Barnes & Noble

Yesterday I went to Barnes & Noble and got Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor, Lola and the Boy Next Door by Stephanie Perkins, Looking for Alaska by John Green, and The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson.  I'm reading Daughter right now. Very excited. These are all books I've wanted for a while.
And then today, I got my ARC of Carrier of the Mark in the mail. So. Lots of reading material for the next week or two.

Hush, Hush

A sacred oath. A fallen angel. A forbidden love.


For Nora Grey, romance was not part of the plan. She's never been particularly attracted to the boys at her school, no matter how much her best friend, Vee, pushes them at her...until Patch comes along.
With his easy smile and eyes that seem to see inside her, Nora is drawn to him against her better judgment, but after a series of terrifying encounters, Nora's not sure whom to trust. Patch seems to be everywhere she is, and to know more about her than her closest friends. She can't decide whether she should fall into his arms or run and hide. And when she tries to seek some answers, she finds herself near a truth that is far more unsettling than anything Patch makes her feel.
For Nora is right in the middle of an ancient battle between the immortal and those that have fallen - and when it comes to choosing sides, the wrong choice will cost her life.

      One thing I will say before I start this review: the cover is freaking beautiful. Why do iffy books have to have such gorgeous covers? It's the primary reason many people bought this book in the first place.


      Now, to the book.


       I could talk about a lot of things in my review. I scribbled down a ridiculous amount of notes while reading this.  But the fact is, I don't feel like writing a several thousand word long rant when I'd mostly be reiterating what all other reviews have already said.  


       No, I'm just going to talk about one aspect of this book.   This aspect has perhaps been talked about the most, but I felt the need to repeat it, because this was my biggest problem with the book.
  
       Patch and Nora's relationship.


        Patch humiliates Nora in front of her whole class.  He stalks her.  He sexually harasses her.  He pushes her against walls, pins her to a bed.  He tries to kill her.  And yet this . . . this is considered romance.


         Please don't get me wrong: I am not saying I hated Patch as a character. I think he could've been a really intriguing character if he wasn't the love interest of the girl he is trying to murder.


         I just really hate the message this book sends. That someone can sexually harass you, embarrass you, force you around, try to kill you, but it's okay--nay, it's good--to love them.  Also, on the matter of love, how long did they know each other? A couple weeks at most. I think that's a little too soon to be making proclamations of love.


         But back to the point.  Their relationship.  It's . . . frankly, it's very, very unhealthy.  Nora spends about 5/6 of the book terrified of Patch, but lusting after him at the same time.  During one of their encounters, she contemplates running to the fire alarm and pulling it so security will come and take him away because he is making her that frightened, and . . . this is about forty pages from the end of the book.  So it's not like she started out terrified and he slowly grew more safe-seeming. No. Forty pages from the end of the book Nora is thinking of how to escape Patch.  This, this must be love.


       Another thing worth mentioning: Nora's logic is crazed.  She's so scared of him for so long,  so convinced that he's stalking her or means her harm before she has any concrete proof, and then when he actually ADMITS to her that he has tried to kill her while pinning her against a wall, she's thinking, "Oh, but Patch couldn't hurt me." (That is not a direct quote, it is the gist of her thoughts. I am too lazy to get a direct quote.)  What is this logic?  You know someone has tried to kill you, but apparently because they're physically attractive, that's perfectly alright.


        Their relationship just really frustrated me.  Even if you ignore the several-thousand-year-old male to teen female relationship that keeps cropping up in paranormal romance these days, the fact that what they have is considered love really upsets me because it sends such a wrong message to all its readers. Ladies, if a man is humiliating you, sexually harassing you, and trying to kill you, please understand that this is not him trying to be romantic; this is the point at which you should run away.


        I gave this book two stars, because despite all my problems with it, it was very readable--it didn't bore me and it did make me want to keep reading, even if I was headdesking at the same time--and the writing itself was pretty decent, although I got a little tired of the ellipses followed by . . . questions?

Will Grayson, Will Grayson

It's not that far from Evanston to Naperville...


One cold night, in a most unlikely corner of Chicago, two teens—both named Will Grayson—are about to cross paths. As their worlds collide and intertwine, the Will Graysons find their lives going in new and unexpected directions, building toward romantic turns-of-heart and the epic production of history’s most fabulous high school musical.

Hilarious, poignant, and deeply insightful, John Green and David Levithan’s collaborative novel is brimming with a double helping of the heart and humor that have won both them both legions of faithful fans.

I haven't fooled myself about why I read this book now, not some later time.  Yes, I really wanted to read another John Green book. But I could've read Looking for Alaska or Paper Towns.  No, I read this book in particular as a somewhat silly teenage rebellion against my dad, who had both expressed his disapproval of gay marriage and insulted John Green in the same discussion a week ago.  But I'm glad I read it.   I had not read any of Levithan's work prior to this, and I'd only ever read John Green's third person, so I was going into this somewhat blind.  While I didn't love it quite as much as An Abundance of Katherines, I was not disappointed.

