Unbreakable - Kami Garcia

Anyone who has been to university knows that there are two basic academic groups: the Science students and the Arts students.  There are of course some subjects that straddle this great divide such as Psychology, Geography etc but these are the main two.  Now I hope you will please indulge me if I be a little broad and sweeping.  

In general Science students like facts, numbers, theories, equations.  They like something tangible; something that they can follow so that they can add ‘x’ to ‘y’ and get ‘z’.  They like to ask questions and get definite answers, or at least some kind of an answer – preferably one that can be expressed in a few words.  

Arts students, myself included here, do not like this.  We don’t answer questions: we like to say things like “well to an extent that is true but really there are a number of factors...” We like to pooh-pooh so-called facts, saying lines like “facts get in the way of a good narrative.”  Now this is of course because the kinds of questions that we tackle are not the same: they are creations of man, not of nature.  You can come up with an equation to figure out how fast something falls or what time the Sun will rise in the morning, but you can’t create one to explain what makes Mozart’s music enchanting or JRR Tolkein’s works enthralling.  You can’t express art through numbers, be it music, painting, sculpture or literature, yet this has not stopped people from attempting to work out the formulas to the perfect book – the 5 easy steps to telling a best-selling story – and in my view, Kami Garcia has attempted to do just that.

I won a copy of Kami Garcia’s first solo book Unbreakable from a competition on Goodreads.  I entered the contest not really bothering to work out what it was about, just because I fancied a free book.  The cover of it made it look a little silly but it was free so who cares right?  The book is a YA supernatural story about a girl named Kennedy who was living the kind of life that 14 year old female protagonists of YA books always lead: alone, boyfriendless and angsty about it, bookish and devoted to her parents (or in her case parent).  Her life is suddenly torn apart when a demon, latched onto her cat like a plague flea on a rat, kills her mother and she is only saved by a pair of dashing twins who tell her that she was descended from a secret order of, in effect, demon hunters.  

So we have the stereotypical protagonist, in a stereotypical-ish plot and now we are going to hit new levels of lack-of-imagination: the twins.  They are both teenage boys but have different characters: one is level-headed and sweet but a little dull; the other is handsome, dashing and damaged.  Care to hazard a guess where the love interest of this story lies?  Oh these three are not alone.  We also have the bitchy, fightery girl who sees the protagonist as a liability, and the nerd, the technical support guy who is no threat to the protagonist and is merely there to provide cool things.  

The plot, other than a lot of angsting around, is about demon/ghost hunting, specifically about preventing a powerful demon from escaping into our world and it is up to our motley band of barely trained teenagers to do it.  Think Ghostbusters but 15 years old and with worse stuff.  And meaner demons.

I think you so far get at why I think this book isn’t great: it’s as formulaic in structure and characters as the speed of light.  Indeed the plot, up until the end at least, is so incredibly predictable that anyone in any sense familiar with YA literature could tell me the entire plot from a small number of clues.  The characters in many ways are caricatures, not over-blown in any sense but just perfect tropes.  I won’t spoil the plot for you, but frankly you could guess most of it from here.  The ending is actually quite good and rather salvages the overall plot into something rather decent, but really this book, while not riddled with faults, suffers from the very basic problem that it is entirely formulaic.  It is as if Kami Garcia had distilled every YA book that she had ever encountered into a mathematical formula, created an algorithm, inserted the names of each character trope that she wished to include, and pressed “Go”.

The book is not badly written, nor is it a terrible read: it is just bland as all hell.  You finish the book and feel very little from having completed it because you feel that you have already read it before.  It is incredibly lazy storytelling and in some ways makes me a little pissed off because I have no idea why this was published.  Books these days are churned out in their  tens of thousands every year and yet the industry is still struggling and it will continue to struggle if all they produce is mediocre, middle of the road, formulaic works such as this.  This books really is one of those times where I wish that it had been bad – if it had been bad then at least it would have been original.

4.5/10

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The Ballad of the Five Marys - Donald Smith

Sometimes when you’re an intern at a publishing house you get questions that you really don’t know how to answer.  These are questions like: “How are you finding your time here?”, “Would it be okay if I asked you to do...” and “Isn’t this cover that I designed fabulous?” which all have very nice and easy answers.  You say: “It’s great, I’m having an amazing time”, “Of course, nothing would please me more” and “It’s beautiful!” and to be honest most of the time you are being truthful because every person that I have worked with so far in this industry has been incredibly friendly and talented.  On occasion, however, the tricky questions come up., the most difficult of which is: “What do you think of this book?” Now this is more than a question of sucking up to the powers that be. You can’t of course be wholly negative, but a sycophantic response praising the book to the rafters is not always appropriate either. You’re trying to show off judgement, taste and maybe a bit of a discerning sense of where the market is.  This means that the normal response is to praise the book but offer reservations. 

Where am I going with all of this?  Well near the end of my first placement with Luath I was given Donald Smith’s The Ballad of the Five Marys to proof-read.  This is a historical-fiction novel set during the life of Mary I of Scotland (the inner historian in me hates calling her Mary Queen of Scots for boring reasons that I will not get into here).  I read through much of the book in one day and was asked how I was finding it.  I, truthfully (often a mistake in work and in love), said that I was really enjoying it and thought it could be, if marketed right, a big seller.  Apparently this was the correct answer (phew!) as the book was quite popular in the office.  However, on describing the novel to some of my friends I have found that people have been quite sceptical about it.  Therefore the purpose of this review really is going to be me attempting to persuade you that this book is, in fact, a really rather excellent historical novel set in a period saturated with a lot of very average works.

