Review: The Book of Broken Hearts, by Sarah Ockler

I'm really saddened by this book. It wasn't super disappointing or anything. It wasn't awful. It wasn't even really bad. It just...wasn't good. I loved, loved, loved Ockler's last book, Bittersweet, and I was looking forward to this one so much.

The Book of Broken Hearts read like a cheesy Lifetime movie, except sometimes those are more emotionally gripping. The story was supposed to have this big emotional swoopage, and it just didn't resonate with me. Like, at all. I never felt like Jude's struggle was real, I never bought the romance between her and Emilio (who I honestly found annoying as a romantic foil to Jude, but more likable as a character than Jude was), and by the 300th time of hearing Jude wax on and on about how she was never supposed to be with a Vargas boy, I wanted to take her journal of broken hearts and slap her upside the head with it.

Plus, in the end, that whole conflict comes to naught because oh yeah by now her sisters are adults and understand that just because he's related to some assholes doesn't mean he is one. So the entire novel was just piling on this "woe is me if I date this boy I like because my sisters will kill me" and it ends with her sisters being like, "Oh, he seems nice" and not really caring at all.

I tried to figure out if this would have been better without the gimmicks. I don't really know. I liked the depictions of scenery and nature, they were quite well-written and beautiful. But then every time Jude's partaking in nature she starts telling us narration like this:

"My heart bursting, my heart aching. Life. Death," and I just wanted to collect the drool of a hippo in a bucket and pour it over her emo head. It's not that you can't have a character talking about the concepts of life and death, but she's literally talking about them by saying "Life. Death," as her contemplative process. I mean, COME ON.

Anyway. I didn't feel strongly about any of the characters. Bonus to the slut-shaming of the neighborhood girl who's name I forget who only appears as a whore out to get Emilio. *eye roll* Anyway. I'm sure that the concept of this book was great, I just think its execution was sloppy and, sadly, boring. 2 out of 5 stars.

- Becca Rose

Review: The 5th Wave, by Rick Yancey

After the 1st wave, only darkness remains. After the 2nd, only the lucky escape. And after the 3rd, only the unlucky survive. After the 4th wave, only one rule applies: trust no one. 

 Now, it’s the dawn of the 5th wave, and on a lonely stretch of highway, Cassie runs from Them. The beings who only look human, who roam the countryside killing anyone they see. Who have scattered Earth’s last survivors. To stay alone is to stay alive, Cassie believes, until she meets Evan Walker. Beguiling and mysterious, Evan Walker may be Cassie’s only hope for rescuing her brother—or even saving herself. But Cassie must choose: between trust and despair, between defiance and surrender, between life and death. To give up or to get up.

Oh, this book. Yancey, you had me. You HAD me. For the first 50% of this book, I was in awe. I was in raptures at the taught writing style, sentences that would make me gasp, the perilous life, fraught with terror, in the wave of the alien apocalypse. This was a five-star book, and I just was in LOVE with it for that first 50%.

And then...

I stopped buying it, and became increasingly frustrated with both the structure of the storytelling, as well as the plot choices. (spoiler-ific, avoid reading more if you're spoiler-shy. SERIOUSLY, don't read past this if you are desirous of a spoiler-free reading experience)

Okay, so...I'm so entirely upset because I had such high hopes, and because for the first half of the book, they were met and exceeded. You could have been so GOOD, book, so GOOD. This is going to sound all ranty, I can't really gather cohesive thoughts on it, so prepare yourself.

First issue: POV. The first half is told in Cassie's POV - and then half-way through, we get this abrupt switch to Ben. It gave me the equivalent of reader whiplash. There is also one small, tiny section told from Evan's POV, and one small section from Sam's, both of which are never returned to again. Then it just goes back and forth between Cassie's and Ben's POV. I understand why the author included Ben's POV because there really was no other way to tell his section of the story (more on that later), but geez, I just thought it was so annoying. I was used to Cassie by the half-way point of this, and found myself impatient to get Ben's POV sections out of the way so I could get back to the person I really cared about.

