Jessica

I liked Purple Hibiscus, but I think I was spoiled by reading "Half of a Yellow Sun" first. That book is so grand in scope, and this one is much smaller. It really just explores the insular world of fifteen-year-old Kambili, who grows up in a very wealthy, but stifling and abusive, household in Enugu. This you can tell from the blurb.

For me, a lot of the most interesting things were on the margins of the novel. I really liked the character of Kambili's cousin Amaka, who's outspoken and fiercely attached to Nigeria, talking contemptuously about the US in comparison. Another (very minor) character has studied at Cambridge, and tries to discourage Kambili's auntie from emigrating on the basis of white racism. I guess what I'm trying to say is that my favourite part of the novel was the political commentary, but this was much less extensive than in "Half of a Yellow Sun" or her anthology, "The Thing Around Your Neck".

I found it hard to get attached to Kambili; I kept getting frustrated that she never stood up to anyone (not even her cousin), even though this makes sense for someone who's been raised in the environment she has. Even by the end of the book, while she's grown somewhat, I wouldn't exactly describe her as a strong character. Which is fine, because a lot of people are like that, and I wouldn't criticise the characterisation exactly, but it did frustrate me more than it made me sympathetic. I found her brother Jaja more interesting, overcoming that rearing instead. As for the character of her father, I didn't really understand him. He seemed to throw money around too indiscriminately for someone who despised anyone who wasn't a devout Catholic... did he only bother telling his family his opinions on religion? Considering he made such a big deal of them, that would seem weird, but it's the only thing that makes sense.

I thought the ending was brilliant.

All in all, definitely worth reading, although I'd probably prioritise her other books.

So nine years on, I've finally finished this series. It looks like I never reviewed any of the previous instalments (not even the two I read last November), so it's hard for me to remember them to work out how this compares.

In its own right, the first 30% or so was really funny, but after that it got rather serious. I found the plot much easier to follow than either of the previous two books, but it was actually a very serious plot about feeling like your existence is pointless and trying to find your purpose in life and, oh yeah, trying to raise a maladjusted teenager who appeared out of nowhere and brandishes weapons a lot.

I feel like I have to rate this book at least as highly as the fourth one, so three stars it is. But it was a strange one.

Una mica avorrit. Havia de llegir aquest llibre per una classe, i mentre la història és curta i passa ràpidament (probablement perquè és molt condensada), no és interessant. Hi ha un home arrogant i odiós que es fa invisible perquè pugui fer delictes, quina història!

No ho odio. Però em va semblar avorrit i no vull rellegir-lo en anglès!

Un libro poderoso de dictadura y resistencia. Me gustó inmensamente, pero todavía tengo el sospecho que me habría gustado más en inglés. Había tantos personajes que tenía dificultad distinguirlos al empezar, y por esta y otras razones estoy segura que me perdí muchos detalles. Algún día me gustaría leer una edición inglesa, y obtener una mayor comprensión del libro.

A pesar de eso, por obvio lo disfruté. Es más realista que algunos otros de Allende, más como [b:La isla bajo del mar|6631038|La isla bajo del mar|Isabel Allende|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1320472711s/6631038.jpg|6825396] que [b:La casa de los espíritus|18273129|La casa de los espíritus|Isabel Allende|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1375291014s/18273129.jpg|25738731]. Combina una historia de resistencia contra un régimen opresivo con una historia del amor (aunque probablemente se podía adivinar esto por el título), y es una lectura compulsiva. En partes puede ser lento, y como he mencionado lo encontré tan difícil al comenzar. Pero esto podría ser una falta de mi castellano, no del libro (tendría que ver después de leerlo en inglés). Hasta aquí, creo que es una de las mejores obras de Isabel Allende (¡pero tengo que leer muchas más!).

This is an incredibly depressing book. It's just relentless misery, all the time. From the very beginning, our narrator's life is miserable, and as time progresses things get worse and worse, until towards the end she finally gets a slight reprieve.

So I didn't find this book very satisfying. I read it over three reading sessions, and it seemed that the novel changed a lot between each of those sessions (even though the points where I stopped were not-particularly-remarkable chapter breaks).

For the first third, the thing that stood out to me was the abusive marriage that Natalia, or Pidgey, was stuck in. Her husband Joe was written so deliberately to be a controlling and emotionally abusive man that I thought it was going to become a plot point at some point, but... no. Perhaps my expectations were raised because it was right there in the introduction that she was going to marry a second time, which I thought meant she was going to find some agency and leave the worthless turd she was married to. Unfortunately not. His behaviour is never really acknowledged as controlling or anything either, which of course reflects the fact that Natalia doesn't have a lot of agency, and just accepts nearly everything that happens to her. She never questions her husband's behaviour, which doesn't mean that the author doesn't, because after all, she laid it out so plainly. But even so, it made it hard for me to get invested in the story – like, it was hard to barrack for Natalia when she wasn't even barracking for herself.

And then there is the second part – my reading session that took me up to 58% – which was just characterised by an overload of pigeons. Apparently (according to the introduction, again) this was actually Mercè Rodoreda's original vision for the novel; she wanted to write about someone completely surrounded by pigeons, and she made up the rest of the novel to work around this vision. I think this novel is an excellent example of how this is a terrible way to design a novel. Also, her violence towards the pigeons – like shaking the eggs to kill the pigeons before they hatched – kind of really disturbed me.