The main reason for why I like this book is the style.  Unlike other genres of fiction, I find that historical fiction tends to be a little stuck in its ways. Most books tend to be written in a fairly standard first-person style, focussing on one or two characters’ journey or in a narrative third-person style. This book is nothing like that at all.  It is set throughout most of the life of Mary Stewart, first crowned regnant-Queen of Scots from the time of her birth to her incarceration by Elizabeth I of England.  The story is told through a number of POV accounts, set through a combination of diary/diary-like accounts, personal correspondence and other similar methods.  The idea essentially is to get a widow on the minds of each individual.  The ‘Five Marys’ (four companions of Mary I along with the queen herself) have their own shared diary, form around half of this, the rest being various people from like Darnley and Bothwell.  The author has a strong didactic purpose (something that I will come back to later) and this means that he attempts to get as many different perspectives in as possible, but this does not distract from the story-telling – in fact I believe it enhances it greatly.  As a historian with an interest in the period I am perhaps not the best person to talk about with regard to how the characters come across, but in my view they are differentiated well without becoming generic and all bring their own distinctive flavours to the story.  Equally, one would expect a story that covers such a significant amount of time to rather flounder as time passes, but quite the contrary, I find it picks up pace as the story progresses.

This story’s main weakness, however, lies in its didactic purpose.  The author professes himself to be a big fan of Mary Stewart and intends for the novel to redress the balance of some professional historiography that, in Donald Smith’s view, unfairly maligns her.   For me this is a rather troubling stance to take.  It is true that modern historiography has often shown Mary to be a rather naive queen, whose poor choices in husband led Scotland to a very bloody period of civil strife that dogged not only her reign but also the minority of her son James.  Furthermore, there is a very valid argument that perhaps this line of enquiry can be overplayed; Mary ruled at a very difficult time thanks to the emerging power of England and the turmoil of the Reformation.  Having said all of that, however, for a fictional account to be attempting to pass itself off as some sort of amateur history strikes me as being a little troubling.  It strikes me as being a bit like films such as BRaveheart that have very little grounding in actual history, but pass themselves off as fact.  Now this book has far more accuracy than Mel Gibson’s mauling of history, but it must always be remembered that this is fiction.  Leave history to the pros!  The worst example of this is the final page which lists a group of ‘Discussion Questions’ which seems to suggest that Smith intends for this book to be taught to children in school as History.  I really hope that is not the case as it would mark a remarkable dilution of the subject for a fiction book to be passed off as fact!

Despite this reservation, I would strongly recommend this book to fans of historical-fiction, if nothing else than because stylistically it is so different from anything I have read before in adult fiction.  Ignore the pretentions of historical scholarship and you will find a very pleasing read!

7/10

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Animal Lover - Raymond Friel

My reading choices in the last few weeks may seem a little eclectic, they certainly have seemed that way to me!  The reason for this mix of different book styles is that I am currently doing a lot of internships at various different publishing houses and a large part of most of these is reading.  A LOT of reading!  Some of what I have read has been good, some not so but that I suppose is the nature of the beast. 

The latest book that has crossed my path was a very unusual offering by a first-time author called Raymond Friel whose debut novel Animal Lover has recently been published by Luath Press.  This curious book was given to me on my first day at Luath to proof-read and I was informed by the boss that it was one of her favourites from this year.  Eager to impress her with my knowledge and to misguide her with spurious statements about by skill in the task set before me, I set about proofing this manuscript.  Animal Lover is a story about a lovable animal rights activist named Danny.  Danny’s life is a bit of a mess, but he does have his little gang of freedom fighters who seek to liberate animals from man’s oppression.  Sadly, an operation to free some dogs from a laboratory goes badly wrong and for complex reasons, the dogs have to be thrown off the roof.  This rather tears apart his group, especially a girl that has recently caught his eye who goes off to join some more hardcore, more terroristy groups.  Things don't really go much right for Danny from there-on-in

The book is written in a narrative style with a very unusual method of writing direct speech which, once you get your head around it, is perfectly understandable but I wish he wouldn’t do it - it seems rather pretentious and unnecessary to me to mess with grammatical rules for no real purpose.  The style is very informal and quite irreverent which fits the narrative well and allows for the absurdities of the plot to come through.  These absurdities make this novel a real hoot to read – I provided some great amusement for many of my colleagues as I occasionally burst out laughing at random points – and it is clear that Friel has a real aptitude for this kind of writing.  The characters are engaging and occasionally surprise you with little gems of conversation that bring the story alive and the book is short enough that the whole thing rollicks nicely.

Having said that, however, the length is this novel’s most significant problem (other than the stupid method of writing direct speech). Well, more specifically, it’s the ending that bothers me. The story builds up to a rather terrific climax, but it all ends rather too quickly. It’s not that there’s no closure, no pay-off as such for completing the book. It’s just that, considering the book has been building up to this big ending at ‘The Circus’, you’d have expected this to last more than just a few pages. It’s all rather frustrating really because it almost spoils the book. I have always said that the mark of a good writer is being able to get the reader/viewer to the end of the story and for them to care for the characters; the mark of a great writer is being able to bring together all the strands of the story and bring them to a pleasing conclusion.  Friel so so nearly does that, but he bottles it with an ending that had promise, but was just not nearly long enough. It’s almost like it was an exam essay and he found that, after spending his first hour and a half writing the first half of the book, he only had 30 minutes to write the rest.