Second issue: Plot choices. Up until the second half, this plot had me guessing, enthralled, completely entangled in its originality. But THEN, oh, THEN. Geez. I'm actually heartbroken at what was such promise, gone so unfulfilled. We find out the aliens? Oh, yeah, they're doing the usual - body invasions. So they're implanted alien consciousness-beings inside of human bodies. YEAH, BECAUSE WE HAVE NEVER, EVER, EVER SEEN THAT DONE BEFORE. The aliens had to "give up" their bodies for some reason...like, to fit onto the mothership, or something? So apparently they can just slot themselves right into humans and become them. And they need the Earth because their own place is kaput, yadda yadda.

Okay. So, instead of just downloading themselves into the human bodies they wanted and then taking control of the planet, they decide to decimate the human population. Frequent references to "extermination" and such. They try to do so with as little damage to the ecosystem of earth as possible (um, but somehow the tsunamis/earthquake shenanigans doesn't count as damaging the earth?) so as to preserve it for their use. It seems like their end plan is to just save a few human bodies, enough for their race, and use them? Or maybe to just let their free-roaming consciousness-es roam the earth like atmospherically? So like, they wipe humans out in a variety of ways, and whatever, maybe I can hang with the plausibility of it until--

We find out that they are gathering up the children, to train them into armies, to send them out to kill the remaining humans, but they don't tell them that, the aliens, no. There are Aliens-masquerading-as-human-soldiers, and they tell the kiddos that the REAL alien-infested-humans are actually what we know to be the non-infested-still-human-humans, and we get this whole plot about how the kids are being trained to kill and being brainwashed at the same time, and their alien masters will then send them out to kill what the kids think are alien-infested-humans but what the aliens know to be just-normal-humans. At this point, I being to have so. many. ISSUES.

First of all. The aliens have this little chip-transmitter thingie they can insert into the human's necks. It's a tracker, but also a kill switch. Literally, they can just press a button and insta-death to the human. So, if you're going to go to all the trouble of planting spies into the human government, like, okay I see why you'd do military. But how about this WAY EASIER WAY OF KILLING PEOPLE ---after the plague they unleash via bird poop (yep), why don't you roll out your military masquerade and set up hospital camps everywhere? Tell people you're treating them for the plague. Insert the chip into their necks, tell them it's the antidote or whatever. Once you have everyone implanted, save the few bodies you're saving for move-in day, press the button. PRESTO, YOU JUST KILLED THE REMAINING MILLION HUMANS.

This, to me, sounds SO MUCH EASIER than the elaborate construct of separating kids from parents, collecting the kids, brainwashing the kids, training the kids, in a very complicated program that takes like months and months, pretending that you are human to the kids, convincing the kids that the real humans are actually the badguys, and then..dropping the kids off in remote locations to presumably slaughter the remaining human population with their machine guns. I mean, as I'm detailing this plan, you can see how it just grows more and more ridiculous, right? Right? Like, how much easier would it be to have a far less complicated plan of just posing as medical personnel and inserting the chips into everyone. Much less messy, much higher guaranteed success rate.

And maybe we're supposed to see this flaw in the plan or maybe the flaw is built-in so that in later books the humans can use the flaw to win, or whatever. But the entire book is telling us how much smarter the aliens are than the humans, how much more evolved, how the humans are cockroaches and the aliens are the highest life form, etc. So...if this is their real plan, I'm just having a really hard time reconciling those two things.

And then we get into the training-the-kids-as-militia plot. Okay. OKAY. I have ISSUES, here, not only with the plot's inception but also with its execution. WHY ARE THEY DOING THIS WITH KIDS? They literally have a 7 year old who we're supposed to believe is trained to be competent with killing using an assault rifle. I understand, that does sometimes happen (think of child soldiers in genocide situations in Africa, etc). But these kids have just been ripped from their soft suburban lives. They're used to privilege. The reason the kids-as-warriors theme works in The Hunger Games is because that's the only life those kids have ever known. They are trained from infancy to be weapons and fighters, and if they're in the poorer districts, they face a constant fight for survival. It becomes plausible, then, that the children in the world of The Hunger Games could conceivably be ruthless killers, efficient in tactics of war and fighting.

