Books 16 - 30
My previous entry, in which I talk about the first two parts of The Hunger Games, can be found here. These are actually books 16-30 of my reading list for the year (which is why the finishing dates end in March). I hope to have books 31 - 56 up sometime soon.
I've tried to keep spoilers to a minimum here, JIC.
Good: Does the unthinkable and genuinely puts its teenage heroine through the wringer in ugly, ugly, ugly ways that YA fiction doesn’t usually try for. Realistic portrayal of a mental breakdown and a bittersweet conclusion that gives certain shippers exactly what they asked for - in a way they possibly wish it hadn’t.
Bad: I … really didn’t like this one. After my copious gushing over The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, I was expecting … well more than this book delivers. Except that it actually does deliver more (more of Panem, more characters, more conspiracies, more action, more tragedy, more ‘love triangle’) yet it does it in a way that somehow makes it feel like less. People far more verbose and intelligent than me have already dissected how the third part of this trilogy failed to live up to the themes and story set up in Books 1 and 2. For me, the first half the book was just as enthralling as I was used to, but the second half was like a house of matchsticks in a roomful of sparking flint. At some point everything went up in smoke and afterwards I couldn’t identify the one thing that had made everything go wrong. I think it was the militaristic elements that left me coldest. It seemed like Collins was taking the Red Shirt approach: setting up new characters with broad, easily dispensed character traits just so she could kill them off to show how serious the situation was. At one point she offs someone graphically with a dart bomb and I had to pause and pull myself out of the narrative to try and remember who the hell the character even was. That sort of thing really cut into my reading enjoyment. I wasn’t asking for a happy ending, or everything resolved, or even everyone to survive, but I wanted the deaths of longstanding characters to mean something (one in particular, who everyone who has read the book will know without me having to name him) and I wanted a plot that didn’t make me feel like I’d been waiting in the wrong room for a party to start and then wandered in when it was drawing to its close. The rebellion felt really … small. I can’t even put my finger on why other than I, the reader, wasn’t there to see most of it and the dribs and drabs I was told afterwards didn’t satiate the questions I’d been hanging onto for close to three novels. All in all, while there are elements I really loved about this book (and indeed this series), the last impression I have of it is lacklustre, and no amount of preceding tremendousness is going to make that last impression go away.
Good: A fantastic start to a series that I started reading when it was already in its eighth book. This is thriller-mystery fiction at its strongest. I don’t care if other people think Harlan Coben (along with half a dozen others on my Favourite Authors list) are nothing but supermarket trash: I’d rather have consistently good reading material with a snarky, intelligent protagonist like Myron Bolitar than a weighty ‘classic’ that is too onerous for me to actually enjoy, just so I can say I’ve read it.
Bad: Dates itself in places, since it’s from 1995 (which dates me too, since I was in my last year of primary school when this was published).
Good: Historical fiction is a real mixed bag: more often than not, getting the details right takes precedence over plot or character. Historical fiction based on true stories is even worse, as most authors try to do justice to actual historical figures and end up boring the reader (well, me) near to tears. Mary Hooper does not do this. In addition to choosing a historical figure I’ve never heard of (Anne Green was a lowly maidservant falsely accused of infanticide and hanged in 1650 England, only to awaken on the dissection table just before doctors performed an early autopsy on her ‘corpse’), Hooper writes using much of the Elizabethan lexicon and grammatical structures, but in a way that doesn’t inhibit meaning to the casual reader. An enticing concept and heroine, well-paced and a real page-turner for such a short novel.
Bad: Ends quite abruptly.
Good: An innovative take on the urban fantasy genre - what if a demon slayer, a tough, witty, ballsy, tried-and-true heroine template used in an abundance of UF fiction, were to settle down, start a family and then have to balance motherhood and fighting the forces of the supernatural? It’s definitely a concept I enjoyed here; the witty prose helping immensely. There’s a lot to be said for a heroine who can think of those well-placed pithy remarks the rest of us imagine up three hours after any confrontation.
Bad: Gets a bit draggy in the middle third, but the start and especially the last third make up for this.
