Kyle
After my 2025 reread: Amazing book, but still stands as my least favorite of the trilogy.
I still find the structure jarring, although I appreciate how Collins manages to write a sequel that creates and completes a satisfying narrative arc and avoiding Middle Book Syndrome. Knowing the foreshadowing of what's to come makes the payoff all the better.
Katniss' character arc across this trilogy is always a highlight of my rereads. Catching Fire sets the stage for her controversial (at least at the time in 2010) arc in Mockingjay perfectly. Very excited to move on to Mockingjay, which has always been, and I expect will still be, my favorite of the 4 books.
A little better than I thought it would be, but not as good as it had the potential to be. I don't know what it is, but Levithan never really ever gets me to fully connect with his characters, and the same applies to this book.
He has this amazing ideas, and that also applies to this one. However, around the 50-page mark, I had a revelation about his books:
Why do books about LGBT characters have to be all about their sexuality? Just because somebody is gay, that doesn't mean that their everyday thoughts are about how unjustly treated they are, or how hard their life is. Some people just live their life, have issues with their friends, their family (ASIDE from whether or not their family accepts them), grades, etc. I'm not at all saying that LGBT fiction shouldn't tackle issues like coming out, and how society treats people with different sexual orientations, since it is true and should be written about . . . but what I just said before is also true (maybe I wouldn't feel the same way if I was gay, but I do have bisexual and lesbian friends in real life who seem to have very happy lives).
Being gay doesn't have to just be this sad, depressing thing of repression and scrutiny. It's just that you love the same gender. Not really a big deal that it should define any book with a gay MC, which it has in any that I have.
But, back to this book in particular, I never found myself connecting to the characters in any special way, nor did I care with whether or not they got what they wanted. It was just an okay read, but nothing special. I was also not at all moved by the storytelling method of those who have died from AIDS. It's unique, but it never really caught my interest much. I think it put up this wall between me and connecting with the actual characters this book concerns.
After reading: Jumping between a 4.5 and a 5. review to come
EDIT #2: SEPTEMBER 10TH?! BUT THAT'S . . . ALMOST AN ENTIRE YEAR AWAY.
Dear God, somebody just kill me already, before the wait does.
EDIT: My goodness, I think I may die. I just read that Smoke will not only be a sequel (thank God, I'd been worried when I'd heard it was a companion novel), but will be told from Pattyn's perspective (I was afraid it wouldn't) but also her younger sister Jackie! Not only that though, there may also be a THIRD BOOK! Gosh, I really hope that it won't turn out like the Crank Trilogy, where every book lost momentum. . . .
I'm going to die not knowing what happens next. I read Burned more than a year ago, and the fact that I could still be waiting more than a year waiting is torture. No book will ever be as good as Burned, and the only book that stands a chance is Smoke, so it better come out soon!
Ok, just a quick mini-review.
Because this deserves to be mentioned: DIVERSITY. Yes, only ONE of the four main characters is Caucasian! Everybody else is a different ethnicity! One of them is Indian-American, one is some kind of Central American (I forget which country) and one is African-American! I give Lorentz serious props for this, since ever seeing an MC that is non-white is a big deal in young adult fiction since about 98% of them are.
The end of this book is really good and has a nice opening for a possible series (I've heard it's a trilogy? Depending on what goes down in Book 2 it might be necesscary. At this point it is).
However the middle drags quite a bit, and there was a LOT of repetitive back-and-forth with the characters. Like seriously, your basically reading the same thing over and over again for 250 pages. And maybe it only became enjoyable once I got used to the formula (but hopefully this isn't in book 2 since that one is almost 500 pages).
There are hints of romance to come later in the series, and a possible love triangle. I'm pretty meh about all of it. I think if Marco's character had gotten more page time aside from his back-and-forth storyline that almost never went anywhere I would be more on board with this.
Also, perhaps a deeper connection to all the characters in general probably would've helped. Overall though, it became an entertaining read towards the end, and I'm more than willing to at least give the second book a chance and see if this series improves since it has the potential.
Afterthought: The plot was too straightforward. No real twists. And plot twists are, IMO, one of the biggest things to make a book exciting.
3.5 stars
A very creepy read, with a great antagonist, on-point pacing, and a MC who was equally compelling and drove me up the walls with some of her ridiculously stupid choices. In terms of grammatical errors, I only found 3 or 4, and none of them were anything major, but they stood out to me as I read - however it doesn't detract anything from the overall quality of the book and therefore not my rating either.
(Yes it worked!)
I mean, I should've known better. This one is all on me folks. I mean, once you have a history with a writer – a negative one – you should know better than to just pick up another book that they write and hope that it'll somehow magically change your opinion about the writer and the way that they write.
After giving both Forgotten and Revive by Cat Patrick a 0/5 star rating, I had no expectations from this author. I mean, she'd had more than one chance to impress me, and epically failed on all occasions. I mean, this was kind of ridiculous. And they both failed for the EXACT same reasons – and that same reason applies to a large portion of why I so disliked Just Like Fate.
It's not that Patrick doesn't have a great imagination when it comes to imaging up her premises. Revive? One of the best premises I'd ever had pitched to me by the computer screen when I read it on Goodreads. Same goes for Forgotten. However, despite the fact that these seemed more science fiction (the former) and magical realism (the latter), what they really turned out to be were mushy contemporary romances with absolutely no substance and boring, wooden writing and one dimensional characters.