Having said all of that, there is no doubt that this is a very fun read, something that I would recommend to anyone wanting to read something quite different and that will make them laugh.  There is definitely something Douglas Adams-y about Friel and that, in my book, is high praise indeed.

7/10

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A Pleasure and a Calling - Phil Hogan

There are many authors for whom I would move heaven and earth to meet.  If, for example, I heard that Jo Rowling, John Green or Bernard Cornwall were speaking at an event near me, wild horses could not keep me from rushing there like the deluded fanboy that I am.  For the great majority of other authors whose books I like, I’d also love to meet them, but I wouldn’t be super disappointed if I missed out.  For the most part when I meet an author I’m intrigued to find out their inspiration, to find out what motivated them to create the characters/setting/story and generally soak up their reflected awesome.  There are some authors, however, that I have no desire to meet.  This may be because their books are terrible, or that they themselves may be terrible people.  Some, however, I am reluctant to meet because, frankly, their books make me scared to meet them.  I worry about what goes through their minds, the imagination that allowed them to create scenes/characters/plots that just completely freaked me out.  This is not necessarily a comment on their writing or on the quality of their work.  It’s just that they creep me out.  There are very few authors in this select list of mine, mainly because I avoid horror stories.  Recently a new author has been added: Phil Hogan.

I have never read a book of his before and to be honest his is not the normal sort of book that I would pick up.  A Pleasure and a Calling came highly recommended from its publicist.  Elizabeth talked this book up as one of the best books that she’s ever read.  With an endorsement (albeit I guess a fairly biased one) I thought that I’d have to give it a try.  She did give me a warning before I started it though, and I shall pass this on to you before I begin this review.  Do not, under any circumstances, read this book if you are moving house.  Seriously.  Don’t  be a hero on this, it’s not worth it.

The first thing to say about this book is that this is not a horror book.  Indeed I would not really call it a scary book as such.  The word that I would use to characterise this book is ‘creepy’.  This book is really creepy.  Super creepy.  It is told in the first person through a guy called Mr Heming.  A beyond creepy guy.  He is owns an estate agency in a town in Middle England and charming and disarming, much like you’d expect a salesman to be.  He’ll find you the perfect house, or will sell your beloved place for a good price.  Great.  The problem is, he’ll keep the key.  He may follow you home.  He isn’t going to hurt you if you don’t notice him.  He’s not that kind of guy.  He is a stalker, he gets his kicks from immersing himself in your life.  This may manifest itself by him sitting in your house while you’re at work, or it may go that extra step further and involve him sleeping in your attic while you are still there...  Yeah I told you it was creepy.

What elevates the creep-level is the way the story is told.  The narrator tells everything in such a matter-of-fact manner.  He is aware that his behaviour is not normal, yet he sees nothing wrong with his actions.  He embraces his life choices, there is no guilt.  He is, for lack of a better word, a sociopath yet the image that he presents to the world is of an eminently trustworthy and likeable man.  He has relationships and is a successful businessman.  His past is a little sketchy – actually it’s a lot sketchy – but people in his town don’t know about that, and mostly he’s fairly good at covering for himself.  This carefully cultivated image that others cannot penetrate is another aspect of what makes this story so disturbing.  Mr Heming seems like any other salesman, like any estate agent that you could ever meet.  It makes me wonder if we changed the locks when we moved into our current house... Do our estate agents have keys?  Do the previous owners? Actually the previous owner passed away... what about her relatives?  This book really opens up a pandora’s box of paranoia that I never knew I had.

You may notice that so far this isn’t a hugely cogent review.  It’s full of short sentences and poorly expressed phrases that really don’t get across why I like this book so much.  Oh, I just realised I hadn’t told you that yet.  I love this book.  It is one of the best books that I have read this year.  The story is beautifully paced, building at first slowly then gathering pace rapidly.  The main character, a quasi-antihero, quasi-villain is a character who is strangely relatable and despite his completely disturbing behaviour I weirdly found myself rooting for him.  Then I stop.  Because that’s weird.  The other characters support the narrative well, but the story really puts Mr Heming centre stage and that is perfect, because he is a perfect storm of creepy.

I really hope that this review does not scare you off A Pleasure and a Calling.  Trust me when I say that this book is an excellent read. It is one of those stories that stays with you; that makes you see the world around you differently.  It packs a significant amount of punch into a relatively small number of pages with a pacing that will leave you gasping for breath by the end.  I would thoroughly recommend it to anyone who is settled in their home and not planning on... you know... meeting an estate agent for real any time soon.

8.5/10

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Dear Thing - Julie Cohen

Those of you who are avid readers of my blog (I imagine that number is precisely one, that one being myself) will know that the last book I read was Two Brothers by Ben Elton, a fairly dark novel which left me feeling a little low. Therefore for the next book for me to read on the commute I wanted something light. Something easy to read where I was fairly certain nobody was going to die.  I had a little peak at the book shelf in front of me at work and saw a rather happy and cheerfully yellow and green looking book called Dear Thing. It seemed chick-litty and its GoodReads score was fairly high so I thought it would be just the ticket. I deposited my manliness in a corner next to some raw steak and had a read.