Good: One of the better-written additions to this series. Since the series is written by different authors, it’s a real hit-or-miss job most of the time. Thankfully this book is treated with the sensitively and respect the subject and topic deserve, without descending into maudlin melodrama or lecturing mode.
Bad: In the first few ‘diary’ entries McKissack sounds like she’s trying to write like Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple for a YA audience. Thankfully this clears up when she gets into her stride and allows Clotee to develop her own character voice.
Good: Um … the cover was pretty?
Bad: Hands down the worst book I have read this year. This may change later, but you’d have to come up with a real stinker to beat this thing. The main character was whiny and annoying; his only friend was patronising and annoying; the villains were histrionic, annoying caricatures; the ‘moody atmosphere’ Horowitz was aiming for throughout quickly became tedious and annoying; and the plot was convoluted, badly explained, ill-paced and (you guessed it) ANNOYING! I should have realised something was askew when the villains are about to bloodily sacrifice the 'hero' and I was egging them on. Only sheer bloody-mindedness, Horowitz’s reputation and a vain hope that things would eventually pick up and become palatable kept me slogging through this dross. And it’s the first part of a trilogy? Three books to AVOID, I think!
Good: I went back to an author I know I like after Raven’s Gate. Susan Mallory’s gentle prose and likeable characters may not be everyone’s preference, but they provided a nice buffer to help me forget what I’d read before it.
Bad: As I said, anyone not interested in gentle romantic comedies should look elsewhere.
Good: My first exposure to Kellerman’s fiction and I was pleasantly surprised. To be fair, I didn’t know this was part of a series when I first picked it up, but for the most part my understanding of the plot wasn’t inhibited. Competent and relatively engaging police procedural crime fiction.
Bad: A slow-burner with an even slower start. The characterisation was a bit of an issue at first too - I had a hard time keeping track of the cast for the first few chapters, although that might have been because this is Book 17 in an ongoing series.
Good: I guess I just couldn’t keep away from those darn vampires for long. Thankfully, scratching that urban fantasy itch with this novel was one of the best (reading) decisions I’ve ever made. The characters were layered and complex, the plot just intricate enough to keep my interest without losing me, the mythology behind this interpretation of vampires is engaging and the snark? Oh, the snark!
Bad: Ends on a feckin’ good cliff-hanger and I can’t find the second book at any of my local libraries!
Good: For the first chunk of this book I didn’t think I was going to like it. I know next to nothing about Italian history, so a plot that splits itself between Florence in 2005 and the Florence during the Renaissance didn’t seem like such good reading decision when I first realised how out of my depth, historically, I was. However, (lack of) knowledge about Italian culture is no problem with this novel. It’s actually more of a psychological magical mystery mixed with a tragic romance in the same vein as Romeo and Juliet, albeit with more über-cute Leonardo Da Vinci than Shakespeare could have gotten away with. Seriously, Leonardo is a supporting character in the Renaissance narrative and he’s the best thing in it. Worth reading just for him alone!
Bad: Slow to start and you do want to bang some sense into the 2005 cast at times.
Good: I started reading Connolly about a year ago and haven’t really dipped back into his prose since then. He’s like a blend of Linda Fairstein and Faye Kellerman’s police procedurals with Michael Koryta and Harlan Coben’s wittiness. If any of those names rang true for you, try this one. Previous knowledge of Bosch or his universe not required.
Bad: Pretty much a template for the genre: what you see is what you get, no more and no less.
Good: An engaging prologue and a thrilling ending with some bright spots in between and the potential for lots of lovely character and plot development in the other two parts of the trilogy. Wendy’s insistence that she is human in the face of her mother’s murderous) attempts to prove otherwise is particularly heart-breaking when she joins the world of the Trylle (politically correct word for ‘troll’ favoured by its denizens) and has to fit into the alien, parasitical life there. This is what YA fantasy fiction should be!
Bad: The middle section feels a bit flabby at times. This was mainly to introduce some key members of the secondary cast and their attitudes towards humans, but there were times scenes were added in that felt a bit pointless. Hopefully this will be disproved in Books 2 and 3.