But in this world, it's in suburban Ohio, in today's society. I had such a hard time buying into the idea that these kids would, in any probability or likelihood, be able to be trained and shaped into ruthless killing machines. From my grasp of the timeline, this happened in a matter of like, 2 months. I'm sorry, but I'm just not biting. Kids whose biggest concern was getting Starbucks after school and their dead cellphones, turned into accurate M16-users? The author tries vaguely to explain this away by talking about how if you survived the first couple of waves of extinction, you must be like a survivor and pretty hardy so then like it would totally make sense to just adapt naturally to the soldier life. And I suppose with kids, taking them from a traumatic situation and giving them structure to cling to could have some credence...but I'm just SO NOT BUYING THIS.

And to my most frustrated point of all - okay, so the aliens choose the ridiculously difficult route of masquerading-as-humans and sending the real humans to kill the remaining humans who really are human but only the aliens-as-humans know this and the humans-being-controlled-by-aliens-as-humans don't. WHY WOULD THEY CHOOSE CHILDREN. Why. still. WHY. One throw-away thing is used to explain this, like, "Children are the easiest to brainwash." Okay, whatever. Children are also SMALL. Weaker than adults. Lacking in full coordination, maturity, decision-making skills. If you want a team of highly-trained assassins who can overpower the real ADULT human survivors, you would not choose children. Like, maybe if they were all older teens, this would remain plausible. But they have 12 year olds on this team. The most bloodthirsty member of their squad is supposed to be a 7 year old girl who's an excellent shot with a machine gun. I DO NOT BUY. Kids are biologically just not going to be able to win out against adults, adults who have been hiding out and shooting anything that comes in sight of them - adults of basically equal skill levels paired against children are going to win, every time.

I mean, the one team of kid soldiers we see sent out into the field end up killing half of themselves all on their own, no outside killing necessary. I. DO NOT. BUY. I don't buy into the premise that the aliens would even choose this tactic in the first place, I don't buy that they'd choose children to enforce this tactic, and I don't buy that normal American kids can become highly-skilled, finely-honed killing machines in a matter of weeks. To me, this just felt like a ploy to be able to use the idea of child soldiers as the plot.

Now, Cassie's development into a badass is handled so believably. She reacts to killing the way you'd expect a suburban teen thrown into an apocalyptic scenario to react - with horror, and badly, but then growing into an uncomfortable acceptance of its necessity. She's what held this novel together for me, and she's why I give it 3 stars despite its second-half-spiral into plot chum. The writing is taut throughout, the prose beautiful in its chilling way. But oh, how this book failed the promise of its first half. It failed itself so hard. I'm distraught with the idea of what could have been.

I think mostly everyone will love this book. I think the plot holes I found so gratingly horrible will slide unnoticed by most. I think most people will get caught up in the adrenaline and just eat this book up. That's good, and fine. It's much better than most of the apocalyptic/dystopian fare out on the market today, and Cassie is a great heroine. I just could not stomach how increasingly stupid the plot became.

- Becca Rose

Eleanor & Park: a Review.

"Set over the course of one school year in 1986, ELEANOR AND PARK is the story of two star-crossed misfits – smart enough to know that first love almost never lasts, but brave and desperate enough to try. When Eleanor meets Park, you’ll remember your own first love – and just how hard it pulled you under." 
Eleanor & Park, by Rainbow Rowell.

Let me just start off by saying that I really did like this book. It was fresh, different from what's on the market, and featured several well-rounded characters. But it did not blow me away like I wanted it to. Something about it just didn't sit right with me, and I was up late thinking about it. I couldn't figure out what exactly unsettled me, and not in a good way, about this read. I wanted to say I loved it, but something was wiggling in the back of my mind that wouldn't let me. I think I finally figured it out.

First of all, I agree with Emily's review, because to me, the leap from friendship to romance happened too quickly, and too unbelievably. I, too, bought them becoming friends, but I really felt that their romantic relationship would have been better served by a longer, slow-burn development period. They kind of went straight from "we both like music" to "I need you, I want you, I love you" whispered in the night, and I just didn't find that realistic to either one of the characters.

Note: spoilers abound throughout the rest of this review. Proceed informed.