Finally, there is the war, and the consequences of that. Her thoroughly unlikeable husband goes off to fight against the fascists, which you could consider an attempt to show us that “even bad people can do good things”, except that the novel thoroughly equates the fascists and the workers' revolution anyway. Bourgeois characters are given space to make their idiotic arguments (like “without the rich, the poor could not survive” – because history has shown how trickle-down economics works so well) and I can't recall any arguments ever being made in favour of the revolution. It's true that Natalia never really supports the fascists, because she's so busy trying to avoid starvation, but there are other characters supporting the fascists on the basis that it'll end the war and end starvation... so. That link is still made, just weakly.

I guess what bothered me about this is that the novel depoliticised a deeply, and integrally political conflict. This is something that depictions of the Spanish Civil War do a lot, and I think it's appalling, because if these are the only depictions accessible to you (which they basically are) then you're going to come away not even knowing what the war was.

I don't think this is a bad novel, but it definitely wasn't my type of novel, being depoliticised with a very weak protagonist. These may be valid choices, but they don't sit well with me.

Edit: Just one final comment – I wasn't really a fan of the translation; it seemed like the translator got over-excited and translated lots of things he shouldn't have, like people's names. Maybe Pidgey instead of Colometa was acceptable (if “Colometa” has the same vibe as “Pidgey” in Catalan, which I'd assume it does), but I don't think there are many Joes, Matthews or Ernies running around Barcelona and that really took me out of the story. Also, some street or another got translated to High Street, but Passeig de Gràcia stayed as it was? Why?! It's not the kind of story that would work if you tried to transplant it somewhere other than Barcelona, so I don't get why you would translate all the names and most of the geographical landmarks. Like I said, it took me out of the story and made me feel like it was set in some weird fake and/or alternate-universe version of Barcelona, which can't have been the intention.

After some reading of other reviews I decided to revise down my star rating. Like I said originally, this is another of those books I would rate 3.5 if that were possible, but it's not, so I have to find some way to lean towards.

Look, I really, REALLY liked the first quarter or so; it was extremely surreal but fascinating. But then the storyline slowed the fuck down and after that it wasn't anywhere near as gripping. It was still interesting, just very slow. To be honest, I found I found the main plot – the conflict between the gods – kind of boring. I vastly preferred the more human subplots, like Shadow's relationship with his wife, or the goings-on in Lakeside. I guess it turned out that the goings-on in Lakeside did pertain to the gods, but only at the very end so I won't count that! As an exploration of “America” and its culture and traditions it was also interesting – I generally liked the flashbacks. I also appreciated that the traditional woman killed in the first 10% of the book to fuel the male protagonist's growth didn't actually go away, although there was still something that vaguely bothered me about the characters. After reading some other reviews, I think it's just that I was never really invested in most of them. Like I said, the human characters were more relatable, but the gods (and Shadow himself a lot of the time) were really detached and blasé about everything, which got boring.

So yeah, I did like this book, but mostly on the strength of the beginning. Admittedly, I was reading the longer “author's cut” rather than the somewhat slimmed-down version that was originally published, and maybe I should have read that one, even if the author himself prefers it longer. I don't know what parts were actually cut out in the original edition, so I don't know! But I do suspect that it might have progressed a bit faster, and been a bit more compelling to read.

I feel like I'm being a bit harsh, but still, I can't say I “REALLY” liked this book. Honestly I think the structure didn't appeal to me. There was no “grand narrative” – plot lines finished well before the end, and started well after the start – and it was a bit confusing. The writer rarely spelled twists out, just somehow stating that the point-of-view character at that particular moment had made a shocking discovery that the reader was meant to have got too. I rarely did and I spent a lot of time flicking backwards to try to work it out, only to usually fail.

Aside from that it was pretty good, though. It talks about love, war, tragedy, and all those kinds of big themes. It doesn't depict this really creepy man as a lover extraordinaire (ahem, García Márquez). It's worth reading. Just not spectacular.

I did like this book, but it didn't seem very “special” to me. I'm finding it interesting to read other people's reviews and find that they're often relating the book to their own lives – dead and ex-POW grandfathers. If you feel some resonance like that while reading it, then I can see why you'd rate it highly, but the only thing that's resonating with me is these reviews.

The book itself is still good, though. Worth a read, at least.

So this is a pretty interesting book, but it's one of those “political argument in novel form” books that I always hold to a higher standard.

The annoying thing about this book is that Marcus never actually does anything productive. Everything he does is defensive, which is valid to a certain extent, but you're never going to change the world by adamantly insisting it stay as it is. Throughout most of the book, he had no strategy to end the DHS's reign of terror. He just had strategies to hold them back for a while, and then they'd crack his defenses, and push him back. This, relentlessly. His “victory” at the end was far too neat and tidy. And the “moral of the story” that people should just get out and vote? Barf. The leaks over the last couple of months have proved that the Democrats are just as bad as the Republicans on this front. What is voting going to do?! Nothing, absent a huge struggle that seriously affects the economy.

As a novel it was a good read, though. And I can't fault it on actually understanding modern technology, which sets out apart from many other novels! So I mean, it was alright (especially since you can get it for free), but not really, REALLY good.

This review probably won't be very long. Basically, this is about the general malaise of obscenely rich kids in LA who have nothing better to do with their time than do lots of drugs. This means they make lots of bizarre and illogical decisions, and some of them seem very fuzzy on the idea that all human beings are entitled to bodily integrity and not being abducted, raped and/or murdered on camera. At least the narrator isn't so bereft of ethics that he enjoys watching that, but he doesn't go to any lengths whatsoever to try to stop it either. He says things sometimes about how caring is too hard, it just makes you get hurt, so he tries not to. I'm not sure if the book is nihilistic or a denunciation of nihilism or both.