Good: If you like ANYTHING by Jodi Picoult, you will already know what type of book this is. Pregnancy pacts aren’t something I’d ever heard of before, especially between teenagers. Delinsky’s prose suits the subject matter well: not too maudlin, just the right amount of sensitive and the preaching is kept severely in check. It even started to make me question my own views on teenage pregnancy, and any book that can change or at least challenge your opinions on something is one worth reading.
Bad: Susan, one of the mothers, comes across as a little too perfect at times, but this is a minor gripe.
Good: Apparently vampire fiction gravitates to me even when I don’t intend it to, as I read this one without having looked at the dust jacket, going purely on the author name alone. Thankfully Cabot was just as enjoyable as ever, with a vast array of character that never fail to engage your interest - even if it is because sometimes you want to pop them in the head for being so dense and prideful.
Bad: I have … issues with Cabot’s sentence structures. This probably wouldn’t bother many people, but her overabundance of sentence fragments … GAH! SO ANNOYING!
Good: Mary Hooper carries on her wonderful grasp of mixing an interesting plot with an original historical premise here. Velvet’s naïveté can be a little grating, but it suits her character given the time period and what her life would have been like as a lower-class girl in Victorian England. I also learned a lot about mediums and what they got up to back then!
Bad: Velvet herself, I’m afraid. It’s wrong to judge her by modern standards of female protagonists, but she isn’t half a wet blanket at times.
I've tried to keep spoilers to a minimum here, JIC.
- Mocking Jay by Suzanne Collins (2012-02-15) - Book III in the Hungers Games Trilogy
Good: Does the unthinkable and genuinely puts its teenage heroine through the wringer in ugly, ugly, ugly ways that YA fiction doesn’t usually try for. Realistic portrayal of a mental breakdown and a bittersweet conclusion that gives certain shippers exactly what they asked for - in a way they possibly wish it hadn’t.
Bad: I … really didn’t like this one. After my copious gushing over The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, I was expecting … well more than this book delivers. Except that it actually does deliver more (more of Panem, more characters, more conspiracies, more action, more tragedy, more ‘love triangle’) yet it does it in a way that somehow makes it feel like less. People far more verbose and intelligent than me have already dissected how the third part of this trilogy failed to live up to the themes and story set up in Books 1 and 2. For me, the first half the book was just as enthralling as I was used to, but the second half was like a house of matchsticks in a roomful of sparking flint. At some point everything went up in smoke and afterwards I couldn’t identify the one thing that had made everything go wrong. I think it was the militaristic elements that left me coldest. It seemed like Collins was taking the Red Shirt approach: setting up new characters with broad, easily dispensed character traits just so she could kill them off to show how serious the situation was. At one point she offs someone graphically with a dart bomb and I had to pause and pull myself out of the narrative to try and remember who the hell the character even was. That sort of thing really cut into my reading enjoyment. I wasn’t asking for a happy ending, or everything resolved, or even everyone to survive, but I wanted the deaths of longstanding characters to mean something (one in particular, who everyone who has read the book will know without me having to name him) and I wanted a plot that didn’t make me feel like I’d been waiting in the wrong room for a party to start and then wandered in when it was drawing to its close. The rebellion felt really … small. I can’t even put my finger on why other than I, the reader, wasn’t there to see most of it and the dribs and drabs I was told afterwards didn’t satiate the questions I’d been hanging onto for close to three novels. All in all, while there are elements I really loved about this book (and indeed this series), the last impression I have of it is lacklustre, and no amount of preceding tremendousness is going to make that last impression go away.
- Dealbreaker by Harlan Coben (2012-02-21) - Book I of the Myron Bolitar series
Good: A fantastic start to a series that I started reading when it was already in its eighth book. This is thriller-mystery fiction at its strongest. I don’t care if other people think Harlan Coben (along with half a dozen others on my Favourite Authors list) are nothing but supermarket trash: I’d rather have consistently good reading material with a snarky, intelligent protagonist like Myron Bolitar than a weighty ‘classic’ that is too onerous for me to actually enjoy, just so I can say I’ve read it.
