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 15: Me Before You

Me Before You by Jojo Moyes was April's hardback book for one of my goodreads book clubs, so it became book fifteen.

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Book Summary:
Louisa Clark is your average 26-year-old. She's got a great family, a boyfriend whom she will probably marry, and she's never been outside of her small village. But when her boss tells her that he's closing the café and she gets a new job as the caregiver for Will Traynor - a quadriplegic, she finds herself thinking about her life in a completely new way. 

Will Traynor used to be a big shot until he was hit by a motorcycle while crossing the street that caused him to become a quadriplegic. He hates what he's become and finds nothing good in his life...that is, until Louisa Clark enters the scene.

My Review:
Oh. My. Goodness. 

If you'd like to stop reading this review now, you totally can because those three words basically sum up everything I feel for this book. It has to be the most beautifully depressing book I've read since The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, and I loved every single second of it. Now, before you run out and buy this book, let me give you fair warning that this book gets kind of deep and debates the topic of assisted suicide. If you are okay with that, then I would suggest you read it. 

Now, on to the ins and outs of what I liked and didn't. What I loved most was the writing. Moyes made me want to go read the rest of her books because of how lovely this one was written. I think she does a fantastic job of developing the main characters, and by the end I was so attached to them that I set the book to the side and sobbed for a solid 2-3 minutes. Now, as I've said in a previous review, I don't like when authors go between narrators, but for some reason it really worked in this book. It helped that she didn't do it often (it is primarily told from Louisa's point of view) and that when she did it she put the name of whomever was narrating at the start of the chapter. I actually really liked those few chapters that were told from another's perspective. As I said earlier, this book delves into the subject of assisted suicide, in fact the author speaks of a real place in Switzerland where one who is terminally ill can go to do this. Some may find this issue unbearable to read about, but I found it thought provoking. On top of this, I was constantly contemplating the fact that an accident like Will's could happen to anyone at any moment. Anytime a book gets me to think deeply on issues that I wouldn't normally think about, I definitely deem it a wonderful story.

There really wasn't much that I disliked about Me Before You, the main thing being the character of Patrick, Louisa's boyfriend. I was constantly irritated by him and found myself wondering why Louisa was with such a jerk. And his character just goes from unlikeable to even more unlikeable when he sells Will's story to the press. 

The only other thing I have to say is that I wish the ending had been different. I wasn't surprised by it, but I wished the author had chosen to give us a twist and go a different way. That being said, it did not degrade this story in any way whatsoever. 

As far as family friendliness goes, this is not a book for young teens. There are many curse words and multiple sexual references (not to mention all the suicide talk). 

My Rating: 9/10

Book 10: The Art of Fielding

So, The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach was originally started as my ninth book, but I had some issues while reading it, and thus it became my tenth book.

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Book Summary:
For the first time, I am at a loss on how to summarize a book. Other than saying that it's a book that's sort of about baseball but sort of not, I've got nothing. So in order to give you something here, I'm just going to type the description from the cover. Here you go:

At Westish College, baseball star Henry Skrimshander seems destined for big league until a routine throw goes disastrously off course. In the aftermath of his error, the fates of five people are upended. Henry's fight against self-doubt threatens to ruin his future. College president Guert Affenlight, a longtime bachelor, has fallen unexpectedly and helplessly in love. Owen Dunne, Henry's gay roommate and teammate, becomes caught up in a dangerous affair. Mike Schwartz, the Harpooners' team captain and Henry's best friend, realizes he has guided Henry's career at the expense of his own. And Pella Affenlight, Guert's daughter, returns to Westish after escaping an ill-fated marriage, determined to start a new life. As the season counts down to its climactic final game, these five are forced to confront their deepest hopes, anxieties, and secrets.

Book Review: 
Okay...now...where to start? It's not that I necessarily disliked this book, it's just that I didn't really like it much either. I'm kind of neutral about it, maybe slightly more to the side of dislike but not much. I thought it was decently written, and the characters were pretty well rounded, even if at times unbelievable. I also thought the book was going to have more to do with baseball than it did. Baseball is used basically just as a plot device to move the story along. There wasn't a lot that I really liked about this book. It started off well; actually I was really into it for the first fifty pages, but then it went downhill.