To its credit, the book is hard to put down – it just kind of rattles along at a consistent pace until the end, and the segments it's divided into are mostly shorter than a page each so it's really easy to do the “just one more... just one more” thing. Plus, it's really short. That doesn't make it fun to read, though.

I was given this book by my mother, who only managed to read part of it before giving up angrily, declaring it was too depressing. It probably is, but I really enjoyed it, nonetheless. At least until the end, it's incredibly realistic, and depicts the everyday tragedies that are constantly happening around us. For me, Krystal Weedon's relationship with her mother was really familiar, reminiscent of my mother at her worst (which, I suspect, is the real reason she couldn't finish the book). There's a ton of unhappy marriages, parents who regret having their kids, small-minded small-town small businessmen who are callous enough to think that cutting off drug addicts (and their entire families) from any kind of help or resources is a good idea, and so it goes. It's an exercise in showing the world as it really is, rather than as we might wish it would be.

I did have some issues with it. Mostly, I didn't like the ending very much. It seemed like the characterisation, which had been impeccable thus far, suddenly went a bit off. It's hard to believe that Krystal left her toddler brother to go wandering off near a river – she's certainly not shown as having perfect judgement, but better judgement than that, I'd think, no matter how desperate she is to get pregnant so she can escape her hellish living conditions – for that very brother's sake! And as well, much as I despised her, Shirley never seemed like the husband-murdering type, and the image of her prowling the streets of Pagford with an Epi-Pen clutched in her hand seemed a bit far-fetched. In neither case did these characters start acting hugely OOC, but they did a bit. It just made the conclusion seem a bit melodramatic and contrived, although I wouldn't say it was rushed, at least.

The other thing that bothered me was the pronunciation respelling in the Weedons' (and co's) dialogue... even words that they were pronouncing as per the standard, like “could” (which became “cud”) and “was” (“wuz”). I'm generally opposed to writers doing this to begin with – it usually comes across as patronising, and while I don't think it does here due to Rowling's obvious sympathy for the Weedons, I do think it did when she used the same technique for Hagrid in Harry Potter. Furthermore, it's unnecessary. These characters' speech patterns differed from what might be considered “neutral” English – lots of use of “ain't”, double negatives and the particle “right?” tacked on at the end of sentences, for a start. Just as an example, the sentence, “But I ain't done nothing wrong, right?” would convey the accent just as well as “Bu' I ain' done nuffin' wrong, righ'?” which is what this text probably would have preferred. Also, Rowling did this (changed the speech patterns but not the spelling) for Andrew Price's dialogue, who it seems spoke much the same way as the Weedons, and in places it got really hard to read. Mostly when Terri was speaking, which probably evokes how hard her slurred speech would have been to understand in person anyway, but still, overall the technique irritated me.

On a slightly related note, the book also has a few sections where multiple paragraph are enclosed within parentheses, and it seems like this was hard to edit because there were also a few spots where there was a closing parenthesis at the end of a paragraph with no pair that I could find. The writing feels a bit casual, but that doesn't bother me, just the apparent lack of editing.

Still, all in all, I loved this book. I wouldn't say it's slow, but a lot of the “action” is characters bickering with each other, so if you have no patience for that this book probably isn't for you. It's not usually my thing either, but I found the characters here so compelling that it worked. I really, really recommend it, and I find it kind of sad that its rating on Goodreads is so low just because of all the Harry Potter fans who read it and had their delicate sensibilities wounded by swearing and frank depictions of sex. I like Harry Potter, but this is a completely different kind of book, and yeah. It worked for me.

Considering how much I loved Everything is Illuminated, I was really, really disappointed with this one. It's incredibly pretentious. Not a lot really happens. The characters didn't feel like characters, but like plot devices. I found the main character, nine-year-old Oskar Schell, kind of cringeworthy. I thought that the subplot about his grandparents' story was much better, but it was similar to the backstory in Everything is Illuminated which was much, much better. I just think having a character who refuses to speak and writes everything everywhere is really gimmicky. One of my grandmothers died when I was seven, and because she had motor neuron disease, I can't remember her saying a word – she, too, wrote everything in notebooks. But those notebooks never overflowed in the house. I'm not sure where I'm going with this tangent, except that this grandfather character seemed like an insult to my intelligence.

I didn't hate the book, but I thought it was very mediocre. Mostly, it thought it was way deeper and more insightful than it really was. I don't even know what it was trying to say – “when people die, you need to move on,” I guess. But considering that's all it's trying to say, the dozens and dozens of pages devoted to Oskar searching for the lock that can be opened by this key he found is really annoying.

Hmm, I was going to rate this two stars, but typing this up has made me reconsider. I didn't hate it, but I certainly did not like it, and apparently “one star” encompasses that! So yeah. My advice – read Everything is Illuminatedfor sure. But skip this. The other book will just get your hopes up, when this is a big let-down.

PS: the exception to the above is Oskar's letter to his French teacher, pretending to be his mother and cancelling his lessons. That cracked me up. His mother apparently never even cares that she's paying for French lessons he doesn't go to though, which is kind of indicative of this book in general.

