Book Review: Shiver, Maggie Stiefvater.

Title: Shiver.
Author: Maggie Stiefvater.
Page Count/Book Type: Paperback. 434.

When a local boy is killed by wolves Grace’s small town becomes a place of fear and suspicioun. But Grace can’t help being fascinated by the pack, and by one yellow-eyed wolf in particular. There’s something about him — something almost human. 

Then she meets the yellow-eyed boy whose familiarity takes her breath away.

In all honesty the only reason I picked up this book was because of the review I  watched on youtube by one of my favourite booktubers. Normally I wouldn’t read something like this because — let’s face it — the blurb reads a little Twilight-like. To me that measures the impact of that horrendous series, I feel forever scarred by following Bella Swan’s exploits (or lack of exploits thanks to her almost purely reactionary nature) and I can’t help but look at other YA fiction with a sideways slant as I imagine co-dependant, poisonous relationships at every page turn. This book however? Completely laid my fears to rest. Stiefvater treats the relationship of the protagonists with honesty and heart and I grew to really like Grace’s pragmatism throughout the narrative; she’s practical, she knows her limitations and she does her best in any given situation. I just plain like Grace, she’s the type of person I could imagine myself being friends with back when I was a teenager.

Without giving too much away about the book, because I would recommend it in a heartbeat for a fast, easy summer read, there is a great new spin put on werewolves. The wolves in this series aren’t the size of horses with baseball sized tears (oh, S. Meyer, why?) but they are instead a pack of normal sized, normally behaved — for the most part — wolves. They don’t change because of the pull of the moon and they can be killed any number of ways including, but not exclusively, by silver bullets. I wish I could say more but I went into the series unspoiled and I want the same for anyone else thinking of picking these books up.

Instead of the plot I’ll use the general writing skill of the author as a selling point: Stiefvater is a good, sol;id writer. Her language is diverse enough that it stuck out but not so much so that it’s out of place, she has a good sense of rhythm and pacing and tension. I enjoyed her portrayals of the different characters, vastly different in some cases, from Grace’s flighty, artistic mother to Isabel Culpeper, cold, hard, intense. This, to me, is a great piece of YA literature; a female, teenaged protagonist who takes action, who is thoughtful but not narcissistic, supporting characters who have their own stories instead of being their to prop up the central cast. In short, the first novel of this series was a fun read, check it out.

Book Review: Freaks, Tess Gerritsen.

Title: Freaks.
Author: Tess Gerritsen.
Page Count/Book Type: Kindle. 20-30 pages?

In this free Rizzoli & Isles short story from New York Times bestselling author Tess Gerritsen, author of The Silent Girl, a bizarre death comes with a supernatural twist. Homicide cop Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles have seen their fair share of mortal crimes, but the death of Kimberly Rayner may qualify as inhuman in more ways than one. When corpse of the emaciated seventeen-year-old girl is discovered next to an empty coffin in an abandoned church, mysterious bruises around the throat suggest foul play. Caught fleeing the scene is the victim’s closest friend, Lucas Henry, an equally skeletal, pale teenager who claims he’s guilty only of having a taste for blood-a craving he shared with Kimberly. But the victim’s distraught father doesn’t believe in vampires, only vengeance. And now, another life may be at risk unless Rizzoli and Isles can uncover the astonishing truth.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I am fairly biased when it comes to Tess Gerritsen. One of my favourite authors, I know without much shadow of doubt that I will enjoy one of her Rizzoli & Isles books and read it quickly and with fervour. With the exception of a couple that fell a little flatter on me than others, her stories captivate me easily and the twists almost always blind-side me.  That is in large part due to Rizzoli and Isles themselves and for me that’s what I enjoyed about this short story. I know it’s a bit of a campy departure from her usual fair, there’s no chilling human killer who gets under your skin as you read, no disturbing take on human nature or the psyche of a killer, there’s an element of supernatural in that the cops on the case get swept up in the symbology of the scene they’re working and the strange counter culture of human-vampirism that Gerritsen touches on but Rizzoli and Isles remain strong.

Here you get their personal and working relationship boiled down to its essentials for new readers; Jane and Maura trade a few witticisms, a few side ways looks at the weirdness of the case (and trust me that have had some weird cases before) and they even share some Chinese food together while mulling over the case, much to Jane’s disgust (really, Maura, discussing body parts over dinner? Gross).  Barry Frost makes a cameo, as usual shouting after Jane when she tears off after a perp, and it’s these things that I know and love about the characters, their behaviours, that made this an entertaining read for me. Perhaps not worth it if you don’t know the series, but a great little morsel to tide us over until this Autumn while we, the fans, wait for the next full length novel.