Here's the thing, I'm not a huge fan of books that have multiple main characters and jump around between the characters from chapter to chapter. I get confused on the timeline of events when this happens. So when after reading five straight chapters of this book being about Henry and it randomly jumped to Affenlight in chapter six, I was perplexed. I didn't realize that was coming and was really confused for the next couple chapters. After I got the hang of it, though, it wasn't so bad.

The main issues I have with this book deal the believability of the characters' actions, like, for instance, when Henry and Pella sleep together. I'm not saying that this stuff doesn't happen, but they basically just slept together because they were in a room alone at the same time, who cares if Mike gets hurt in the process. It just didn't fit with their characters personalities to me. Also, Owen sort of drove me crazy. I felt like he was written, purposefully, as this super stereotypical gay male, and it wasn't believable for me. The other thing I didn't like was that there were plot lines introduced in the book that were never wrapped up. This is not the type of book you write a sequel for, so I suppose the author just didn't think people would wonder whether Mike got over his pain killer addiction.

All in all, I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it either. I would probably never recommend it to someone. As far as swearing and sexual references go, both are present and abundant. There are multiple sex scenes (not overly graphic, but graphic enough), both hetero- and homosexual, along with a magnitude of swear words including multiple f-bombs.

My Rating: 4/10

Book 8: Tell the Wolves I'm Home

I recently joined some bookclubs on goodreads.com. I figured it would be a good way to read some books I wouldn't have otherwise picked up. Tell the Wolves I'm Home by Carol Rifka Brunt was one of the books for the month of February for one of said book clubs.

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Book Summary:
In 1987 June Elbus is a fourteen-year-old girl who isn't understood by anyone. Anyone, that is, except her Uncle Finn Weiss, a renowned painter. Super shy around everyone at school and terrorized by her sister, she can only be herself around him. When he dies, far too young, from AIDS, she is lost. She has no one she can turn too except, perhaps, the one person she never suspected. Toby may be just the friend she needs to help her heal. Being the only person that loved her uncle as much as she did, he may be the person she needs the most to get her through.

My Review:
First off, let me say that this book is beautifully written, and based on the reviews on goodreads and amazon, obviously it has deeply touched a lot of people. I, however, am not one of them.

I really wanted to like this book, but I found the story to not only be quite dull but also really kind of creepy. The relationship between June and her uncle, and then Toby, came off very disturbing to me. June says numerous times that she loved her uncle, and she pretty much means she was in love with him. After he dies, she basically transfers those feelings to his boyfriend, Toby. It really bothered me that Toby, a thirty-something-year-old man, would spend so much of his time with a fourteen-year-old girl. I understand that many young girls develop crushes on men in their lives who they deem "safe" and this is what is happening from June's perspective, but that does not explain Toby.

On top of being slightly bothered by the entire book, there is basically no plot. There is no climax. There is nothing but the main character continually thinking and doing the same things over and over again. I kept putting the book down because I was bored, only to pick it back up again because I knew that if I didn't just barrel through it, I would never finish it. I found myself counting down the pages until the end of the book.

Finally, June's sister Greta is the worst portrayal of a sister ever! She is just plain mean and hurtful throughout the entire book, and then when the author explains the reasoning behind it, it is so stupid! I understand sisters being mean to each other; after all, I have a sister. But, I cannot imagine my sister, or any sister, ever acting the way Greta acts in this book. It made her entire character completely unbelievable for me.

All that being said, I would not recommend this book to anyone. I may be in the minority with this, but I just think you will waste your time reading it. I don't believe there is much swearing, but there are some sexual references, though nothing graphic.

My Rating: 3/10

Book 7: Still Alice

Still Alice by Lisa Genova has been on my to-read list for a couple years, but for some reason I never got around to reading it. I decided this challenge was the perfect time to pick it up, so I chose to read it as my seventh book.

