Thursday 28 January 2016

Wolf by Wolf

27433569

Book Title: Wolf by Wolf
Author: Ryan Graudin
Series: Wolf by Wolf #1
Date Started: January 24th 2016
Date Completed: January 28th 2016
Genres: Historical, Adventure, Thriller
Quality Rating: Four Stars
Enjoyment Rating: Five Star
Final Rating: Five stars
Review:

◆ Thank you NetGalley for this eBook copy for review ◆

Wolf by Wolf was time well spent when it came to both fun and quality, and actually quite an original idea. But, just like Graudin's The Walled City, there was just something missing for it to completely blow me away - but that alone isn't a good enough reason to deduct stars from such a good book.

This book reminded me how good Ryan Graudin actually is. It feels like she came out of nowhere last year, but actually she's really got a knack for stories, especially when it comes to the darker subjects and showing them appropriately. That word makes it seem almost boring, but I guess it's the way she never simplifies tough parts or patronises the reader, and she never makes you feel uncomfortable just to get across the point that it's a dark subject. She can create realism and a sense of real disgust or fear, but do justice to what the subject is (I'm generalising since the themes I've seen her tackle revery different between this book and The Walled City). And then at the same time, she can mash this all together with some more everyday themes to help the reader settle into the world, without making them feel stupid or out-of-place around the darkness.

In Wolf by Wolf, we're effectively exploring two different characters - one of which we only see through other people's eyes, and the other we gradually learn more and more about as we follow her in the present. From the perspective of structuring that's already really interesting, but when you see how this is built on by the other people and their relationship to the protagonist it adds to the engagement as well - not just cleverness, it actually makes the story more enjoyable, I promise. A huge thing with this book is that you're trying to work out what relationships Adele has with the people around her, and you're solving it right along with Yael who's taken her place without them knowing. The people themselves were interesting (if a little conventional), but seeing these really intimate partnerships through a stranger's eyes without really knowing how to react almost forces you into Yael's situation - you want to know what these relationships are, but neither of you are entirely sure. And we never get a definitive answer for a lot of them, which I also really liked (it felt like events just didn't turn in a direction where we'd find out, as opposed to being deliberately led away from the truth to make you come back for more books).
The orchestration of the ending was also really well done. Like I've mentioned, I wasn't blown away at any point in this book, but I was still so invested and engaged with what was going on. Throughout the whole thing you suspect that things are going to go in various directions, and even by the end you're right on the edge of your seat trying to guess ahead of the action - and the climax doesn't disappoint. It 'resolved' the plot of this book well enough (so it didn't seem pointless that we'd just read through 400 pages) but there are so many things left open to solve and explore.

While I'd like to say this is a character story, I think it's actually more about their relationships than them as individuals - so it obviously is quite dependant on the ensemble. Having said that, there were only really a few important recurring characters and I could see how they mirrored quite a few that have come before.
Yael/Adele (okay, it's definitely Yael, but part of me feels like so much of what happens is dependant on Adele's life that I might as well mention her name) was a great protagonist. Again, she didn't have the most unique backstory, but her actions in the book itself were good enough to win me over. She's exactly the kind of person you'd want to root for in a competition like the Axis Tour - though I have to say, I didn't see that much difference between her and Adele when it came down to it, and apparently everyone buys her character 'transformation' pretty quickly.
Que the male interest: Luka Löwe. There was a point near the beginning where I thought Luka was really bad news, and I got quite excited about potential conflict looming on the horizon. Turns out, he's actually a reasonably decent guy - which doesn't bother me too much considering Graudin could have gone down the path of 'tortured and attractive' lover. Thankfully he's more than that - not ground-breakingly different, but enough so.
Also que protective brother: Flex Wolfe. So maybe he's not the protective brother of the actual protagonist, but he's Adele's twin, so half there I guess. Again, different enough from the convention to be interesting enough as a character, but close enough to have to mention it. I really liked the relationship he had with 'Adele', and the fact he was more protective in the way that he wasn't going to give up trying to help her, as opposed to just punching anyone that came near her. He also had a genuine conflict with her, not just sibling bickering, but actual - sometimes quite bitter - arguments about what she was doing. Like I said, interesting enough, but bordering on cliche.