This book reads like bad fanfiction. It's just terrible. It's not even fun to read, which the previous books in this series all were, even if the plots started to get holes in them and there was often too much camping in the woods. This was just miserable.

The problems started with the protagonist, fifteen-year-old Aya. This is the same age that Tally was at the start of Uglies, but Aya is not Tally, and consistently behaves like she's much younger. She is completely obsessed with achieving fame, but she doesn't seem to have any friends at all – just a small flying robot, Moggle. She does have a brother (Hiro), who seems to find her a nuisance, and her brother also has a friend (Rem, I think) who she seems to treat as a friend of her own, even though at one point in the novel he makes her swim to the bottom of a deep lake to collect the robot Moggle, instead of like, using a net or something. Oh also, early in the book she meets a reasonably famous guy (Frizz) at a party who develops a crush on her, even though he's so committed to telling the truth that he got brain surgery to make him incapable of telling lies and she lies all the time.

And you see, this lying is related to why she seems to have no friends – she is so desperate to achieve fame that when she does become part of a particular clique, it's only so she can expose their secret (illegal) thrill-seeking and somehow achieve fame that way. Which, as a plan, does not even make sense. But nonetheless, Aya seems to regard other people as mere tools to be used in the pursuit of fame, being so astoundingly self-absorbed that she is really, really unlikeable.

Also, she doesn't seem to have any parents or anything. In general, she seems very ungrounded – which again, is a huge contrast to when we were introduced to Tally in Uglies, who we knew to have parents (hell, her parents even appeared in one scene), and also friends (Peris, although he'd already been prettified). Aya has none of this background; she could almost be a robot with false memories who hadn't existed until just when the novel began. It probably would have been more interesting if that was the case.

Anyway, if Aya is unrelatable and unlikeable, so too is everyone else. Hiro just seems kind of unpleasant early in the book, Rem has the incident with the lake, and Frizz is just a walking plot device. When characters from the previous books arrive – Tally, Shay and co. – not only are they really dislikeable but they're not even in character. In the intervening time since Pretties (which, by the way, is only THREE YEARS – the entire social structure this book describes was established and stabilised in THREE YEARS, what?!), Tally has somehow gone from how she was then to a gruff and celibate type who thinks nothing about getting random teenagers kidnapped by the people she thinks are the bad guys. Just... callous.

The main plot, honestly, is pretty boring (although probably my contempt for most of the characters helped to shape my opinion), and an economy based on reputation doesn't even really make sense, although I'd be willing to forgive it that if it had done anything interesting with the concept.

There was some interesting stuff around social media gone too far (I guess) – people in Aya's city seem to have Facebook (although it isn't called Facebook) installed directly into their eye sockets, so at any moment they can look up “their” feeds, and the feeds of others, and have these things projected directly onto their eyes. Kind of like Google Glass, but weirder. So that was interesting conceptually, but it added a whole extra level onto the narration – I think Westerfeld wrote more about what Aya saw on her feed than what she saw in the actual physical world – and it meant this book had a very different feel to the three that came before it. Honestly, I think it would've been better if he'd just written a standalone novel, with better characters.

So in the end... I came away from this very disappointed. I felt like this book sullied my memory of the other ones, and particularly of the character of Tally. Uglies wasn't a perfect book, but it was interesting and I really liked it on the reread. The other books may have let it down a little, but this one did in a big way. I wish I hadn't read it. Man.

As far as I'm concerned, this is a perfect book. It tells the story of three (or four) generations of the one Uruguayan family, and in particular three women: Pajarita, her daughter Eva, and her daughter Salomé. It's very left-wing, with most of the characters having leftist sympathies of some description (but not, unsurprisingly, wealthy Argentine doctors) and there's representation of transwomen and same-sex attraction.

I guess in large part I loved it because it talks about the struggles of working-class women in twentieth-century Uruguay, and the women here are defiant and bold and determined to define their own lives. They do suffer, but they bounce back. It is frustrating, as a reader, when injustices happen that are never really avenged, but it's also satisfying to see these characters moving on with their lives and not, for the most part, just being crushed.

The book ends on a sad note, but for me it was really touching, and I even started crying about five pages from the end. I really recommend this book, particularly for anyone interested in South America and its history – and especially if you've been to Montevideo or Buenos Aires, because even though I haven't been to either place for long it evoked them very well – gazing out at the endless blue of the Río de la Plata from La Rambla in Montevideo, or the stark contrast between the Buenos Aires neighbourhoods of San Telmo and Recoleta. Its depiction of Rio de Janeiro is probably similar, although that one I can't say.

A parting note though – even though it was definitely worth it, trying to get a copy of this book was really damn hard (although, as I discovered, not as hard as trying to get a copy of de Robertis' second book, Perla!). I prefer not to buy paper copies of books because then I have to find room for them in my overly-cluttered house and they're usually much more expensive... but getting an electronic copy was a nightmare. For some reason, not only has the publisher decided it has to be absurdly expensive ($12!) but it's also decided to put geolocks on it, such that most ebook sellers won't sell it to Australians. Eventually though, I found that I could buy it from Diesel eBooks, and I breathed a sigh of relief. I'm not really sure why Random House is so intensely determined to prevent people from buying their books, but uh... yeah. That was by far the worst part of this book. Get your act together, Random House.

On the reread, I liked this book better than the one that came before it. This may be due to improvements such as – less time devoted to camping in the woods, and not just rehashing the first book.

It still didn't match up to my fond memories of it.