I haven’t seen the TNT show based on the series and I’m not much interested in it, honestly, but  whether or not this is meant as a fun little introduction for watchers of that show into the world of the books or not, I enjoyed it, I read it in bed, and I’m glad I did.

Book Review: Touch of Power, Maria V. Snyder.

Title: Touch of Power.
Author: Maria V. Snyder.
Page Count/Book Type: Paperback, 390 pages.

Avry’s power to heal the sick should earn her respect in the plague-torn land of Kazan. Instead she is feared. Her kind are blamed for the horrifying disease that has taken hold of her nation. 

When Avry uses her forbidden magic to save a dying child she faces the guillotine. Until a dark, mysterious man rescues her from her prison cell. His people need Avry’s magic to save their dying prince. The very prince who first unleashed the plague on Kazan.

Saving the prince is certain to kill Avry — yet she already faces a violent death. Now she must choose — use her healing touch to show the ultimate mercy or die a martyr to a lost cause.

Prefacing this with a warning that I will be discussing the ending of this novel, so if you want to remain spoiler free and read it for yourself (please do!) I would stop reading… now.

I like this novel fine. Like most of the reviews I have read of Snyder’s other works I would still consider Poison Study to be her most accomplished novel and even then it’s not without problems. This book is a quick, easy read, the story is uncomplicated (though the prose has a tendency to get confusing at times) and the characters are… fine. That’s my problem with it ultimately. It’s just fine. There is a lot of room for depth in the world that Snyder has created in this freshman book of what I assume will be another trilogy, and she even achieved some success in making the magic of this world different from that of the Study and Glass series which I imagine took a lot of work. I much prefer the basis of this magic, there’s no “blanket” of magic covering the world that magicians pull their power from, no “flame outs” which I always found something of a contrived way of setting limitations and implying added danger. However, I have to say, I didn’t really warm to these eleven different types of magician, they seemed random and childish in a way. There’s healing, life, death, moon, forest, rock… I can’t remember them all but to be honest the only ones we really get much of a look into are healing and forest magic with a cursory glance given to the life and death magics.

My main problem with this book was that I knew Avry wasn’t going to die healing the prince like the back of the book suggests. I knew that through some magical mcguffin she would survive and (SPOILERS) she does. This is exactly what happens. There’s a lot of nonsense with the Peace and Death Lilys and that is probably the cheesiest plot of the book so I wasn’t that surprised when it played a massive role in the conclusion of the story.

Now I probably seem uncharitable here; I knew what I was getting into when I picked up this book, I know Snyder’s style by now, but I can’t help feeling that I’m reading her books in the hope that they’ll surprise me or that her writing will get better because I do like them but there’s not really enough depth for me to fall in love with them. There’s not enough depth of character or world, there’s not a deep enough explanation of… well anything really. Snyder writes humour fairly well, and as usual I did find myself enjoying the supporting characters for their witty one-liners but is that enough to carry a book? No, not in my opinion. From reading the blurb I knew who the love interest would be, and while I frequently say I would be disappointed in some ways if books like this didn’t follow through on the romance subplots just once I would like something to happen to upset the formula.

For me that’s what Snyder’s books are becoming: formulaic.

These are not hardcore fantasy books, nor do I think they are meant to be, but I can’t help feeling that she can do better, that she could write better, she could certainly stand to learn how to use punctuation correctly (something I was focusing on a lot more than the actual plot of the story quite frequently) but that’s another problem for another post entirely.

To sum up I give this book something like a ‘meh’ out of ‘sigh’. It’s a few hundred pages of retread, it seems, but if you like light fantasy and you don’t like fearing for your favourite characters at every page turn then this is a book for you.

Goodreads Challenge 2012.

Last year I ambitiously decided that I would try to read fifty books in 2011. By the 31st of December I had managed to read just under half of that with twenty-one. This was mainly due to the fact that I started a new job but National Novel Writing Month impacted that too; I didn’t like to read while I was writing lest my prose be influenced too heavily by the style of the book and author I was reading. These are things I didn’t plan ahead for but this year will be different!

