The Book Lode (18)

There are quite a few memes to choose from now for showing the books we've gotten recently, so I thought to be fair I'd link my posts up to a different meme each month. I'm grouping the posts under the name "The Book Lode," and this month I'm linking up to Stacking the Shelves, hosted by Tynga's Reviews.



For review:

Contagion by Tim Lebbon
Hero by Alethea Kontis
Rogue by Gina Damico
The Shade of the Moon by Susan Beth Pfeffer
Stained by Cheryl Rainfield
New Money by Lorraine Zago Rosenthal (New Adult)

Thanks very much to PYR Books, Thomas Allen & Son, and St. Martin's Press!

Shatter Me: A Panoramic Review

"Juliette hasn’t touched anyone in exactly 264 days.

The last time she did, it was an accident, but The Reestablishment locked her up for murder. No one knows why Juliette’s touch is fatal. As long as she doesn’t hurt anyone else, no one really cares. The world is too busy crumbling to pieces to pay attention to a 17-year-old girl. Diseases are destroying the population, food is hard to find, birds don’t fly anymore, and the clouds are the wrong color.

The Reestablishment said their way was the only way to fix things, so they threw Juliette in a cell. Now so many people are dead that the survivors are whispering war – and The Reestablishment has changed its mind. Maybe Juliette is more than a tortured soul stuffed into a poisonous body. Maybe she’s exactly what they need right now.

Juliette has to make a choice: Be a weapon. Or be a warrior." (from Goodreads)

Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi

My reaction: 

Before I read Shatter Me, I know I saw comments about its shaky dystopian world-building...and I am inclined to agree that yes, it isn't all that realistic. There's a lot going on in terms of explanations for how the world is now, and I'm not sure how everything jives together scientifically.

The narrator Juliette is an interesting character, although I didn't totally connect with her. She's quietly intense most of the time, but not afraid to speak her mind when she wants to. She's also very dramatic and angsty. Granted, the situations she finds herself in are not enviable ones (like being imprisoned and told to torture people), but I have the feeling she could find drama anywhere. She spends a lot of time whining about her past as well as her present situation. We know she's been treated badly, and obviously that's gotta suck for her, but she makes all these really BOLD statements that end up feeling a bit repetitive. And Juliette doesn't really have much of a sense of humour. There is not a lot of laughing-and-having-fun to be found here.

That said, I found the Juliette-Adam relationship sweet; I like that the two of them have a history and connection. Warner's creepy and complex; it's very clear he likes power, and he can do stuff in cold blood, pushing emotions aside. Still, he seems to have some kind of longing for Juliette in a way. It's frustrating, though, that they spend much of the book battling back and forth without either of them really getting anywhere.

Best aspect: The importance of human touch to Juliette is described really well. It's something that most people don't think about, but she does because she isn't able to touch other people most of the time. That's why Adam is so important — his touch amazes and thrills her (and this isn't just a sexual thing, but also the fact that nobody else will touch her with skin-to-skin contact). The whole idea of the kinds of emotions that human touch can evoke in people and the comfort it can bring is illustrated effectively here, albeit in a somewhat dramatic fashion. (The idea of Juliette not being able to touch people, and thinking of herself as a monster, is overplayed somewhat.)

 

If I could change something... Well, there's a couple things I'd do. One would be to make the society's progression to this state clearer (and make sure it was scientifically valid). 

Another would be to make the villain more, well, villainous. Warner is extraordinarily patient, taking a long time to try to get what he wants. He has that cocky, know-it-all attitudes villains sometimes have that I find very annoying. I always hate it when villains are too overconfident. And I feel like Juliette's significance in the big picture is overstated — don't they have other ways of torturing people, after all? Why is she so important?

I also found the ending disappointing; while there is a climactic part that's cool, the resolution drags on for too long and then the book just sort of ends. I was expecting a big bang! surprise kind of ending, leaving the reader hanging, and thought it was strange that instead there was just a lengthy denouement.

If you haven't read it: and you like dystopian YA books that are heavy on the romantic angle and less so on the world-building logic, Shatter Me might be your cup of tea.

If you have read it: did you like Juliette as a narrator, or did you find her a little too angsty and self-focused, as I did?

Just one more thing I wanted to mention: The writing was over-dramatic for my typical tastes, abundant in metaphors and symbolism. There's definitely a poetic, literary bent to Juliette's narration. The writing style of words being slashed out — representing Juliette's innermost thoughts, such as what she's afraid to say or how she truly interprets what someone says — is an interesting device, although a little odd to read. It's neat, though, to see a YA author messing with the bounds of traditional writing style.

Final verdict: 3.5 shooting stars.

August "New Adult" Reviews: Link Them Up Here!

Participants in the "New Adult" reading challenge, if you have NA reviews from August, here's your chance to link them up! And to everyone else: if you have not yet signed up for the NA Challenge but want to participate, don't stress — you can still sign up here :)

The Secret Keeper: A Close-Up Review (Adult)

"The new novel from the New York Times and internationally bestselling author of The Distant Hours is a spellbinding mix of mystery, thievery, murder, and enduring love.

During a party at the family farm in the English countryside, sixteen-year-old Laurel Nicolson has escaped to her childhood tree house and is dreaming of the future. She spies a stranger coming up the road and sees her mother speak to him. Before the afternoon is over, Laurel will witness a shocking crime that challenges everything she knows about her family and especially her mother, Dorothy.