Really, though, here's the main thing I had an issue with: for all its dismissal of fairy tales, this story is  a fairy tale. There's a trend I've noticed in YA recently, and I'm calling it the Abused-Kid-Fantasy. The AKF is the fantasy that every child of abuse has, in which their main hope is that one day, some day, someone will rescue them from this terrible place. Someone will save them from their abuser, and they will live in a happily ever after in which their abuser is gone and they get all the safety and security they lacked in the abusive environment (Another example of this type of story is "I'll Be There," a recently published YA novel). These types of stories detail the abusive environment in a way that makes us horrified, that makes us really really feel for the protagonist. And then, in the end, after some trial or tribulation, the child is saved, the abuser punished, and the happily-ever-after begins.

What I'm about to say about this might seem cruel or harsh. I believe this type of story is damaging, because it sets children up to believe that this type of happy ending really does exist for children of abusive parents. But it doesn't. Eleanor's escape is a fairy tale, a wish, a dream come true. For every real-life Eleanor in the world, there are 100,000 others that never make it out of the abuse, at least not during their childhood. It's like the Divorced-Parents-Reunited-Through-Their-Child trope in kid's movies, but even more toxic. 

One of the things that bothers me about this story trope is that the kids never "do the right thing" - i.e, tell an authority figure about the abuse occurring at home. They're afraid of social services, they protect their parents at all costs, and eventually their salvation comes through circumstance or despite their best efforts to keep their lives a secret. While this may be the reality for some, the real way kids escape these horrific environments is by telling the truth.They tell the truth to a teacher, to a friend's parent, to a social worker when they come to visit. That'show the nightmare ends. But in these stories, that never happens. The lesson? Sit tight, stay quiet, and one day, someone will rescue you. That's the kind of thinking that ends up in children getting killed.

I know that Eleanor seems to break this mold by escaping to her uncle's house and telling him the truth. However, in doing this, she leaves her 4 young siblings behind in an abusive environment. She tells herself she doesn't have any way of helping them. But the thing is, she considers telling her guidance counselor before then, and never does. When she tells her uncle, he doesn't call the authorities. Her siblings eventually do get to leave, but that's because Eleanor writes her mother a letter, threatening to tell unless her mother leaves the abusive stepfather. This results in her mom taking the kids and leaving Richie. Here's the thing: You know what happens even less than the one Eleanor in 100,000 abused kids escaping? The abused partner leaving. That. Doesn't. Happen. Sure, it may happen for some, but consider the facts of Eleanor's mom's life: she already let Richie kick Eleanor out for an entire year without protest. She has been with this guy for so long now that she will suffer no complaint from Eleanor about his behavior. She tells her to stay quiet, to lie, to cover up. She lets him do horrible things to herself and to her children for an extended period of time. 

This is not the behavior of a woman who leaves. Perhaps I would have bought this, except for this: she defends Richie to Eleanor. She takes Richie's side against Eleanor. When a parent is that far gone, that they'd defend their abuser and the abuser of their children over their actual child, that's far gone. Maybe one in a million come back from that. But Eleanor's mom doesn't seem like the type to do so, not throughout the entire novel. She doesn't do so when Eleanor calls the police, multiple times. We get no indication that Eleanor's mom would ever leave Richie - not that she's thinking about it, not that she'd ever consider it, not that she thinks it's the right thing to do. But in the end, we're supposed to believe that in response to Eleanor's threat to tell the truth, she takes the kids and leaves. I don't buy it. That's a fairy tale. And it's a nice one to believe in, but it doesn't happen. 

The issues of how the abuse is handled are really what stuck out to me, and why I couldn't like this book as much as I wanted to.

Here are a few more bits about the actual story: 

 Things I liked: 

~Eleanor. That whole thing of being yourself when it's not popular, being cool but not knowing it, not being afraid of being unique but yet intensely aware of the social criticism you face-  it was done so well in her character. She's the girl who, after high school, is going to be the coolest cat of all. I love that we got to see that, even though she didn't. Also, she's not afraid to speak up for herself. When Park says something offensive, she tells him. She at one point says, "No, I don't want to talk anymore" and walks away from him saying a hurtful comment. I love how she has her own personhood. She felt real.

~Park, and his evolution. While the novel seems like it's Eleanor's story, he really does do a lot of changing and growing. And I loved his family dynamic. 

~Park's jump-kick. That whole scene, and its repercussions, had me laughing aloud. 

~Eleanor's friends. Never really featured, but a great addition whenever they popped up.

