contemporary Archives - Page 3 of 7

Yzabel / August 6, 2017

Review: Nothing

My rating: [rating=2]

Blurb:

Nothing ever happens to Charlotte and Frankie. Their lives are nothing like the lives of the girls they read about in their YA novels. They don’t have flowing red hair and hot romantic encounters never happen—let alone meeting a true soul mate. They just go to high school and live at home with their parents, who are pretty normal, all things considered. But when Charlotte decides to write down everything that happens during their sophomore year to prove that nothing happens and there is no plot or character development in real life, she’s surprised to find that being fifteen isn’t as boring as she thought. It’s weird, heartbreaking, silly, and complicated. And maybe, just perfect.

Review:

[I received a copy of this book through Edelweiss.]

Well, this book captures ‘nothing’, which is both good (the character Charlotte intends to show nothing exciting happens in her life, and she does that well), and not so good, because in the end, it made for a fairly plotless novel that read like a journal, quite slice-of-life, and it wasn’t exactly exciting. So I’m on the fence here, in that I get the intention, but don’t really enjoy it?

The author nailed the ‘teenager narrator voice’—also both a good and a bad thing: good for characterisation, bad for… hm, let’s say that 20 years later, it’s not particularly interesting (yep, I wasn’t interesting myself in my teens, hah). The intended audience being YA, possibly the latter won’t be too much of a problem, as younger readers may relate to Charlotte’s views on life… or maybe not? I tended to like Frankie more, in any case, because at least she sometimes -does- things, and tries to initiate change.

The awkwardness of relationships is also well-portrayed, for instance Charlotte’s relationship with Sid, how they met through internet and kept texting each other, and Charlotte likes him but is convinced they’ll never met and it’s doomed to fail anyway, and so on.

Of course, the book shows that the ‘nothing’ Charlotte complains about isn’t such a truth; little things happen, opportunities arise, the girls are just so convinced their lives are boring that they don’t notice those things are being important, through the way they add up. But that’s also something I wasn’t really at ease with.

First, the girls are quite similar, and it was difficult at times to know if a chapter was about Frankie or Charlotte (at some point I just went with 3rd person = Frankie, 1st person = Charlotte); they’re not helped in that by their common background, there isn’t much diversity in here, nor in the friends they mention, most often in passing.

Second, there’s a subplot that Charlotte sort of… brushes over as if it was trivial, and I’m sorry, no, I don’t think anyone would go through such an event and then just leave for home and not realise even for five minutes that what they did was awesome and, yes, important. That’s the part where Charlotte prevents a school friend from getting raped by a boy who clearly saw she was drunk and didn’t know what she was doing anymore. Way to trivialise attempted rape, and way to show how selfish and shitty a person can be, I mean, hello Charlotte who won’t stay with her because, oh my God, then she has to tell her parents she was at a party and her parents will think she was drinking too and she’ll be grounded… Yeah. I get it, ‘nothing’ happens in your privileged little life. And let’s not mention the ‘wai things would be more interesting if we were gay’. Nope, no love from me, girl. Can we stop using LGBT relationships as plot devices, and use such characters as, you know, people with personalities?

Conclusion: At least it was a quick read, and points for writing teenager characters fairly well, but I can’t say I enjoyed reading Charlotte’s parts.

Yzabel / July 28, 2017

Review: Saint Death

Saint Death by Marcus Sedgwick

My rating: [rating=4]

Blurb:

Anapra is one of the poorest neighbourhoods in the Mexican city of Juarez – twenty metres outside town lies a fence – and beyond it – America – the dangerous goal of many a migrant. Faustino is one such trying to escape from the gang he’s been working for. He’s dipped into a pile of dollars he was supposed to be hiding and now he’s on the run. He and his friend, Arturo, have only 36 hours to replace the missing money, or they’re as good as dead. Watching over them is Saint Death. Saint Death (or Santissima Muerte) – she of pure bone and charcoal-black eye, she of absolute loyalty and neutral morality, holy patron to rich and poor, to prostitute and narco-lord, criminal and police-chief. A folk saint, a rebel angel, a sinister guardian.

Review:

[I received a copy of this book through NetGalley.]

This is not a happy book, and to be fair, I’m a little unsure why I requested it in the first place, since I’m usually not too keen on reading ‘realistic’ stories (the world is depressing enough as it is). Well, no: I guess I requested it because I like Marcus Sedgwick’s stories, also I met him briefly at a book festival and he was definitely a cool guy. So, yes, I guess there’s that.