Overall, I don't think the plot of the entire trilogy made much sense. It all hinges on some connection between brain structure and chemistry that I don't think Westerfeld properly worked out himself. On the one hand, Tally can “think her way out of” being a bubbleheaded pretty, and the same with being a special; but on the other hand, some mysterious chemical “cure” changes people's brain chemistry such that they break with the habits of a lifetime (or at least the part since their pretty operations)... and stage an entire continent-wide revolution.

The “cure” is explained even less well than in the last book, too; at least that time there was something about “lesions” making people bubbleheaded, that “nanos” can eat to cure the affliction. Okay. But then in this book, we learn that Tally's experience of thinking her way out of bubbleheadedness has inspired Maddy to change her cure design. So what does it even do now?! If Maddy's been inspired to let people think their way out of their brain configuration, that makes it sound like her new “cure” is just a placebo. But it's clearly not, because countless specials receive a cure against their will that changes the way they think... against their will.

So, I really don't understand what we were meant to take away about brain structures and personality and so on there. It just seemed inconsistent and considering it's what the entire plot revolves around...

There were other plot holes, too. For instance, I do not believe that the Crims would be recruited to this elite, secretive force known as Special Circumstances and never seem to be under any kind of supervision of any kind, ever. They're just free agents doing their own thing, and “their own thing” turns out to involve destroying the city's armoury in a massive chemical disaster. Seriously? Dr Cable didn't think to monitor her pet projects a little better? Considering the way the trilogy depicts her as this master manipulator who's always three steps ahead of everyone else, this is perplexing.

And her demise, as I suggested, is pathetic.

Then the book seems very muddled in the message it's trying to send about human nature. The book specifically declares that human nature is to be selfish, and it suggests that human nature is to pursue endless growth until the destruction of the world. “Rusty civilisation” (our civilisation) serves as a warning throughout the series of the dangers of endless, unsustainable growth, but then in this book it seems that the first thing humanity does when in possession of their own minds is resort to environmental destruction. Which is why the last two pages is about how Tally and David are going to become the “new special circumstances”, and try to stop that. But again... seriously? Two people are going to single-handedly save the environment of an entire continent? Sure, that is so believable.

And as well, it ends up giving the impression that the very regime Tally just overthrew had the right idea – human nature is to slowly commit mass suicide, so you'd better keep them pacified for their own good. I think when I first read the series, I loved the apparent moral dilemma. Now, I'm not so sure.

Another seeming contradiction that crops up is the glorification of cutting, after the first book spent so much time preaching about how horrible all our modern stress over body image is. Like... I don't understand why you would preach and preach about body image and how everyone should feel comfortable in their own skins, but then glorify cutting. They just seem like two sides of the same coin (or two sides of the same dice... I'm sure there are lots of similar issues), and considering this trilogy seems to aspire to impart a moral lesson to pre-teen, or perhaps young teenage readers, it doesn't seem very good at it.

In the end, I am really undecided as to whether to give this two stars or three. I did like this book better than the previous one (which I rated two), mostly for reasons of pace and structure, which were much improved. But then the plot made a lot less sense, so ratings-wise I think that evens out. It's a reasonably fun read, just kind of nonsensical.

I'm still planning to read the “bonus” book, Extras, at some point in the near future; I didn't actually read that one when it first came out so it'll be something new, at least! And hopefully an improvement, although, maybe I won't expect too much from it.

It's hard to say how I feel about this one. First and foremost, it's an excruciatingly painful book to read. But at the end of it, I come away thinking it's the kind of book everyone should read at some point in their lives.

The themes of this story really resonated with me. It's told in the form of letters by Eva Khatchadourian, mother of the titular Kevin, and it's really more her story than his. It's the story of her marriage to Franklin Plaskett, a very different person to her – conservative to her liberal, innocent to her cynical, all-American to her “worldly traveller”. Regardless, their marriage is more or less doing fine... until they have a child, Kevin.

Kevin, to put it briefly, is a horror. He's such a horror that Eva's accounts of his horribleness sometimes veer into making her sound deranged, which I think is the point. But from the off, Franklin – to whom she's addressing all these letters – consistently takes Kevin's side, telling her she's imagining all his misdeeds and bad attitude. This effectively destroys their relationship.

It's also one of the things that makes this book so frustrating to read. It's basically a 400-page exercise in Eva justifying herself. Considering we know from the blurb of the book (or, if we didn't read it, from pretty much the start of the book anyway) that Kevin winds up conducting a mass-murder at his school, we know that Eva is right about him, in essentials if not always in the detail. Throughout her letters, Eva seems determined to rub this in Franklin's face. She must detail dozens of arguments in meticulous detail, all of which show how she is right and Franklin is stupid and wrong. After the first hundred pages I felt like I'd got the point already and that's what made getting through the rest of it so hard. I'm glad I did, but I'm just saying, that's the only thing that makes me give this four stars instead of five.

The fact that all the characters in this book are so flawed really appealed to me – Kevin is a special kind of flawed, of course, but Franklin is optimistic to the point of stupidity, and Eva is incredibly self-absorbed. It's a really cynical book, in a lot of ways, and obviously there is no happy ending. I liked it for its representation of the world, I guess, and less for its ability to provide emotional satisfaction, because it couldn't.

Oh, and another flaw in the book – Shriver didn't seem to know that domain names can't have underscores in them. Incredibly minor, but the novel cited these supposed domain names with underscores in them more than once and it took me out of the novel somewhat.