Graudin managed to avoid the episodic structure common in road trip stories (though labelling it that does narrow its full quality) and so the story flowed really nicely for me - even with regular flashbacks. Non-linear timelines with road trip genres tend to be a bit hard for me to read since they never quite settle: it always feels like we're stopping and starting and never actually seeing enough for the story from any angle. Wolf by Wolf thankfully doesn't have this problem since Graudin's mastered the gradual introduction of relevant exposition without distracting from the main story, only building on it from the past.

Though I enjoyed Graudin's last book, I was a little apprehensive at the idea of yet another WW2 story (if you can call this that) with slightly far-fetched science fiction elements; but Wolf by Wolf brought something new and engaging to the table for me and blended far more themes than just the historical ones. I'm really looking forward to where this series is going, and I'm going to have high hopes when the sequel comes out.

Image Source https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27433569-wolf-by-wolf

Sunday 24 January 2016

Magonia

23215491

Book Title: Magonia
Author: Maria Dahvana Headley
Series: Magonia #1
Date Started: January 17th 2016
Date Completed: January 24th 2016
Genres: Contemporary, Fantasy, Romance
Quality Rating: Four Stars
Enjoyment Rating: Three Star
Final Rating: Three stars
Review:

Magonia is a good book, honestly, but I just didn't enjoy it as I'd hoped. I can see why there was some hype around it last year, and it's really great that there is something quite imaginative and crazy in a different way in the Young Adult genre - but I feel like I've read better versions. The main reason I picked this book up was because I had heard it was unlike anything people had read before, but in the end that just wasn't what I feel I got.

There wasn't any particular beauty in the writing for me, even though there's definitely beautiful aspects of the world - but its more the literal mechanics of Magonia as opposed to how it's shown to us. Having said that, there isn't so much world building, but just a world we're shoved into. The fantastical world wasn't really explained at any point. This is fine in magical realism (which this it, I guess, at a push), but because of how straightforward the first half of the book had been, I felt like I was missing something.
One thing that's quite unrelated, but I have to mention because it was the one thing that actually irritated me past being disappointed, was the mismatch between the characters' narration and behaviour. It's not that uncommon to find first-person perspectives that contradict the character you get acting in the story, but at so many points in this book people are well aware that they're being used or tricked or misled, but they act like they have literally no awareness of this happening - when they've actually said in their narration the opposite!

This book was rushed for me. It's quite a small book as it is, and I wandered how quite a long timeline could be squished into it, and it became clear that it wasn't really in the end. It is, essentially, because this is the story of Aza and Jason. There's supposedly a main plot line, but actually it just comes down to them. We spend a lot of time (the whole first half) getting to know Aza and Jason in our world, and it feels just like the contemporary genre. And then suddenly we're shoved into the fantasy, but it didn't quite flow. It was quite close to the end of the book that I actually felt us settle into this new world, and even then it still felt very much like a contemporary teenage storyline. Yes, there's a big twist but I didn't feel like I was reading anything particularly new.
It also came across that everything that had come before in the first half of the book was almost redundant past letting us know how much more important the two protagonists were than the world we've been thrown into. Likewise, the climax was about them. I don't usually mind character-based stories, but when we're not even shown what happens to everyone else, and don't see the consequences on the world (especially in something with so much involvement of a fantasy world) it just feels like it hasn't been taken completely seriously - I'm sure that's not what Headley meant, but I have to admit that's what I felt.

Looking back on how this book panned out, I realise that most of the characters ended up being irrelevant. I have no doubt that they'll be brought in later in the series to create some sort of conflict, but in Magonia itself (which actually ties itself up pretty neatly at the end) they didn't do much. Or maybe I wasn't interested in them enough to notice the little things they did.
Aza I had high hopes for, but she unfortunately fell a bit flat. She started off quite protective, isolated and seemingly strong from pushing herself to do this, and so I thought she would have some interesting reactions when all hell broke loose. But the way she reacted to everything when things did start happening (which sadly wasn't dramatic enough to be all hell breaking loose) didn't ring very true to realistic for me. This comes into the feeling that the book became rushed, but she settles and then changes her mind with considerable ease throughout the whole story, and doesn't seem to be that uncertain in her actions in the long run.

