book review – Page 22 – 29chapters.com

Review: We Are Okay

Review for "We Are Okay" by Nina LaCour (2017)

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Beautifully written book, but man oh man…this is so, so boring.

‘We Are Okay’ is the story of Marin, a girl from California with no immediate family, so she decides to spends her winter break alone in the dorm after everyone has gone home. Marin is visited over the break by a friend from her hometown, Mabel (all of this occurs before Chapter 3, btw). The rest of the book is flashbacks on her life back in California over the previous summer, uninteresting conversations with Mabel, and getting to the bottom of why she took off abruptly before the semester started and left Mabel hanging with a bunch of unanswered texts (yikes!).

Add to the mix tons of minutiae such as: two girls shopping for clay pots, eating chili, doing the dishes, wiping plates. So many details and not much of a story arc here. I would say screw that, this is a character study, but neither one was really all that interesting.

As I said before, the book is beautifully written. The only reason I didn’t nix it is because something in the writing compelled me to continue. Without giving too much of it away, it is clear that this is a YA book about grief and loss, though there’s not much stated here on the subject that we haven’t already heard before.

If you like ‘quiet’ reads, this is the book for you. I won’t be mad at you for liking it either.

Extra points for the cover, btw. So pretty

Review: The Troop

Review for "The Troop" by Nick Cutter (2014)
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I liked this book.

Started off a bit slow, with Scoutmaster Tim Riggs taking five boys into the wilderness for their annual camping trip on Falstaff Island, a remote outpost near Prince Edward Island. On their first night, a very hungry stranger enters their camp. He isn’t well. He is unknowingly infested with a horrifying efficient, genetically modified parasite, which eventually takes each character to the brink of their own survival.

Now I will admit that there were some parts of this book that I didn’t want to read so I skipped it (i.e., scenes of self mutilation, a particularly detailed account of the torture of a cat, etc). Otherwise I didn’t find this book as gory as some other online reviewers have. I guess it’s a matter of personal taste. Otherwise it’s a great novel, with echoes of some pretty classic works–Stand by Me, The Lord of the Flies–all throughout.

If you like old school, 1980’s era Stephen King-esque horror, then this book is for you.

Review: Harmless Like You

Review for "Harmless Like You" by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan (2017)
Rating: None (DNF)

I DNF’d this book, so there’s no star rating. I didn’t want to, but I just wasn’t feeling it.

This book is a like a cloudy day with no sun, just black clouds everywhere. Every time I picked it up it was the same thing, just leaving me more and more empty on the inside. The writing is good but the characters are stiff and wooden, the action was super slow to develop. I made it to page 200 before just putting it down for good.

‘Harmless Like You’ is the story of Yuki, a Japanese-American girl growing up in NYC in the late 1960s. Her parents move back to Japan around the age of 16 and leave her in the care of her friend, an amoral model by the name of Odile and her mother, Lillian. Lillian is physically abused by her boyfriend, Lou. Yuki begins starving herself, and eventually moves in with Lou, who also ends up abusing her. She quits school and longs to be an artist, yet she doesn’t pursue this dream. Yuki marries a friend, a boring dude who stifles her creativity. They have a son.

Cut to present day: the novel also follows the story of Jay, a douchebag of a guy who hates his wife. He also feels no paternal instinct toward the baby he has with her and eventually cheats on her. We later learn that Jay is Yuki’s son whom she abandoned many years before in pursuit of her artistic dreams.

Yuki’s chapters are in a detached third person, Jay’s in brief, first person narration. It doesn’t do anything for the unrelenting bleak tone of this novel, it’s the same all throughout.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with somber reads. I just think what killed this book for me is that I have to be in the mood for such reading and now was not such a time. I do recommend it, however, perhaps you will get something out of it and can explain it to me.

Review: City of Saints and Thieves

Review of "City of Saints and Thieves" by Natalie C. Anderson (2017)
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Tina is a Congolese refugee and a motherless child, as well as one of the few female members of the Goondas, a gang of street thieves in Kenya. She cares for her younger sister, Kiki, while she fantasizes about revenge on Mr. Greyhill, a wealthy business magnate and employer of Tina’s mother, whom she suspects had her murdered after learning of his shady business dealings. With the help of the Goondas, Tina breaks into the Greyhill’s estate and is discovered by their son, Michael. The two form a reluctant alliance and go deeper into the dark side of Kenyan society to discover who murdered Tina’s mother.

With all that said, this was supposed to be a good book. The writing is fine, the setting is well-researched, and the character is kick-ass, there’s no complaints there. I think where this book lost me is somewhere in the middle when it lost the feel of a true revenge thriller. There really is only one suspect, and we find out before the middle of the book is over that it isn’t him. Although we know Tina seeks revenge for her mother’s death, that plot turn is also settled fairly early on in the novel. That left this book kinda hanging by a thread and less about the mystery we were promised and more about a girls’ search for her past. Not bad, just not quite what I expected.

