Title: The Fault in Our Stars
Author: John Green
Publisher: Dutton Books
Published: January 1, 2012
Number of Pages: 313
Genre(s): YA, Realistic Fiction
Date Read: February 9, 2014
Acquired: Waterloo Public Library
Summary:
Hazel Grace Lancaster is dying. This is not a secret. This is not new. Hazel has been dying since she was born, as have we all been. Because dying is a side effect of living. But if you really want to get technical, Hazel is actively dying whereas the rest of us are passively dying, and she has been actively dying since they found the cancer in her body. Her cancer has always been terminal, she's never had an X chance of surviving, there's never been a surgery to take the cancer out, because it's not that kind of cancer. She has accepted all of this with a grace befitting a girl whose middle name is Grace, she has accepted that she will cease to be sooner rather than later, and she just wants to get out with as little bit of a mess as possible. She doesn't want to be a grenade in the lives of the people who she loves and who love her.
She thinks she has a choice. Right up until the moment that Augustus Waters walks into her life, she is right. But Gus changes everything. They suddenly find themselves together on a whirlwind journey that only leads to one inevitable ending. Absolute and complete heartbreak.
Review:
Oh. My. Gods. John Green what have you done to me!? Oh but does this book ever live up to all of the hype about it. Mr. Green you are as spectacular an author as you are an entertainer sir, and you are an exceptional entertainer in my eyes so draw your conclusions on how I feel about your writing from that statement.
I had seen John Green's book in the Library, while shelving them, but I had never bothered to pick one up and read the dust jacket. And then I came across the YouTube Mental_Floss list show. Well that show is right up my alley, educational and entertaining, and hosted by John Green. As I worked my way through the playlist I said to myself, before he ever mentioned his books in the videos, "Gee I wonder if this is the same John Green who wrote those YA novels everyone is talking about." Well of course he's the same John Green. Still didn't make me pick up his books, but it did drive me to his other videos (CrashCourse is AMAZING and I watched all of the humanities videos in under a month, omg.). It was as I was working my way through CrashCourse US history, with all the hype building for the TFiOS movie, that I decided that I should check out his books. So I put The Fault in Our Stars on hold at the WPL, and while I was waiting I went out and bought Looking for Alaska (which is now on the to-be-read shelf of course, because my hold came in).
TFiOS arrived this past Thursday at the library, and obviously, since I am now writing this review I have finished reading it. I started it Friday night and I devoured it in three dedicated sittings in between bouts of watching Olympic Slopestyle (YES THAT IS ONE WORD, AND A REAL WORD GOOGLE, NO I WILL NOT HYPHENATE IT!) Snowboarding and Luge; and working on job applications, with a little smattering of John Green on the side because the last video for Crash Course US History was posted. I knew a little of what I was getting myself into having been watching John Green videos lately and having watched the trailer for the movie, and being brutally honest, I didn't think I was going to like it, like at all. I am not usually a Realistic Fiction fan. I am all about the escapism of literature, but at the same time, one of my favourite things about literature is well written, intelligent, sharp witted, and insightful characters. This book is chock full of those types of characters. Hazel and Augustus, even the names, especially his, conjure to mind images of old scholars in tweed jackets with leather patches on the elbows. They are not that image, they are young and they are funny, and they are dying. They are fully aware of the tragedy of their circumstances and they both have a deliciously black sense of humour. Which I can fully appreciate. My own family, myself included, is known for our wickedly dark sense of humour.
This is not a happy book, there is no happy ending, there is tragedy and there is death, but as I said throughout it all there is humour. I think it is a truly special thing when a book that is essentially all about dying, death and the tragedy of lost love can still have a current of humour running from cover to cover. More than once I found myself moved to near tears (that is not to say your book could not induce tears in someone else Mr. Green, but I am one of those silly over emotional people that has an easier time crying over tiny things rather than big things, and your book is a very big thing indeed Sir.), but for every one of those moments there were two where I was laughing loudly, smiling, or snorting to keep myself from laughing at something that was probably meant to be serious.
