Book 19: The Dog Stars

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Book Summary:
Hig is a survivor. He survived the flu that killed everyone he knew. He has no family left and no friends...unless you count Bangly, the cynical codger with whom he cohabitates in a compound of abandoned buildings, and Jasper, his ever faithful pup. For years, Hig knows only one thing, just keep surviving, but after his pup dies of old age, he decides to go out past the point of no return in his 1956 Cessna to see if he can find the source of the random transmission he heard on his radio three years prior. Without enough fuel to return home, Hig discovers that he can have more in his life than what he originally believed.

Book Review:
Let me start by saying that I did not enjoy this book. It took me five painstaking weeks to finish this novel. Everyone kept telling me I should stop reading it, but I just couldn't bring myself to do that for a couple reasons. First, I thought maybe I'd get into it if I just kept pushing through, and second, I need to have books that I review that I legitimately do not like. That being said, I honestly like absolutely nothing about this novel. I mean, I can understand why others have liked it (it's gotten pretty decent ratings on goodreads and amazon), but it just was not for me. Okay, so let me break down all the reasons I basically wanted to shoot myself while reading this book.

First off was the writing style. This was the biggest turn off for me. There were absolutely no quotations anywhere, and just about every other statement was either a run-on or an incomplete sentence. This seriously drove me bat-crap crazy. I realize that the book was purposely written this way, and I actually understand why it was written as such. However, it made me want to gouge my eyes out.

Secondly, I did not enjoy the plot at all. It starts off after basically everyone in the world has died from some unknown flu (which we don't find any real details about until nearly the end of the novel), and then it goes to tell the story of next to nothing. I mean, stuff happens, but when it was over I felt like nothing of importance occurred. I realize that important things did actually happen: Jasper dies, Hig learns things about himself, he finds Cima and her dad, etc. I guess, though, that I didn't care about any of these characters, so none of this seemed that important to me.

Lastly, the ending. One day random planes start flying overhead, and when Hig tries to contact them they don't respond. This happens for days or weeks (I'm not really sure how long), and then the book ends. Who was in planes? Were there a lot more survivors? Were they the Arabs that were spoken of early on in the novel? I have no idea because the book just stops there without letting us know.

So, overall, I basically hated this novel. As far as family friendliness goes, this gets an F rating, as in next to every other word was an f bomb. Also, there are a couple graphic sex scenes along with a ton of violence including some cannibalism. I definitely would not recommend this book to anyone.

My Rating: 2/10 (It gets an extra point because of Jasper the dog)

Book 18: The Storyteller

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Book Summary:
After the death of her mother, Sage Singer becomes an introvert who works through the night, trying to escape her memories and loneliness by doing the one thing she knows, baking bread. When Josef Weber begins coming to the bakery, the two form an unusual friendship. This all changes when he confesses to her that he was a Nazi, and he has spent the last seventy years hiding from his past. He only asks two things, that she forgive him being that she is of Jewish decent and that she kill him. With confusion over her own identity and the idea that her closest friend could have done something so terrible, Sage must make the toughest decision of her life.

My Review:
Let me start by saying that I am not a huge Jodi Picoult fan. It's not that her books are awful because she's actually a very good writer; it's just that all her books seem like a lifetime movie in the making. This one is no different. It was very well written, and I liked the idea behind it. A former Nazi asking forgiveness of the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor is a great plot. However, this storyline is squeezed in among an affair, a romance, a death, and about ten other subplots. Even though this is the main point of the book, at times it got lost amid all the other things that were going on. I really like that Picoult did so much research before beginning this book. She pretty much learned everything she could about Nazis so she could weave a plausible back-story. She also learned about what someone who actually hunts down Nazis for a living does to find and prosecute World War II criminals. Lastly, she learned the intricacies of bread baking, which being that this is something that I actually know about, I thoroughly appreciated that Sage actually knew her way around baking bread. I think my favorite thing about his book was the ending, and Sage finding out that sometimes people aren't who they seem to be.

Though I enjoyed Minka's story from the war, I felt that it drawn out longer than it needed to be. I honestly skipped pages during her story because it literally went on for well over a hundred pages, and though it had everything to do with her story as a Holocaust survivor, I didn't feel like it was as important to the plot as Josef's story which was not nearly as long. I also did not like the subplot of Sage dating a married man. I don't feel that it added anything to the story other than causing Leo to judge her for it. I understand the reasoning behind the author using this, as it's a device to help us see how much Sage changes from the beginning of the book until the end, I just thought the book would have been fine without it.

Overall, I thought the book was very well written, it just wasn't really my type of book. I think that if you really like Lifetime movies, you would probably thoroughly enjoy this novel. There is some swearing and a good amount of sexual references.

My Rating: 6/10

Book 17: A Discovery of Witches

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Book Summary:
Diana Bishop is an alchemical history professor doing research while at Oxford University. When she requests a manuscript called Ashmole 782 at the Bodleian Library, she believes it to be an ordinary book, that is, until she gets her hands on it. Even though she has tried to keep all magic out of her life, she can tell that this ancient text is bound with it. Insisting that she wants nothing to do with her magic, she makes a few notes and then sends the book back. What she doesn't realize, however, is that this text has been lost for centuries, and the magical community will do anything to get thier hands on it. Soon after, witches, daemons, and vampires begin appearing at the Bodleian. One in particular is Matthew Clairmont, a distinguished scientist who also happens to be a vampire. Once Matthew enters Diana's life, she finds that nothing will ever be the same.

