Anna and the French Kiss

Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I didn't expect to like this book as much as I did, and I mean that in the best possible way. I don't normally read contemporary romances, much less YA contemporary romances. But this book was utterly charming, a lovely little teen fantasy. I gobbled it up like so much candy.

This is another example of "Bookstagram made me do it!" I snatched a free copy of this book on my Kindle a week or two ago, and started reading it on the train as something I figured would be easy and fast. I was right about the easy and fast - this was the first book I've read in a long time that gave me the couldn't-put-it-down feels.

The plot moves quickly through Anna Oliphant's senior year at an American boarding school in Paris. She (predictably) falls in love with her popular and adorable classmate, Etienne St. Clair, an American-French boy with a British accent and perfect hair. But their love story is mostly about how they become best friends, and then how they resolve their feelings for each other in the midst of being horrible to their other friends and love interests. It's all very teen drama, but I found it realistic instead of manufactured. Anna and St. Clair both act exactly how I'd expect 17 and 18 year olds to act. And their budding friendship-turned-love is something I've experienced with the same welter of confusion and terror of ruining a good thing.

The other characters in the novel were not entirely multidimensional, but they were still compellingly realistic. Paris was described in such a way that I could feel its atmosphere and taste its cuisine. The pacing was decent, and obviously I was drawn in to Anna's world enough that I wanted to keep reading after each chapter ended.

The only thing keeping this a four star review instead of five was the neatness of the ending being a bit too Happily Ever After for me. Everyone seems to get what they want (or need) and no character is left upset. That's probably fine, but it leaves me rolling my eyes just a bit.

Anyway! My one word for this book is CHARMING and I'm sticking with it.



View all my reviews

Steeplejack

Steeplejack by A.J. Hartley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"We say we are all equal in Bar-Selehm, but you know as well as I do that that is not even close to being true. You cannot simply take people's land, property, freedom from them and then, a couple of hundred years later, when you have built up your industries and your schools and your armies, pronounce them equals. And even when you pretend it is true, you do not change the hearts of men, and a great deal of small horrors have to be ignored, hidden, if they myth of equality is to be sustained."

Steeplejack is set in a fantasy version of Victorian-era South Africa, complete with all of the racism you'd imagine such a setting would contain. Ang, the main character, is a teenage girl from the slums on the edge of Bar-Selehm. She's an unwanted third daughter, but she's found a living working as the only female steeplejack in the Seventh Street gang - so basically she climbs chimneys and fixes/cleans them. The story follows her as she discovers her new apprentice has been murdered as part of an elaborate plot Ang is driven to find the source of.

Steeplejack being published in 2016 (and my reading it after the 2016 US presidential election) feels very timely. I chose the above quote to help sum up the book because this fantasy is really about a very real problem: historic tensions between people based on the color of their skin. There are protests in the city and attempts to incite international incidents. And at the heart of everything is a struggle among the elite for power and money.

Ang's personal struggles are dramatic, but relateable. She's still grieving for her father two years after his death. She wants to get along with her sisters, both distant from her for very different reasons. She feels guilty for removing herself from her own culture, but disagrees with the heart of their rules. She's self-sufficient, but insecure. She's invested in helping those too weak to be able to help themselves, but she questions the effect on her own life.

Hartley's writing style is mostly gripping. I am seriously jealous of his ability to sketch out side characters in a few sentences to the point where I feel like they are complete people I can see and hear. I understand their motivations without their being flat characters. He has an excellent sense of pacing and I found myself eagerly flipping to the next chapter to find out what happened next. But there was a lot of info dumping in the beginning of the book relating the history of the city that I felt he could have easily conveyed as the facts became especially relevant. I also had some difficulty understanding Ang's motivations at times - for a seventeen year old girl, she's unusually responsible and ... patriotic? I'm not sure what the word would be, but she often does things in defiance of her own survival to preserve the city.