This book resonated with me, I am not a cancer kid, but I have been affected by cancer many times over. We lost my father directly after a cancer operation four days before Christmas in 2002. Before that there was my Grandmother, before that my Uncle Jim, and even before that there was my Mother's sister, for whom I am named, but who I have never met, because she was a cancer kid, she died when she was 9. Since I am being honest, all of that was why I didn't want to read this book initially, because I didn't want to read about a young girl who had to face the awfulness that is cancer. But that is in the end what makes this book so good, Hazel handles the awfulness with a complete and devastating honesty. And I am emotionally devastated having finished this book. Because every page makes you think, and every page makes you thankful for the people and the things in your life that you love and that love you.
So maybe it's the combination of the sheer emotionality of this book, combined with the feeling I always get about the Olympics, but I am sitting here bereft feeling both simultaneously like an insignificant speck upon the Universe, but also a complete and utter triumph because I am here, and I am living, and I am able to sit here and contemplate the way a fictional book has impacted my worldview, and that's not something that everyone can do. Sometimes we need to be reminded of that in order to remember that some of the things we take for granted every day are actually a BFD.
What am I trying to get at then? GO AND READ THIS BOOK. That is what I am trying to get at. It is just so well written, and moving, and powerful. And you need to read it. Now. Or you know not, really in the end it's up to you, but I think you should read it and I think everyone should read it. It should become required reading in high schools.
Now if you'll excuse me, I am going to try and decide what book to read next, and watch some more Luge! Well after I write the summary anyway, because I wrote the review first...
--Ren
Title: Soulbound (Legacy of Tril #1)
Author: Heather Brewer
Publisher: Dial Books
Published: June 19, 2012
Number of Pages: 394
Genre(s): Fantasy, YA
Date Read: February 14, 2013
Acquired: Wal-Mart
Summary:
Kaya has lived her life knowing that she and her parents are fugitives, that their entire existence depends on discretion and secrecy. They are on the run from the ruling council of Tril, the Zettai Council run by the most powerful Barrons in the land. The Barrons are the warrior class, the highest of the Skilled and the most revered; every Barron has a single Healer bonded to them, that is the way it has always been and should always be according to council law, one Barron and one Healer and nothing else. After losing their respective Healers to the War and falling in love, Kaya's parents knowing they were breaking this law went in to hiding and raised Kaya, born a Healer, to know and hate these traditions. For 15 years this life of secrecy has worked, for 15 years they have been free in a way, living life hidden amongst the Unskilled who know nothing of the Barrons and Healers or their Council.
But suddenly and inexplicably and without any warning the war is on Kaya's front door and her father must give them all away in order to save not only Kaya's life but their entire village. In exposing them Kaya is discovered and is summoned, on pain of death for her parents if she disobeys, to Shadow Academy to be trained as a Healer, forced into a Bond with a Barron she does not know, and made to follows strict rules of Protocol that her parents had spent her entire childhood trying to keep her away from. Kaya chaffs under the rules of Protocol, unable to accept the passive, dangerous role of the traditional Healer, she does not understand why she should not be allowed to defend herself, why she should have to rely on her Barron to protect her at all times and at any cost. So she sets out to get herself trained no matter what the cost to herself, her family, or the people she asks for help.
Review:
This was the book that prompted me to bring up world building last Wednesday. I did something that I keep telling myself not to do while reading a book; I looked at the GoodReads reviews, I already learned that doing that does nothing but colour my opinion of the book as I continue to read it and yet I did it again with this book anyway. I swear lesson learned this time, promise. It was this review in particular that ended up being the route of my problems. Up until that point I honestly hadn't been bothered by the world building because I usually give the first book in a series the benefit of the doubt that further books will continue to expand the world. The problem lies in that this reviewer and all the other reviewers who mentioned poor world building are right. Brewer does not lay enough of a foundation here in Soulbound, so I have little hope that the rest of the series will be able to sufficiently make up for what is lacking here. We get a general description of what it means to be Skilled and Unskilled, but we get absolutely no information about why those labels came to be, who created them or why people like Kaya's parents haven't revolted and tried to change things. We get told about a war that is suppoed to be devouring Tril, meanwhile the only people who know about this war are the Skilled, and we get very little information about who the Big Bad is or what his motives are. I understand that a lot of this might be able to be attributed to the narrator, which in this case is the main character who has been sheltered from all of this information and so is probably unreliable; but I don't know, I feel like Brewer didn't even bother trying to world build, she envisioned Kaya to supposedly be this game changing character who is completely against the current hierarchy, but she really never does any real hard questioning or digging so how can she be expected to change anything when she doesn't understand any of it? Am I the only one thinking that way?