This book, surprise surprise, is about a love triangle. First we have Ben who is the Husband. He’s a hardworking architect/surveyor/building-stuff guy who has wanted to be a father since forever. He is caring and sharing and generally a stand-up guy. The Wife, Claire, is a baby-crazed yet sadly infertile woman who seems to spend the entire book brooding and baking things. She is a music teacher at a local posh school and is mostly homely and mumsy (can you be mumsy if you aren’t a mum?) Finally we have the Friend/Rival. She is called Romily (stupid name) and has a young daughter called Posie (stupid name). She is best friends (and secretly in love) with Ben/the Husband and offers to be a surrogate for Claire. This goes about as well as it sounds really.  The Wife has trouble getting over the shame that she feels for not being able to give birth to the child that she so desperately wants. The Husband is torn between the feelings he has for his wife but also the birth-mother of his child. The Friend/Rival is equally torn between her conscience and her love for the Husband.  The Friend/Rival’s daughter adds a lot of humour and stress to the mix, especially when her father turns up!

I have railed before about how certain kinds of books (Young Adult for example) get automatically criticised or looked down upon because of their genre. People seem to think that just because you don’t need to take a breather every 10 pages or so while reading that that must mean the book is no good. I call it the Dan Brown Effect. A Chick Lit book generally has a fairly set and formulaic structure, which of course is part of the appeal. You pick it up knowing vaguely what to expect and read it without having to engage too many parts of your brain. This does not mean, of course, that they can’t be good. Bridget Jones Diary of course is a classic example of a Chick Lit book that crossed over into being a ‘good’ book, but generally these kinds of books are maligned as being vapid and silly; not something for ‘real booklovers’ to admit to reading; the sort of thing that you put on your guilty pleasure list. I hate those people. I hate their pretentious voices and their crass words. Something that is readable and fun can OF COURSE be good.

Dear Thing is perhaps a little too formulaic for my tastes.  The story pans out almost exactly how one would expect, which I guess is the point but at least an attempt at some sort of twist would have been niceThe author Julie Cohen is quite engaging but she suffers a little from what I call the Clancy Problem.  Like the late Tom Clancy, she has clearly done a heck of a lot of research into pregnancy, surrogacy and motherhood and therefore she wants the fruits of her labours to be out there for all to see.  This means that you often get rather needless sections about breast milk and the like which don’t really move the plot along or really add anything other than the author having a knowledge-gasm. 

Having said all of that, I did enjoy this book. It took a little while to get going, but the second half of the book was truly excellent. The characters began to come alive and the action really grabbed hold. The major sign of how much that happened was that I was about 70 or so pages from the end when the train I was on reached my local station. I was so engrossed that I couldn’t just put the book in my bag and walk home not knowing how it all panned out, so I read it as I walked. Not many books can make me do that, so Bravo Mrs Cohen, Bravo.

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Two Brothers - Ben Elton

“If nothing else works, then a total pig-headed unwillingness to look facts in the face will see us through.”

Ben Elton placed these words in the mouth of Stephen Fry’s General Melchett inBlackadder Goes Forth were used to mock the archaic generals of the First World War, men whose ignorance of the realities of modern warfare sent millions to die from behind their comfy desks.  Elton has published a number of books in the past from the satirical crime novel Popcorn to the darkly comedic High Society.  His newest offering Two Brothers tackles something far closer to his heart than anything he has hereto written: the Holocaust.  “Total pig-headed unwillingness to look facts in the face…”  Sounds tailor made for the Holocaust.  That quote is no longer so funny.

One thing that has marked out Elton’s works is his gallows humour; his ability to find laughs in any situation, no matter how dark or desperate.  Yet while poking satire at World War I generals was by no means uncontroversial, taking on a book about the Holocaust is quite another task.  Two Brothers follows the lives of a Jewish family in Inter-War Berlin as their lives convulse with movements of history quite beyond their ability to affect.  They live through the chaos of the German Revolution, the hyper-inflation of the Weimar Republic and the terror of the Nazis yet throughout the book focuses on the characters themselves and how these events shaped and affected their lives. 

Elton punctuates his work with false-dawns, little silver linings of hope for the characters in the grips of twentieth century Europe’s worst nightmare. These green shoots are however quickly trampled on, as of course we always knew they would.  The characters are relatable and engaging without being stereotypes which makes their trials all the more heartbreaking.  This is both a story of the horror of the life for Jews in Nazi Germany, but also the more universal story of two brothers who fall for the same girl and the friend who just wants to be noticed.

This book envelops you, it sucks you in and before you know it you look up and its dark outside and you have no idea where all the time went.  It is a truly remarkable achievement and I would thoroughly recommend it to anyone.

Fair warning, it will make you laugh but only through the tears.

8.5/10

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The Casual Vacancy - JK Rowling

So, Jo Rowling wrote another book. Let me give you this one quick warning. If you are expecting another wizarding epic - you will be disappointed. If you are expecting another heart-warming young-adult story - you will be disappointed. If you want a cracking good read - you’re in for a bit of a treat.

When you attempt to explain the premise behind this book, it is difficult not to make it sound a little dull:

Person A: “so what is this book about?”

Person B: “errr its a story about a bunch of people in a West Country village and about a Parish Council election.”

Person A: “Well that is a bit dull isn’t it??”

Person B: “But it has lots of interesting relationships between the people wanting to be on the council. Plus it has this girl who comes from this deprived background and…”

I think you get my point. To attempt to explain this story while attempting to not spoil it is tricky. Also, and this really does irritate me, a lot of reviewers seem to fail to be able to divorce this book away from the Harry Potter series, in particular the Guardian review. This book has NOTHING to do with Harry Potter. They share no references, no ideas, nothing. While it may be difficult, we must forget Jo’s other books and review this one in isolation.