~How Park's attraction to Eleanor is depicted. Sweet, honest, and a little bit groundbreaking. He's not physically attracted to her because she's fat - he's physically attracted to her because he finds her beautiful. 

Things I didn't like: 

~The secondary characters were inconsistent - in that, some felt like rounded people, and some felt very flat. 

~Emily's point above, the development of their relationship.

~Eleanor describes herself as fat. Some people call her fat. But then some people say she's not actually "that fat." She thinks she is ugly, and other people tell her that as well. But she gets a makeover, and suddenly she appears to be a dewy sex goddess. I couldn't tell what we were supposed to believe - is she an ugly duckling now, but will be pretty once she grows into her features? Is she hideously fat, or just bigger than average? The description felt inconsistent, but perhaps that's just how it is in reality. You're as fat as you think you are, but other people don't think you're fat at all. I had something happen last week where a friend of mine described a girl as "Really heavy, like, really fat" and the implication she was trying to produce was that this girl was fat and I was not. But here's the thing: I'm fat. Curvy, plus-sized, however you want to say it. So perhaps Eleanor's experience is like all of ours, in that her perceived level of fatness changes in the eye of the beholder. I just wanted a little more clarification.

Review: A Certain Slant of Light, by Laura Whitcomb

Or should I say, "mini review"?

In the class of the high school English teacher she has been haunting, Helen feels them: for the first time in 130 years, human eyes are looking at her. They belong to a boy, a boy who has not seemed remarkable until now. And Helen--terrified, but intrigued--is drawn to him. The fact that he is in a body and she is not presents this unlikely couple with their first challenge. But as the lovers struggle to find a way to be together, they begin to discover the secrets of their former lives and of the young people they come to possess. 

I reviewed A Certain Slant of Light, a touching YA romance, some time ago. But I've been thinking about it a lot lately, and thought it couldn't hurt to talk about this one again. I warmed up to this one because, even though it's a YA paranormal romance, it has a more adult feel to it. It has less to do with wish fulfillment and more to do with real love - in that it is experienced by two adults for who this love means their existence, and for who I believed could not truly live without it.

That said, I wasn't wholly satisfied with the relationship of Helen and her romantic interest, James. There were some pacing problems that, though they didn't tarnish the authenticity of their romance, left me a little underwhelmed.

For the most part, however, I believe more forgiving readers will really enjoy A Certain Slant of Light. As I said, it's a very touching read and beautifully written. I found Helen’s fears and her resignation to her long, lonely fate, complex and moving. There are moments when she is thankful just for the silent companionship of her hosts, and others where she hungers for more than an endless life of haunting. Her relationships with her previous hosts, her devotion and affection for them, were some of the most sincerely rendered portions of A Certain Slant of Light. It was here that I found Helen, and her hosts, most captivating. But when her story transitioned more into the ground of her host body's life and once her physical relationship with James began, I found my interests waning.

I appreciate how they felt about one another, I do, but I wasn't as entranced by their relationship once they interacted with one another in a physical environment. The second half of their romance lacked the pacing and heart of the first, and my reading experience suffered because of it. After that, I was far more interested in the other details of Whitcomb’s novel – Jenny, Billy, Jenny’s family, etc. But, overall, Helen and James worked for me. I felt their relationship became a bit too hasty and in need of substance, but there was still something tender about their needs and wants in each other. Even when I wasn't really invested in their relationship, I still believed in it.

While it ended up falling a little flat for me (with some redemption in the end), I do believe that most readers will be engaged by Helen, James and their mutual need to find somebody in a great, big, empty world.

- Bitterblue

Review: Return to Me, by Justina Chen Headley

Or, All Hail the Potato King!

Note: I'm about to get REAL spoilerific. I'd say don't read if you don't want spoilers, but this book is so blatantly obvious about EVERYTHING that I doubt I'd be ruining much of any of the experience for you. 

Further note: Prepare for much RANTY RANT RANTS. 

Dear Justina Chen Headley: Can I call you JCH? I feel like we've been in a sad, sad relationship, the kind where you start off all butterfly-y and glowy and just completely in love and then SUDDENLY, without any warning, one of us just goes batcrazy and flies around in a cape made of soiled underpants and tells everyone "I AM THE POTATO KING, I AM THE POTATO KING" and the relationship just digresses and melts into oblivion and the non-potato-king is wondering how on earth it got stuck with someone who'd wear other's soiled undies as a fashion choice. 