Another thing that bothered me about this book? The buzz words highlighted on the back: deeply romantic adventure, heart-stopping action and impossible to forget heroine; my problem with these buzzword is that none of them are true. I find nothing at all romantic about any of the relationships in this book, they're both unhealthy. We're told that Kaya's relationship with Trayton is this huge romantic thing, sure Trayton does a couple of nice, sweet, romantic things, but for every one of those moments there are another two-three where he's either manipulating Kaya, belittling her, abusing her, or neglecting her, and she lets him do it even though she's supposed to be this independent spitfire. Forgive me if I don't see the deep romance there. And don't get me started on her relationship with Darius, he's just as bad as Trayton especially when you get to the end of the book and find out he's been lying to her the entire time. Although if you're observant, which Kaya is not, at ALL, you'll have the big twist figured out pretty much the first time Darius is introduced, I know I did.
As for heart-stopping action, yes there were some nice action scenes thanks to the sword fighting, but I wouldn't class any of the battle scenes as heart-stopping not by any means, especially when the narrator herself spends most of the time worrying about not cutting herself on her own katana. Which brings me to the claim that Kaya is impossible to forget, from the cover I was expecting her to be the ultimate badass, I was left highly disappointed as she turned out to be full of stereotypes; yes she wants to learn to defend herself instead of relying on Trayton to defend her, very feminist, very independent I applaud her for that. She actually achieves that goal by the end, except she still does need rescuing at some point in pretty much every one of her fights. And honestly, she was damn whiny. For how much emphasis was put on battles and war and breaking Barron protocol, Kaya spent an inordinate amount of time angsting over her supposedly romantic feelings for the two male leads, even though she self identified as not being interested in boys when she was first introduced.
If I don't actually stop and think about all of those things then I can enjoy the book. I hope that the next book in the series is narrated by a different character, I'd much prefer to see things from either Darius's point of view or Maddox's they seem to be the most interesting characters to me. I know that's not going to happen though because this series is the Kaya show for better or for worse. I really hope that Brewer delves more into world building in the next book, because I think that she could have a really, really interesting world going here and I want to know more about the mythology. There is culture blending galore you've got names like Patrick and Samantha mixed with names like Trayton and Darius and Sharya; Japanese katanas and European Chain mail, the cover depicts leather armour but there's never mention of any in the actual story, they just all seem to be dressed like ninjas are always depicted.
Overall, even though I have complaints, I will continue reading the series out of sheer curiosity to see just where she is going with all of this.
--Ren
Title: The Taker (Book One of The Taker Trilogy)
Author: Alma Katsu
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: September 6, 2011
Number of Pages: 464
Genre(s): Paranormal Romance, Urban Fantasy, Historical Romance
Date Read: February 1, 2012
Acquired: Wal-Mart
Summary:
Luke is working what starts off as a quiet night shift in the ER of a small town Hospital in rural Maine. That quiet relaxing shift ends when the Deputy shows up with a murderess; an ethereal waif with a mass of blonde curls, slight, beautiful, and covered in blood. Luke is immediately and inexplicable intrigued by this girl, but not because she is a murderer, he can't pinpoint why, and then she starts to tell him her story. The story starts with an admission that, yes, she did kill her companion, but it wasn't murder, he had asked her to do it. He being Jonathan St. Andrew, Luke doesn't believe that it is a coincidence that the man shared his name with the town they are in.