Now I must own up to the fact that I am a huge Harry Potter fan, and I could spot her writing style a mile off. Yes this book involves fairly graphic descriptions of teenage sex, drug taking, rape, self-harm and all sorts of other things we’d rather prefer stay on the News BUT she has a writing style that shines through. She is still an incredibly readable author, and I don’t mean that as a criticism. I feel some people seem to put a premium on putting your point across in a very pretentious manner in order to seem more sophisticated. It is not necessary and I wish they’d stop. She also is incredibly gifted at weaving a world into our minds. Even though the world that she describes is our own and the setting fairly familiar to any of us who watch BBC 3, the way she manages to immerse the reader into the story is really quite magical. 

There are a great number of characters in this story, so many indeed that it takes you a fair amount of time to get your head around all of the names. They all belong to a series of different families, all of whom at some way link back to one man: Barry Fairbrother. He in many ways is the hero of the story. This is inconvenient because he dies on page 5. He was a champion of the upper-middle class village in which he lived taking care of the deprived town suburb that lay close-by. His acolytes and his enemies on the Parish Council then rush to compete to fill his empty seat: the Casual Vacancy. The race to replace him is full of elitism, snobbery and barely disguised racism and sexism but that is only part of this story. There are also teenagers involved. Some are nice but meek, some are confident and arrogant, some are extroverted but damaged. All are rebellious and tired of the machinations of their parents. These children are often severely misguided in their actions, but then again they are teenagers. They act like them, albeit in a slightly extreme form. Their actions really serve to act as a comparison with the similarly juvenile actions of their parents. In a way the story asks: Who are the real children, and who are the real adults in this story.

This cacophony of passive aggression and in many cases active aggression all builds up to a frenzied and powerful ending, and that is another place where I wish to praise the author. One thing that Jo Rowling is very good at is ending a story - in bringing multiple strands of a complex narrative together and creating a conclusion that is both powerful, sensical and satisfying. So often I find that authors and screenwriters spend all their time throwing the metaphorical chips up into the air and nothing like enough time arranging them once they fall.

This book is far from perfect however. I feel that in her attempts to disassociate herself from her young-adult author past, Rowling enters into some rather odd metaphors and thesaurus-swallowing which can interrupt the narrative a touch. It also can fall a little short when it is very clearly trying to make a political statement. Rowling herself is a big supporter of the Labour Party, and her concern for what she sees as rich elitism trampling over important social programs can sometimes be a bit of a naked reference to many Labour attacks on the current government in the UK. 

Having said all of that, I think that this is an excellent book, and I think it is rather underrated. I would be fascinated if this book had been published under a pseudonym. Perhaps it would not have sold so many copies, but I guarantee you there would not have been so many bloody references to Harry Potter!

8/10

Favourite Quotes

- “You must accept the reality of other people. You think that reality is up for negotiation, that we think it’s whatever you say it is. You must accept that we are as real as you are; you must accept that you are not God.” 

- “It was so good to be held. If only their relationship could be distilled into simple, wordless gestures of comfort. Why had humans ever learned to talk?” 

- “Krystal’s slow passage up the school had resembled the passage of a goat through the body of a boa constrictor, being highly visible and uncomfortable for both parties concerned.” 

- ““Stone dead,” said Howard, as though there were degrees of deadness, and the kind that Barry Fairbrother had contracted was particularly sordid.” 

- "It frightened people when you were honest; it shocked them."

- “She had a way of moving that moved him as much as music, which was what moved him most of all. Surely the spirit animating that pearless body must be unusual too? Why would nature make a vessel like that, if not to contain something still more valuable?” 

- “Both could feel the relationship crumbling to pieces beneath the weight of everything that Gavin refused to say.” 

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City of Bones - Cassandra Clare

So this will probably be the last ‘Young Adult’ book that I read for a while as my reading list is filling up with other things. I chose this book largely after seeing the trailer for the upcoming film adaptation and becoming intrigued by the story. I started reading with some trepidation, not least because the cover review was by Stephanie Meyer, the rather divisive author of the teen-girl favourite ‘Twilight’ series. The story is an urban fantasy story that fans of ‘Buffy’ will find instantly familiar. Indeed I would describe this story as a melange of the two. It is set in New York City and follows the a teenage girl Clary as she gets embroiled in the dark underworld of the city. A chance meeting in a night-club with a group of ‘Shadowhunters’ (think ‘slayers’ from ‘Buffy’) sees Clary get embroiled in this complex underworld where shadow slayers live in an uneasy peace with the part-human ‘Downworlders’ (vampires, werewolves, faeries etc.) She finds out that though she thought she was a normal human or ‘mundane’ she was actually part of a family at the centre of an enormous conflict in this underworld.

Now, I fear this review may get negative quite quickly so I shall first talk about the things that I liked about it: Firstly I think the world created by Clare is quite vivid and rich, and I particularly liked a scene in a diner/restaurant where all the various inhabitants of this underworld mingled. It gave a certain sense of community to the story and I love references to food in books. Secondly I liked how the story shifted throughout, starting as a simple search by a daughter for her mother, through a quite boring love-story section (more on that later) and finally into a really very interesting exposition-led history lessons mixed in with breathless fight and chase scenes. Thirdly, I loved the scenes with Luke/Lucian. In a book with characters of dubious depth, I felt his story was the most convincing and the most powerful.

