Jessica

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.

I really adored this book. It's paced pretty much perfectly, never seems slow or boring, and there's a lot of dry humour that I really appreciate in the first half, that gradually fades away as the narrative turns more sombre and melancholy.

I have little more to say than that - it's so hard to think of things to say when a book was pretty much perfect. Read it!

No sé qué decir de eso. Supongo que me gustó, pero no es un libro compulsivo, si eso tiene sentido. La mayoría del libro sigue Eva Luna mientras una larga serie de cosas le pasan; sólo al final estas cosas me parecían ponerse conectadas. Por eso, fue difícil motivarme leer más después de cada vez que terminaba un capítulo. Hay interés en el libro pero todavía luchaba :p

This is a book that I read and adored when I was 13, and rereading it now, my opinion didn't change very much.

You can probably read the blurb for yourself, but it encompasses a lot of themes that I find really interesting - there's a dystopian, futuristic society, there's a bunch of rebellious youths struggling to create a new kind of society, and there's creepy stuff around brain surgery changing the way people think, making them placid and happy all the time. The first time I read the book, the first few chapters seemed kind of boring, but they establish the setting of the book efficiently and it's not like they're hard to read, so you can race through them and get to the good bit soon enough.

The novel can certainly seem a bit heavy-handed - the words “ugly” and “pretty” are used so many times that they can start to seem like they're not even real words, and there are quite a few tangents (whether spouted by a character in dialogue, or as a monologue from narrator Tally's own head) about the absurdity of judging people by their looks, how this leads to societal problems like anorexia or discrimination against ugly people or just everyone feeling really miserable in their own skins all the time. This is all true but I think the book overdoes its denunciations a bit - no one consciously thinks this obsession with appearance is a good thing, after all.

Overall though, the plot is good, the setting is fascinating, and towards the end of this book and, I think, in the other two of the trilogy, there's some stuff that comes up to make you pause and think. It's not a five-star book for the reasons I've outlined, but I love it deeply nonetheless.

Where do I even begin?

This book reads like a first draft. What's more, it reads like a NaNoWriMo first draft, with oodles and oodles of pointless description that seem to serve no purpose but to pad the page count. But unlike the NaNoWriMo requirement, this book is really long. According to my phone's Kindle app, it is 580 pages long. There might be 300 pages' worth of content in there. Look, there's nothing wrong with your first draft being overlong and unwieldy with lots of pointless stuff that needs to be cut out, but if the finished product is like this, it's a big problem. Most of my antipathy for this book is probably due to this.

Considering the 580 page length, it feels like not a lot really happens, either. Looking back on it, I guess stuff happened, but the way I remember it is: something happened at 10% in, another thing happened at 42% in... and although reviews on Goodreads had suggested that the book would get better in the second half, it really didn't. It continued to be a slow and plodding story in which I was desperate for something, anything interesting to happen. At 54% into the book she did seem to die, which fit my criteria quite admirably, but unfortunately she didn't actually die and kept on narrating from the spirit realm. And then returned back into the "real" realm, where she discovered that she had a brother who was a giant cat. Mmhmm.

What did happen in the second half was narrator Cat randomly crushing on her would-be murderer and general vain and conceited twerp, Andevai. As well, in the last 20% of the book, we suddenly found ourselves in the midst of a vast, popular uprising, but not to worry, as if this novel would spend much time contemplating that! Instead, we hear all about Cat's aforementioned sudden inexplicable love for Andevai. I'm assuming that this is what the next two books in the trilogy are going to be about (the sudden inexplicable love that is, I wouldn't hold out any hope it'll be about the uprising) but I don't really intend to find out.

My review might seem unrelentingly negative, but honestly I'm just frustrated that I spent so long reading this book, which was set in the lead-up to a mass uprising with a woman of colour for a protagonist, and it was so boring. How do you even have a beginning like this and make it so boring? How is this even possible?? Like, there's potential here, and it's completely squandered and buried under hundreds of pages of hardly anything ever happening. Ugh. If you'd like me to begrudgingly admit some things that I liked:

1. the demonisation of Camjiata over the whole book - I don't recall any huge block of exposition at once, but he's gradually depicted as some incredibly evil, dangerous guy, who challenged the political order (even though we can see this order is really bad) - before it's revealed that he's a radical who isn't too bad.

2. that Cat is a member of a minority group... this got annoying when it was 755867968 characters commenting on her shiny black hair, but it was good when it involved her explaining how the Romans had demonised her people, for instance. It wasn't a whitewashed vision of alternate-universe nineteenth-century Europe, which I appreciated.

3. the basic story around Cat's parentage, I guess... except IF IT COULD HAVE BEEN GOT THROUGH A BIT FASTER, THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN GREAT.

Yeah.

This is definitely my favourite book that I've read so far this year - and I know that it being February means that there's plenty of time for that to change, but the point is, I thought that this book was amazing.