 Do you know who is the Potato King in this relationship, JCH? 

You are. You're the Potato King.

What the heck happened to us, Potato King? Your debut book, North of Beautiful , was so exquisite, so vivid, so gorgeously rendered, I couldn't help but be in awe of it. I gasped aloud while reading, so stunned was I by your power to convey emotions and family dynamics in a real, raw, true way. So imagine my thrill of anticipation when I discovered Return to Me was about to come out. I'd waited years for this! Another book by the great JCH! Another rich family drama! A coming-of-age story! But no, all my hopes were dashed. Our romance was not to be. You just had to go and throw on your soiled-undie-cape and declare yourself the Potato King. 

What even is this book? This is the most disappointed I've been by an author in quite some time. This book is trite. The characters unlikeable, their motivations completely spelled out for us. Everything is laid out to the point where there's barely any actual conflict. The resolution is so nice, so easy, it leaves the territory of saccharine and ventures into freaking Candy Land. Every single thought, dynamic, feeling, and person is EXPLAINED to us, via Reb's EXTRAORDINARY LEVEL OF INSIGHT into the people around her.

It's like if God wrote a book about his people on earth and instead of SHOWING what they did, instead of carrying the reader along the journey, God was just like, "Yo, Ima tell you what's up inside these people's heads yo, just cause I know what's up inside they heads and that way this is just way easier than me having to like, write good books, yo." 

I mean, this feels like it couldn't possibly be from the same author of North of Beautiful because that was a GOOD BOOK. This is NOT. This is a Potato King. 

Random points pulled out to display major irritation: 

* Literally days after her dad's affair and subsequent leaving of her mother, Reb's all waxing philosophical like, "Maybe this is the best for both my parents, maybe they're free to find their true soulmates, la la la" but let me just state that NO HUMAN BEING FEELS THAT WAY literally days after her father reveals he's been spending 5+ figures on romantic getaways to Paris for months now, living a double life, jetting off on "business trips" that were really with his mistress, whom he keeps in an apartment in Manhattan, and that OOPS HE SPENT ALL YOUR COLLEGE MONEY ON THIS HO TOO, and he ruthlessly broke your mother's heart, and you just, you are like, three days later being all "dis is for da best mmkay yuhs".... 

* The architect stuff was skull-numbingly terrible. So. GODFORSAKENLY BORING. 

* Reb spends the first 25 pages telling us how annoying her mom is and how she can't stand her, and the next 300 pages telling us how she got her mom all wrong and her mom's really not that bad and like yeah. I cannot relay to you how annoying this was. Probably more annoying than the most annoying girl you can think of. Think of her. Now, yes, even more annoying than that. 

* She tells her little brother he's a good man, frequently. HE IS TEN. 

* "Jackson, my Jackson. Jackson u is perfect. Jackson I bet u is gonna cheat on me cause my daddeh cheated on my mommy. Jackson I is going to break up with u then never answer u texts/calls and then come running back after a whole summer of ignoring u and expect u to jump back in my arms even after i treat u like dirt. u is dirt, Jackson. u is my dirt." = the whole romantic relationship. 

* Everyone in this book is just. SO. no. You just, don't even believe them for a second. It's like every single person is a Manic Pixie Dream Person.

* Her dad seriously moves her mom and family ALL THE WAY ACROSS COUNTRY, from Seattle to New Jersey, and THEN, THEN he tells the mom he's having an affair and he's leaving her and that he never should have moved her out there. He'd been having the affair for MONTHS. No person would DO that. 

* The ending is so barfingly perfect and I can't even.

* Let's go ahead and call this a Manic Pixie Dream BOOK.

 Listen, Potato King, you can go around running and screaming all you want. I'm breaking up with you.

- Fire

Review: The Holders, by Julianna Scott

17-year-old Becca spent her whole life protecting her brother from, well, everything. The abandonment of their father, the so called 'experts' who insist that voices in his head are unnatural and must be dealt with, and the constant threat of being taken away to some hospital and studied like an animal. When two representatives appear claiming to have the answers to Ryland's perceived problem, Becca doesn't buy it for one second. That is until they seem to know things about Ryland and about Becca and Ryland's family, that forces Becca to concede that there may be more to these people than meets the eye. Though still highly skeptical, Becca agrees to do what's best for Ryland.