HOWEVER. There are numerous reasons why this book has issues, central among them is the dreaded love triangle. Readers of things like ‘Twilight’ and ‘The Hunger Games’ will be familiar with this incessant requirement in YA fantasy novels with a female lead to be ignorant of two guys falling hopelessly in love with her. While I could just about deal with it in the other two books, in this book it was very tiresome. The combatants in this affair of the heart are:

Clary - Artistic and book loving, launched into an adventure to save the people she cares about. 

Jace - Dangerous and damaged Shadowhunter. Suffers from numerous daddy-issues and outrageously confident in his own looks and charms

Simon - Faithful bff and puppy dog-like kid who ‘proves himself’ when needed.

These tropes are so stereotypical that it slightly hurts my teeth and in my view are entirely unnecessary in a story that does not need it. The bit with Simon declaring his undying love for Clary is particularly awful and I nearly threw the book at the wall while reading it. Other characters have romantic interests which work much better.

Another issue at play is the writing of Clare. I get rather annoyed at people who criticise authors who first cut their teeth in the world of fan-fiction. I think it is a form of intellectual snobbery against a medium that, while is mostly populated by barely literate 13-year olds), also contains many talented and interesting writers. Clare, though I fear is not the greatest or most talented author to emerge from this world. Her use of mixed metaphors/similies etc sometimes beggars belief and she also suffers from ‘swallowed-a-thesaurus syndrome’ where she doesn’t quite understand certain adjectives that she uses making some sentences nonsensical.

To wrap up, this book has a lot of things that made me enjoy it - but I would not recommend it. While the world that Clare creates is interesting and some of the characters created compel, it is mostly fairly derivative. I read the first book, thinking that if I liked it, I would read the rest - but I will not. I can see why some may disagree with me, but I don’t think it’s because I did not ‘get’ it - it’s just that it is not very good.

4.5/10

Favourite Quotes

- “The boy never cried again, and he never forgot what he’d learned: that to love is to destroy, and that to be loved is to be the one destroyed.”

- “The next time you’re planning to injure yourself to get my attention, just remember that a little sweet talk works wonders.”

- “It means ‘Shadowhunters: looking better in black than the widows of our enemies since 1234” 

- “To love is to destroy, and that to be loved is to be the one destroyed”

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The Ways of the World - Robert Goddard

Some books are terrible.  They really are.  You read their book them and all the while you’re fighting a great urge to google the author, find out their address, drive over there and urge them to throw out their pen in favour of contributing something worthwhile.  Then there are some books that are wonderful, quires of awesome pages that make you happy to be alive.  Most books aren't either of these things.  Most fall under categories of are ‘quite good’, ‘okay’, ‘rather fun but’ and so on.  Occasionally though you find a book where you finish reading it and you’re not sure what to think.  You’re aware that you managed to finish it, so it can’t have been awful (or worse incredibly dull).  You’re also aware that it didn't excite/thrill you or make you laugh much/cry.  It feels wrong to call them ‘average’ or ‘decent’ because you’re not sure if they could have been better or worse than that.  They are, in short, a nightmare to review and usually end up taking up a lot of my time because gathering my thoughts takes rather a long time.  For me, Robert Goddard’s new book The Ways of the World falls right into this category and if you’ll bear with me (and I promise this isn't going to be too rambling) I’ll explain why.

Robert Goddard is a very experienced author having published 24 books including this one, largely focussed on the Crime and Mystery genre.  This book is set in Paris during the Armistice Treaty negotiations after the Great War.  The hero is James ‘Max’ Maxted, a veteran airman whose diplomat father was killed in suspicious circumstances at the house of his mistress.  Although the Paris police write the death off as an accident, Max, against the will of pretty much everyone, seeks to find out the truth.  This predictably ends up getting him into all sorts of trouble with people ranging from Russian Monarchists, German spies and the British diplomatic service.  He finds help along the way, but he is very much the amateur sleuth, cleverly but clumsily eking his way towards the truth while pushing back against the obstacles placed in his path.

The author, as one would expect from someone so experienced, writes well in an engaging style, feeding you information as you go along little by little, allowing you to form your own suspicions in very much the way that the characters do.  His characters, if a little bit caricatured, are interesting with decent development throughout.  The only real criticism that I would throw his way is his constant need to throw in phrases/sentences in French.  Now I, luckily, speak quite good French and had no difficulty parsing these sections and I would imagine that most people would be able to get the gist of most of them, but it would have been nice if he’d been a little more nuanced.  It would not be hard to make the translations easier to work out through the English dialogue that surrounds it.  Other authors do it well and Goddard’s refusal to do so smacks me a little of arrogance.

Other than that I have no real criticisms of this book and so you may be wondering why I’m so conflicted over how to come to an opinion over it.  The problem is that I can’t for the life of me work out whether or not it is any good.  I enjoyed reading it without it really having any significant affect on my heart-rate or on my emotions.  It was well-structured and came to a good ending, but it didn’t really leave me wanting more though nor did it leave me disappointed.  The book isn’t bland per-sé but it lacks punch or zest.  I could of course be being very harsh here.  From other reviews on the wild-world of the internet I see that this book has attracted reasonable praise and has sold quite well, but I wonder how much of this is because of the man and not the book.  I would encourage people to give this book a go, if nothing else because I’d be intrigued to have a conversation with someone who’s not as conflicted as me over it. 

6/10 (I think)

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Paper Towns - John Green

So any of you who have been following this blog (wow thanks if you have :D) may have noticed that all my reviews so far have been for John Green novels. This is because I have been undergoing a grand introduction to his genius and since the person who is lending the books to me is leaving soon, I have to read through them without gaps in between. If you are not a fan then I apologise and I promise to read someone else soon!