Lanny, that's the name of the beautiful killer, convinces Luke to help her escape the hospital by beguiling him with her sordid tale. With her story she takes him back over 200 years, to her birth and early life with Jonathan as the children of the founding generation of St. Andrew, Maine. How she loved him all of her life, and he never loved her back; the multitude of ways they hurt each other until she was sent to Boston. In Boston Lanny finds herself ensnared by a hedonistic group led by a charming, sado-masochistic, madman who falls in lust with Lanny's beauty and capacity for "perfect love". As they run for the Maine-Quebec border crossing Lanny's story changes to Lanny's story about this man, Adair's story, and from then on the three tales are interwoven. Lanny is trapped with Adair, forced to entrap Jonathan; has she trapped Luke the same way 200 years later after killing Jonathan?
Review:
What drew me to this book first was the striking cover; every time I went into the store it sat there on the shelf calling to me. Finally I caved and picked it up to read the summary on the back. My first thought was "Oh another vampire novel, sounds interesting enough." and with that it was promptly put into the cart and brought home. Where it then sat on the pile for a month or so calling to me as I read other books. I was in the process of trying to read The Thirteen Hallows, but I was having trouble keeping engaged, and I realised the reason was that I REALLY wanted to be reading The Taker, so I gave in and put the Hallows on hold to take it up.
To be honest I wasn't entirely sure how I felt about it as I started reading it, and that uncertainty stayed with me for most of the books. Be warned that this is actually a very dark book, with quite a few morbid parts. It markets itself as a romance, a love story, but I really don't like those labels for this. None of the love in this book is healthy in any way, shape or form. You've got Lanny's obsessive love for a self-centred, arrogant golden boy who takes her for granted and strings her along for her entire life; KNOWS that he is doing it BUT STILL CONTINUES to do because she's his only friend. Then you've got Jonathan, the aforementioned golden boy who claims to love Lanny, but not enough to actually rectify the way he treats her. Adair claims to love Lanny, but I feel like he is completely amoral and incapable of love, he feels covetous of her beauty and her capacity to love, he doesn't love her but he desires her and wants to posses her. She in turn sort of falls for him for a time in what screams to me a clear cut case of Stockholm Syndrome until she rationalises herself out of it. And then there's Luke, who toward the end of the novel fancies himself in love with Lanny, even though he's only known her for a few months and most of the things he knows about her tell her that she's not exactly the delicate damsel in distress she appears to be.She needs him, and he needs her, but again I can't see anything healthy in their relationship and I definitely can't see the type of love that warrants giving this novel the label of romance. The interplay in these relationships is complex and intriguing, definitely keeps you thinking, I just really dislike it when a book tries to present itself as something it is so clearly not.
That all being said it did deliver as promised by the advanced review on the back, even if it couldn't be honest with itself, you can always count on a reviewer to point out the truth, it's a showcase of the dark side of romantic love; that is a statement I can agree with. I don't have any personal experience with the dark side of love, thankfully, but I feel safe in saying that Katsu's relationships in this novel definitely have crossed the boundary into that realm.
I think it's a bit of a breath of fresh air in that regard. Yes it's dark and twisty (like Meredith Grey always claimed to be!) and I frequently found myself highly disturbed by the fact that I was enjoying the book. Because of the content of the book I keep finding myself saying out loud, "I'm not entirely sure if it's all right to find this interesting or not..." and then I'd have to set the book down and walk away from it for awhile and work through what I'd just read in my head. With the exception of Luke none of the main characters deserve sympathy from the reader, Lanny comes close because of the circumstances and context surrounding her behaviour, but for the most part it's really hard to give her sympathy. What Katsu did amazingly well here was to create characters so utterly undeserving of sympathy that you can't actually help but feel sorry for at certain times and then that leaves you shouting "ACK NO S/HE'S AN ARSE I SHOULD NOT BE FEELING SORRY FOR THEM!!" and banging your head against the desk...or maybe that's just me, I have a tendency to get REALLY into whatever I'm reading...
