follows you around, not even realising what a stalker he's being.

Henry is maudlin and fancies himself as this amazing writer and although he believes the editorship of the school paper is his by rights he does precisely 'fuck' and 'all' in terms of work when the position is awarded to him. The cast of characters are an eye-wateringly pretentious collection of people, but even in this group, Henry is King of Pretentious. He has never had a romantic relationship before and fixates creepily on Grace as soon as she walks through the door of his classroom.

Grace is a disturbed loner with some undisclosed personal issues. Henry decides to brush her insular nature and desire to be left alone aside and he befriends Grace even though she clearly wants to be left alone and eventually they get drunk at a party together and kiss. Then Henry discovers that Grace's problems stem from the fact her boyfriend died a few months ago. Like literally just a very few months ago.

Instead of backing off and offering to be the friend she so clearly, desperately needs, Henry keeps creepily pushing the romance and even after they have sex and Grace lays sobbing in his arms having basically used him as a flesh dildo so that she could pretend to be shagging her dead boyfriend, EVEN THEN he doesn't gently disengage himself from her romantically and guide her towards the nearest bereavement counselor.

And even when Grace makes it clear that she wants nothing more to do with him (she discovers him snooping around her bedroom - don't ask), he still mopes around wondering to himself where he stands with her.

The whole thing came across as so far beyond creepy, it was really unpleasant to read.

There were plenty of other characters that annoyed me - the most Australian Australian guy in the world, the kooky-yet-highly-intelligent sister - but these felt like sad caricatures. Henry was the real star of the show. Because of the creepiness.

I deeply regret reading this book. I don't recommend it to anyone.

1 star

What I Lost by Alexandra Ballard

What I Lost was an interesting book about a girl with an eating disorder who finds herself in a treatment centre.

Purely in terms of this being a novel about the mental and physiological effects of disordered eating, and the good or bad influence family and friends can have on recovery, it was a pretty good read.  I liked the characters and the dynamic between them and the was the anorexics looked down on other residents of the treatment centre for their perceived 'lack of control'.  Details like this made the book feel very realistic.

The reason this book didn't get a higher rating was the author's insistence on shoehorning a romance into the plot.  There's this whole thing with a secret admirer who sends our MC gifts while she's in a treatment centre (I mean, seriously?  If you've got a crush on the girl just hold fire and effin' well leave her alone until she's feeling better instead of bothering her while she's trying to get herself well.

At the risk of sounding flippant, the romance made the book felt a bit like 'Eating Disorders Lite' in some respects.  I've never had an eating disorder, so I have no first hand experience, but I have read a number of books about EDs, and compared to others this book just seemed a bit too fluffy.  Like, I think we can all agree that eating disorders are a horrific, life-changing thing, right?  Well, because the author spent time and effort on including a romance it meant she had less space to talk about Elizabeth's recovery so it made her recovery seem a bit easy.

Elizabeth's family was a welcome inclusion, especially the way they were well-meaning but also deeply flawed.  So often, parents are just portrayed as either totally awesome and supportive or else the root of all evil, so this was very realistic.

I'd recommend this book as a decent treatise on recovery after and eating disorder, but I wish I'd been able to give the romance aspect the swerve.

3 stars

The Fall of Butterflies by Andrea Portes

This was a pretty good book about a small-town gal whose absentee mother wangles her into a prestigious boarding school where she plans to commit suicide.

So this isn't exactly the cheeriest start to a book and I never really got to grips with why Willa wanted to off herself.  Still, the author manages to lift the mood considerably by not really talking about Willa's intended suicide for the rest of the book and instead regaling us with the escapades and pranks that Willa and her new boarding school friends get up to. 

The plot is pretty good, although I could kind of see where it was going in terms of Remy's problems.

I found it hard to actually identify with any of the characters, which was a bit of a hurdle for me as a reader.  All the rich kids (like 90% of the characters) seem ultra-privileged, super-rich and don't have to go to classes if they don't want to.  This was so utterly unlike my own high school experience that it just felt off-kilter.  They got very tedious and I wanted Willa to tell them all (Remy especially) to bog off and when she didn't I wanted Willa to bog off for being just a doormat.

While I really like Andrea Portes' style of writing (Anatomy of a Misfit remains one of the most emotionally-affecting books I've ever read) this one didn't hit the mark as well as I'd hoped.