And, anyway, I enjoyed the story. Though I should’ve guessed it wouldn’t be a bed of roses for the characters (pay attention to the very first character we meet, too). It is both realistic and haunting—haunted as it is by the presence of Santa Muerte, who may or may not be present, and who can tell, and does it really matter? For the characters believe in her and in her powers, and quickly learn that you must be crazy to try and trick the White Girl.

The story is told in third person point of view, present tense, which I typically enjoy less than past tense for a simple reason: it’s difficult to use, and too many people fail at it. Here, it works, and lends itself to that haunting atmosphere I mentioned previously, making the story somewhat surreal… which, in turn, strengthens its gritty aspects even more.

This isn’t a happy world, and there isn’t much light at the end of the tunnel. Yet this is also a world where one can learn to retain their human dignity, and not give in to the darkness. A world where there are still good people in spite of all the bad ones. It is both hope and sadness—and death, who unites everybody in the end.

Yzabel / July 27, 2017

Review: The Serial Killer’s Daughter

The Serial Killer’s Daughter by Lesley Welsh

My rating: [rating=1]

Blurb:

Charmer, liar, father… Killer.
Suzanne’s life changes forever the day she receives a visit from Rose Anderson, the woman who has been living with her estranged father, Don.

Don is dead, but Rose wants Suzanne to have his possessions – including a series of intimate diaries and a mysterious collection of photographs of women.

To Suzanne’s shock, one of the photos is of her friend Sophie, who died ten years ago in an unexplained and devastating fire.

But Don only met Sophie once, on an unsettling visit he paid Suzanne just days before Sophie’s death… So why did he have a picture of her?

Unable to let Sophie’s memory alone, Suzanne begins to dig into her father’s life. What horrors is she about to unearth in his journals? And who is it that’s out there, watching her every move?

Review:

Reading about Don’s twisted point of view and convictions about himself, others and the world about him, was fairly interesting. This kind of characters always feels like a train wreck to me: you know it’s going to be horrible, yet you keep on reading nonetheless, to see if the monster is truly so abject or if there’s anything else. I definitely won’t empathise with the guy (no kidding), but… yes, I find that interesting.

My major problem with this story, though, was the style itself, of a definite ‘tell-doesn’t-show’ kind, which kept throwing me out of the narrative at almost every page. In turn, I couldn’t empathise with the characters (whether ‘victims’, ‘criminal’ or ‘investigators’); this would have gone much better if their actions, their feelings, and whatever went through their heads, had been shown dynamically. However, I constantly felt that I was being given a recap, a textbook, telling me about them (I guess the flashbacks, or rather, where they were placed, contributed to that).

This diminished the tension created by the horrors described in Don’s notebooks and the investigation Suzanne embarked on, and didn’t contribute in making me warm up to ambiguous characters either, like ‘he’ (the man who follows Rose and Suzanne), for instance. So in general, I didn’t really care about them. I suppose I also expected something a little different, regarding the notebooks and the way Suzanne discovered the truth about her father—possibly something more psychological, and less along the lines the story followed in its second half.

Conclusion: 1.5 stars. Good basic idea, but I didn’t care much about the execution.

Yzabel / June 4, 2017

Review: Clock Zero

Clock Zero: I’m not my social feed by Nawar Alsaadi

My rating: [rating=3]

Blurb:

Tom is your average Joe working at a call center, with his real life going nowhere, Tom’s existence has been reduced to chasing Likes on Facebook and hearts on Instagram and Twitter. For Tom, owning the latest iPhone is what gives his life meaning, until the day he meets the enigmatic Daniel Drake, a man with a daring plan to rid the world of its social media smartphone addiction. Tom is captivated by the premise of a new unplugged world, but is Daniel Drake the good Samaritan he claims to be?

Technology trap. Terrorism. Corporate greed. Meaningless life. Narcissism. Clock Zero beautifully captures the existentialist struggles of this generation through an extraordinary voyage of suspense and satirical discovery.

Review:

[I received a copy of this book through NetGalley.]

Quite an interesting story, with likeable characters—possibly a like goofy, too, but I was in the mood for that, and also, taking jabs at helpdesks/customer service? Count me in, I’ve been in that kind of jobs that for some time now, and we all need to find our fun somewhere, otherwise we’d just get bonkers.

