I'm in ur library, readin ur wordz
Reviews!
The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness
Um... Wow. This book is intense. And I mean INJECTING A COFFEE AND AMPHETAMINE COCKTAIL INTO YOUR EYEBALL intense.
It's pretty violent, it's pretty gory, it's very fast paced and fairly twisty, but the real intensity comes from the incredible rawness with which the lead character experiences all this stuff.
Scott Westerfeld once said that the reason he wrote YA was because that was the age of firsts: Your first kiss, your first meaningful lie, the first time you betray a friend. This is definitely the case with "Knife". The voice of Todd Hewitt ( our protag) makes you feel every moment of hope and terror like its the first time, like winter air against an open cut.
Also, the dog. I loved the dog. Manchee the dog almost made me a dog person, (and I have two cats slinking away in disgust while I write this.)
I have a couple of gripes, there are moments where one of the villains comes perilously close to comical in the frequency with which he reappears, and there is a little of the tedious emotional self-flagellation which seems obligatory for YA protags right now. But all in all it was my fave YA book since The Mortal Engines.
Read. It.
Catching Fire By Suzanne Collins.
I enjoyed this. I really did. No really. Just... not as much as I was hoping to.
I loved the first book in this monumentally successful trilogy. The Hunger Games did some interesting stuff I hadn't seen before, and a lot of stuff I had seen before very well indeed. The individual scenes in Catching Fire are no less well crafted, but structurally... it reads like her publisher kicked down her door and made off cackling with the first draft in order to meet a deadline.
It contains the beginning of a love triangle (fairly standard YA fare now), which is handled sensitively, but not especially insightfully. It has a lot of action, including some scenes (like the Jabberjays) which were truly terrifying, but all the action is jammed tighter than cannon wadding into the back end of the book, which means that Catching fire goes from 0-60 in about 200 pages and from 60-0 in about 2. Pacing, they tell me, is important in action-thrillers.
There are *many* scenes of Katniss beating up on herself for failing this character, or being more selfish than that one. However, cruel and mean spirited man that I am, I just didn't care. Unlike the first book, the writing didn't bring me close enough to her dilemmas, and they felt generic and thin as a result.
The real problem though, is that while Catching Fire does develop the story from the first book, almost *none* of this development happens on page. Katniss is a foil, and occasionally a dupe, and as a result doesn't know what's going on. As this is a 1st person story, that means *we* can't know what's going on. This results in a final chapter exposition which is one of the most unembarrassed and yet blatant plot info-dumps I've read. Worse it was a reveal that made me think "dude, I want to read *that* book," rather than the one I *had* just read, which, as a friend of mine pointed out, is mostly just a re-run of The Hunger Games with a train journey bolted onto the front.
I haven't rushed to pick up mockingjay, although I probably will read it at some point.
The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness
Um... Wow. This book is intense. And I mean INJECTING A COFFEE AND AMPHETAMINE COCKTAIL INTO YOUR EYEBALL intense.
It's pretty violent, it's pretty gory, it's very fast paced and fairly twisty, but the real intensity comes from the incredible rawness with which the lead character experiences all this stuff.
Scott Westerfeld once said that the reason he wrote YA was because that was the age of firsts: Your first kiss, your first meaningful lie, the first time you betray a friend. This is definitely the case with "Knife". The voice of Todd Hewitt ( our protag) makes you feel every moment of hope and terror like its the first time, like winter air against an open cut.
Also, the dog. I loved the dog. Manchee the dog almost made me a dog person, (and I have two cats slinking away in disgust while I write this.)
I have a couple of gripes, there are moments where one of the villains comes perilously close to comical in the frequency with which he reappears, and there is a little of the tedious emotional self-flagellation which seems obligatory for YA protags right now. But all in all it was my fave YA book since The Mortal Engines.
Read. It.
Catching Fire By Suzanne Collins.
I enjoyed this. I really did. No really. Just... not as much as I was hoping to.
I loved the first book in this monumentally successful trilogy. The Hunger Games did some interesting stuff I hadn't seen before, and a lot of stuff I had seen before very well indeed. The individual scenes in Catching Fire are no less well crafted, but structurally... it reads like her publisher kicked down her door and made off cackling with the first draft in order to meet a deadline.
It contains the beginning of a love triangle (fairly standard YA fare now), which is handled sensitively, but not especially insightfully. It has a lot of action, including some scenes (like the Jabberjays) which were truly terrifying, but all the action is jammed tighter than cannon wadding into the back end of the book, which means that Catching fire goes from 0-60 in about 200 pages and from 60-0 in about 2. Pacing, they tell me, is important in action-thrillers.
There are *many* scenes of Katniss beating up on herself for failing this character, or being more selfish than that one. However, cruel and mean spirited man that I am, I just didn't care. Unlike the first book, the writing didn't bring me close enough to her dilemmas, and they felt generic and thin as a result.
The real problem though, is that while Catching Fire does develop the story from the first book, almost *none* of this development happens on page. Katniss is a foil, and occasionally a dupe, and as a result doesn't know what's going on. As this is a 1st person story, that means *we* can't know what's going on. This results in a final chapter exposition which is one of the most unembarrassed and yet blatant plot info-dumps I've read. Worse it was a reveal that made me think "dude, I want to read *that* book," rather than the one I *had* just read, which, as a friend of mine pointed out, is mostly just a re-run of The Hunger Games with a train journey bolted onto the front.
I haven't rushed to pick up mockingjay, although I probably will read it at some point.