Onwards with 2012! Thirty books this time, and I’m making my start with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. A book I have been desperate to read for months.

Good luck if you’re attempting the Goodreads challenge yourself and if you’re not? Why not give it a shot! You might stumble on some gems this year that you wouldn’t otherwise!

Book Review: The Forest of Hands and Teeth, Carrie Ryan.

Title: The Forest of Hands and Teeth.
Author: Carrie Ryan.
Page Count/Book Type: Hardcover, 320 pages.

In Mary’s world there are simple truths. The Sisterhood always knows best. The Guardians will protect and serve. The Unconsecrated will never relent. And you must always mind the fence that surrounds the village; the fence that protects the village from the Forest of Hands and Teeth. But, slowly, Mary’s truths are failing her. She’s learning things she never wanted to know about the Sisterhood and its secrets, and the Guardians and their power and about the Unconsecrated and their relentlessness. When the fence is breached and her world is thrown into chaos, she must choose between her village and her future — between the one she loves and the one who loves her.

And she must face the truth about the Forest of Hands and Teeth. Could there be life outside a world surrounded by so much death?

(How many comma-splices are there in this blurb? IT’S LIKE A GAME).

It shouldn’t take a lot to keep my interest up when a book has zombies in it; I love me some zombies. I really loved this book to start off with too, unfortunately about a hundred pages from the end my enjoyment took a dramatic dive off a cliff. It starts out well written and thought provoking (in as much as thinking about the zombie apocalypse and I think about that more than is probably normal anyway), I liked the setting, I liked the style and I was interested to see where the story was going and what the significance of the fences and paths was. Mary was the undoing of this novel for me, her selfish behaviour and her inability to to satisfied with anything she had (even when it was something she had supposedly been desiring passionately for weeks if not months) reached the point where I could find nothing redeeming about her and the excuse of her being a teenager wore completely thin. For me there needs to be some growth of character in these types of novels, the protagonist should discover something about themselves as they discover the world around them or through their interactions with the characters around them, but Mary stagnates and it truly hits home that she has not changed or grown a single bit about two-hundred and fifty pages in.

From then on I just wanted to finish the book and find out what happened and sadly I was disappointed again. The end is vague and boring, the novels goes out with a whimper rather than a scream and in a zombie book? You expect a scream. It was the right place to end the novel in my opinion but not at all the right way. It was handled lazily. The moment where I ought to have been feeling a rush of relief and hopefulness for Mary was overshadowed by the fact that she had sold everyone up the river to get to that point. All I could think about was what an awful person she had become, how the journey through the novel instead of building her up and making her into a strong, brave young woman had only reduced her to a selfish little girl and someone I would have gladly seen eaten by the Unconsecrated.

There were moments where I teared up while reading this, though. Most of the emotion came from secondary characters, namely Jed and his wife Beth, and Travis, one of Mary’s love interests. Jed was perhaps the most defined character for me, even Travis’ characteristics were wishy-washy for most of the novel and now that I think about it I could not tell you much about anyone’s appearance; Cass has blonde hair, Mary brown and Travis has green eyes. That’s all I’ve got. The depth was missing for the characters for me and I wouldn’t have minded that so much if the story had propelled itself in a different direction, a better direction. I would have been able to enjoy the ride but all I can think about having finished the novel is how much I dislike Mary and how much I wish the other characters had been given more time to shine.

Notice that I mentioned love interests, plural. That’s right, we’re entering Twilight territory here, folks. I would usually never be so cruel as to compare a novel to Twilight and I don’t draw these parallels lightly. Marys is, in many ways, like Bella Swan; she is self-serving and unable to think of other people’s emotions most of the time let alone place them before her own. However because this book is infinitely better written I was willing to forgive those traits early on; she’s a teenager after all, of course she’s a bit selfish. It’s the lack of growth that turns her into Bella Swan 2.0 for me, she doesn’t learn from her mistakes and she never ever takes the high road, placing the feelings and safety of her brother and the man she loves above her own. Then we have the fact that two men fall in love with her. That’s fine, I don’t mind a good love triangle but I do place my emphasis on the good part. Much like Jacob/Bella/Edward I cannot fathom why it is these boys fall for Mary. In the end they both pay for it in their own ways which I will admit is an improvement on the way things turn out for Jacob and Edward (full body shudder as I recall Breaking Dawn).