Anyway. That was for the fun parts, enhanced with the way the narrator swipes at social media, the amount of time we spend checking Facebook and Twitter, and how it’s so easy to get lost in it. Not that I don’t like my little FB time, but I know what it feels like to turn your computer on at the end of the day and realise you’ve spent the past two hours going through clickbait crap when you could’ve been doing something else. (Like reading, and reviewing, and therefore catching up on your backlog of NetGalley books, so that you can then post your reviews on your blog and FB page and… Wait a second.)

There are less fun parts, too, closer to actual terrorism, with a plot meant to destroy cell towers, satellites, etc., through a virus uploaded on everybody’s smartphones. A revolution of sorts, to force people to look up from their phones and enjoy life again. Kind of extreme (I’m trying not to spend too much time on social media, but let’s be honest, if internet and networks in general are gone, I’m out of a job). One will like this idea or not. It’s probably a case of ‘doing the wrong things for the right reasons’. In the light of recent years and the growing amount of terrorist attacks, this commentary is not, well, enjoyable, yet one can also (unfortunately) relate to it while reading about it (my main Tube hub is closed today because of that, now let me tell you that’s one instance I was glad to hang on FB instead of being out socialising!).

Style: the writing is OK, some typos now and then (it was an ARC so hopefullyl those were corrected in the final version), and at first the narrator alluding to hashtags and emojis was a little confusing. Nothing too bad, though.

I’m torn about the twist in the end—can’t decide whether I like it, or would have preferred the story to end one chapter earlier. Still unsure as well if the book was meant to be totally satirical, and if I should get angry at it (I preferred to treat is as satire and fun, because I’m too lazy and it’s too hot outside to waste energy into such feelings).

Conclusion: Maybe not the best read you can find when it comes to taking jabs at social, yet enjoyable nonetheless.

View all my reviews

Yzabel / January 4, 2017

Review: The Girl Before

The Girl Before by J.P. Delaney

My rating: [rating=3]

Blurb:

A damaged young woman gets the unique opportunity to rent a one-of-a-kind house. When she falls in love with the sexy, enigmatic architect who designed it, she has no idea she is following in the footsteps of the girl who came before: the house’s former tenant.

Review:

[I received a copy of this book through Edelweiss.]

When Jane applies to live at One Folgate Street, a minimalist house designed b y famous architect Edward Monkford, after recently suffering bereavment, she doesn’t know yet that another woman, Emma, lived there before her, and that events surrounding her were not of the good kind. What matters is that even though the house comes with two hundred rules designed to make it the perfectly ordered and uncluttered, the rent is cheap, and it’s an opportunity at starting a new life and letting go of a painful past. But Emma’s shadow is everywhere: in the place she inhabited, in how the landlord used to perceive her, in how the house started to shape her… and the same thing may happen to Jane.

Well, this novel was quite readable, and I took pleasure (and was thrilled) at discovering gradually, through a double narrative, what happened to Emma and what is now happening to Jane: their reasons for moving into the house, their personal lives, what tragedies befell them and how those kept affecting them, as well as the parallels slowly drawn between them. There’s a constant game of similarities intertwining here, only to better highlight the differences and subsequent reveals, for neither Emma nor Jane are exactly who we think they are at first.

Granted, some of these revelations are a little convoluted. In hindsight, there’s also nothing invalidating them, and provided one’s willing to take a “what if?” approach, rather than expecting answers and explanations set in stone, well, it can work. They are problematic in some ways, though, for reasons I won’t explain here as not to spoil, but let’s just say that these are unreliable narrators we’re speaking of here, and lies or at least things unsaid are a big part of this story. Including infuriating lies.

I wasn’t satisfied with the ending—to be honest, I much preferred the beginning and the gradual increase in tension, when I was still wondering if there had been a murder or if it was suicide, and if the culprit was who I thought it was, or not. The ending… well, let’s say it was a bit of a letdown, with a last, questionable twist related to ‘perfection vs. imperfection’ that I found callous and uncalled for. Again, no spoilers, but frankly, it was unnecessary (and I don’t think it plays very well either into the theme of ‘sterile perfection and narcissism’ in Edward’s little world).

Conclusion: Enjoyable throughout, only it didn’t reach its full potential in the end.

