Tagged: masq1
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne
(Cover picture courtesy of Kids Book Review.)
If you start to read this book, you will go on a journey with a nine-year-old boy named Bruno. (Though this isn’t a book for nine-year-olds.) And sooner or later you will arrive with Bruno at a fence.
Fences like this exist all over the world.
We hope you never have to encounter one.
I wanted to like this book. I really, really did. I mean, it’s practically a classic. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is studied in classrooms all over the world and it’s even been made into quite a popular movie. It’s supposed to be a touching take on the Holocaust through the naive eyes of a nine-year-old boy. This should be a book I loved.
Obviously it wasn’t if I’m rambling on like this. Throughout the novel, the words ‘trying too hard’ came to mind because of John Boyne’s writing style. He tries to portray an incredibly naive nine-year-old boy but ends up portraying a spoiled, unaware brat. He tries to put an ironic, tragic twist at the end, but it feels contrived. John Boyne just tried too hard instead of letting the story speak for itself. His constant interjections and observations make it seem more like he’s telling the story than truly showing it through innocent Bruno’s eyes. It makes it feel like he expects his readers are idiots who couldn’t infer some of the more subtle themes from the story itself.
I’ve read thousand page books that are less tedious than The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. John Boyne repeats things over and over and over again until it feels like he’s beating you over the head with a stick. Readers are not idiots; they will not forget that Bruno’s father was visited by the ‘Fury’ over only 215 pages. They will also not forget that Bruno is a spoiled brat who matures very, very little by the end of the novel. In the end, he’s still essentially the same ridiculously naive child who seems to lack even basic understanding of the world around him. There’s also the issue of whether Bruno could have even gotten near the fence at Auschwitz without getting spotted by the numerous guards or getting zapped by the electrified fence.
In short, what was supposed to be a touching novel was not. It was patronizing and tedious, just to use two words that come to mind. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas should have been a tribute to those who lost their lives, but ended up feeling like John Boyne wanted a literary award badly.
I give this book 1/5 stars.
The Eye of Erasmus by Teresa Geering
(Cover picture courtesy of Goodreads.)
The Eye of Erasmus’ tells of Erasmus, a baby born during a thunder storm, who is clearly destined to be special and, initially, especially obnoxious with his flashing black eyes and haughty ways, until he finds love. The trouble is that the girl literally of his dreams hasn’t actually been born yet. No problem …… Oh, but there is ……. Danger lurks ……..
[Full disclosure: I received a free print copy of this book from Teresa Geering in exchange for an honest review.]
I had mixed feelings about The Eye of Erasmus, but not necessarily in a bad way. My feelings were more of “That was good, but it could have been much better.” I’ll explain.
The Eye of Erasmus was sort of told in an omniscient point of view, but unfortunately that means that we’re being told everything rather than shown it. We’re told how Erasmus and Shasta feel and the narrator injects bits of information about the future not-so-subtly. Still, for such a short book it worked out okay. It certainly made for a fast-paced plot. Yet at the same time, I feel if it had been told in a third person point of view between just Shasta and Erasmus with more showing and less telling, the book could have made the jump from ‘good’ to ‘amazing’.
Teresa Geering has a very pared down style of prose and that’s fine, but sometimes I feel like I really want more description. What sort of time period did Erasmus come from? What did it look and feel like? I wanted to be transported to his time and feel his despair as he left it, but also his hope of finding the girl he was meant to be with. A little more description would have made it easier to picture the setting as well as get the whole tone of the novel more quickly. What received a lot of description and really got my attention was the supernatural elements, more specifically Erasmus’ powers. His powers are fascinating and it would be great to see if in the sequel we learned exactly why and how he got them.
While I wouldn’t call The Eye of Erasmus amazing, I would call it good. Because despite my criticisms, the characters were generally well developed, the plot was fast-paced and there were some pretty crazy plot twists that blindsided me. Shasta and Erasmus kept my attention and the affection between them was real, if a little bit rushed. Overall, it was a decent book but not a great one.
I give this book 4/5 stars.