So in the end... as I said, I think everyone should read this book. It's chilling, it scared me, and it's a reminder that having children can completely ruin your entire life. Even short of having Kevin turn into a mass-murderer, the book illustrated the point – if anything, that was just a framing device to give structure to the book, and the real story ended before it ever happened. The thing that makes it scary isn't the mass-murder, but the thought that you could lose a happy, satisfying relationship to a horror of a child. Or at least, that's what I took out of it.

So, unlike the first book in the trilogy, this did not live up to my fond memories of it.

I think the main problem is the plot. Second instalments of trilogies often seem a bit difficult, and this isn't the first time I've read one where there's a giant disconnect between the first half and the second, such that it seems really jarring. That's exactly what happens here. The first half is about Tally's new life as a pretty, and struggling against it – and then the second half is practically the first book redux. Only, this time around she meets a "primitive tribe" which seems to serve purely as a vehicle for Westerfeld to ruminate on the violence and self-destructiveness he sees as inherent to human nature.

As I recall, the first book could be preachy too, but this one is even preachier. Tally is suddenly full of exposition and philosophical ramblings, and it's just... well, it doesn't appeal very much. The conclusion of this book is literally a re-run of the conclusion to the last book. I just don't think we, as the reader, made a lot of progress.

I also didn't care much at all for the love triangle, and I thought it was absurd that kissing Zane, and falling in love with Zane should improve Tally's clarity of thought. That makes no sense. But really, nothing about the brain damage inflicted on pretties nor the cure makes any sense, and I preferred the last book which didn't spend so much time dwelling on this nonsensical cure.

I'd also have liked to have seen more on the dynamic between Tally and Shay, and the sense of betrayal that Shay has every right to feel, honestly. Then the end of the book was far too rushed – considering that the romantic subplot about Tally and David was so central to the last book, in this one they reunite and break up again in what, thirty pages? and she's excessively nasty to him too? WHAT IS THIS. Maybe more time should have been spent on this, and less on camping in the woods.

So while it saddens me to give this book such a low star rating, I can't really justify giving it any higher. It was a fast read, which made it a nice change, but it just didn't hold up for me.

I probably can't review this book any better than people already have before me. Nonetheless, there are some things I feel obliged to say.

Mostly, this book is stupid. The premise is completely stupid. It's basically about a society where 90% of the working class is “factionless”, and the rest of society is divided into five factions based on what quality they value most – Abnegation for selflessness, Dauntless for courage, Candour for honesty, Erudite for intelligence, and Amity for kindness. If you think that more than one of these qualities is important, you are “Divergent”, which is apparently extremely unusual and considered so much a threat to the status quo that people try to kill you.

Yep, just for having a personality that isn't completely centred on one quality.

On top of this, at the end of the book, the Erudite come up with the genius plan to destroy the factionless, who they see as a drain on society, even though they do almost all the work that makes society function. Wow.

So, you can read a lot of reviews about how stupid the premise of this book is, and I recommend you do, because they were so entertaining that they inspired me to stick with this book when I was 27% done and dismayed at how unexpectedly bad it was. But for now, I'd like to move on from the premise.

The characterisation was bad. It seemed like most of the characters were depicted in terms of the faction(s) they were associated with and had no personality or development beyond that. Some characters are one-note sadists, others one-note loudmouths, others one-note selfless people. Even when characters did demonstrate a new side to them, it never really felt like they were showing off a new side; it was more like some new, different character had usurped their body. That was the vibe I got.

The main character never really clicked with me. To be honest, I never really got how she was supposed to be ~~sooooooo speshul~~ just because she was neither purely brave, nor purely selfless, nor purely smart, but brave AND selfless AND smart. EXACTLY WHO IS ONLY ONE OF THOSE THINGS?!? And because of her specialness, she excelled at every mental test thrown at her, so much so that her passing her initiation was never in doubt... it just made no sense.

Her love interest didn't seem like a fully-formed person either, just your requisite badass with a tragic past. The romance itself was okay, just a bit boring because I didn't care about either character.

And as for the plot? Well, I can't say there wasn't one, but it's a bit thin. The good thing is that it's a quick read – reading this in a Kindle app on my phone, I'm not sure how this was 487 pages; maybe they were 487 really short pages? Anyway, that is what saves this book from a one-star reading. It's not a painful read, just mind-boggingly stupid. Which means you get all the entertainment value of complaining about how stupid it is, so really, it earns that extra star. I probably won't buy the next book, but if someone were to leave it lying conspicuously in front of me, I'd give it a read. This book is bad, but at least it's a semi-fun kind of bad.

This book made me reflect a little on anthologies, as a form. I mean, I did really like this book (at least the first half - I felt the last three stories were weaker), but I felt that the fact that it was a series of short stories in an anthology meant that I enjoyed it less than I'd have enjoyed a novel on similar themes.

There's a couple of reasons why I think this. The first one is that every story meant introducing an entirely new set of characters, and this was something I don't think she did very effectively, at least in the last three. For each of those stories, I spent quite a few pages puzzling over how each of the characters was supposed to relate to each other, and in the case of “Yellow Jackets”, I never quite did work it out fully. Over the course of a novel, it would have been the same group of characters, and I'd only have to work out the puzzle once. And then the second reason why I didn't like the anthology format as much is that there was no compulsion to keep reading. After reading the first couple of stories, I didn't bother reading any more for months. I read the rest over the course of about a week, but it's such a short book, I could have read faster if I'd been compelled to. But when you're creating a new set of characters every twenty pages, it's hard to get invested in them, and you certainly can't be driven to keep reading out of passionate curiosity to see what happens next.

