Sunday 31 August 2014

The Dying of the Light

18131799

Book Title: The Dying of the Light
Author: Derek Landy
Series: Skulduggery Pleasant #9
Date Started: August 28th 2014
Date Completed: August 31st 2014
Genres: Fantasy, Adventure, Action, Thriller, Mystery, Comedy, Horror
Rating: Infinite stars
Review:

I don't think I'll ever really be ready to write a review for this book.

Indescribable. Epic. The perfect end.
There's also nothing I can really say without giving the whole thing away.
If you know and love this series, know that it broke its own sky-high standards.
Mr Landy, you are an evil genius, but thank you so much. For everything.

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show/18131799-the-dying-of-the-light

Tuesday 26 August 2014

The Kiss of Deception

18490681

Book Title: The Kiss of Deception
Author: Mary E. Pearson
Series: The Remnant Chronicles #1
Date Started: August 17th 2014
Date Completed: August 26th 2014
Genres: Romance, Adventure, Mystery, Fantasy
Rating: Three stars
Review:


There's been quite a bit of hype recently over this book, and I was really looking froward to picking it up. Unfortunately, however, while I think this story had so much potential, it fell infuriatingly flat of anything exciting and engaging for me.


Lia, the First Daughter of the House of Morrighan, is about to be wed off to secure a political alliance. But in a desperate bid for freedom, she flees on her wedding day, and travels across the country to settle in distant town. But her father won't just forget her defiance, and soon Lia has to be wary of everyone, even the two men lodged in the Inn she works at. But one is an assassin sent to kill her, the other the prince betrothed to her. Can she discover their secrets before it's too late?

The writing had it's fair amount of faults for me. It was very straightforward, which isn't always a bag thing, but I felt like there was actually the baselines of an interesting world, but it's never explored enough to be worth anything.
Furthermore, the narrative just wasn't engaging to me, and each different character sounded exactly the same when they led a chapter. For this reason, I think the book would really have benefitted from a third person perspective, rather than first. This also would have been incredibly useful in the 'who's the assassin, who's the prince' mystery that the book is known for. As it is, it messes up the continuity and characters with a constant, straightforward style in a book that's supposed to be about working out who's who!

Not much actually happens in this book. And that's fair enough, since the main plot device to supposed to be working out the prince and assassin's identity. The problem is, that mystery was solved for me in the first few chapters, because there's very little depth and ingenuity to it. Literally, the first descriptions you get are very obviously pointing to each identity. (Maybe it could've at least tried to give no - or at least little - information about them!)
Something else that really irritated me was the fact that, realistically, Lia should've been dead within the first hundred pages. She's constantly getting followed, and completely unaware of it, and she's constantly doing stupid things. I won't rant, but honestly, she should be dead.
Another problem I had with this book was the vast amounts of information dumping, that wasn't really relevant anyway. The majority of the book is Lia relaying various childhood memories and dragging explanations of a tradition that doesn't end up being very useful. I've already said I had trouble with Lia's narrative, and so going through longish paragraphs about this that and the other just made me skim read, and I actually didn't really absorb any of it.
The continuity also lacked in various places: sometimes Lia was guilty, but the next second she'd be completely fine; she suddenly just knows how to defend herself (don't get me wrong, it's great to have a heroine who can handle herself. But HOW can she handle herself in this situation?).
Oh, and the instant love was just ridiculous.
However - yes there is something that went very well actually - the last pages were brilliant. I considered giving up this book several times while reading it, but I was skim reading most of it, so I was getting through it reasonably fast. I'm very glad that I kept going, because the last few pages were great. Suddenly there was something happening, and the characters finally got conflicted. It is such a shame because if the whole book had been like that, I probably would've given it five stars. (It's now even more annoying because I really want to know what happens next.)

I think, if the characters had had individual personalities and qualities, I might have been won over. But they didn't and I found it really hard to connect to any of them or feel anything towards them apart from annoyance.
I disliked Lia right from the beginning: she seemed bratty and stupid and far too proud. But, at the time that was fair enough, and I was willing to wait for some character development. However, as the story went on, and she continued to be stupid, I pretty much gave up on her. It also really annoyed me that everyone fell in love with her in thirty seconds - she was just too perfect.
Rafe and Kaden blended into each other for me. In fact every character other than the protagonist were there for Lia, and didn't have their own stories or personalities. Neither really showed any indirect remorse or conflict between their duties and what they wanted. And when you really don't get on with the main character and everyone else is pretty much pointless, it makes it very hard to read a book.