Three stars–no more, no less.

Review: Tricks

Review for "Tricks" by Ellen Hopkins (2009)
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

This is my second book by Ellen Hopkins. My first was “Crank,” her novel in verse about a girl hooked on crystal meth, based loosely on the life of her own daughter. Hopkins is quite a prolific YA writer, tackling many of the issues that people tend to avoid when writing for teenagers. She’s written about drug abuse, mental health issues, sexual abuse, eating disorders. I’m not so much a fan of her verse as I am her fearlessness, because I admit that I’m drawn to her books for much of the reason I imagine most people are, to see how certain issues are portrayed for a YA audience.

“Tricks” is no exception; it tells the story of five teenagers who find themselves for various reasons lost in the dangerous world of prostitution. Eden is the daughter of a conservative religious family who is sent away to a Bible camp; Seth is a farm boy who struggles with his sexuality and finds himself a Vegas sugar daddy; Whitney is a goody-goody who stumbles into the arms of a drug-dealing pimp; Ginger is from a broken home and her entrance into the sex trade mirrors her own mother’s, and Cody is a kid who sells himself to men to ease his gambling debts.

I would have preferred to read each character’s story straight through, much like a short story. Instead, Hopkins focuses on one character for while, then abruptly switches to another. The constant starting and stopping of the narrative made it hard to get to know each character and made the book as a whole hard to follow. It never really had a good sense of cohesion and gave it the feel that it was five separate stories instead of one. There was some overlap of the characters, but it was fairly minor (one character mentioning another did occur, but only in passing).

This book is also really explicit in its sexual scenes. I won’t go into detail but if you’re unfamiliar with gay porn or girl-girl-guy threesomes I would leave this book on the shelf. I’m in my 30’s and I felt uncomfortable reading it, not because I’m a prude, but for the sake of the audience it was written for. Personally I wouldn’t allow my teen son to read this unless he was super-mature, which he isn’t. The details were a little too salacious for my taste and the story got lost in the process.

There is a second story in this series that picks up where the action of this story left off. I may read it eventually, but for right now I think I’m good with this.

Review: Saint Death

I just realized that this is my third NetGalley book that I’m about to write a less than flattering review about in the past few weeks. Ya’ll know how I feel about my reviews though. Anyway, on with the show:

Review for "Saint Death" by Marcus Sedgwick (to be published in the U.S. on 25 April 2017)
Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

This was a really strange book. The tone is dark and so is the subject matter, particularly for a YA book. It explores the world of Mexican immigrants, as well as a dark, spiritual world of guns, gangsters, violence, gods, and money.

Arturo is a young man living in the border of the U.S./Mexico in a shack, working for scraps at a garage and hustling card games for quick cash. Enter Faustino, a childhood friend who Arturo hasn’t seen in years who urgently needs Arturo’s assistance to get his girlfriend and their child across the border to a smuggler, who is to facilitate their illegal entry to the U.S. Together the two pray to Santa Muerte (Saint Death), and make a plan to go after some dangerous men for the money they need. Of course not everything goes according to plan and they run afoul of some gangsters in the process, and of course, there are consequences to pay.

I didn’t really like this story. It’s all over the place with the immigration plot, the supernatural elements of Santa Muerte, the narco stuff, and a couple of other subplots that I could go on and on about. I understand that the author is going for a modern retelling of the Faustian legend (if you missed it, one of the main character’s names is literally Spanish for “Faust”), but Arturo and his friend were never characters that I completely understood or related to. The action was too slow in coming and when it did come, I actually found myself skipping pages. Interspersed throughout the story were also informational factoids about NAFTA and borders and U.S. corporations, all of which could have been edited out for clarity and none of which seemed to match the tone of the story.

Even though I didn’t like this one, I don’t think I would rule out this author’s work in the future.

[Note: A free digital copy of this book was provided by the publisher, Roaring Brook Press, and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.]

Review: Marlena

Review for "Marlena" by Julie Buntin (to be published on 4 April 2017)

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

After the bitter divorce of her parents, 15-year-old Catherine (nickamed “Cat”), her mother, and her older brother move to a trailer in a rural town in northern Michigan. It is there next door that Cat meets wild child Marlena, a beautiful, eccentric girl whose father is a meth cook. Cat quickly becomes caught up in Marlena’s life, and the two become the best of friends.