My biggest disappointment (view spoiler)[ (and this is a silly thing, I will admit) is that I thought Ang and Dahria had AMAZING chemistry and when Ang announced they were going to solve a murder together, my mind immediately flashed on how amazing a slow burn relationship between them could be. Alas, no such luck. It seems instead that Ang is interested in Dahria's brother, her employer Willinghouse. That's fine. I liked the whole Mnenga storyline, and I liked that romance was not a major part of the story in any way. I can see being interested in a future relationship angle with Willinghouse, so I'm not TOO disappointed. (hide spoiler)]

Overall, I was pleased with my decision to read this. It had none of the usual YA tropes I dislike, and the diversity it portrayed was compelling. I'm eager for the sequel!

View all my reviews

Dandelion Wine

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Ray Bradbury is an emperor among wordsmiths. This book provides so much evidence for his place on my pedestal of writers I love and admire and I know I can never match his inestimable talents. As I read Dandelion Wine, I tried to note the particular places where Bradbury's use of language impressed me the most - but I had to stop when I realized I'd be noting something on every single page of this deceptively slim volume.

Dandelion Wine is a contradictory book. It seems to be about a summer in Green Town, Illinois experienced by twelve year old Doug Spaulding. Really, it's about life and death and everything found in between. Two scenes bookend everything else that happens. At the beginning of the summer of 1928, Doug has a sudden realization that he is alive. And as summer dies, so too does Doug realize that he will someday die as well. Doug sets out to record his discoveries that summer with the aid of his younger brother Tom, as well as the many residents of Green Town.

The book unfolds slowly in a series of vignettes all painted with Bradbury's best language. My favorites were: the heartbreakingly sad story of soul mates separated by time, the inevitable death of the old colonel who just wanted to hear the sounds of his past lives one more time, and the departure from Green Town of Doug's friend John Huff. But every story told was familiar to me, like memories of my own life I'd somehow forgotten. The book relates the sort of American childhood spent roaming the town's neighborhoods and playing fast and loose with one's imagination that I experienced.

To sum up, this book felt like the perfect glass of lemonade, tart and sweet and sometimes so cold I could feel literal chills running down my spine. And in the end, I remember it as pure deliciousness. A feast for the senses. Five clear stars from me for this beautiful book.

View all my reviews

A Court of Mist and Fury

A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I hated A Court of Thorns and Roses. But I decided to read this sequel because so many people have told me how good it is, and Maas has a fairly stellar reputation among readers of YA fantasy.

Having now finished A Court of Mist and Fury I can't say I'm sorry I read it. I liked it enough that I will probably pick up A Court of Wings and Ruin from the library when it comes out. But I don't mind confessing that spending time on this series stems mostly from fear of missing out on something everyone else seems to love, not my own genuine enjoyment.

So, let's get to the nitty gritty, shall we? I took A LOT of notes while I read this book. And I'm going to address as many of them as I can.

First, why the three star review? I gave ACOTAR one star because I couldn't give it zero. But ACOMAF I'm giving three.

- One star for characters because FINALLY there are interesting secondary characters. I liked the Court of Dreams quite a bit, and especially Amren with her ominous backstory. I liked the Weaver and the Suriel and the Bone Carver, all interesting and slightly frightening. And I even liked the Summer Lord Tarquin who would be so easy to fall in love with. I hope we get to see more of him and that he proves to be as seemingly complex as the much beloved Rhysand. I'm being kind with the full star here though because so many of Maas's characters are still quite flat or cliche. See: Ianthe, the mortal queens, Jurian, the king of Hybern... I see a pattern here of Maas having a difficult time making her true antagonists complex and believable.

- One star for readability. I'm sighing and rolling my eyes at myself as I say this, but this book did manage to grab my interest and pull me in after Feyre leaves the Spring Court for the Night Court. Finally Maas gave me the action sequences and travel across Prythian I desired.

- Half a star for setting. Maas's world building is still quite thin (stereotypical medieval Europe setting, very little Fae mythology, no big cultural differences between the mortal and immortal worlds), but it was so much better than the first book.

- Half a star for plot. Maas spends way too much time lingering over details that have NOTHING to do with the plot. (For example, the number of times I knew every stitch of what Feyre was wearing was frankly unforgiveable.) Most of time I feel like she is writing the script for a TV/movie with how much attention she gives to describing pretty scenes that seem purely atmospheric or just fan wish-fulfillment.

There we go. Three stars.