Now, admittedly, the premise of this one doesn't pretend to be anything except a contemporary romance with a twist, but that twist was what gave me hope that this would be interesting as well as the fact that Patrick wasn't the only person who wrote this book! Another author could've been the saving grace of this book! And who knows, maybe if Patrick had written the whole book this would've gotten a 0 star rating instead of a 1 out of 5. Yet that still doesn't cut it for me, and if anything, just deepened the disappointment.
So first we have our main character, Caroline.
The premise of this book should've told me I would hate her with a passion. Cause I did. I mean, maybe we just have different values in life and whatnot. It's just, to me, if my grandmother were lying in a hospice and could die any day now, I wouldn't even consider running off to some stupid high school party, no matter how high the chance was that I'd have “stories to tell until the end of the year.” Personally, I felt very little sympathy for her, and thought she was a selfish and spoiled brat, just like her sister Natalie thought she was for the majority of the book. And of course, anybody that doesn't like Caroline all of a sudden is a jerk and needs to be villianized to death.
The two romantic leads were boring, flat, and I can't even remember their names as I'm typing this, and I care about this book so little that I'm not sure if I can bring myself to look it up. The romance itself was cheesy, nauseating, and not at all enough to breathe any life into this book. I'm being very serious hear when I stress the fact that if you don't enjoy the romance in this book, you're basically screwed, because that is essentially what this book is about, plain and simple, no other way around it.
It was slow, annoying, and very difficult to make myself sit down and flip through pages and pages of this, just wondering when the heck it was going to end. And for me, the end to the romance was so obvious that it wasn't even funny. What was the point of doing it even? And I'm not a fan of cheating either, so I was already rooting for this romance to come out just so that it didn't look like the author(s) was advocating that it's okay to cheat when your doing it for true wuv.
Please, save yourself some time and brain cells and don't read this unless you just so happen to have loved everything that Cat Patrick and Suzanne Young have published. Maybe if you like their romances and their writing and characters this book will work better for you. And hopefully I've finally learned my lesson to stay away from Cat Patrick's books, once and for all.
Can also be seen over at Book Probe Reviews where I co-blog!
If the hype surrounding this book hasn't reached you yet, and you're pretty active in the YA community in terms of keeping up with big releases, then you've definitely been under a rock the past few weeks. This book has a storm of hype surrounding it, no doubt, and for very good reason. Alternate worlds, time travel, assassination attempts, romance, and huge moral questions raised make for quite an interesting combination to say the least.
When I first requested this one off of NetGalley, I saw the UK cover, which with the heart on the cover, as well as a boy and a girl on it as well, the first thing that popped into my head was that it was a YA paranormal novel. Well, I must say, that that cover is extremely deceiving, since this book is hardly a starry-eyed novel about a girl meeting a new boy and falling head over heels in love.
This, my bookish friends, is a novel about sacrifice, and questions how far you would go to stop great evil, even if it meant stopping it when said evil was the most innocent thing in your world. So, don't let the description that says “and a love story that leaps back and forth in time” lead you astray into picking up this book (which is on the UK synopsis). While I feel that you should pick this up, I don't want you picking this up for the wrong reasons, since sometimes that alone is enough to ruin a reading experience for me.
Now, just before I start the review, I wanted to bring up that my e-ARC had some formatting issues, where it incorrectly labeled Marina's POV as Em's POV – twice. I automatically knew it was just a mistake since the places where scenes were taking place only matched with Marina's storyline and not Em's, but that is something that definitely should be fixed before publication. (However that isn't anything that I reflected in my rating since I figured there would be some mistakes here and there)
While some of the mechanics involving the time travel didn't quite fit with my very limited scientific understanding, I was able to just about get the gist of what this book did, and apparently a lot of people understood it a lot more than me. Unfortunately, I think that perhaps the time travel should have been told in simpler terms, since this is a very complex time travelling system in my opinion.
I also was disappointed in the lack of explanation regarding the world. We're told about wars going on between certain world powers, but not any motivation. Had this been a dystopian this would've driven me absolutely crazy, however since the focus was mainly on the time travelling and the events of the past, I was able to forgive it a little. However it was something that I personally was looking forward to, so when the explanation wasn't given, I was disappointed.
Also, the ending is a little lackluster. Now, when I say the ending, I mean the last few pages, not the entire last 10% or anything like that. I don't believe that the author explains enough about what is going on, and I think that also has to do with the fact that the majority of the time travel mainly went over my head. I discussed what I believed to happen with another reviewer, and we seemed to have come to the same conclusion, so I'm going to hope that what I think happened is what happened, since that is the only logical conclusion that I could come to.
However, on all other fronts, this book is one of the best that's coming out this year, and I can say that with utmost certainty. There is a dynamic cast of fantastic characters, with actual problems beyond wanting to be with the mysterious bad boy, but he's hiding secretszzzz and is so mean to her that he becomes more irresistible by the minute. There is believable romance, with a very interesting and original approach to how it is handled, with love interests who aren't barf-worthy in their arrogance or cheesiness.
The romance is also able to stay in the background where it belongs, and never once tried to take center stage or is ever presented as being a bigger concern than what the characters are trying to accomplish in the long run.
There is enough action to hold the readers attention, but also enough moral questions to get the reader thinking. All in all, it's an impressive addition to the YA science fiction thriller genre, and just about lived up to the hype for me with the exception of its few blunders in the science and explanation of said science. I cannot wait for whatever Terrill publishes next!
(Unless it's a sequel to this book. Despite my immense enjoyment of this one, it DOES NOT need a sequel. Please, Terrill, don't give into the peer pressure of the overwhelming about of YA series!)