Magonia had quite a slow start for me, and then felt rushed when it came to the second half of the book. Admittedly, I'm not a huge fan of contemporary stories, and it is very firmly set in our world to start with - in fact there's a very distinguishable separation between the first half, and then being thrown into the fantasy in the second half. I think it came down to the fact that fantasy as a genre just needs a little more time to develop a believable landscape for characters to act in - whereas we can quite quickly slip into contemporary because we're aware of how our own world works - but we got almost a smaller section for the fantastical part of the story.

I really wouldn't say Magonia is unlike anything ever before (I could list the 'chosen one' references; someone feeling isolated and actually belonging in another world; romance between two teenagers coming between wars; people being dead but not being dead etc), but it is something a little bit different for its target audience. The reason I'm not that happy calling it an innovation is that I don't think assuming YA audiences are only aware of YA stories is true, and Magonia definitely combines a thousand different stories together - sometimes quite messily - but I do understand the allure of it. But someone adding a little quirky imagination to YA literature doesn't mean it's groundbreaking.

Image Source https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23215491-magonia

Saturday 16 January 2016

Fire Study


Book Title: Fire Study
Author: Maria V. Snyder
Series: The Chronicles of Ixia #3
Date Started: January 15th 2016
Date Completed: January 16th 2016
Genres: Fantasy, Adventure, Romance, Action
Quality Rating: Three Stars
Enjoyment Rating: Two Star
Final Rating: Two stars
Review:

Maybe this star rating is a bit harsh: to be honest this book is okay, but it's just so boring. I was never irritated by anything that happened, but it was all just so flat and dull. I have to say, I was disappointed with the first two books in this series, but with Snyder's reputation I thought I should continue, but really it's not worth the time it takes to read.

Something I love about the fantasy genre is its ability to go all out with the rich and magical imagery and systems, but I've never really got that from Snyder's books. The prose is actually very dry; there's barely any description and it's incredibly straightforward. While I understand the desire to avoid over-complicated fantasy politics and world building, it is pretty boring to just be told that someone walked to the other side of the room and then said something and then looked out the window. Just something with a little more impact and expansion would make everything more interesting.

As I was reading Fire Study I kept falling into the assumption that it was a book aimed at a younger audience than it is. I've already talked about the straight forward writing style, but I also kept getting the feeling that I was supposed to be taking it seriously, yet the book itself wasn't taking itself seriously. Things are written on the page but that's it. Politics is around, but is feels like it's just two groups of people fighting; magic is a big part of the story but there isn't really a system to it; there's friendships but only to further the plot or show how much everyone loves Yelena. World-building is so important in high fantasy, but things feel like they're developed as we go along. I mean, Snyder does well at avoiding a lot of YA conventions (apart from having her characters pass out to change the scene), but doesn't exactly offer many new innovations either.

Fire Study's characters are all very passive. What I keep coming up against is that everything is just so uninteresting. I don't know how you can have a story without believable conflict, and believable conflict with characters that are so passive and seem to solve any problem within a few pages.
Yelena is an okay protagonist, like everything in this book, but I can't really see any development over all three of the books - if anything she's a lot more passive than what was kind of a typical rebellious teenager at the beginning of the series. And again, it's not horrific (there are much, much worse female leads out there) but I'm just brought back to that disappointment of how this series was carried out.

I got through Fire Study very quickly and there's no denying that things are definitely moving, and from the amount of action scenes shoved in there's clear movement in the storyline. It was just I didn't really care because everything was just so dull. I ended up skimming most of this book pretty fast - and the fact that I still knew what was going on proves how straightforward (and dull) it is.

The Ixia Chronicles in general just feel so flat for me. There's so much you can do with the high fantasy genre, but I just can't feel any substance to these books. I'm also pretty sure Fire Study was originally the end of a trilogy before Snyder went on to release more books - but it's not much of a finale. It's a real shame because I really do believe there's potential in the world and characters - perhaps it does get better in the new sequels.