Yzabel / September 1, 2016

Review: Winning

Winning by Lara Deloza

My rating: [rating=3]

Blurb:

Who ever said being nice would get you to the top?

Certainly not Alexandra Miles. She isn’t nice, but she’s more than skilled at playing the part. She floats through the halls of Spencer High, effortlessly orchestrating the actions of everyone around her, making people bend to her whim without even noticing they’re doing it. She is the queen of Spencer High—and it’s time to make it official.

Alexandra has a goal, you see—Homecoming Queen. Her ambitions are far grander than her small town will allow, but Homecoming is just the first step to achieving total domination. So when peppy, popular Erin Hewett moves to town and seems to have a real shot at the crown, Alexandra has to take action.

With the help of her trusted friend Sam, she devises her most devious plot yet. She’ll introduce an unexpected third competitor into the mix, one whose meteoric rise—and devastating fall—will destroy Erin’s chances once and for all. Alexandra can run a scheme like this in her sleep. What could possibly go wrong?

Review:

(I got a copy through Edelweiss, in exchange for an honest review.)

I’m usually not much into “high school drama” (it’s often too over the top for me, or perhaps my high school years were just too quiet and boringly normal, who knows), but this novel was quite pleasant to read, and what could’ve been total cliché characters were surprisingly fleshed out and interesting, in spite of fitting tropes.

Alexandra Miles is the expected Queen Bee, the one who’ll no doubt become Homecoming Queen, like she has planned. Everything is planned, for her to get out of Spencer with a bang, not a whimper, become Miss America, and then… What else? What’s more? Lexi doesn’t know, and it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter too much either that she’s living what used to be her mother’s dream, the latter her having pushed her on the pageants road since she was a toddler. In short: Lexi is a queen, she knows it, she’s smart and cunning on top of being pretty, and she won’t settle down for anything less. And she’s ready to go to quite a few lengths for that.
Enters Erin, the transfer student, Erin the cutie who’s so adorable her mere presence soon starts to turn tables. She’s a viable candidate for Homecoming Queen… a -very- viable candidate. This puts several things into motion, Lexi’s plans not the least.

I liked Alexandra in general. She’s the villain, she’s cold and calculating, and overall all that’s “nice” about her is just on the surface, acting, ploys to get what she wants and twirl people around her finger. She’s good at that, really good, and she has the connections to boot, including her best friend Sam and her brother. She’s despicable, too, the way she uses Sam and Wyatt’s love for her to make them do her bidding. Yet once she comes home, once she has to face her drunken mother who forces her through the motions, you can’t help but wonder if she’s not just a kid who never received enough love—not an excuse, but an explanation. And when she believes in something, she pours her heart in it, for instance the way she stood up for Sam when the latter made her coming out. So, yes, she’s selfish, self-centered, and not a likeable person… yet I still found myself rooting for her sometimes. Not necessarily in a “I want to see her crush the others” way; instead, in a “I don’t want her to win but I also don’t want her to be completely crushed at the end”.

The story in general revolves around the girls. Male characters are present, but they’re not the main focus, they’re not the end to attain. These girls fend for themselves: Lexi aiming to be queen; Sam who sometimes questions her fierce loyalty; Erin the newcomer whose plans are a mystery; Sloane whom Alexandra humiliated and who’s determined to act instead of remaining passive; Ivy who gets dragged along the way yet turns out to be stronger than she thinks. The narrative makes use of four POVs (Lexi, Sam, Sloane and Ivy), and manages to play on their unreliability: is this or that person a real schemer, or do they just seem they are because Lexi perceives them that way?

Bonus points as well for the lesbian characters, and for the subplot that makes them strong people on their own, without going for the “villain / victim / casualty” tropes. They’re not 100% understood, but they’re not complete pariahs either, and stand their ground: no victimisation here. The romantic undertones would work exactly the same if they were about a boy and a girl; it’s all about understanding one’s feelings, deciding who’s the most important person after all, discovering love in an unexpected place, basically being human, with needs and feelings like everybody else.