How do you feel when you find yourself feeling sympathy for a character who you know doesn't deserve it?
--Ren
Title: Death Has Come Up Into Our Windows
(The Zombie Bible Book #1)
Author: Stant Litore
Publisher: 47North
Published: August 14, 2012
Number of Pages: 93
Genre(s): Horror, Historical Fiction, Mythology
Date Read: January 13, 2013
Acquired: Chapters
Summary:
Yerusalem is being ravaged by a plague, so what else is new? It's biblical times, something bad is always happening in Yerusalem! This isn't just your normal plague though, this isn't wine and water turning to blood, it's not frogs or fireballs falling from the sky, and it's definitely not something as mundane as a plague of locusts. No, this is an old plague, true evil, a sign that the people of Yerusalem have truly failed God and are doomed, it must be; for why else would the dead be walking the earth?
Yirmiyahu (Jeremiah for those of you unfamiliar with the biblical spelling) tried to warn the people, he truly did. He tried to stop them, did everything in his power to try and make them see the error of their ways. He has failed; the city is besieged by Babylon and there are more and more dead wandering the streets, soon they will surely out number the living. He is of course terrified and appalled, with his fellow men and especially with himself. He blames himself for their downfall, for not doing even more than he did to stop it from coming to this. Yirmiyahu has given everything to try and save Yerusalem, even breaking his covenant with his wife to send her away so that he could stay and try to save the city he loves. But now he is alone, for even God has left Yirmiyahu.
WIthout God how can Yirmiyahu hope to save Yerusalem and its people from the tide of walking dead that they unleashed upon themselves?
Review:
At 93 pages this is a lovely little one sitting read, or at least it would have been something I could have read in one sitting were it not for the fact that I've been having a hard time concentrating on anything for more than thirty minutes at a time thanks to my wisdom tooth headaches (I'm headed to the dentist on Wednesday to get that looked at). I like books that can be read in one sitting, I'd much rather spend two and a half hours reading a book from start to finish than watching a movie. The book is a much richer world and I have a very vivid imagination; I usually much prefer my own visualisations to those in film adaptations for example. Because of my headaches, I wanted something that would allow me to get through it quickly because I knew it would be an effort to focus so I scoured the pile and came away with this and it fit my reading needs at the time perfectly.
This is not the type of book I would normally gravitate towards, when it comes to supernatural creatures I'm usually a vampire or werewolf fan. I always used find zombies to be incredibly lame but then I took a class back in 2008 and we studied zombie movies and even though I still thought they were lame I enjoyed the symbolism of them. Milla Jovovich and the Resident Evil series can be attributed with eradicating my dislike of zombies; the zombies in that series are not lame at all. So thanks to that class, and Resident Evil when I won the third book in the Zombie Bible series from Book Riot's Name that Author contest one week back in November I was super excited to read it because a) Hey I won a free book! Yeah! and b) Oooh Christian mythology meets modern horror! so I decided then and there that I would acquire the first two books and read them in order. I asked my local library to order them, and they did; but then I ended up getting a lot of book money for Christmas and just bought them myself.
I'm extremely glad that I did decide to dive in and give the zombie lit. a chance because this book didn't disappoint me. That being said, if you're a zombie fan a word of warning, do not be fooled by the gory cover image above, the title or the summary; the zombies are in there, assuredly, but they are not the stars of the action so if you're expecting gory action scenes all over the place and life or death chases this is not the zombie book you are looking for. I for one am okay with that because I really enjoyed the direction that the author took the story but maybe that's just the religious culture scholar in me? There's a lot of philosophical and religious waxing on the part of the main character; a good 90% of the book is him working through his own actions and those of his fellow Israelites, trying to figure out if they are capable or even worthy of redemption by God. For that reason the narrative is not linear it jumps around a lot between the present and several different points in the past through flashbacks.