3.5 stars

The Wrong Train by Jeremy de Quidt

Okay, I've given this five stars but I'm not sure how much I really enjoyed it!  I mean, I kept reading and stuff because the stories were so compelling, but they were also completely terrifying and creepy.  I read this book in bed a couple of times and found that I had to read a couple of chapters of a nice fluffy contemporary before putting my light out to un-freak myself.

So the premise is that one night this boy gets on the wrong train home.  He realises his mistake and gets off the train as soon as he can, but the place he disembarks turns out to be a way station, not a real station.  His phone dies so he just has to sit in the dark and wait for the next train to come through.  Then this creepy old guy comes along and starts telling the boy stories.

Spoiler alert: none of the stories have a happy ending.

The stories are really good and all have a central theme of a young person unwittingly awakening some malevolent force.  They are super creepy.  I was freaked.  I would peg these stories as The Shining level of creepiness, and like I said before I had to read something else for a bit before trying to get off to sleep.

If you like your stories weird and creepy, I would definitely recommend this one.  I really enjoyed it.

5 stars

Prisoner of Night and Fog by Anne Blankman

This was a fairly good book about a girl who manages to put aside her anti-semitic views when she meets a hot Jewish boy.
 
Okay, that's a bit harsh.  Or is it?  Because Gretchen Muller, our protagonist, is the daughter of one of Adolf Hitler's friends.  Uncle Dolf has always been a prominent figure in Gretchen's life and her views are pretty racist and right-wing - Jews are the anti-Christ, they're dirty, conniving, sub-human.  You know, typical 1930's Germany.  But then she meets Daniel, who is intelligent and, as I mentioned, hot and this makes her realise that Jewish people aren't all that bad.
 
Pretty flimsy reason to change your entire worldview, but there you go.  At least she showed some character development, which is more than I can say for some other books I've read recently.
 
So Gretchen  realises that, shock horror, Jewish people are human beings too but where does this leave her with good old Uncle Dolf.  You probably don't need me to tell you that it's nowhere good, especially when you factor in Gretchen's sociopath brother, who is one of Hitler's hired thugs.  Gretchen's development coupled with the danger of having Jewish sympathies in 1930s Munich makes for a pretty good story.
 
If the book suffers from anything, it is probably a bit over long.  There are entire chapters that could have stood being cut out or amagamated to make the plot flow quicker.
 
I also found Gretchen pretty naive and willfuly blind as to what was going on around her.  She doesn't really seem to know much about how dreadfully Jewish people are being treated like literally right under her nose.  And when she does see evidence of it, she just  kind of ignores it or sighs and shrugs.
 
Will I read the next book in the series?  Don't know.  If I had a copy thrust under my nose and there was nothing else in the pipeline i might give it a go, but it's been a couple of weeks since I read this book and I can hardly remember what happened so I'm not going to make a huge effort to get the sequel.

3 stars

On Hiatus

Super busy at the moment, been on holiday, work is crazy and my laptop has been in the repair shop.  I'm currently working through all the books I've read recently and will be posting again soon.

The Cows by Dawn O Porter

COW n. /ka?/

A piece of meat; born to breed; past its sell-by-date; one of the herd.

I really enjoyed this book. It's a story about a group of women who don't know each other but whose lives intersect, who are on journeys to discover who they really are.

Tara is a documentary producer working in a mysogyistic office and raising her six year old daughter on her own. Cam is a high profile blogger and committed to her child-free life. Stella, grieving after the death of her twin sister, is the PA to a photographer.

This is a book about friendship and relationships and dealing with the crap life throws at you. I love Dawn O Porter's writing and how unflinching she is about covering subjects that other authors would shy away from with complete honesty. If you're not keen on earthy language or frank sexual talk then you might find this a bit of a turn-off, but I loved it.

I thought parts of the plot line were a bit far-fetched, but it was still immensely enjoyable to read and had me cringing in places (Walthamstow Wank Woman) and the responses of the media and social media were so horrifyingly believable (especially that of the Daily fucking Mail). The three viewpoints of the women were different enough that it was easy to keep track of who was narrating what.