It would take me too long to list all the unfinished plot-lines, too. There are many, many things that Ryan never fully explains and that definitely becomes frustrating. What I think she was trying to do was hint at the answers and let the reader take the final jump but she’s much too vague about it and while I could take a stab at a guess and probably be right, I don’t think there are quite enough nudges in the right direction to make it comfortable to do so. This is a very unfortunate thing, as I think had she followed through on these things the story would have been a lot more rich and full.

All that said I would be tempted to pick up the second novel in the series: The Dead-Tossed Waves. Partly because it has a cool name and partly because I would love for Ryan to redeem the ending of the first novel with a killer encore. Of course I have a habit of inflicting terrible books on myself out of stubbornness, so we’ll see how that goes.

Book Review: The Summoning, Kelley Armstrong.

Title: The Summoning.
Author: Kelley Armstrong.
Page Count/Book Type: Hardcover, 390 pages.

After years of frequent moves following her mother’s death, Chloe Saunders’s life is finally settling down. She is attending art school, pursuing her dreams of becoming a director, making friends, meeting boys. Her biggest concern is that she’s not developing as fast as her friends are. But when puberty does hit, it brings more than hormone surges. Chloe starts seeing ghosts–everywhere, demanding her attention. After she suffers a breakdown, her devoted aunt Lauren gets her into a highly recommended group home.

At first, Lyle House seems a pretty okay place, except for Chloe’s small problem of fearing she might be facing a lifetime of mental illness. But as she gradually gets to know the other kids at the home–charming Simon and his ominous, unsmiling brother Derek, obnoxious Tori, and Rae, who has a “thing” for fire–Chloe begins to realize that there is something that binds them all together, and it isn’t your usual “problem kid” behaviour. And together they discover that Lyle House is not your usual group home either…

I don’t actually read YA fiction usually but since a good friend of mine is going through a part of her library course where she has to read them I decided to join in to see what’s out there. This, of course, precludes the fact that I have read the Twilight series, that was out of a mix of spite and curiosity and with the knowledge that I was torturing myself by reading something terrible, not out of an interest in YA fiction. This book is the opposite end of the scale to those atrocious books.

Obviously it’s not an instant classic of anything but I genuinely enjoyed this book; it was quick to read, it more or less got straight to the point, and having read the adult Otherworld books I knew what was going on before the protagonist. The fact that her YA novels take place in the same universe as the main series is really interesting to me; I was continuously thinking “Aw, kids! I know who can help you with this stuff.” There are two more books and I sincerely hope there will be cameos from the adult characters at some point in them, but I will have to read them to find out and judging by how much I enjoyed this book I think it’ll be worth it.

If I had to criticise one thing it would be the ending which was incredibly abrupt and such a cliffhanger I was practically in conniptions wanting to know what would happen next. That is probably the point, however. Hats off to you, Kelley Armstrong.

Book Review: Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Lynne Truss.

Title: Eats, Shoot & Leaves.
Author: Lynne Truss.

Page Count/Book Type: Paperback, 228 pages.

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

“Why?” asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

“I’m a panda,” he says, at the door. “Look it up.”

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

“Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”

So punctuation really does matter, even if it is only occasionally a matter of life and death.

This book you guys. This book. It was like finding a soul mate or something, everything in it (more or less, but let’s stick with the more) spoke to me so much. I never really thought of myself as what Truss terms a “stickler” before but having read this and realised that all these things really do annoy me; when I see signs with little to no punctuation, or terrible grammar (Customer Toilet, anyone? WHAT DOES THIS EVEN MEAN?), I now know that there is a term for my obsessive compulsive need to add semi-colons and apostrophes. I always knew these things bothered me but apparently now I have a bible to refer to and the knowledge that there are people out there just like me; we’re not crazy, just picky! I know people eye-roll about punctuation an awful lot, they say that it doesn’t really matter and wonder why people like me get all hair tear-y about possessive apostrophes and the like, but I really do think it’s important; as Lynne Truss points out, punctuation acts as road signs for the reader of a text. Punctuation does half the work in a paragraph, it tell the reader when to pause for a beat and when to stop completely, it can provide or add impact to words, it’s one of the most important tool in a writer’s kit, and only a madman doesn’t use all the tools of the trade.

It has certainly made me aware of how often I accidentally comma-splice my way around. Sadly I’m in the habit of placing a comma in a sentence when I pause to think! Honestly everyone should read this book, it’s just fantastic and I cannot sing its praises enough. Long live punctuation.