Writing

It's interesting, seeing how writing as different as John's and David's could work together so well.  

Though it's slightly different from his third person, John's first person is still funny and smooth reading and thoughtful with excellent dialogue. It never tripped me up, and it was really easy to get lost in it as I read.

David's . . . I'm going to be honest, I thought I would hate it at first.  I mean, the capitals.  The lower case letters were murder for my OCD.  I could barely stand them. But then, as the book progressed, I slowly grew used to them. And really, they were sort of perfect for Will's character.

Also, the train-of-thought feeling his writing often has. That bugged me at first, too.  But like the capitals, it was fitting, and I got used to it. By the end of this book I could could say quite comfortably that I liked David Levithan's writing.

Good, solid writing for this one.

Characters

I'm going to cover three characters: John's Will Grayson, David's Will Grayson, and Tiny Cooper.

So, the John Green Will Grayson. I really liked him.  John Green definitely has a talent at creating characters whose narrative you can just slip into, who you can fall in love with even though they're not the typical "hawt" males of YA today.  His voice was very clear, and he almost never frustrated me, which is saying something.  I was rooting for him. I root for characters I like.

Now, David's Will Grayson. Similarly to the writing, I thought I was going to hate him at first.  He was just so angry and depressed that I was sitting there waiting for his chapters to end.  But as the book went on, he  grew. Both the Will Graysons grew, changed, evolved.  And while I can't say I was in love with this Will Grayson by the end of the book, I understood him. And see, that's really the important thing.  I discovered this in Thirteen Reasons Why.  You don't have to like these sort of characters. They don't need your liking. You just need to understand them and why they are the way they are, and I understood this Will Grayson by the end.  That's what matters.

Finally, we come to . . . Tiny Cooper.    Some have argued that this isn't really the story of two Will Graysons, this is the story of Tiny Cooper. And they are kinda right.  Everything sort of revolves around him in a way.  This huge, hugely gay boy who acts like a child, falls in love in a flash, and, cheesy as this sounds, has a heart even bigger than his rather enormous stomach.  

Sometimes I really loved Tiny and wanted to give him a huge hug, and sometimes I wanted to slap him.  Like when he talked about Will to Gary, and then seemed almost offended that Will was offended by what he's said. Well, I know I'd certainly be offended if my friend said something like that about me. And the fact that he didn't apologize for it.  But there was something so sincere and sweet about him most of the time that's so rare these days, and that I loved.  Tiny Cooper was definitely a very well-developed character, at the least.

For the most part, the rest of the characters were very good. I really liked Jane. I think she complimented Will very well, and I like how John Green's girls are always more awesome in their personalities than their looks.

One last thing: I congratulate the two of them on keeping the characters pretty consistent throughout the chapters.  Obviously the two Will Graysons saw the characters different ways, but they were very steady throughout the book.

Both John and David have a talent with characters, and considering this novel was mostly about the characters and their journeys, that's definitely a good thing.

Plot

The thing is . . . there wasn't an exceptionally strong, overall plot.  This book was not about the plot. It was about the characters, how they interacted, how they grew, the journeys they took and where those took them.  It's about love and tolerance and truth.  Yes, I did think several of the romances happened too fast, and yes, the musical thing could've been focused on a bit more before the musical itself, but in the overall picture of this "plot," that doesn't really matter.  Because these characters changed so much and learned so much in the space of 310 pages, and that's what does matter.

Overall

I really enjoyed this book.  While it wasn't one of those books that I'd say you can't live without reading, that I will remember forever and ever, it made me laugh, it made me smile, and it made me think, and that's what I ask of in a book.

Four stars.

The Book Thief

It’s just a small story really, about among other things: a girl, some words, an accordionist, some fanatical Germans, a Jewish fist-fighter, and quite a lot of thievery. . .   

Narrated by Death, Markus Zusak's groundbreaking new novel is the story of Liesel Meminger, a young foster girl living outside of Munich in Nazi Germany. Liesel scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she discovers something she can't resist- books. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor's wife's library, wherever they are to be found.

With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, Liesel learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids, as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement.

I'm not even quite sure how to write a review on this.

Give me a bad book, or an okay book, and I can criticize the hell out of it. I can write you a several thousand word review detailing every reason I did and did not like it. But give me a book like this, and I have no words.

Ironic, really, considering the huge role words play in this.

This is one of those books where I can't say I liked it. I can't even say I loved it. I feel like that's too simple, too shallow of a thing to say for this book. I didn't love it. To express how this book made me feel, a short image, as Death was fond of giving:

A girl sits on a wide hotel bed. There's a book in her hands, dark with the picture of dominoes on the verge of being toppled, the words The Book Thiefscrawled across the top. She isn't moving. She's barely even blinking. Another girl comes up and sits next to her, nudges her shoulder, but she still doesn't move.


That was me.
This book didn't make me cry. It didn't make me sob.
I was too numb for that.

I want to explain to you why this book made me feel the way it did, why every person should read it, but I just can't do that. I can't pick this book apart, even in a positive way.