Image Source - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7170750-fire-study

Friday 15 January 2016

The Road

4770168

Book Title: The Road
Author: Cormac McCarthy
Date Started: January 4th 2016
Date Completed: January 14th 2016
Genres: Dystopian
Quality Rating: Four Stars
Enjoyment Rating: Three Star
Final Rating: Three stars
Review:

The problem I have with this book is that really it's good - I appreciate what it sets out to show and the way it gets there - but can I think of a way that justifies it as being the entirety of a book? Not really.

Around the first few pages of this book I noticed how much I enjoyed the writing style: a stream-of-consciousness narrative that was third person and constantly tricking the reader but also showing the mindset eating away at the characters. As I read on I noticed all the clever little techniques that make us feel like we are the people in this dystopia. but when I was reading, I just wasn't enjoying it. What it comes down to is why you read: I, personally, do it because I love it and I enjoy it. That doesn't mean I'm not open to books that are maybe more complex and beneficial in some other philosophical way, but just having a 'clever' book that doesn't actually amount to any message or question is not what I'm looking for.

While The Road is very much about getting the reader to project themselves onto these characters going through these horrible circumstances, the rare events that actually happen are strangely repetitive. Everything that happens either shows how evil the world is, or how kind-hearted the boy is; and everything that happens is pretty much the same situation. Now this would've been completely fine with me had it pushed the characters to change, or had really amounted to anything in the end. But it just kept repeating with no message or development until the end. Likewise, I expected the references to a backstory to somehow influence something, or be significant at some point, but it just faded away halfway through the book and that was that.
Honestly, I had more of a problem with the structure of this book than the bleakness and content. I know a lot of people find the harrowing story quite hard to stomach (and fair enough) but I found the world and story so disjointed I didn't really get a chance to get deep enough in the dystopia to be sickened by it.

I think the initial characters we're given are a really interesting choice, but there is little to no development throughout the whole book. These nameless people are clearly made for the reader to project themselves onto: the innocent child distressed by the harshness of what the world has become, and the adult desperately trying to find it in himself to keep going. Both are things everyone can relate to in our everyday lives, despite being in considerably better situations, and I think the purpose of this book as a whole is to make the reader think while tricking them with a story about two characters going through certain events. It's clever, there's no denying that. But did it make for an enjoyable or beneficial reading experience? For me, unfortunately, no. Part of why I'm conflicted about The Road is that I can see how in theory it works - but when I was reading it it just didn't come across as well.

The pacing wasn't so much the issue as the structure: I can handle long passages going in circles to show how life is for these people, but when the rare moments of action happen I expect them to build up to something as opposed to continually repeating the same thing with no message or influence at the end of it. One thing I will say is don't be tricked by the short paragraphs and font size: this book is a stream-of-consciousness without punctuation for speech and so takes a little more brainpower to keep up with the present. (Again, I find myself noticing the clever little ways McCarthy puts the reader literally into the characters' shoes, but as a reading experience I just didn't really settle with it.)

I appreciated The Road for what it was, but it wasn't enough for me. There seemed to be no point to anything - which, admittedly, is kind of the point. But I read to enjoy and learn, not to be shown how bleak a dystopian setting can be for the sake of it. I still think it's an interesting read, but it needs patience and an open mind.

Image Source - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4770168-the-road

Friday 1 January 2016

The Battle for WondLa

18454480

Book Title: The Battle for WondLa
Author: Tony DiTerlizzi
Series: WondLa #3
Date Started: December 28th 2015
Date Completed: December 31st 2015
Genres: Adventure, Sci-Fi
Quality Rating: Four Stars
Enjoyment Rating: Four Star
Final Rating: Four stars
Review:

I've been meaning to finish this series for a while, and I thought squeezing it in just before the end of the year was going to be a good idea since there's a nice mix between full-page illustrations and text. This turned out to be quite a bad idea when I kept getting distracted by the stunning artwork, but it gives credit to the quality of these books and I managed to marathon the last couple of hundred pages just in time to end 2015 on a good note.