What they find at St. Brigid's is a world beyond their imagination. Little by little they piece together the information of their family's heritage, their estranged Father, and the legend of the Holder race that decrees Ryland is the one they've been waiting for. However, they are all - especially Becca - in for a surprise that will change what they thought they knew about themselves and their kind. 

Oh, interesting premise. I was so excited about you. I thought, how cool! Powers! And Irish culture! And relics! And a protective older sister! Ireland! SUPER POWERS. This oughta be fun. 

Alas, interesting premise, you have been failed by poor execution.

What you need in any book is a likeable main character. They can make poor decisions, they should have flaws, but you need to be in their corner, rooting for them. Let me just say, I was not rooting for Becca. And I was also not a fan of the TELL-NOT-SHOW that was happening here.

Tell-Not-Show-itis: when an author tells us everything instead of showing us. Almost incurable. Always annoying. Approach with caution. 

If the only thing you find yourself chanting while reading a book is "SHOW NOT TELL. SHOW NOT TELL" then you know that author definitely needs a makeover on their manuscript. It's the basics of writing 101. I just...I just don't think it's too much to ask for in any novel. Becca is all tell, ALL TELL. And irrational. And just...so unpalatable as a character. And she did absolutely zero protecting of her little brother in all of this. And I saw the plot twist coming a millllllllion miles away. And Alex, oh, lovely Alex, we never know what, exactly, he sees in Becca. And we never understand the family issues happening with Becca and her parents.

I just. I don't know. This one fell really, really flat for me. Read with caution.

I was given an advanced reader's copy via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. 

- Fire

Review: And All the Stars, by Andrea K Host

Madeleine Cost is working to become the youngest person ever to win the Archibald Prize for portraiture. Her elusive cousin Tyler is the perfect subject: androgynous, beautiful, and famous. All she needs to do is pin him down for the sittings. 

None of her plans factored in the Spires: featureless, impossible, spearing into the hearts of cities across the world – and spraying clouds of sparkling dust into the wind.

Is it an alien invasion? Germ warfare? They are questions everyone on Earth would like answered, but Madeleine has a more immediate problem. At Ground Zero of the Sydney Spire, beneath the collapsed ruin of St James Station, she must make it to the surface before she can hope to find out if the world is ending.

And All the Stars is a very interesting book. I mean that in a good sense, but also, sort of not. The blurb does not do the book any justice, because Madeleine makes it out to the surface in the first 15 pages. The book is actually about things like fighting off alien invasions and surviving an apparently infectious bodily change, let off by the dust.

This book is hard to classify. It's dystopian, but not. It's science fiction, but not. It's romance, but really not. It's survivalist, not-quite-post-apocalyptic, science-fiction-y, action-ish, with a hint of romance. Madeleine really grows on you the further along in the book you get. Her merry band of men that accumulate around her, their very own survivalist group, grows on you too. Host writes with sparse prose, and that works both to and against her benefit. It's difficult to connect to Madeleine on an emotional level, but at the same time, the reader wants to. At times, it was hard to distinguish between characters as some of them have two and even three nicknames. I kept wondering if their group was growing or if I was crazy for not remembering them. The secondary characters are not very fleshed out.

I felt like a lot of this book's promise was lost in the middle act. There's too much discussion wasted on logistics and hiding and not enough, I don't know, building of the plot. It's like the book wants to be character driven, but it turns out it's supposed to be plot driven. I am still not sure what I think of it all, and it's been a few days since I've finished it. It also took me a bit to slog through the middle part, and I usually finish books very fast.

That being said, I did enjoy the characters, I did enjoy the premise, and the imagery of the aliens was lovely. The epilogue wraps things up almost too perfectly for me, though. The resolution to everything is just too easy, for the entire build-up. It felt forced. Anyway. What I'm saying is, Host is clearly a talented writer, but I'm just not sure if this book worked for me entirely. I look forward to seeing what she produces in the future.

I was given an advanced reader's copy via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. 

- Fire