So that's what I was thinking about the limitations of this form, but then there's more to say about this book beyond that.

As I've probably mentioned, I really liked it. It's a collection of stories that seem pretty well based on the author's own experiences, or the experiences of people in her circle. Some of the characters I can recognise to a certain extent, like the left-wing organiser who calls you up to guilt-trip you into coming to this or that event, or people who think they're really progressive because they can talk about war or capitalism and patriarchy, when actually as people they're kind of shit. There are mothers who neglect their children, lovers who feud because one has joined a left-wing organisation so distanced from reality that it seems a bit cultish... and it goes.

Anyway, I am a left-wing activist, so I don't really just want to rubbish on left-wing activism. The point I'm really trying to make is that there's a lot I could recognise in this book from my experiences, and it was an interesting read because there's really not many books that describe the same kinds of things. One of the characters even leafleted!! It was exciting stuff.

I guess I just came away feeling that much as I enjoyed this, I might have enjoyed a novel on the same themes even more. I mean, she does keep coming back to the same archetypes - the annoying sanctimonious left-wing activist, the depressed single mum, the well-intentioned liberal who thinks radicals are a bit weird, the ten-year-old girl who has to fend for herself, this kind of thing. What limited information I've found through Google suggests that Clausen has also written novels though, and these are maybe some things I should seek out.

I'm not sure how easy this book can be to find - I picked it up at a clearance sale where an entire bag of books went for a dollar. If you stumble across it though, it's well worth a read. Especially if you're familiar with the kinds of milieux she's writing about!

This is a hard one to rate. If I'd had to rate it halfway through I'd have given it four stars, but the second half really irritated me, so I've decided to be harsh. Sorry.

I really like what this book is trying to do. I like the idea of telling the story of a relationship between people who meet all out of order. I like that this is a universe where you can't rewrite history, and once it's known something is going to happen then it's already happened and is inevitable. I would love to see more plots like this. However, this novel started to seriously bug me.

In large part, I ended up just not liking Henry very much. In his youth he's depicted as a callous womaniser (although only one of his “conquests” is given an actual name...) and even when he's older, and supposedly become a better person out of love for Clare, he keeps doing things that make him reflect on how Humbert Humbertish he is but doesn't like... stop doing the things. He's also rather pretentious. Mostly, I wanted to smack him.

And then there is Clare. Honestly, who is Clare? I never got a good grasp on what her personality is supposed to be like. She seems to fall in love with Henry because he's much older and magical and falls into the meadow by her house and overall, because it's her fate. This makes me feel that Henry is a bit creepy, and even when Clare and Henry meet in real time, he's much older. And much more experienced in bed. (And wow, side thought - what was the deal with Clare feeling all guilty that she had sex while Henry was out of her life for two years? I'm pretty sure Henry had no shame on his womanising whatsoever. If Clare had felt guilty for betraying Charisse that'd make sense... but Henry???) After marrying Henry, she seems to desire nothing in life but to bear his children. She has an art studio because he bought it for her but she sure doesn't seem very invested in this career. I ended up just feeling bad for her because she literally has no life outside of Henry. At any point in the book.

I mean to be honest, none of the characters came across as particularly well realised, except maybe for Henry who's that infuriating kind of “reformed” womaniser who never seems to meet his karmic retribution.

But I like the idea of a love story like this, and while the second half drags on too long and I became really impatient to finish, the ending got me in the heart a little bit. It's just infuriating that this could have been mindblowing and yet, in reality, it's just kind of problematic.

EDIT: Sorry, I just wanted to add this quote that I took special note of because it was just so ridiculous:

“Computer viruses as art.”
“Oooh.” Oh, no. “Isn't that kind of illegal?”
“Well; no. I just design them, then I paint the html onto canvas, then I have a show. I don't actually put them into circulation.”

I watched the movie before reading this book. I watched it months ago. I'm not sure I'd have liked the book any better if I hadn't seen the movie (or, conversely, liked it any worse), but I think it's probably important to note that the entire time I was reading this book, I just had the movie in mind. I visualised the scenes from the movie. Overall, I came away with the feeling that the movie was an amazing adaptation of a pretty sweet book, and I think the movie also had a better climax - in terms of what happened the climax is the same, of course, but because the format of the book is a series of letters Charlie is writing to a mysterious someone, the climax is basically Charlie writing, “so basically, I realised that what I dreamed about Aunt Helen is true and now I've been in the hospital for two months,” which... was not really as good as the way it happened in the movie.

Nonetheless, I really liked the book.

So I liked this, but it was by far the weakest book of the trilogy. Above all, it was just very, very slow. I felt like there were lots of subplots and plot threads that were unnecessary, or not fleshed out enough to justify their presence in the book, but they took up space nonetheless. For instance, the Section fabricated a new exchange to replace the conspiratorial one that had really happened between Telorian and the other guy... but this never seriously posed a threat to the "good guys"' plan, ever? And Erika Berger's subplot seemed extraneous as well, and its resolution meant that the book really had two climaxes, which is just kind of weird.