So - ‘Paper Towns’. This is another ‘Young Adult’ story by John Green. It is set in Orlando, Florida in an area of samey Milton Keynes-esque new-builds (I will be using British-isms, suck it up). The main character is Quentin ‘Q’ who lives next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman, a sort of mix of Quin Fabray and Ramona Flowers (I bet no one else mixes a Glee reference with Scott Pilgrim). He developed a crush which quickly became an infatuation with this girl after they shared the trauma of finding a dead body together as kids, and this quickly envelops him. He also has two close friends: Ben, an extroverted nerdy kid and Radar, a cooler yet still nerdy kid who is obsessed with editing an online encyclopedia called Omnictionary (so blatently not Wikipedia…).

The basic premise is that Margo, who has always been dreaming of skipping town - and has already done so several times - disappears just before graduation from high school, shortly after leading Q on a whirlwind adventure of revenge against those that ‘wronged’ her including her cheating boyfriend, her ‘traitorous’ friends as well as tying up some other loose ends. Her disappearance terrifies Q who does not know whether she wants him to find her, or whether she is dead. Thus the book becomes a mystery story: Where is Margo Roth Spiegelman? Who is Margo Roth Spiegelman? Where did she go? Why did she go? Is she dead? Does she want to be found?

There are numerous themes within this books, and many of them are shared between books. The first is the *sigh* ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’ character (I hate that word and all of its sparkly pony dustiness). Like Alaska Young from ‘Looking for Alaska’, the main character is obsessed with this mystical entity tied up in a girl. Like Romeo’s obsession with Rosaline (yes I can relate things to Shakespeare), the main character’s infatuation is without serious base. It is the obsession with the idea of the girl rather than the girl itself. Margo is this force of nature, a character who transcends her identity because of the she legend built up.

Another theme is death. This is less obvious than in ‘Fault in Our Stars’ or ‘Looking for Alaska’, but it definitely there. There is 1) the dead man at the start of the story, 2) there are the dead/unused new-builds that Margo directs Q to 3) the near death experience that Q experiences towards the end of the book and 4) the fact that at various points the characters believe Margo to have committed suicide. It is not all-pervasive as a theme, but it always in the background.

Finally though, and this is a true shocker in a book about teenagers about to graduate from high school, this book is really for me about growing up. Q’s friends in the story all seem to be people developing much needed social skills, leaving their insular group of friends and interacting more with the wider school community. Q’s voyage of discovery is about finding out who the girl of his fantasies really is and dispelling the idealised portrait he has of her. And Margo… well there is no way of going into detail without spoiling, but it is rather obvious on reading the book.

So to my views. Well I enjoyed this the least out of the Green books that I have read so far for a couple of good reasons, chief amongst which is that I really did not like the main character. I think Green never quite convinced me why this boy would be so fixated on chasing the girl; why would he give up so much of his time and sanity on chasing her? I get the fact that he idolises and idealises her, and that he thinks that she may be dead but even so, it just never made sense to me. I did not related to him in the same way that I was able to with Pudge or Hazel. I also just felt the story was a hodge-podge of different ideas that didn’t quite click. The 3 sections are very differently paced and styled in varying ways which made the narrative a little disjointed. Overall I think Green tried to accomplish too many things in one book. HOWEVER, that is not to say I did not enjoy the book. It still had those wonderful John Green touches in the narrative and dialogue that cannot fail to make you laugh, and the final part of the book is a masterful example of how to tie up a complex mystery story in a way that is very satisfying and edifying. 

7/10

P.S. I look forward to my final John Green read, but I think I will take a break first… what to read next??

Favourite Quotes- “If you don’t imagine, nothing ever happens at all.”

- “Peeing is like a good book in that it is very, very hard to stop once you start.” 

- “Those of us who frequent the band room have long suspected that Becca maintains her lovely figure by eating nothing but the souls of kittens and the dreams of impoverished children.” 

- “Poetry is just so emo,’ he said. ‘Oh, the pain. The pain. It always rains. In my soul.” 

- “Angela, I really like you, but there’s something you need to know: when we go to my house and hook up, we’ll be watched by the twenty-four hundred eyes of twelve hundred black Santas.” 

- “As far as I can tell, there are two basic (kissing) rules: 1. Don’t bite anything without permission. 2. The human tongue is like wasabi: it’s very powerful, and should be used sparingly.” 

- “Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.” 

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Gloriana, or The Unfulfill'd Queen - Michael Moorcock (Classic)

So last week I was at my friend James’s house (http://vittoriacorombona.tumblr.com/) and, as is my wont, I immediately began inspecting his rather lopsided bookcase. It had a rather odd collection of novelisations of video games, academic texts and some unusual fantasy novels. While perusing this smorgasbord of literature, one book caught my eye. This book was ‘Gloriana’, a fantasy/alternate history story set in a version of Elizabethan England. Intrigued, I asked James if I could borrow it and, being the gentleman that he is, he acquiesced.

To attempt to thoroughly explain this book in the context of this review would, I fear, be a difficult and ultimately futile task. For a relatively short book (my version weighs in at 368 pages), it sure packs in a fabulous amount of depth, detail and drama into its punch. In short, the story is about Albion, an Empire centred in modern England that stretches across the British Isles encompassing North America, the Middle East through to the Indian Subcontinent. It is ruled by Queen Gloriana, a woman whose carefully crafted exterior belies a damaged soul who, behind closed doors, struggles to find any kind of emotional or sexual fulfilment. Other characters include Lord Montfallcon, the power-behind-the-throne and shady architect of the so-called ‘Golden Age’, the protective and beautiful Countess of Sciath and the calculating cold-hearted Captain Quire.