If I have one criticism about this book, it's that sometimes it felt like someone brainstormed 'Shit Women Have To Put Up With That Men Don't' on a bit of flip chart paper and then wrote a book about it, but other than that this was a really sound read.

4 stars

Not That Kind Of Girl by Siobhan Vivian

I wish I could say I knew exactly what the author was trying to do with this book, but I'm not entirely sure I do.

On one hand we have Natalie, over-achieving, ultra-controlling left-brained alpha female. She is basically Tracy Flick from Election. She eschews all high school boys, seeing them as the quickest way to ruin her reputation and her ambition and controls the minutiae of her relationship with her best friend. She is massively judgemental of all other girls for everything from their sexual behaviour to their clothes to their (lack of) ambition.

Basically, Natalie is what every feminist-hater thinks a feminist is. Humourless and man-hating.

On the other hand we have fourteen-year-old Spencer, who is a sexual being and isn't afraid to show it. She thinks slut-shaming is sexist and that women should be allowed to wear whatever they like, as long as it empowers them.

Of the two, I come down more on Spencer's side, but Spencer doesn't exactly have a happy ending. A nude photo she sends a boy goes viral and she gets publicly shamed and I think this ending is a shame. Spencer at least tries to stand up to Natalie and show her that her brand of radfem isn't helpful

But then again, having said that, I can see where Natalie is coming from in her 'hate all men' agenda. Because the boys at their school are really disgusting. They are basically parodies of hormone-driven, sexually abusive teenage arseholes. And I imagine that yes, every school might have a couple of these types of boys, but an entire campus full of them?

I *think* the message of this book is that radical feminism can be as damaging as no feminism at all.

3 stars

Waiting On Wednesday - The Smoke Thieves by Sally Green

“ Waiting On Wednesday ” is a weekly meme where bloggers can showcase upcoming releases that we are eagerly waiting for. This week my Waiting On Wednesday pick is The Smoke Thieves by Sally Green.  Here's the blurb:

A princess, a traitor, a soldier, a hunter and a thief. Five teenagers with the fate of the world in their hands. Five nations destined for conflict.

In Brigant, Princess Catherine prepares for a political marriage arranged by her brutal and ambitious father, while her true love, Ambrose, faces the executioner's block. In Calidor, downtrodden servant March seeks revenge on the prince who betrayed his people. In Pitoria, feckless Edyon steals cheap baubles for cheaper thrills as he drifts from town to town. And in the barren northern territories, thirteen-year-old Tash is running for her life as she plays bait for the gruff demon hunter Gravell.

As alliances shift and shatter, and old certainties are overturned, our five heroes find their past lives transformed and their futures inextricably linked by the unpredictable tides of magic and war. Who will rise, who will fall and who will unlock the secrets of the smoke?

Kissing In America by Margo Rabb

This was a book about a girl who is so deeply immersed in grief over her beloved dad's death that she manufactures a relationship with a random boy in her school and emotionally pressures her best friend to go on a crazy-arsed road trip across the country to take part in a quiz show to win $200,000 only to prove herself literally the worst friend in the world at the last moment.  Have I missed anything?

The problem I had was that I could totally see how this book could have been great.  I could see what the author was trying to do.  She just didn't do it that well.

It was painfully obvious that Will had only half-arsed feelings for Eva.  They weren't even ambiguous.  They were tepid feelings.  He might as well have walked up to her with a big sandwich board over his shoulders with 'I only have tepid feelings for you' written in green neon.  Only I bet she still would have thought he was in love with her.

The baddie aunt was comically bad and thoughtless and controlling.  It was like someone had done a flip chart - based focus group on What Teenagers Don't Like and came up with:

- Adults who talk about sex
- Adults who try to boss them about

(Which is interesting, actually, because as a Brit with an interest in U.S. current affairs, it seems to me that What Teenagers Don't Like at the moment is politicians who are funded by the NRA)

It needed more humour in it (and yeah, I know it's a book about grief, but it is possible to mesh humour and grief).  It needed something to lift the atmosphere, to provide a bit of spark.  As it was, the writing style was like taking a walk through warm, humid air.

This really wasn't one for me.  I'm currently in a huge slump and I don't know if it's because work is going crazy, or because I'm not sleeping properly or because I just keep picking dull books, but this book didn't really help.

2 stars (maybe 2.5)