Bad: Dates itself in places, since it’s from 1995 (which dates me too, since I was in my last year of primary school when this was published).
- Newes from the Dead by Mary Hooper (2012-02-23)
Good: Historical fiction is a real mixed bag: more often than not, getting the details right takes precedence over plot or character. Historical fiction based on true stories is even worse, as most authors try to do justice to actual historical figures and end up boring the reader (well, me) near to tears. Mary Hooper does not do this. In addition to choosing a historical figure I’ve never heard of (Anne Green was a lowly maidservant falsely accused of infanticide and hanged in 1650 England, only to awaken on the dissection table just before doctors performed an early autopsy on her ‘corpse’), Hooper writes using much of the Elizabethan lexicon and grammatical structures, but in a way that doesn’t inhibit meaning to the casual reader. An enticing concept and heroine, well-paced and a real page-turner for such a short novel.
Bad: Ends quite abruptly.
- Carpe Demon by Julie Kenner (2012-02-26) - Book I of the Adventures of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom series
Good: An innovative take on the urban fantasy genre - what if a demon slayer, a tough, witty, ballsy, tried-and-true heroine template used in an abundance of UF fiction, were to settle down, start a family and then have to balance motherhood and fighting the forces of the supernatural? It’s definitely a concept I enjoyed here; the witty prose helping immensely. There’s a lot to be said for a heroine who can think of those well-placed pithy remarks the rest of us imagine up three hours after any confrontation.
Bad: Gets a bit draggy in the middle third, but the start and especially the last third make up for this.
- Slave Girl: The Diary of Clotee, Virginia, USA 1859 by Patricia C. McKissack (2012-02-29) - Part of the My Story series
Good: One of the better-written additions to this series. Since the series is written by different authors, it’s a real hit-or-miss job most of the time. Thankfully this book is treated with the sensitively and respect the subject and topic deserve, without descending into maudlin melodrama or lecturing mode.
Bad: In the first few ‘diary’ entries McKissack sounds like she’s trying to write like Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple for a YA audience. Thankfully this clears up when she gets into her stride and allows Clotee to develop her own character voice.
- Raven’s Gate by Anthony Horowitz (2012-03-01) - Book I in the Power of Five series
Good: Um … the cover was pretty?
Bad: Hands down the worst book I have read this year. This may change later, but you’d have to come up with a real stinker to beat this thing. The main character was whiny and annoying; his only friend was patronising and annoying; the villains were histrionic, annoying caricatures; the ‘moody atmosphere’ Horowitz was aiming for throughout quickly became tedious and annoying; and the plot was convoluted, badly explained, ill-paced and (you guessed it) ANNOYING! I should have realised something was askew when the villains are about to bloodily sacrifice the 'hero' and I was egging them on. Only sheer bloody-mindedness, Horowitz’s reputation and a vain hope that things would eventually pick up and become palatable kept me slogging through this dross. And it’s the first part of a trilogy? Three books to AVOID, I think!
- Someone Like Me by Susan Mallory (2012-03-06) - Book I in the Los Lobos series
Good: I went back to an author I know I like after Raven’s Gate. Susan Mallory’s gentle prose and likeable characters may not be everyone’s preference, but they provided a nice buffer to help me forget what I’d read before it.
Bad: As I said, anyone not interested in gentle romantic comedies should look elsewhere.
- Cold Case by Faye Kellerman (2012-03-07) - Book XVII in the Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus series
Good: My first exposure to Kellerman’s fiction and I was pleasantly surprised. To be fair, I didn’t know this was part of a series when I first picked it up, but for the most part my understanding of the plot wasn’t inhibited. Competent and relatively engaging police procedural crime fiction.
Bad: A slow-burner with an even slower start. The characterisation was a bit of an issue at first too - I had a hard time keeping track of the cast for the first few chapters, although that might have been because this is Book 17 in an ongoing series.