Where I found the book wanting was in some of the plotting and decisions. Lexi’s plot was a bit… strange and convoluted, and I kept wondering if the scheme she had hatched would be very efficient anyway. It seemed it was more cruel than anything else, and that it rested on a somewhat “naive” vision. Granted, this fits, in that she’s brilliant but still 17, not a mastermind with decades of manipulations behind her; nevertheless, it also reminded me that this was, well, high school drama, and in that, it came too close to the usual clichés (such as “let’s make X drunk so that she looks bad in front of the whole school” — I guess Lexi had made me expect something more sophisticated, all in all). In the end, I suppose the plot was too simple to my liking, without as many twists and devious plans as I would’ve hoped. It would definitely have benefitted from more than the basic Homecoming thing.

Yzabel / August 22, 2016

Review: The Vengeful Half

The Vengeful Half by Jaclyn Dolamore

My rating: [rating=1]

Blurb:

Olivia might look human, but she’s grown up with a heavy secret: her mother is a potion-maker from a parallel world, the Hidden Lands.

Alfred is the blind, charismatic young heir to the illegal potions trade. When Mom is kidnapped by the magic dealers with whom she once made a bad bargain, Olivia has no choice but to trust Alfred’s offer of help. They travel to a strange new world of bootlegged American pop culture, lifelike doll people, and reincarnation. Alfred finds himself putting his position on the line to defend Olivia against his family’s conniving plans. Maybe he has morals…or maybe he’s just falling in love.

When Olivia escapes from an attack by a curiously familiar sorceress, she learns that potion dealers weren’t the only thing Mom was hiding from. Dark secrets lurk in Olivia’s past, and now Olivia must kill or be killed by the girl with whom she once shared everything…

Review:

(I got a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.)

This is one of those overdue reviews, since I’ve had this book on my tablet for quite a while. I remember requesting it partly because of its cover (the paperback one — by comparison, the Kindle cover on Amazon is pretty bland), which seemed quite ominous to me. What can I say, I’m weak when faced with a certain type of cover.

The plot was intriguing, for sure. A hidden world full of family secrets, alliances to be had, strange magic (the doll people and the potions), ancient feuds, revelations aplenty, and a hidden enemy who’s been bidding her time and is now bent on getting what she wants: possibly revenge… or something else? There’s almost too much going on at times. At first I thought it would be more a quest-like story, with Olivia going after her mother and braving danger to save her. It didn’t turn out like that, but that was alright, the kind of plot and intrigue it led to was pretty fine with me as well.

The characters: we have that girl, Olivia, who knows she’s from another world/civilisation, without having been brought up in it, which leaves room for showing this land to the reader, without necessarily having to explain *all* of it, since Olivia already knows part of it and we can dispense with. We have Alfred, rich heir and future boss to a crime family, who’s blind almost since birth and goes his way without whining about this—he’s used to it, he has trouble with some things but has found ways to cope. Alfred also has to constantly remind other people that he can do, not everything but a lot of things: a conundrum close, I think, to quite a few double standards going around disabled people (pitied and treated like children almost, or blamed for “not making enough efforts” by many, instead of being considered as human beings first and foremost…). There’s also Thessia, Alfred’s fiancée, who could have been a nasty bitch and/or a jealous whiner, especially since she fits the too-beautiful-to-be-true girl, and turns out to be an idealist, an activist, and, well, a fairly decent person to be around, even though she has her downside (Atlantean rich society seems to be hell-bent on having its girls marry rich heirs, and gods forbid they want to have a career of their own…).

So, all in all, a lot of interesting things here. Unfortunately, a lot more annoyed me, causing me not to enjoy this story in the end.

From the start, something kept nagging at me, and it took me a while to put my finger on it. At some point, the author mentioned when the story originated (more about that later), back when she was still a child or teenager; I think this was what I “felt” about it, for having gone myself through the same conundrum of taking a story I first created when I was 12 or so, and trying to trim it and make it something worth reading. This was something I found extremely hard to do, because what we perceive as wonderful plot twists and concepts when we’re younger aren’t necessarily good things to leave as is… yet “upgrading” them is easier said than done. And so, I had that strange feeling that I was reading something I might have written when I was younger, and my reaction to it was a little similar. It’s hard to explain. I could sum it up with “this feels like a very early work, and it needs more editing.”