Now, fifty years later, Laurel is a successful and well-regarded actress, living in London. She returns to the family farm for Dorothy’s ninetieth birthday and finds herself overwhelmed by questions she has not thought about for decades. From pre-WWII England through the Blitz, to the fifties and beyond, discover the secret history of three strangers from vastly different worlds—Dorothy, Vivien, and Jimmy—who meet by chance in wartime London and whose lives are forever entwined.

The Secret Keeper explores longings and dreams, the lengths people go to fulfill them, and the consequences they can have. It is a story of lovers, friends, dreamers, and schemers told—in Morton’s signature style—against a backdrop of events that changed the world." (Goodreads)

The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton

Characters:

Dolly: Dolly was a very darkly intriguing sort of character. Her constant need to move up the social ladder, her grasping, manipulative nature and selfish desire to get what she wanted at the cost of others' happiness was positively fascinating from a psychological perspective. One of the other characters points out that she has a bit of a narcissistic streak, and I'd say she also has a tendency to histrionic personality disorder — she likes to be the center of attention (at least in some ways) and certainly likes to think of herself as glamorous. Plus, she's very good at imagining what she wishes her life was like and then living in the fantasy she's concocted (spoiler, highlight to read: she makes up this friendship with the rich woman who lives across the street, Vivien, and in reality they're never really friends). But she takes it way too far, and when reality comes and pokes a hole in this dream world she gets very vengeful, because she doesn't like being brought face to face with the fact that she's still pretty much "nobody." Dolly always wants to be somebody special; she never felt she belonged in her family (and I did feel sorry for her about that, at least when she was younger) and this festers inside her, ultimately turning her into a very, very unlikeable person. It's disgusting what she tries to pull in order to gain a foothold in society. Her pathetic desperation actually causes a lot of harm — the fall-out is greater than even she anticipated.

Vivien: I really liked Vivien and wish we'd gotten even more of her story, but the glimpses we are given are fantastic. I would have liked to have seen a little more of why she ended up marrying a certain man (spoiler: her abusive husband), as Morton only really skims the surface of her motivations (spoiler: her need for punishment). I thought this explanation was a bit too convenient and pat, too much like "pop psychology" rather than actually exploring greater depths of Vivien's psyche. What we do see of Vivien, though, is a very strong person — as a child she loved nature and her family, and she became drained and depressed after a certain incident (spoiler: everyone in her family died, and she blamed herself). Jimmy sort of brings her back to life, and they certainly share a connection and spark.

Jimmy: he's a really good-hearted, honourable kind of guy, and it was frustrating to watch him be so in love with Dolly when it was obvious he deserved so much better. I thought he and Vivien were much more suited to each other than he and Dolly were.

Laurel: her search for the truth was understandable and I particularly liked the younger Laurel (the older one I couldn't identify as well with). I admired that she was so persistent in finding out the truth despite the fact that she was investigating her own mom. Laurel kept on going even though everything she was discovering was bad news, and then in the end she was rewarded for her search.

Setting:

There are a few settings in here, but it primarily alternates between present-day and 1940s England. Kate Morton's writing really shines in the historical sections; she manages to capture the mood of the times in a way that feels very authentic and puts you right smack-dab in the era she's portraying. The language she chooses is evocative of the time period, and the writing manages to give the reader a sense of wartime life — the outfits they wore, the gritty atmosphere of rationing — without getting bogged down in description. While WWII settings have been done to death in a lot of novels, and there is nothing particularly unique in Kate Morton's depiction, she captures it well.

I admit, the contemporary storyline didn't grab me the same way; I always wanted to get back to the historical. While they meshed together well enough, I think they didn't depend on each other as much as the interweaving storylines of the other Kate Morton novel I've read, The Forgotten Garden. I feel like the past storyline was telling us most of what we needed to know anyway, so the contemporary one didn't feel that necessary. But I did like the idea of Laurel conducting this search to get to the bottom of this mystery, because she was quite young when she witnessed her mom killing someone (not really a spoiler, as it happens very early on) so there was definitely a compelling reason for her to investigate.

Plot:

There's a twist towards the end that I didn't guess at all! Spoiler: the twist of Vivien switching identities totally jived with the observation that Laurel's mom seemed so different from how she "used to be" — since her mom wasn't Dolly after all.

The way things turn out has a slight bittersweet quality (spoiler: Jimmy and Vivien don't end up together, despite their compatibility; they both end up marrying other people) but it's a relatively happy ending with some karmic justice (spoiler: Dolly unexpectedly dies in a bombing and Vivien's ex-husband is, of course, killed by Vivien).

Final verdict: 4.5 shooting stars. I'm very glad I've found Kate Morton as an author because her writing style and plots are one of the few in adult fiction that appeal to me. I really enjoyed the psychology in here, particularly in the twisted character of Dolly.

Disclaimer: I received an ARC of this book as part of Atria Books' Galley Alley.

July "New Adult" Reviews — Link Them Up Here!

Sorry this post is up so late this month! Participants in the "New Adult" reading challenge, if you have NA reviews from July, here's your chance to link them up. And to everyone else: if you have not yet signed up for the NA Challenge but want to participate, don't stress — you can still sign up here! :)