Ha'ani

It was a good book. I finished it in 4 days, so it was definitely interesting. It was insightful, inspirational, hopeful, and very introspective. I like how it showed the viewpoints of many people, many lives, but through the same eyes. I think that Nathan was a very underused character, and the ending was disappointing. Very vague and disappointing. A basically manipulates the body he is in to give Rhiannon a new boyfriend, since A can never be there for her. And then he runs away. I think the author meant for it to be a vague ending, but I find it pretty unsatisfying. I also think that A was a terrible name for the author to choose for the main character. If this book was written in, like, Japanese or something, A as a name would be acceptable. But in English, a is such a common word, it is one letter–it's barely a sound. It's an article, it's a GRAMMAR thing. Having a character named A makes following certain conversations unnecessarily hard.

Still, I think the book was worth reading. I think I'll give it 3.5 stars.

Pretty good. I initially read it because at a writer's camp, a girl recommended it to me. I asked her why she liked it so much and she just shrugged and said, I don't know, I just do. But now, I understand. I read it, and I like it. Why? Honestly, no particular reason. It is just well-made.

The book holds a themes of redemption and identity as Chase Ambrose struggles to find his place in school after falling off a roof and getting amnesia. He then figures out that he used to be a horrible bully and spends the rest of the book making amends with the people he used to torment.

One interesting thing about this book is the wide range of narrators. As many as 7 characters take turns narrating, but it is always in 1st person. Similar to Tui T. Sutherland's Darkstalker, each chapter declares the P.O.V. before it starts. So, that was unique and fresh.

Overall, I enjoyed it.

Moral: It's never too late to turn your life around.

The first thing I thought when I finished this book: What the tingling Teva did I just read?

I was interested in the cloning part. The Sci-fi mystery part. Why does Teva duplicate every year? And it was interesting seeing the strangeness of living in a house filled with your older selves, and sharing memories with those selves, and...it was interesting!

But the author doesn't let the book be about that interesting stuff. Instead, she turns it into a generic high school drama with the sci-fi stuff in the background.

Why? I don't care about the creepy Ollie guy, or Tommo who wants Teva to rub baby oil on his chest. I don't care! They aren't interesting characters, they don't raise the stakes for what should be the main plot.

I do care about conflicts directly related to Teva's “condition”, like when she worries about showing too much of her weirdly-marked clone skin during a fashion show. But that's it.

The climax was kinda dumb.

Teva dies, and a new Teva comes out and yells at her lab dad (who completely appears out of nowhere. Well, I guess it was hinted at earlier, but come on...) to tell him YOU DID THIS! And everyone backs her up and they make a big scene out of it...And the clones all go to school and get normal lives...But there is no solution. Our protagonist just died for no reason. And will Teva keep cloning until she dies? Or is every old Teva gonna die, like 16, when the new Teva emerges? Nobody knows!

This book would have been good on Wattpad, but as a published book it's a bit disappointing.

Because the whole situation of prehistoric big cats, some of which talk and keep livestock like humans, fighting against each other until one of them tames “the Red Tongue” kept me interested throughout, I consider this a good book. I liked Ratha, and I appreciate the author's efforts to keep her realistic and flawed. The book's world and story was strong enough to keep me reading.

However, I think the way the plot ‘flows' is the book's weakness. The whole story was predictable, and each time I reached a major plot point, I knew whatever happened happened because, well, because plot. I don't know about y'all, but when I read a book, I don't want to feel the plot like that. Things should just happen naturally. For example, Ratha realizes that her cubs are ‘witless' and becomes so angry that she attempts to murder one cub, then purposefully injures her mate. In that moment, I knew the author placed that moment there for no reason other than to drive Ratha back to the Named. It was too obvious. She was also daydreaming way too much about raising her cubs to be like the Named—more daydreaming than is usually allowed for a book character—earlier in that chapter. So, I knew her cubs would turn out to be ‘witless' already. Much of the book was like this: extremely predictable. Many moments in the book made me think, oh, this is happening so that this can happen later on, rather than, oh, this is happening because this happened earlier.

But other than that, I still think that this was a good book, and I admire the author's creativity with this one. I think it deserves 3.8 stars.