It’s apparent early on that this is a story told largely in flashbacks, with an adult Cat telling us the story of her past from her current state as a sad, functional drunk. We also learn within the first few lines of the book that it is within a year of Cat and Marlena’s first meeting that Marlena will be dead. I hate that the author gives us that critical detail on the back flap (it isn’t a spoiler), because the rest of the book becomes an interminable wait for the inevitable to happen. Even though the book is well written, there’s no suspense, there’s no surprises, and ultimately there’s no fun here. It’s a pretty depressing book and I found it unsatisfying.

P.S. – If you’re really interested in a recently written book on complex, destructive teen girl friendships I’d recommend “Girls on Fire” by Robin Wasserman, and “The Girls” by Emma Cline. Both of these books are five stars.

[Note: A free digital copy of this book was provided by the publisher, Henry Holt, and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.]

Review: History of Wolves

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Review for "History of Wolves" by Emily Fridlund (2017)

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Didn’t like this book, which is odd because it has really high ratings on Goodreads. Did we read the same book? Or am I just being a Negative Nancy again? Hmm…

Here we have a character with three names (Linda, Mattie, Madeline) depending on what part of the story you’re reading. She’s a 14-year-old girl in a rural Minnesota town with a lot of deep thoughts, none of which left an impression on me. She babysits for a very weird couple with a young son, and a series of events occur between her and this couple that left me wondering if her relationship with the Gardners was really real at all or just some symbolism that I was supposed to be connecting to the whole ‘wolf’ theme of the book. Either way, the tone here is detached, and Linda/Mattie/Madeline is far too cerebral and disengaging for me to get into.

There is a subplot in this story involving a teacher at Linda/Mattie/Madeline’s school who’s accused of having sex with a student. This plot has absolutely NOTHING to do with the rest of the book. As interesting as this story is, it never goes anywhere or connects to the main story. Why was it here? Maybe I missed something?

Oh yeah, the ending is weird too. I’ve watched a lot of David Lynch movies, so maybe it was supposed to mean something too. I don’t know.

(*sigh*)

[Note: A free digital copy of this book was provided by the publisher, Grove Atlantic, and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.]

Review: Mischling

Review for "Mischling" by Affinity Konar (2016)

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

First off, let me say that I’ve read a lot of Holocaust stories. This particular one sounded as if it would venture into a different territory, so I placed it on my reading list as soon as it came out. Dr. Mengele, the infamous Auschwitz “Angel of Death” was known for sending millions to the gas chambers, as well as his cruel, torturous ‘experiments’ on prisoners, identical twins, and multiples with no regard to the health or safety of his subjects. Mischling is the story of 13-year-old twin girls, Pearl and Stasha, who arrive at Auschwitz in 1944. Each twin narrates an alternating chapter, filling the reader in on the horrifying details of life inside of Mengele’s “zoo.”

I did not care for this book. The writing is not bad, but it failed to suit this story and make a real emotional impact here. Instead of a groundbreaking Holocaust story, what we get is a familiar and predictable story of this time in history that doesn’t really rise above the standard Auschwitz account. What I mean by that is that you don’t really learn anything new here other than what you already learned about the Holocaust in middle school: the separation of families, the gas chambers, heavy work and starvation, etc. Mengele’s experiments (the info I really wanted to know) through the experiences of the narrators are discussed, but the author relies heavily on metaphor to describe these events. While there’s nothing wrong with metaphor, the story got lost and it disengaged me from the novel and left me completely confused.

I regret finishing this book, as I would have DNF’d it a long time ago if it had not been for my curiosity about the end. I would have preferred a much simpler prose style here.

Review: The Last Policeman

Review for "The Last Policeman" by Ben H. Winters (2013)

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

The premise of this book is indeed an appealing one: solving a murder in a crumbling world that’s only months away from certain annihilation from an asteroid called Maia. Harry Palace is a rookie cop who encounters a insurance agent’s body hanging in a McDonald’s, quickly dismissed by his peers as another suicide, as there’s plenty of those to go around these days. Palace, however, suspects something more. He begins investigating the man’s death as a murder, and digs up far more than he bargained for.

Perhaps I expected more chaos, more action…I don’t know. What I got here was a depressing, uncompelling narrator and a ho-hum story. We understand that Palace is driven to do the right thing in a world that could care less, but I found his character unconvincing, unmovable, and just plain boring. The plot is also terribly slow, as there wasn’t enough meat in this story to keep me satisfied in waiting until the end. Then I get to the end and there’s the answer to the mystery and that’s just kinda…it. Blah.

I loved the setting of this story, which I why I won’t go lower than 3 stars here. I just wish the character here was meatier, more interesting. General curiosity draws me to the other two books in this series (this is the first in a trilogy and I’m a sucker for apocalyptic fiction) but right now I think I’ll chill on this one.