Now I'm going to get into my notes... This will probably be mostly for my own reference later, so expect some rambling. And ranting. >.>

Right, Maas gets no style points for me because of the following:
- the number of times she used the verb "barked"
- the number of hyphenated colors (dawn-pink, blue-grey, sky-blue, etc etc etc)
- this phrase: "sighing through her pert nose"
- Feyre referring to everyone as males/females rather than men and women or anything else. I'm not sure why this bothered me so much, but every time she did it I kept looking up from the book and wondering if she was working with animals or people...
- Feyre using a wrestling metaphor???? "He'd built something. And then gone to the mat to defend it."
- The truly unforgivable sin of this sentence: "There was an orb, it turned out, that had belonged to Mor's family for millennia: the Veritas." IT TURNED OUT? NO. BAD WRITER. This is just as bad as writing the words "for some reason."
- The brief flip to Rhysand's point for the second to last chapter. As a writer, you must have a ridiculously good reason to change point of view when you've written the last 1000+ pages of your series in a close first person narrative of your main character. As far as I can tell, the only reason she flipped to Rhysand for four pages was to show us 1) Cassian and Azriel don't die and 2) to reveal the crap about Rhysand making Feyre the High Lady of the Night Court the evening before their invasion of Hybern. Oh, and I guess to reassure us that he did indeed understand Feyre's duplicity. If I could reach into the past and smack Maas's hands off her keyboard while she wrote this chapter, I would. I'll repeat myself: BAD WRITER. Give the readers the suspense of wondering what is happening with poor Cassian and Azriel and Rhysand. And if you're going to reveal in the final chapter with Feyre that she's the High Lady anyway, you sure as heck don't need this chapter to reveal it first. Bad, bad writer.

Other stuff...

The sex. Wow, these books should in no way be marketed as Young Adult. I realize that is probably the publisher's fault, but I'm also going to ding Maas because I really don't understand the point of the sex scenes. I find them awkward (tongues scraping/stroking roofs of mouths more than once...? gag) and I just don't get what they add to the plot. Maaaaaaybe the first time Rhysand and Feyre have penetrative sex is relevant to the plot. But why she feels the need to turn it into a romance novel, I just don't get. Dear readers of this series who just love these scenes: get thee to the romance section of a bookstore or library and enjoy the actual good stuff.

Feyre's trauma. I don't want to judge Maas and whether or not she has ever suffered any kind of trauma or depression in her life, but my feeling is no, she hasn't. I did like that she made Feyre's trauma from what she did at the end of ACOTAR a huge part of ACOMAF and the vehicle for her character growth, but I thought it was handily clumsily. A lot of telling, and little showing.

Feyre rockets back and forth between thinking she's plain or thinking she's gorgeous. I guess she's insecure, but I found the abrupt switches in her view of herself off-putting and unbelievable.

The sexting. Are you serious. Why was this a thing. The entire exchange between Feyre and Rhysand about licking each other made me want to vomit. It also played into my constant frustration that all of the centuries-old immortal fae in these books act like stupid teenagers. (I'm pretty sure Amren was the only exception to this.) Also, later when Feyre tells Rhysand she wants to paint him and it's so cute and such a big step for her - and then he replies "Nude would be best," I nearly lost my mind. I was so MAD that the moment felt ruined by a typical fuckboy response.

(Also why did Feyre think flirting with Rhysand was so "lethally dangerous"? She thought that a lot, and I didn't get it. Was it just because she viewed flirting with him as betraying Tamlin? Was the lethal part her thoughts about Tamlin's reaction or Rhysand's?)

The fact that Feyre mind-rapes Tarquin... and then doesn't really think about it at all after that scene? I sure hope that gets addressed again because that was super disturbing.

Feyre is now an immortal super being with powers other fae can only dream of and she never once considers just leaving everyone else behind and figuring out what the heck she wants out of life and who she is as a person. I really dislike her utter dependence on other people. Rhysand might have ended up being her mate, but she trades her dependence on Tamlin for dependence on Rhys long before she was romantically attached to him.

The differences between Tamlin and Rhysand were reiterated so often and so overtly that I kept shouting "THIS IS A BIT MUCH" at the book. More telling rather than showing. Ugh, it bothers me so much. So basic.