My Review:
If Harry Potter and Twilight were to have a baby, I'm pretty sure it would be this book. That being said, Deborah Harkness is a better writer than Stephanie Meyer, so this was a halfway decent book. I really enjoyed the fact that because Harkness is a history professor by trade, she somehow manages to make a novel that is one part historical fiction and one part modern fantasy. I have very mixed feeling about this book, however, because for some reason I really enjoyed reading it even though so much of it bugged me. Maybe Deborah Harkness put a spell on the book because that is pretty much the only explanation I can come up with.

Though I enjoyed the overall concept of a witch who wants nothing to do with witchcraft who gets violently thrown into that world, I felt that by the end the subplot romance becomes the total driving force for the story. This is fine if you're writing a romance, but I wasn't really wanting to read a romance when I picked up A Discovery of Witches. Also, I feel that though Harkness starts out writing a strong female character who can fully take care of herself, the second Matthew steps into the picture Diana becomes a major damsel in distress. On top of that, Matthew is basically a douche throughout ninety percent of the story, and Diana, after only a couple weeks of knowing him, is completely willing to choose him over her family at every instant. Matthew definitely falls into the stereotypical vampire role of obsession with a woman that turns into the need to posses her fully as if he owns her.  Honestly, I think in general I have issues with vampire romances because they make absolutely no sense unless ultimately the girl is going to become a vampire. If that is not the intention, there is going to come a point where you will look forty years older than your vampire husband. Do characters not take that into account before deciding they want to marry the living dead? On a completely different note, there were definitely some really cheesy lines that I literally laughed out loud at. I also wasn't to keen on the whole genetics side to the story where magical creatures have extra chromosomes, and you can tell what powers a which has based on her DNA. Even in a story about magical beings, this was a little too much of a stretch for me.

All of that being said, I flew through this book and really did enjoy the overall experience of it. Harkness made me care about the characters, and so I fully plan on reading the rest of the series. Maybe this makes me as bad as the twihards or maybe I've just been reading so many books recently that I'm not paying as much attention to writing as I am to the overall story or maybe ever since I first watched Buffy I've just really wanted to fall in love with a vampire, of this I am not sure. Whatever the reason, I definitely want to know what becomes of Diana and Matthew.

As far as family friendliness goes, this is definitely not a book for young teens. There is a decent amount cursing and some semi-graphic scenes both sexual ones and violent ones. I definitely would not let my young teen pick up this book.

My Rating: 5/10

Book 16: Reached

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*Spoiler Alert: This is the third book in a series. If you haven't read the first two books you may want to stop reading*

My review of book one can be found here, and my review of book two can be found here.


Book Summary:
When an epidemic of the plague hits the provinces, the Rising uses their cure to gain hold and overthrow the Society. But when the plague mutates, Cassia, Ky, and Xander must help the Rising and the Pilot find a new cure. They must decide who they can trust. Is the Rising really a rebellion, or are they just the Society under a new name?

Book Review:
It's been a couple months since I read Matched and Crossed, so it took me a couple chapters before I was able to get back into the plot of this series. There were parts of this book that I liked a great deal more than the previous two, but there were also parts that I liked quite a bit less.

First off, I really enjoyed the storyline. I thought this was a much more interesting plot than either of the first two books. Since Cassia, Ky, and Xander are all major players in this book, each chapter is written with one of them as the narrator. As I've said before, I normally don't like when authors do that, but it worked out in this series pretty well. I really liked how in the series as a whole Condie goes from everything being told from Cassia's point of view in the first novel, to going back and forth between Cassia and Ky in the second, and now using all three of them in the third. As far as characters go, I still don't really like Cassia or Ky much; however, I really liked that Xander played such a large role in this story. Since the first book, I've never really gotten the reason behind why Cassia decided she loves Ky so much when she knew next to nothing about him before his face popped up on her microcard. Because of this, I always felt bad for Xander because he truly loves Cassia and had always hoped he would get matched to her someday. Thankfully, though, Xander was given another love interest in Lei, and I really liked seeing that story come to fruition.

Now to the things I didn't like. I thought the last couple chapters were really boring. Honestly, I wasn't such a huge fan of the final wrap up. It's not that the story ended terribly, it's just that I felt that the ending could have been a lot more interesting. It was just kind of a "blah" ending. I also didn't like what happened with Indie. I was really starting to like her, and felt that Condie could have done a lot more with her character. The final thing I didn't really like or even really understand was the whole thing about Cassia and the tablets. I felt like Condie was trying to make us believe that Cassia was really special because the tablets didn't work on her like they did everyone else, but this fell flat for me. I didn't feel like Cassia was special at all. I honestly got tired of reading about her and the tablets, so I ultimately skipped over the parts of the book where she was trying to remember the Red Garden Day.

Overall, I guess the good outweighed the bad in this book. And as far as family friendliness goes, there are very few (if any) curse words and no sexual references.

My Rating: 6/10 - (for the series I would give a 6/10)