Another thing that bothered me, when it comes to this theme of parallel/hidden worlds, is how close to ours the latter was, when a parallel world could pave the way to so many other things. Let me develop a bit more by giving a personal example: I grew up in France, with a lot of dubbed TV shows originating from the USA, and at the time I had that fascination for the USA. If I wrote a story, I set it in some imaginary US town. Not my home country, no, it wasn’t “good enough”: it had to be like the USA, feel like the USA, whatever. Obviously it didn’t occur to me at the time that Stephen King, for instance, set his stories in his country because that’s what he knew, and that I was under the impression everything was better there only because I hadn’t been exposed to shows from other countries. (Bear with me, I was 12-something.) And somehow, the way Atlantis people lived reminded me of this: their world felt like it hadn’t been so much evolving as trying to mimic Earth’s, and more specifically, well, you guess it. “Everything’s better if it looks like our world.” Kind of like being promised a walk in quaint little streets with exotic market stalls, and finding yourself in a mall instead—Atlanteans driving Ferraris didn’t exactly impress me. I’d stand with Olivia on that one, who was expecting a high fantasy world at first and found a place with chocolate and soda cans instead.

(To be fair, though, all this might still hold more appeal to a teenage audience than it did to me: I also remember thinking “those are plot devices/themes I would’ve used myself, since I loved them, when I was in my teens.” I had that thing going for telepathy and psychic powers in general, and parallel worlds, and “aliens/people with powers coming from those worlds to live hidden on Earth”. I seriously doubt I was the only one.)

Third annoying bit: the somewhat sexist, somewhat dismissive way a few characters tended to act. Alfred disappointed me towards the end when it came to Thessia (pretty assholish move to make if you ask me, and then she’s left to go away with the equivalent of “kthxbye see ya later, ah women, they always need some time to calm down huh”). Or what I mentioned above regarding heiresses only good enough to marry—any female character with a position/job of her own seemed to be either a villain or a reject/castaway/fugitive, as if no “proper woman” could hold her own. Although was pointed as backwards thinking, I felt a dichotomy, a certain hypocrisy in how it was mentioned, yet the people mentioning it still kept buying into the patriarchal model nonetheless.

Fourth: so many tropes. So, so many. You’ve got it all: pretty boy with a beautiful fiancée against which the main character feels so plain (but still becomes a love interest fairly quickly); people who were supposed to be dead but aren’t; telepathy/psychic powers being used and thrown in in vague descriptions, solving things a little too easily at times; mandatory love triangle; elite school in which talking to The Wrong Person will turn you into a black sheep, instantly, just add water. It felt like a soap opera at times, and since I’m not particularly keen on those, it didn’t help.

On the fence: the drawings, comic strips and short inserts. I didn’t care about the style, but I can certainly understand the appeal, and who would fault an author for including those and being enthusiastic about it? Not me! However, I think they disrupted the flow of the story in some cases, either by revealing too much about the characters at that specific point or by just being there in the middle (did we really need pictures of the various soda brands?). More annoying though were the written inserts: in between two chapters, we get a bit (twice!) about how the story was born. Not uninteresting, yet… this could and should be put at the end, otherwise it’s either disruptive or meant to be skipped, which would defeat the whole point.

Conclusion: could’ve been for me, but… nope, sorry.

Yzabel / August 14, 2016

Review: Malus Domestica

Malus Domestica by S.A. Hunt

My rating: [rating=2]

Blurb:

Kids are going missing in the tiny hamlet of Blackfield, Georgia, and nobody knows why except for Robin, the homeless young woman that just rolled into town last night.

When she claims she knows who’s responsible, only 4th-grader Wayne Parkin and his schoolmates Pete, Amanda, and Juan believe her…but it takes a terrifying encounter with an interdimensional creature to spur them into action.

Robin proves to be a formidable monster-hunter with strange supernatural powers, but a tragic setback reveals a secret organization and a centuries-old conspiracy.

Can new friends and old enemies band together to save Blackfield from an unspeakable darkness?

Review:

[I received a copy of this book through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

1.5-2 stars. I liked the ideas at this novel’s core, but ultimately I had a hard time getting into it, and had to force myself to go on reading. I guess this was a matter of rhythm, and of some clichés that didn’t sit too well with me.

The premise: young witch hunter Robin Martine has been travelling through the USA, filming her tracking and fighting witches (women who sacrificed their heart to goddess Ereshkigal in exchange for powers and a longer existence). She puts her videos on her YouTube channel, followed by thousands of people who don’t realise this is no special effects, but reality. After years spent training and hunting, Robin comes back to her home town, to get rid of the witches who killed her mother; along the way, she gathers quite a little posse of various characters who’ll help in that quest.