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Book Summary:
Alice Howard lives a great life. She's in her early fifties, has a husband and three grown children, works as a cognitive psychology professor at Harvard, and is an expert in linguistics. After becoming extremely forgetful and at times disoriented, she goes to the doctor to find out if these are symptoms of menopause or something greater. From there her doctor sends her to a neurologist, where she discovers that she has early-onset Alzheimer's disease. Told in month to month format, this heartbreaking story tells of how she progresses from simple misplaced items to forgetting her family.

My Review:
Since I can't afford to purchase fifty-two books this year, most of the books I've been reading have come from the library. Because they come from the library, at times I won't be able to read the book I really want to read. This is what happened to lead me to read Still Alice. I really wanted to read Insurgent (the sequel to Divergent) next, but I was unable to obtain a copy. Instead, I decided to read one of the books that I pulled from my grandma's shelf last month when I went to Wellsburg for her funeral. I am so glad that I did.

I really, really enjoyed this book. The story was so heartbreaking that I couldn't put it down. Having had two Grandmother's fall into dementia, much of this story hit close to home for me. Especially when it got to the point of her not recognizing her children and calling them, in her mind, "the mother" and "the actress". I've not done this in other reviews, but I'm going to go ahead and quote my favorite scene in this book:

--Alice looked at Lydia in pieces, close-up snapshots of her features. She recognized each one like people recognized the house they grew up in, a parent's voice, the creases of their own hands, instinctively, without effort or conscious consideration. But strangely, she had a hard time identifying Lydia as a whole.
"You're so beautiful," said Alice. "I'm afraid of looking at you and not knowing who you are."
"I think that even if you don't know who I am someday, you'll still know that I love you."
"What if I see you, and I don't know that you're my daughter, and I don't know that you love me?"
"Then, I'll tell you that I do, and you'll believe me"--

I absolutely loved this scene because it just felt so real and raw to me. As her youngest child and the one from whom she was most distant, it makes sense that Lydia would be the first she'd start to forget. This is one of the times where she is realizing that she's starting to forget her own child. Everything about this scene is perfect for me. And it's so true, once someone you love forgets you, you just tell them that you love them and hope that they believe you.

The only thing that bugged me in the book was her husband John's response to her. I totally understand why he was being distant, he couldn't bear seeing her descent into madness, but it still bugged me.

I would definitely recommend this book to others. It takes a little bit to get started, but the story is ultimately beautiful. There are a few swear word sprinkled throughout, specifically the f word, but I honestly believed, for once, it was well used in a book. Where the character was at emotionally when she used it, was exactly on point. Other than that, I don't believe there is much, if any, sexual references.

My Rating 9/10

Book 2: Paper Towns

For book two, I decided to finish out my John Green book set by reading  Paper Towns.

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Book Summary:
The book begins in Orlando, Florida when the protagonist, Quentin "Q" Jacobsen, and his neighbor and friend, Margo Roth Spiegelman, both nine-years-old at the time, find the body of one Robert Joyner, a divorced man who had committed suicide. Flash forward to high school. Q and Margo are no longer the close friends they used to be. Margo is popular and dating starting shortstop Jason Worthington while Q is a band geek, who isn't in the band but spends all his free time there with his best friends Marcus “Radar” Lincoln and Ben Starling.

Margo finds out that Jase has cheated on her with her friend Becca, so she enlists Q's help to get back at them in a night he will never forget. The next day, Q wonders if Margo will begin eating lunch and hanging out with him and his friends since she is upset with the popular kids, but she doesn't show up for school. After going missing for three days, Margo's parents file a report with the police, but decide that since this is the fifth time she's run away, they don't care if she comes back. After learning that Margo has run away, Q discovers a poster of Woody Guthrie taped to the back of her window shades. This leads him to a string a clues that he believes will ultimately lead him to where Margo has run, so he, Radar, Ben, and Margo's friend Lacey all team up to hunt her down.