The book is based largely, so I am told, off the Faerie Queen, something I would comment on where I familiar with it. Thus I can only really comment on its allegories to the real-life Elizabethan age, and the similarities are obvious: the tyrannical, blood thirsty, war mongering and womanising father; the refusal to marry despite the presence of a great number of suitors; the use of piracy against Iberia; the use of espionage to protect a ‘Golden Age’. There is a rich backstory alluded to as to how the ‘Albion’ (an ancient name for England) of this story came to be in possession of such an Empire but the story itself is not about ‘Empire’. The story is about how a state based on an idea, on a person, can fall apart when that idea is challenged.

Every character in this story has two faces: public and private, and in many ways the story is the same. Each character has their public persona - noble, chivalric, patriotic but behind closed doors are revealed sexual deviancy, cruelty to lovers/spouses and a number of other vices. Gloriana herself is seen to be, despite her reputation for being different from her father, to share many of the vices and traits that he exhibited. These dichotomies are my favourite part of the story.

Another reason to love the story is the descriptions. The world that Moorcock builds is as intriguing as it is beautiful. There is barely a chapter that passes without a tapestry being woven in your mind, be it the catacombs within the walls, the grounds of the palace or even the vestments of the characters themselves. Moorcock’s true achievement really is in these descriptions as they allow you to immerse yourself in this world that is both familiar and wonderfully unique.

There is much to like in this story, but there are also equally issues. For my tastes, the story took quite a while to get going. The scene setting, while written and described well, took up much of the first third of the book and that’s pretty hard going in a story that was not the easiest to read. The ending too has issues in my mind. I don’t wish to spoil it and I understand that in a new edition this bit has changed, but it crossed some lines in my view that should not be crossed.

All in all, this is a story that I would thoroughly recommend, but one I am unlikely to revisit any time soon. Perhaps had I been greater acquainted with some necessary background reading I would have appreciated it more. But I haven’t. So I didn’t

7/10

Favourite Quotes

“Along the gallery now comes a scrawny, snag-tooth villain wearing leggings of rabbit fur, a torn quilted doublet, a horsehide cap pulled down about his ears.  He wears a sword from the guard of which some of the rust has been inexpertly scratched.  His gait is unsteady not so much form drink as, it would seem, from some natural indisposition.  His skin is blue, showing that he has just come in from the night, but his eyes burn”

“Nor could she refuse to spend the remainder of the afternoon in quiet seclusion, lying face down upon a cushioned bench in her private dressing room while gentle Lady Mary rubbed all the soreness from her muscles. Such occupations were safe, and harmless. It was only afterwards, when she was sleeping deeply, that Captain Quire came to her in a dream.” 

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Looking for Alaska - John Green

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The Fault in Our Stars - John Green

I was given this book to read by the wonderful and beautiful Kaitlyn from onadarklingplain.tumblr.com who is a big fan of John Green. With him (and her) being a Liverpool FC fan I was initially skeptical (as he clearly has poor judgement and taste when it comes to football) and this was only increased when I found out the premise of the book.

Essentially this book is about a 16-year-old girl called Hazel who is suffering/recovering from cancer and who falls in love with a fellow sufferer called Augustus Waters. Now from that brief synopsis you would expect this to be either a heart-warming tale of triumph-over-adversity by a dedicated hero who never complains etc etc OR it be a tragic story of a life cut short by cruel fate blah-blah-blah. In fact, on the face of it, this story is nothing like those things. Indeed our heroes both actively rebel against these stereotypes. At one point in the book one of them remarks that most people in the world are not self-less, non-complaining, brave people and that doesn’t change once you get cancer.

The girl Hazel though is acutely aware of her own mortality, she once compares herself to a grenade ready to explode but she is also keen to live her life in the way that she wants too. Being a cancer-sufferer does not stop her from being a teenager either. She is just as irrational, as rebellious against authority and as insecure as any teenager - she just happens to live with a life-threatening illness.

The most surprising and most rewarding thing about the book though is its humour. To make a situation like this story as funny as John Green has takes real skill and it takes real balls too. The closest thing that I can compare it too is the Roberto Bengnini film Life is Beautiful. Like that film, it is a story set in terrible circumstances, but told in a very witty and amusing way. The dialogue between the characters is very easy and well written and you never feel like any of them are really caricatures (except for perhaps Hazel’s friend Kaitlyn). At its heart, this is a love story between two teenagers trying to live in a world that has dealt them a bad hand. They go on adventures and experience loss and pain but most importantly they experience love.

I have few criticisms of this book, but there are a couple. The humour dies away a little towards the end of the story as the whole tone gets a little darker. I understand perhaps what the author was doing there, but there were a few moments where I was wondering if I’d slipped into a different story as the ‘crying’ moments started to overwhelm the ‘laughing’ moments. He also weirdly slips into play script style when writing dialogue exchanges. I’m sure there is some pretentious ‘English student’ word for this, but I thought it a little pretentious.

Overall however, I would strongly recommend this book if only because you will not believe how a story about cancer-suffering teenagers will make you laugh. It is very clever, very funny and a wonderful summer read.

9/10

Favourite Quotes

- “Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.” 

- “Some people don’t understand the promises they’re making when they make them,” I said.

"Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That’s what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway.”

- “What a slut time is. She screws everybody.” 

- “That’s the thing about pain…it demands to be felt.” 

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