As said, the ideas themselves were fine. The YouTube channel? Why not: surely being anonymous would be a better choice, but there’s a certain appeal to the “hide in plain sight” theory. The various secondary characters formed a pretty diverse cast— a veteran turned artist, a kid and his father, a gay childhood friend and his brother owner of a comics shop… There’s a creepy house, existing on two different levels (I love that kind of atmosphere, those “parallel nightmarish worlds” layered over the normal world). A ruthless killer. Cats who’re more than cats. The stifling surroundings of a small town where just about anyone can be a spy of the witches. And so on.

The problem with the characters, though, were that in spite of their diversity, they were also a bunch of clichés, and not very developed as individuals. Kenway had his own background story and issues, but Leon’s bereavement for instance was just touched upon, and he wasn’t more than “Wayne’s father” in the end. Same with Joel, who felt like a potential sidekick but also like a gay butt-monkey of sorts. These side-stories both took too much room, in a way, while at the same time just being here, instead of being fully exploited (“while we’re here, we might as well…”).

I was hoping to see more of the witches and the killer working for them. While they did create a predicament for the “heroes”, I kept thinking they could and should have done more, been more frightening, brought even more weirdness into the story.

The writing itself was alright (although I found it weird when onomatopoeias were inserted—don’t ask me why I’m sensitive to that). Even though I mentioned having trouble getting back to the book every time I stopped, it wasn’t because of the style.

Really, it’s too bad I didn’t like it more. This book could’ve been right up my alley, but didn’t work for me in the end.

Enregistrer

Yzabel / August 2, 2016

Review: The Body Reader

The Body Reader by Anne Frasier

My rating: [rating=2]

Blurb:

For three years, Detective Jude Fontaine was kept from the outside world. Held in an underground cell, her only contact was with her sadistic captor, and reading his face was her entire existence. Learning his every line, every movement, and every flicker of thought is what kept her alive.

After her experience with isolation and torture, she is left with a fierce desire for justice—and a heightened ability to interpret the body language of both the living and the dead. Despite colleagues’ doubts about her mental state, she resumes her role at Homicide. Her new partner, Detective Uriah Ashby, doesn’t trust her sanity, and he has a story of his own he’d rather keep hidden. But a killer is on the loose, murdering young women, so the detectives have no choice: they must work together to catch the madman before he strikes again. And no one knows madmen like Jude Fontaine.

Review:

[I received a copy of this book through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

For three years, Detective Jude Fontaine was kept under lock, in the dark, abused and malnourished, at the hands of her unknown abductor. With no contact with any other human being than that man, her survival reflexes made her learn to “read” him, in order to stay alive. After she seizes an opportunity to escape, she realises she has retained this ability to “read” other people, booth the living and the dead: even a frozen corpse will still “talk” to her, in its expression, the way its fists are closed, and so on. As she’s trying to go back to her former career as a cop, Jude understands she can use this newfound skill to make things right.

Excellent idea, but one that I thought wasn’t exploited enough throughout the story: we are made to see June “read” her new partner first, then “read” a corpse, yet nothing much happens in that regard after that, and it’s like the body-reading concept got lost along the way, along a more “traditional” thriller story. This was rather too bad, as I would have enjoyed seeing more of Jude’s ability, things that would truly set her apart from “just yet another very talented cop”.

Another problem I had with the story was the moments when Jude tried to figure out how to go back to a normal life, or even if she could: a new flat, maybe getting back with her boyfriend, her tense relationship with her family… All interesting things, but presented in too descriptive a way, rendered too flat: I didn’t “feel” her predicament, I simply read about it, and it just wasn’t the same. I felt more connected to Uriah, who had his own emotional struggles to contend with, but here too the whole thing was more descriptive, not vibrant enough.

Finally, the ending was too neatly wrapped, too quickly, without the kind of intensity I’d expect from the last chapters of a thriller. I could also sense the places where the story was trying to mislead me, yet at the same time the lack of involvement (or, should I rather say, the sideline involvement) of some characters gave a few things away.

I did like, though, how Jude, even though toughened and emotionally withdrawn, went about getting back control of her life by doing something useful, like picking up cold cases, and how the author didn’t fall into the typical trappings of adding some romantic twist in there. Sure, there’s the boyfriend, but this side plot is never presented as an end in itself, never touted as “Jude’s salvation in the arms of a man”, or whatever similar tripe. In the same vein, Jude and Uriah give off a definite “work partners and perhaps friends someday” vibe, not a “and perhaps lovers someday” one.