And now I'm going to end with two things I liked. :)

1) Tamlin's fucked up move of locking Feyre in his house. This felt realistic to his character. And her reaction also felt realistic. I really liked how fucked up this was because it felt like an appropriate catalyst for the rest of the book's events.

2) This is very personal, but Maas managed to make me love Rhys and Feyre together by playing into my favorite hurt/comfort tropes. Rhys helping Feyre process her trauma? Yes. Feyre comforting Rhys after his nightmare? Yessss. Feyre saving Rhys from his captors and then healing him? YESSSSS.

...well, I've now invested way too much time in this review. And I'm way too curious what my reaction will be to the next book in this series. I still don't understand why these books are as beloved as they are, although I suppose I now understand the obsessive Feysand shippers. Cheers until ACOWAR comes out!



View all my reviews

A Court of Thorns and Roses

A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I am not going to parse my feeling on this one. And spoilers will abound because I cannot be bothered to pretend I care about spoiling this book for anyone.

I hated 99% of this book. I hated it so much that I ripped through it as quickly as I could in the vain hope that perhaps something could redeem it. Spoilers: no such redemption ever happened. Seriously. It took until 70% of the way through this for me to find one thing I liked about the writing, characters, or setting. (For the curious, that one thing was the punishment Amarantha meted out to Jurian for destroying her sister. It was the first thing I found original and interesting and cruel enough to merit Amarantha's reputation. Amarantha herself did nothing in person to interest me whatsoever. Cookie cutter villain to the nth degree. And her motivations made me want to puke.)

In broad sweeps, my feelings are thus: None of these characters had an ounce of originality. The setting could have been interesting, but was lingered over in all the wrong spots and used in none of the good ones. The plot PLODDED on and on and on. (I was so freaking bored waiting for something to happen. Even when things were happening I was bored because I knew what was going to happen.) The writing was... weak, at best.

In short, I haven't felt this way about a book since the Eragon novels by Christopher Paolini. What could have been an intriguing twist on an age-old story is instead rife with paper cut-out characters, descriptions of clothing and OMGEMOTIONS, and a plot so thin I could've blown it apart with a breath. Even the answer to Amarantha's riddle was obvious (duh, it's love, because of course it is, don't you know LOVE IS THE ANSWER TO EVERYTHING). And I haven't even mentioned the insanity that was the insta-love story between Tamlin and Feyre, or the much hinted at love triangle to come with Rhysand. Which is a shame because Rhysand was the only character I had a shred of interest in even if he is just a typical antihero. Maybe she won't go there with the love triangle (I haven't read the sequel yet), but I doubt it. Everything else has conformed to the worst stereotypes of young adult fantasy-romance, so I'm not going to hold my breath.

Did I mention how much I loathed Feyre? She was unimaginably stupid, even for an uneducated teenager slave to her emotions. Her inner monologue was so frustratingly repetitious that I often felt like Maas wrote this as a NaNoWriMo novel and was struggling for word count. And, oh, her feeling about things completely turned on a dime at several points with little to no build-up to her changing her mind. She's the NARRATOR. We're IN HER HEAD. I feel like the main character's move from loathing the fae to falling in love with the High Lord of the Spring Court might have been a tad more believable.

I'm ripping this to shreds for a few reasons. One is that all the people I know who like young adult novels loved this series. How could so many people be wrong, I thought naively to myself as I pulled this off the library shelf. Two is that as soon as I realized the premise of this book was a retelling of the Beauty and the Beast fable, my interest was piqued. Too bad that contributed to the book's predictability and mundanity. I'll take Robin McKinley's Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast or Rose Daughter over this any day.

The third and most important reason I am not holding back on my wrath for how awful I found this book is that I am a writer. I am writing young adult fantasy with romance. I cannot believe things like this not only get published, but are nearly universally loved. This is not good romance. These are not good characters. None of this was good writing. I'm going to give Sarah J. Maas the benefit of the doubt and hope some of her other books are better and that is why people love her so, but... Guys. Really? In some ways, this gives me more hope of being published. In other ways... not so much. If THIS is what readers want? Ugh.

....okay. Enough of my ranting. Time for me to get my hands on A Court of Mist and Fury. Yeah, I'm gonna keep reading. I've heard the sequel is better. And I'm nothing if not persistent.



View all my reviews