My Review:
Paper Towns is my second favorite book by John Green. The story was really interesting, and I liked it a lot. About half way through the book I wasn't sure if they were going to find Margo at all, and if they did find her whether she was going to be dead or alive. Because of this, I did what I always do (and people think is crazy), I read the last chapter of the book. Most people think that ruins the book, but I like to know where a book is headed so I can prepare myself.

I enjoyed the character Q a lot. Although he doesn't have a strong voice, he was a great character that I found myself really routing for by the end as he comes to figure out not only who Margo really is but who he is as well. Along with him, I liked the secondary characters of Ben, Radar, and Lacey. In the beginning of the book, Green makes you want to dislike Lacey. He turns her character around quickly, and she adds the much needed female perspective to the group. Plus, being the only character other than Q who knows Margo at all, she is the only one who is truly worried about Margo which creates a nice bond between the two of them. Although Ben and Radar are great characters, I think that they are there more for comical relief than anything else, even though Radar definitely progresses the story at times with his knowledge of computers and the internet.

By the end, I found myself really bothered by Margo. I just didn't like her at all. I thought she was super selfish and needed to get over herself. Her character is probably my biggest issue with the book. She's just kind of a jerk, and I wanted Q to get over her and find someone better to be in love with. Other than that, there were parts of the story that were slightly confusing to follow, and I needed to reread a couple pages to understand what was going on. But, that could be more that I was reading quickly than an actual issue with Green's writing.

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed myself through this book. I would recommend it to others, but be warned that there is some salty teen talk and sexual references, though nothing overly graphic and I don't believe any f bombs (I'm not totally positive about the f word, but I don't recall there being any).

My Rating: 8/10

Book 1: An Abundance of Katherines

So for Christmas my parents got me this book set:

 

And being that I love John Green (seriously, he's awesome...check out the vlogbrothers on youtube and be amazed by his awesomeness), I was super excited to open this. Now, at this point I had already read The Fault in Our Stars* and Looking for Alaska, so I started with An Abundance of Katherines.

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Book Summary:
The main character is a seventeen-year-old child prodigy named Colin Singleton, and he's dated a lot of girls named Katherine. In fact, he's dated only girls named Katherine (spelled as such)...nineteen of them to be exact, and they all seem to dump him.

After being dumped by his most recent girlfriend, Katherine XIX, he and his best, and only, friend Hassan Harbish decide to go on a road trip. They end up in the town of Gutshot, Tennessee where they meet Lindsay Lee Wells and her mother Hollis. When Hollis offers them a job and a place to stay, they decide to stick around Gutshot. While there Colin comes up with a theorem that he believes will be his big Eureka moment that will transform him from child prodigy to genius, an equation that can predict the outcome of any relationship.

My Review:

So, ultimately I liked An Abundance of Katherines. It had a fun storyline that was easy to follow. It's an original concept that's humorous and super quirky, which I loved. One of my favorite things about this book is all the footnotes explaining things Colin says, and trust me, some of them you will actually need to look at to understand what he's talking about. Colin is really smart, so he has a very hard time making friends and doesn't fully understand some of the nuances of human interaction. I found the scenes where he doesn't fully understand why people do certain things very amusing.

One thing that started to get slightly annoying was the fact that Colin likes to anagram anything and everything, so there are tons of times in this book where he randomly starts anagramming.  By the end I was just skipping over those parts. Because the storyline is so easy to follow, I found myself zoning out at times and realizing that I didn't remember anything from the last page, but it never really mattered enough for me to go back and re-read it. 

All in all, this book is a fun coming of age novel that I believe teens and adults alike would enjoy. As far as swearing goes, the characters use the word "fug" to replace the f word, and I believe most, if not all, other cursing is done in other languages. There are some sexual references along with one sexual scene that is slightly graphic.

My Rating: 7/10

*I read The Fault in our Stars twice last year. It is by far my favorite of John Green's books. You will laugh, you will cry...it has everything you want in a book. If I was reviewing it right now I would be giving it a 10/10. I would definitely recommend you check it out!