2 stars: I quite liked some of the themes here, but this remains an “OK” book and nothing more, because it fell flat for me, and because its ideas weren’t developed enough compared to what the blurb had made me expect.

Yzabel / July 13, 2016

Review: The Casquette Girls

The Casquette Girls by Alys Arden

My rating: [rating=2]

Blurb:

Seven girls tied by time.
Five powers that bind.
One curse to lock the horror away.
One attic to keep the monsters at bay.

After the storm of the century rips apart New Orleans, sixteen-year-old Adele Le Moyne wants nothing more than her now silent city to return to normal. But with home resembling a war zone, a parish-wide curfew, and mysterious new faces lurking in the abandoned French Quarter, normal needs a new definition.

As the city murder rate soars, Adele finds herself tangled in a web of magic that weaves back to her own ancestors. Caught in a hurricane of myths and monsters, who can she trust when everyone has a secret and keeping them can mean life or death? Unless . . . you’re immortal.

Review:

[I received a copy of this book through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

I’m not sure exactly how to rate this novel: I really liked the setting (New Orleans), but some of the characters’ features sometimes made me roll my eyes. To be fair, this may be in part due to my own jaded views on similar works: I’ve probably read one too many YA paranormal romance stories, so the usual love triangle and annoying guy attitudes has become old for me. I regret not liking this book more, at any rate.

The setting was definitely enchanting, in a sort of twisted way—twisted because this New Orleans is one slowly getting back on its feet after one of the most devastating hurricanes it’s ever seen (possibly Katrina, or at the least inspired by it). Infrastructures are in shambles, crime’s on the rise, there’s a curfew the police can barely enforce… And while I have no idea if this is an accurate depiction of a post-hurricane city, whether it would’ve been thus left to fend for itself by the government, I still liked that NOLA, for its blend of “post-ap” and people trying to go back to, and go on with, their lives there, keep smiling, keep the businesses running, and so on. Somehow, I could understand Adele’s desire to stay there, and not be shipped off to Paris or somewhere else, all the more since it’d mean being in a boarding school and not with her family. It was still magic.

I also liked the parts about Adeline: a bit awkward in the way it was introduced, maybe (a journal), but her journey, the people she met, the stifling stay in a ship for weeks, knowing a threat was lurking and nobody could just walk away to escape it, those were interesting.

On the downside, the novel relies on quite a few YA tropes that I couldn’t care less about—love triangles, good boy vs. bad boy love interest, female characters being talked about as if they weren’t there and generally being a bit… passive, Queen Bee and Mean Girls at school, and so on. Granted, Adele was not passive for the whole story so I won’t fault her too much for that, and the school part wasn’t the main part; it just felt like the “mandatory YA dynamics being inserted here”, when the actual plot itself could’ve done without that. Mysterious murders, predators waking up, Adeline’s story shedding light on what happened and hinting at what to be done: all those would’ve been fine, no need for a romance subplot (which didn’t have anything special going for it), that slowed down the pace to a crawl in places: I could do with the “slower” chapters used to describe the city and its atmosphere, I could do less with lulls caused by romantic scenes.

Some of the descriptions (told in 1st person) were a bit odd, too—on the purple prose side, and not very believable coming from a 16-year-old girl. I found this happened mostly in the beginning (darkness being described as “the obsidian”, or “espresso-coloured hair”?), and less afterwards. I’m not sure either about the French words and sentences used here and there; some were alright, others sounded grammatically weird. No idea if this is how people in New Orleans do speak, but as a native French reader, it’s strange.

Finally, I felt some subplots and threads were left somehow dangling. For instance, Adele’s mother was thrown in here a bit at random, too close to the end. And I would’ve liked to know a bit more about Cosette and the native girl; did they have offspring or not, and if not, was it to keep the number of characters down? Sometimes it seemed like things happened by coincidence, as plot devices, and not naturally enough to be really believable.

Conclusion: The main plot (monsters and witchcraft, with events originating in the past) was good, even though not the most original ever—it’s less about “being original” and more about “what you make of it” anyway. Yet I didn’t really care about the main characters, nor about the romance.

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