On the plus side you really don't need to know anything at all about Christian mythology because Litore has taken little almost meaningless biblical incidents and imbued them with a new fantastical life. It is a bold undertaking indeed, and I know that there are people out there who are perfectly willing and ready to label this as sacrilege or blasphemy, but I am not one of those people. I applaud him for having the courage to take on this idea and it is a brilliant one. He has executed his vision amazingly, and he is so completely into this project that even his historian's note at the beginning and about the author section at the back do not break from the character he has created for himself of a zombie historian who has survived a 1992 outbreak of zombies in the Pacific Northwest. That right there is dedication to one's art.
I am excited to read the rest of the series and Stant Litore is now most definitely on my list of authors to watch for.
Check him and his zombies out at http://zombiebible.blogspot.com
--Ren
Title: City of Dark Magic
Author: Magnus Flyte
Publisher: Penguin
Published: November 27, 2012
Number of Pages: 464
Genre(s): Sci-Fi, Fantasy
Date Read: November 3, 2012
Acquired: GoodReads First Reads
Summary:
An interesting and unique page-turning romp that you won't be able to put down, this is the debut novel of Magnus Flyte (who is actually a team of two other authors); it's a fantastic mixture magic and mystery with just a dash of history and a little bit of science. Set in the gorgeous and historically rich city of Prague, Sarah Weston a PhD candidate in music is surprised to find herself offered the once in a lifetime chance at cataloguing Beethoven's manuscripts at a new museum set to open in Prague Castle; Sarah doesn't stop to wonder if it really is just too good to be true. Sarah is warned that legends and myths all say that Prague is a threshold for dark and sinister happenings.
It's not long after she arrives that strange things begin to happen. She learns that her mentor, who was working at the castle (another mere coincidence?), may not have committed suicide after all. He left cryptic notes, could he have been trying to warn her? Sarah tries to untangle his clues about the identity of Beethoven’s “Immortal Beloved,” and in the process she manages to get arrested, to have exhibitionist sex in a public fountain (perhaps those things are connected?), and maybe even discover time travel; all in all a pretty standard summer for a music scholar right? She also manages to catch the attention of a four-hundred-year-old dwarf, a handsome Prince, and crosses wits with a powerful U.S. politician with secrets that could change the face of government if they stay secret.
City of Dark Magic has elements of so many genres but ignore the labels and just be entertained by Sarah's adventures.
Review:
Sometimes you just have to casually pick up a sledgehammer and keep going; Sarah does just that at one point and that one small phrase sums up the entirety of this book perfectly in my mind. I wondered when I read that phrase, "How does one casually pick up a sledgehammer?" especially when that one is a young, slim musicologist, it's a rather ludicrous and hilarious action to envision to me and that's really what the this whole book is about. The ludicrousness and hilariousness of day to day life and how little we actually understand about the way the world works. I was so excited when I received this book through the GoodReads First Reads program; the blurb on the back cover was 100% accurate, because it really is the most entertaining novel I've read all year.
As I read it I was strongly reminded of two other novels with similar themes of the past meeting the present and completely changing the way the characters understand the world. While reading I heard this constant little voice in my head saying to me that the story has overtones and themes that are in line with the content of Deborah Harkness's A Discovery of Witches (I have yet to read the sequel, it is however on my very large pile of books to be read though!), where Harkness's book is about the mysteries surrounding a very old book, Flyte focusses on the mysteries of music, musicians and their patrons. Both however make mentions of alchemy and magic. The other work I found my inner voice saying this reminded me of was A.S. Byatt's Possession: A Romance.
On the whole this book has everything I love, relatable, hilarious characters, historical references that make me want to go and learn more, action, mystery and intrigue and just the right amount of believable urban fantasy thrown into the mix. Although I think I'm going to have to go back and look for the "tantric sex in a public fountain" that the back cover mentions; I remember sex against a lot of statues, but I don't remember any fountains...
The only thing I can say is I wish Magnus had introduced a few of the bigger plot elements earlier, because during the first half of the book it started to feel like Sarah wasn't really getting anywhere at times. I smell sequel though based on the ending, and that pleases me because there's nothing I love more than a really good book series!
Title: The Fault in Our Stars