Not much happened throughout the whole book, and the only point that that was okay, because of vaguely interesting narrative, was right at the end. But for most of this novel I skim-read because I got bored very easily and just couldn't connect with any of the characters.

While I did not enjoy The Kiss of Deception itself, until the last few pages, I do think future books might achieve the potential available more than the first instalment. To be honest, there's nothing incredibly wrong with the book, it just annoyed me how good it could have been. If you like romance-driven stories and not so much depth in characters and plot, maybe you'll get on with it more than me.

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18490681-the-kiss-of-deception

Tuesday 12 August 2014

The Shock of the Fall

20754586

Book Title: The Shock of the Fall
Author: Nathan Filer
Date Started: August 10th 2014
Date Completed: August 12th 2014
Genres: Contemporary
Rating: Five stars
Review:


I've never read anything quite like The Shock of the Fall, and I'm still not sure how to do justice to it in a review. There's plenty of books out there that try to achieve what Filer's story shows, but no rivals I'm aware of come near to the honesty of presentation in this book. Of course there were little faults here and there. But I was blown away to be honest.


Simon died about ten years ago. Matthew still thinks it's his fault, even when Simon tries to get him to play like old times again. Matthew is schizophrenic, but he's not an idiot. He knows why he's in the ward, why his life is just a repeating cycle. He knows a lot of things, about people, himself and other things, but he doesn't know anything either. So he writes it down instead. And this is what he writes.

I love Filer's writing style. At first I couldn't really pick out what it was about it, and I'm still not entirely sure. But the embedded narration has got to have something to do with it. I'm not a huge fan of first-person narratives because I think they can easily become one-sided and biased and take a lot of potential away from a story. But Filer deliberately used this to show Matthew as a character, but also the cause and affect of everyone around him - which is something really important in a story about mental illness.
The time jumps really helped this as well; not only when Matt skipped parts of his story, but also the little reminders that he's writing retrospectively and the locations he's in at the time. (Even the fonts added to this affect! There was a subtle difference between how he wrote on his typewriter back home, and then the computer at the ward.)
Matthew's character was just built up so well through the writing in my opinion: the repetition, and then confession that he copied and pasted parts just brought his personality to life. Finally, the gradual descent of his style as he got worse and better, and worse again was very well done.

The Shock of the Fall doesn't have a storyline, as such. It's more a string of events and thoughts that slowly develop and change. But, for this reason, everything you read is relevant, and has application to the rest of the novel and the characters. I absolutely loved this: it got rid of the issue that things might have been going slowly and nothing was really happening. Because everything that happened meant something to Matthew. So he wrote it down.
I loved the brutality of the events, and then the tenderness, and the raw honesty. When you can put soppy scenes, and then scary scenes, and disturbing ones, and sad ones etc in the same book and have it work, I don't know how, but it just makes everything so much more interesting and, strangely, realistic.
The ending, whilst not being what I expected at all, fitted really well with the novel as a whole. It's not a big climax, and it's not a big cliff-hanger. It's just enough to tie up some strings, but leave enough hanging. And it's not happy, but it's not sad. It's uncertain. And that sums up the whole thing for me pretty nicely.

I thought all the characters in this book were very realistic, and each added to Matthew's situation and personality, and therefore the story. However, at the same time, they all had their own stories and troubles, which I think is sometimes overlooked, especially in books focusing so heavily on one person's particular struggles. (I also adore the short time we had Annabelle. I loved her character and her reaction to Matt and I just wish there was more of her.)
Matt was a great protagonist. His narrative was so down to earth and it hit home far more than once. This made his character so much easier to relate to, despite the progressive and subtle breakdown in his storytelling (this was also amazing structurally). He therefore seemed far more real, but at the same time I could see his faults where he overlooked things about himself and other people. But sometimes he did too, which, again, endeared his character to me more because it's something that happens so much to myself.

This novel doesn't really have a storyline, but even so I got through the book very quickly. The jumping chapter lengths, while adding a great affect to the narrative, did slow me down a few times. However, the writing is still easily readable.

I kept thinking about my review of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time when writing this, and just like then, I feel like The Shock of the Fall is a book that everyone reads at some point. Not only is it an amazingly interesting book, but it's also incredibly honest and realistic about taboos in society. Everyone should read this. Everyone.

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