Abandon by Meg Cabot
(Cover picture courtesy of Manda’s Movements.)
Now Death wants her back
Pierce knows what it’s like to die, because she’s done it before. Though she tried returning to the life she knew before the accident, Pierce can’t help but feel at once a part of this world, and apart from it. yet she’s never alone…because someone is always watching her.
Now she’s moved to a new town, but even here, he finds her. Pierce knows he’s no guardian angel, and his dark world isn’t exactly heaven, yet she can’t stay away…especially since he always appears when she least expects it, but exactly when she needs him most.
If she lets herself fall any further, Pierce may just find herself back in the one place she most fears: the Underworld.
The myth of Persephone…darkly reimagined.
Could there possibly be a more confusing way to tell what should be a straightforward story? What happened to a linear narrative? Or at least one that makes sense?
Meg Cabot is a great author, no doubt about that. I loved her Airhead trilogy and Abandon is still well-written. However, I had a very hard time figuring out what the heck was going on as Pierce described three different points in her past all at once. We jump around from her grandpa’s death to the incident at her old school after her death to her first death and it’s just terribly confusing. If you’re going to give your readers some backstory, at least give it in a logical order! (And yes, I’m actually quite mad about this because this could have been a great story with a little logic added to how the backstory was presented.)
Okay, so once I actually figured out what was going on, I sort of did enjoy the story. Pierce is a decent enough character and you can actually feel her emotional struggles as she tries to cope with life after coming back from the dead. Her confused feelings about John, her loneliness, etc. were all very real and made her an interesting character. Her altruistic side came through often, which makes her much more sympathetic than a lot of YA heroines. John himself seems like kind of a jerk to me, but unlike some love interests there’s potential for him to change in the next book. And he also has a legitimate reason for being a jerk, again unlike a lot of love interests.
If you can figure out the plot, it’s quite fast-paced and there are some pretty interesting twists. There are parallels to the Persephone myth for those of you that like Greek mythology, but Abandon doesn’t stick strictly to it. That way it’s close enough to add another dimension to the story without making it completely predictable. And now that Pierce’s backstory has been established, I will be reading the next book, Underworld in the hope that without so much plot confusion it will be a decent book. However, I will be borrowing the next book from the library, not buying it. I’m still kind of wary.
I give this book 3/5 stars.
Sharc by Paul Rudd
(Cover picture courtesy of The BunsyDawg Diary.)
It’s massive, it’s intelligent, it’s relentless and it’s always looking for its next meal or its next challenge.
Maxwell Baxter is intent on fulfilling his greatest ambition yet, and he is an ambitious man. He wants to build the largest floating aquarium in the world, an aquarium city, and fill it with all manner of monsters from the depths, the first being a presumed extinct Megalodon he has captured, a prehistoric monster shark currently only thirty-five feet long but destined to grow up to one hundred feet of raw, razor-toothed ravenous greed with extraordinary abilities to detect anything edible or threatening in the water for miles around.
In the midst of international financial negotiations to raise the rest of the money to complete his ARC, and with the Governor of California being entertained on his private yacht on his way to review the facility, the Megalodon escapes and begins to terrorize everything in the Pacific, ships and other sea creatures alike, no matter what their size.
Maxwell Baxter’s future rests on a knife-edge, and the Megalodon has a gigantic mouthful of them, each five inches long and giving it the capability to bite a small whale in half with one snap of its jaws.
With a Megalodon about, if you are thinking of getting back into the water, don’t flatter yourself – you’ll barely be a snack.
[Full disclosure: I received a free paperback copy from Paul Rudd in exchange for an honest review.]
In some respects, Sharc reads a lot like a B list action movie, but at the same time Paul Rudd remains fully aware of this and occasionally pokes fun of himself in his writing. The comparisons to Jaws, the allusions to James Bond, etc. show that he didn’t take himself too seriously when writing Sharc, which is a good thing. It definitely helped me buy more into the premise and just enjoy the book for what it was rather than constantly nitpick over plausibility.