While DiTerlizzi is talented as an author, it would be entirely unfair of me to not mention his stunning work as an illustrator. While he doesn't quite have the synchronicity of Brian Selznick when it comes to telling his stories partly in images, DiTerlizzi does have a talent for fully capturing these strange new worlds beautifully to enhance whatever he happens to be writing about. Having also grown up with The Spiderwick Chronicles, I've really enjoyed seeing how his style has evolved and changed and his particular work with limited colour schemes found in each of the WondLa books is astounding in its effect.
But besides that DiTerlizzi is a great writer, especially for younger audiences. Something I especially noticed in this book was the way the species politics and diversity of Orbona was presented in an accessible way for children. I sometimes get bored with one-dimensional societies created in children's books - that are made to be understood by younger readers, fair enough. But DiTerlizzi creates actually what could be seen as quite a complex system between clans and species, but doesn't overcomplicate relations, or patronise readers with its simplicity.

I was really happy to see harmony in nature playing a really big part in this story, as it has with the entire series. It's really nice when books for younger readers take subjects adults don't actually talk about a lot and explores them in an exciting way: we tend to hear moans and criticism when a story talks about 'saving the planet' and 'the impact of humankind on spirituality' etc, but the WondLa series discusses this in a very subtle way. It doesn't feel like we're being preached to about our impact on the planet, we're just being shown a way that a certain person found to live with both nature and humans (and a whole assortment of aliens, but you get my point). To then have this combined with the importance of family being the people you care about as opposed to blood was lovely. I also felt like Eva really was searching for harmony with nature as opposed to survival for the human race: you get the feeling that she would've accepted a reality where humans had to stop being on the planet if that had been the only way.
The one big let-down for me was that I didn't really feel moved by anything, and I didn't really sense the chance in tension or pace at any point. I could tell I was at the climax when I noticed there were very few pages left to read, but the drama didn't really hit me; I felt like I was reading a forward-progressing plot as opposed to a the build-up to the end of a series. This might also have been influenced by the fact that there are a few loose ends I expected to be resolved. There were some people I thought would come back so they could make amends, or for Eva to overcome certain personal obstacles, that just didn't happen. Though having said that, the resolution was perfectly adequate and ultimately ended the trilogy on a nice note.
I also think DiTerlizzi made really nice use of the epilogue. In my experience, epilogues can often be used to detail everything that happens to the protagonists after the story in a last-ditch attempt to show you that they lived happily ever after or that their actions had some kind of impact and ultimately to prove to you how great they were at saving the world (can you guess what genre I'm thinking of). But this epilogue wasn't about that: we got hints about how Eva and the others played out the rest of their lives, but it's more about showing the impact of time on history, and how events and then stories and then myths echo down through centuries and all the subtext and symbolism behind that.

In a story as diverse (species-wise) as this, it's really important to give meaning and personalities to the various creatures you meet along the way of your adventure. Luckily we get this from certain individuals, though I have to say in the grand scheme of things I don't think each alien species had a particularly distinguishable persona around them (apart from the odd accent) - though this didn't negatively impact the story that much.
Something so wonderfully about this series is that it really is Eva Nine's story. She gains help from so many people along the way, and earns the trust and respect of them too, but it really is down to her and her courage, kindness and intelligence that she succeeds. Personally, I found it so refreshing to have a protagonist in a children's book that gained help from others, but was indisputably the hero of their own story. She's incredibly different from all those around her because of her intuition and care about the world, and a reason why I wasn't too annoyed by her gaining magical powers was that it was basically a physical manifestation of who she was: she can now understand the creatures and plants around her, but she could practically do that to start with anyway.

I thought The Battle for WondLa was well structured to keep progression in the story, but not fly through the plot. Potentially, the events Eva is in could be carried out very quickly, but we get to see her relationships and development in between the climactic sections of the book. Admittedly, I didn't really get caught up in the drama of it all, but I was still able to get through this book pretty fast despite its length.

The WondLa trilogy is great for any younger readers that are perhaps interested in stepping up their reading into full-length novels, but is equally enjoyable for older ages too. Of course, fans of DiTerlizzi's work in The Spiderwick Chronicles should pick up his most recent novels since they're definitely different enough to be worth the read, but also have that safe familiarity.

Image Source - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18454480-the-battle-for-wondla