The problem with loving a book so much is that I don't have much to put in a review of it. The one thing I didn't get was why parts two and three are in the order they are. That is, chronologically part three comes before part two (the rest of the parts being in order) and I just don't know what the purpose of that was? All it meant was that I spent part two mildly frustrated at this mystery being built up surrounding the circumstances of Baby's birth, and by the time I was reading part three I already knew how everything was going to turn out - that Olanna would forgive Odenigbo and Kainene would forgive Richard, because I'd just read about them being perfectly happy in part two. And also, that the baby would end up being raised by Olanna and Odenigbo, because that's what was happening in part two, after all.

But it didn't bother me that much - the novel works the way it is, I just think it also would have worked without the middle two parts being swapped, and I don't understand what swapping them really achieved.

Anyway. The novel as a whole has a sense of the inevitable about it, so maybe that's another reason why it didn't bother me. After all, it's a historical novel, and honestly I had never heard of Biafra before reading this book, so I was pretty sure they were going to lose their war of independence. But within that, there was still suspense. Bad things would happen, but what bad things? Characters were dying left right and centre, with only the five characters at the novel's core seeming immune - so I guessed that at the end something bad, like death, would befall one of them and that would be the climax... but that didn't really happen. There was the fake-out where Ugwu seemed to have died, but then he came back and recovered, and of course there was Kainene's mysterious disappearance that DEVASTATED ME FOREVER because she was the most engaging character to me, but her disappearance didn't seem much of a "climax" to the book, even though it happened at the end. In the end, the way the book ends seems to mirror the end of the war it's set in; it's exhausted and devastated, and there's nothing left to go wrong because there's nothing left.

I skim-read some reviews here on Goodreads and there were some complaints about the characters - that they were unrealistic, too perfect, or unengaging. I found none of these to be the case. To the contrary, they were all very imperfect but you could see how their backgrounds and social positions made them what they were. In particular, one of the reviews I skimmed complained that Richard was so anti-racist it was painful, but I still thought he was anti-racist in a very “privileged white person” way. He gets excited about Biafra's declaration of independence because he thinks this means he can be a native Biafran, and he spends half the book irritated that this or that person considers him an outsider, when can't they hear he speaks Igbo?! (Even though at some point late in the book he admits that "idioms and dialects elude him" - which would seem to mean a lot of spoken Igbo...) The point is that he, just like every other character, has flaws.

Another of the criticisms I read is that this book is hard to understand if you don't know anything about Nigerian history; well honestly, I knew practically nothing, and got completely absorbed in this book all the same. So while it may have been the experience of that person, I really don't think people should avoid the book, or postpone reading it in favour of another one, for that reason.

In fact, I would recommend this book to anyone who likes historical fiction. The characters are very real and engaging, I found the storyline compelling, the book never seemed to drag in spite of its length. There's a lot of sex scenes, if that influences your decision. Just read it because I loved it, and I'm sure that people aside from me would love it, too.

So... this book is slooooooow. It's mostly descriptive, with SOME conflict here and there but uh, mostly no. In fact, there are way more potential sources of conflict than actual sources of conflict.

As well, the start of the book kind of antagonised me, seeming to be more a polemic in the form of a novel than a novel itself. This feeling DEFINITELY went away, maybe a quarter of the way in (I forget exactly). The thing that irritates me is when writers create characters with perfect politics, and then make the whole book about this skilled political analyst existing in a particular situation. Given that the narrator is a late twentieth-century woman existing in an oppressive, pseudoreligious patriarchy, I got worried that that was what I was in for. But I wasn't. I was relieved.

Once that fear went away, I could better enjoy the flashbacks to life before, and especially the chapter that went through how the system changed. I am unconvinced that the explanation for how things changed is likely, but it didn't irritate me too much. As I said, there isn't really much conflict that over arches everything – there are more these flashes of conflict, especially in the flashbacks or in retrospect. At 81% done I had no idea where the climax was going to come from; at 92% no idea... then at 94% the narrative ended suddenly and I was really confused.

The epilogue contextualises things a bit better but I feel like SOME of that context could have been IN THE NOVEL (in particular, it is never mentioned even once – as I recall – that this is a recording on a cassette tape. She mentioned once that she was monologuing to herself, I think, so I thought the novel was supposed to represent the stream-of-consciousness from her head).

I actually really liked the epilogue. As a history student, once I read this series of letters by a particular woman, and there's no record of what happened to her after the letters cease either – so it's like, there's this whole story but some of the context is missing and we have to guess. Either way, it's an interesting form, to write in the form of historical documents – even if it's a bit late to be all, “By the way, that's what I was going for,” in the epilogue of the book I think.

Anyway! I did enjoy this overall, but it didn't grip me. If half-stars were a thing I might give it three and a half, but I'm not feeling very generous today, haha. So that's that.