Sometimes the constant changing of points of view annoys me, but Paul Rudd managed to toe the line between head-hopping and moving the plot forward. The point of view changed often enough to make things interesting, but not so much that I couldn’t connect with the characters either. In fact, some of my favourite characters include the spoiled rich boy Tyler Baxter and the diver Morgan. Both have great character arcs and are just overall interesting characters. I wouldn’t go so far as to call them amazing, but the characters were good in that they were well-developed and changed throughout the story.
There are quite a few subplots throughout Sharc, but they don’t distract from the main plot: the fact that there’s a prehistoric shark on the loose. In fact, the subplots with the development of the ARC and the characters’ struggles just add to the tension the shark creates throughout the book. With the shark, it’s like waiting for a shoe to drop because you know it’s going to strike, but you don’t know where and when. You don’t even know if you can stop it. So I suppose Sharc could also be classified as horror, in that when you think about it, the idea of a great big shark swimming around devouring humans is pretty terrifying.
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed Sharc by Paul Rudd. You just really have to take it for what it is: a plot-based thriller, not necessarily hard science fiction.
I give this book 4.5/5 stars.
A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin
(Cover picture courtesy of Ciska’s Book Chest.)
In this thrilling sequel to A Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin has created a work of unsurpassed vision, power, and imagination. A Clash of Kings transports us to a world of revelry and revenge, wizardry and warfare, unlike any we have ever experienced.
A comet the color of blood and flame cuts across the sky. And from the ancient citadel of Dragonstone to the forbidding shores of Winterfell, chaos reigns. Six factions struggle for control of a divided land and the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingsdoms, preparing to stake their claims through tempest, turmoil, and war. It is a tale in which brother plots against brother and the dead rise to walk in the night. Here a princess masquerades as an orphan boy, a knight of the mind prepares a poison for a treacherous sorceress, and wild men descend from the Mountains of the Moon to ravage the countryside. Against a backdrop of incest and fratricide, alchemy and murder, victory may go to the men and women possessed of the coldest steel…and the coldest hearts. For when kings clash, the whole land trembles.
Since we got over all of the character introductions in the first book, A Clash of Kings really starts to heat up. We see Tyrion’s triumphs, Sansa’s struggles, Jon wrestling with decisions involving family and honour and so much more. Not only do we get to see these characters, we also continue on Arya’s and Daenerys’ points of view and have the added POV of Davos, the ‘Onion Knight’. This is all very fascinating, but I’m getting the impression that the series could suffer from extreme character bloat in the next few books. As things heat up in all threads of the plot, I have a feeling it may be hard to keep all of the characters’ stories straight because Martin seems to be adding more and more all of the time.
However, A Clash of Kings generally manages to stay on topic and not get too sidetracked. We see characters like Sansa finally mature and unlikely heroes like Tyrion and Daenerys triumph in their own ways. Part of what has impressed me so much about A Song of Ice and Fire is the characters and how much time is devoted to their development. They are so much more complicated than their archetypal descriptions would suggest and that makes A Clash of Kings a fascinating read. Characters can make or break a story for me, so I’m thankful for Martin’s attention to detail.
For an epic fantasy novel, A Clash of Kings is quite fast-paced. There is a bit of a slouch in the middle of the story, but compared to a lot of epic fantasy out there, the plot still moves forward. Alliances are made and broken, murders are planned and carried out and treason is all around. You never really know what’s going to happen next and that’s really what made this second book so exciting, even more so than the first.
The further development of the fantasy world is satisfying as well. We start to learn about places other than Westeros, in part because of Daenerys’ travels. We also learn more about the other powerful empires in Martin’s world as well as the fact that there are free, trade-based cities within this world of kings and tyrants. This is not just your typical epic fantasy with kings and queens; George R. R. Martin has obviously studied history and knows that nothing is ever that simple. In some places, there are republics and in others there are oligarchies and in still others (Westeros) there are the traditional monarchies. The politics within all of these countries are more nuanced than I’ve come to expect, so I really do appreciate Martin’s world-building.
I give this book 5/5 stars.