- Halfway to the Grave by Jeaniene Frost (2012-03-12) - Book I in the Night Huntress series
Good: I guess I just couldn’t keep away from those darn vampires for long. Thankfully, scratching that urban fantasy itch with this novel was one of the best (reading) decisions I’ve ever made. The characters were layered and complex, the plot just intricate enough to keep my interest without losing me, the mythology behind this interpretation of vampires is engaging and the snark? Oh, the snark!
Bad: Ends on a feckin’ good cliff-hanger and I can’t find the second book at any of my local libraries!
- The Medici Curse by Matt Chamings (2012-03-13)
Good: For the first chunk of this book I didn’t think I was going to like it. I know next to nothing about Italian history, so a plot that splits itself between Florence in 2005 and the Florence during the Renaissance didn’t seem like such good reading decision when I first realised how out of my depth, historically, I was. However, (lack of) knowledge about Italian culture is no problem with this novel. It’s actually more of a psychological magical mystery mixed with a tragic romance in the same vein as Romeo and Juliet, albeit with more über-cute Leonardo Da Vinci than Shakespeare could have gotten away with. Seriously, Leonardo is a supporting character in the Renaissance narrative and he’s the best thing in it. Worth reading just for him alone!
Bad: Slow to start and you do want to bang some sense into the 2005 cast at times.
- City of Bones by Michael Connolly (2012-03-15) - Book VIII in the Harry Bosch series
Good: I started reading Connolly about a year ago and haven’t really dipped back into his prose since then. He’s like a blend of Linda Fairstein and Faye Kellerman’s police procedurals with Michael Koryta and Harlan Coben’s wittiness. If any of those names rang true for you, try this one. Previous knowledge of Bosch or his universe not required.
Bad: Pretty much a template for the genre: what you see is what you get, no more and no less.
- Switched by Amanda Hocking (2012-03-17) - Book I in the Trylle Trilogy
Good: An engaging prologue and a thrilling ending with some bright spots in between and the potential for lots of lovely character and plot development in the other two parts of the trilogy. Wendy’s insistence that she is human in the face of her mother’s murderous) attempts to prove otherwise is particularly heart-breaking when she joins the world of the Trylle (politically correct word for ‘troll’ favoured by its denizens) and has to fit into the alien, parasitical life there. This is what YA fantasy fiction should be!
Bad: The middle section feels a bit flabby at times. This was mainly to introduce some key members of the secondary cast and their attitudes towards humans, but there were times scenes were added in that felt a bit pointless. Hopefully this will be disproved in Books 2 and 3.
- Not My Daughter by Barbara Delinsky (2012-03-23)
Good: If you like ANYTHING by Jodi Picoult, you will already know what type of book this is. Pregnancy pacts aren’t something I’d ever heard of before, especially between teenagers. Delinsky’s prose suits the subject matter well: not too maudlin, just the right amount of sensitive and the preaching is kept severely in check. It even started to make me question my own views on teenage pregnancy, and any book that can change or at least challenge your opinions on something is one worth reading.
Bad: Susan, one of the mothers, comes across as a little too perfect at times, but this is a minor gripe.
- Insatiable by Meg Cabot (2012-03-24) - Book I in the Insatiable series
Good: Apparently vampire fiction gravitates to me even when I don’t intend it to, as I read this one without having looked at the dust jacket, going purely on the author name alone. Thankfully Cabot was just as enjoyable as ever, with a vast array of character that never fail to engage your interest - even if it is because sometimes you want to pop them in the head for being so dense and prideful.
Bad: I have … issues with Cabot’s sentence structures. This probably wouldn’t bother many people, but her overabundance of sentence fragments … GAH! SO ANNOYING!
- Velvet by Mary Hooper (2012-03-29)
Good: Mary Hooper carries on her wonderful grasp of mixing an interesting plot with an original historical premise here. Velvet’s naïveté can be a little grating, but it suits her character given the time period and what her life would have been like as a lower-class girl in Victorian England. I also learned a lot about mediums and what they got up to back then!
Bad: Velvet herself, I’m afraid. It’s wrong to judge her by modern standards of female protagonists, but she isn’t half a wet blanket at times.