Overall, this book is a bit of a mess. There are too many characters, too many plot threads to keep track of (I can tell you for a fact that I didn't keep track of), and my favourite character spends most of the book stuck in hospital not able to do very much. The corporate intrigue that irritated me in the first book but was joyfully absent from the second returns with a vengeance; as well, I continue to despise Mikael Blomkvist mostly for being infuriatingly perfect. Erika and/or Annika comment on his irresponsibility with relationships, how he sleeps around and toys with women's hearts without a care in the world, and while this is a good reason to despise him, this is also something there is next to no narrative basis for. The last book established how he's so perfect that he remains on good terms with all his former flames! What is this?

I don't know if that complaint even made sense, but it's basically a broader one about Larsson's sloppy approach to characterisation.

Anyway, the main reason I loved the first two books was that they were fun to read. They were, in large part, about a sassy and indomitable woman who took on all these men who are completely disgusting and (I would agree with Lisbeth) don't deserve to live, and wins. While it's not always straightforward, the bad guys always suffer eventually, and it makes for satisfying reading. This one just wasn't fun in the same way. Lisbeth was too incapacitated to do anything much, and the takedowns that occur seem like too little, too late at the end.

So, three stars. It should really have been edited, by which I mean completely restructured. The courtroom scene was fun though.

This is a collection of 12 short stories which, in general, cover the same kinds of themes - being an immigrant in America, being an Igbo academic, being an Igbo writer, facing war and persecution in Nigeria, having to reclaim your identity and history from white colonisers. These are essentially themes I don't have a lot of experience with, so I can't comment on how they're used or anything, but it was a collection of stories and themes I found interesting.

In response to some of the other reviews I glanced over - I don't think it's a problem that the stories were all largely on similar themes; to me it makes more sense for a collection to be on similar themes than for a collection to consist of things that have little to do with each other. But another criticism I read is that a lot of the stories have weak endings, and this I agree with; a lot of the time it seemed that they stopped suddenly, with no real conclusion reached.

As I mentioned when I reviewed Half of a Yellow Sun, I really like Adichie's prose. She also clearly writes things that are close to her, and her experiences - she returns to the same social layers, the same towns, etc. to tell her stories. It all seems very personal.

So in the end, I'm giving this four stars. For me, probably the highlight of the anthology was the last story, “The Headstrong Historian”, but there were quite a few good ones. I recommend it!

I'm definitely more liberal with the five-star ratings with nonfiction books than fictional ones... regardless though, this was a great book. It should be compulsory reading for any right-wing idiot who wants to claim Orwell was against revolutions; the entire point of this book was that he was fighting to defend it, and his criticism of the Communist Party is scathing not because they wanted revolution, but because (under orders from Moscow) they were determined to wreck it. His political analysis is brilliant – he uses the phrase “state-capitalist” before Cliff had ever theorised state capitalism - and above all, is passionate in his support of working-class revolution, with no pretense of being “impartial”. The truth is not impartial, basically.

Overall I loved this book. I'm definitely going to have to read more of his work; of course I've read his novels, but this has given me a taste for his nonfiction, too :)

I actually liked this better than the first book, at least until the goddamn CLIFFHANGER ENDING, which can't really count as a thing to make me dislike the book. (Well... I guess it could? But for me it doesn't. Not really.)

Good, so now that's settled. The book does start really, really slowly - the first 15% or so could be condensed so much, and there's lots of needless description devoted to such topics as Lisbeth's furniture purchases - which, needless to say, are never relevant to the rest of the plot.

As far as I can recall, it took until I was 40% of the way through the book for the really key event, the one that triggers all the drama and suspense, to happen. Then there is a veritable explosion of new characters, new intrigues, new mysteries, etc. and I could only just barely keep on top of it. This is another of the reasons I'm irritated about the cliffhanger ending - I have no idea how much of those characters, intrigues, etc. I'll be expected to remember by the time I get to it, although admittedly this book did a pretty good job of summarising the important plot points from the last one in case I'd forgotten what they were (I hadn't - that book was a breeze to understand compared to this one - or maybe that was because I read it faster), so...

I continued to love Lisbeth Salander; I know I should probably have some kind of political objection to vigilantism, but I share Lisbeth's revulsion for the cops and honestly, it's just so satisfying to see people we know (because the narrative told us) are the bad guys get their comeuppance. This is like 90% of the reason I read books so you know I'm going to love it.

Although, in contrast to what I wrote in my review of the first book, this time I did not like Mikael Blomkvist. Or I don't know, it's not that I didn't like him so much, but it seemed to me that he was just serving as this wish-fulfilment character for the author. That is, he's this man who's just so perfect in bed and he has all of these relationships on the go with all of these interesting women and he always remains on good terms with them after breaking things off, with the sole exception of Lisbeth Salander... but it seemed to me that after I noticed this the author did too, and the sections from Lisbeth's point of view are full of her making jabs at him, calling him “Practical Pig” or... ok apparently I lost all my other quotes but things along the line of “insufferable do-gooder”. And I would read these things and be like, “YES, THANK YOU.” It is actually possible that these comments were there all along, and not just after I realised how annoyingly perfect Blomkvist was... but maybe not, I don't know.

So overall, I did enjoy this book better than the first one, but not enough to give it a higher star rating (they're both four stars!). There are just too many flaws for me to give it a five-star rating - the slow beginning, the lengthy paragraphs about Ikea furniture, that kind of thing. Happily though, there was much less space devoted to the accounting of the Millennium newspaper, or any of the corporate intrigue that bored me the first time round. It's a good read and reasonably political, so I'd consider it a great follow-up to the first one.