Just read it. Please. Just . . . please. 

I'm reading a John Green book with a pizza bookmark.

I just thought this was too awesome not to share.

Between Shades of Gray

Have you ever wondered what a human life is worth? That morning, my brother's was worth a pocket watch. 

Lina is just like any other fifteen-year-old Lithuanian girl in 1941. She paints, she draws, she gets crushes on boys. Until one night when Soviet officers barge into her home, tearing her family from the comfortable life they've known. Separated from her father, forced onto a crowded and dirty train car, Lina, her mother, and her young brother slowly make their way north, crossing the Arctic Circle, to a work camp in the coldest reaches of Siberia. Here they are forced, under Stalin's orders, to dig for beets and fight for their lives under the cruelest of conditions. 

Lina finds solace in her art, meticulously - and at great risk - documenting events by drawing, hoping these messages will make their way to her father's prison camp to let him know they are still alive. It is a long and harrowing journey, spanning years and covering 6,500 miles, but it is through incredible strength, love, and hope that Lina ultimately survives.Between Shades of Gray is a novel that will steal your breath and capture your heart.

I'm going to be very blunt right now: I would have enjoyed this a lot more if I had read this before The Book Thief.
Now don't take that statement the wrong way.  I did think this was a good book, especially, for a debut. But I just didn't find it as amazing as most others seemed to.


Writing
The writing was pretty decent.  For a debut author, it wasn't bad at all--for the most part, it flowed very well, and didn't use any sort of phrasing that left me scratching my head or making weird faces.
My big problem was the dialogue.  The dialogue seemed very awkward and unrealistic to me.  I tried to convince myself that it was because they were in a different time period, and using a different language, but . . . excuse me for this, but I'm going to compare it to The Book Thief. That was set in the same time period, and while the language they spoke wasn't the same, they, too, were speaking a different language, and I never found that dialogue awkward whatsoever.  In Between Shades of Gray, I would sometimes say a line or two out loud and realize just how incredibly odd it sounded.  Some of the lines were beautiful, but they're just not something a human would say.
Aside from that, there were a few typos, but nothing too terrible.  I did like the writing, the dialogue just bothered me.


Characters
I had mixed feelings about Sepetys's characters.
On the one hand, I think it's beautiful how she showed their strength and determination and hope even under the harshest of circumstances.  All these characters were truly krasivaya(I'll let you find out what that means for yourself).  I loved reading about that, even when such ugly things happened.
But--ironically, considering the title--I felt most of the characters were too black and white. Too good or too bad.  Lina's mom, for example.  Her mom was a lovely woman, but I found it hard to truly love her because she seemed too good to be true, to me.  I felt like she never slipped up, like she was always the best person around. And while I realize there are some really amazing people out there, none of them are perfect.
In contrast, you have the NKVD. Save for Kretzky(whom I will mention later), they were mostly portrayed as pure evil.  While I can see how one of the deportees would see them as such, Kretzky can't have been the only one with more to him than that.  There had to be at least some of them with decency left inside.
Even, on a lesser scale, the bald man. I think she was trying to create one of those characters that you think you're gonna hate but you end up loving or liking them in the end because of some redeeming qualities, but . . . I never got that. He did a few decent things, but he said too many ridiculously cruel things for me to ever like him, at all.
Lina, as a narrator, was good.  I liked how she preserved their story through art and writing and how much she cared about her family. But same as with her mother, I  never loved her. I just never fully connected.
Kretzky was the only character I really connected with and liked. I think he was the most complex, well-developed character, and I would've liked to see even more of him.
Also, a nitpick here--how some of the characters were referred to bothered me.  The majority of the characters were referred to be phrases, like "the man who wound his watch" or "the grumpy woman."  After being in such close quarters with these people for over a year, I'd think they'd learn one another's names.  And then there are some whose names she learned later on, like "the little girl with the dolly," whose name was Janina, and so she referred to her as Janina from then on. Then why, after learning the bald man's name, did she not call him that?  It's a pretty small nitpick, but it bugged me.
Overall, Sepetys's characters were good, but I never fully connected.


Plot
First off, let me say that I think it's amazing Sepetys tackled the story of these poor people, which has been mostly hidden from us for decades.  If I'm being honest here, I had no idea what Stalin had done to these people until I read this book, and I think it's great that by writing this, she's finally spreading this story.
This is not a pretty story.  People die, gruesomely. People get beaten to the ground and treated like filth. People get disease. People get their modesty stripped away. People starve.
But the sad fact is, this really happened.  This happened to millions of people in the Baltic regions. And while what happened to them was terrifying, disgusting, unbelievable, as I mentioned before, it was very uplifting to see how they persevered even in the worst of times.
However, while the fact that this is all based on true stories makes this a very powerful book, I did have some nitpicks. Yes, more nitpicks.
The flashbacks. This bothered me less as the story went on and I saw that some of them were relevant to the current story, and I know it helped build up sympathy for her papa, so we could feel her sadness and anxiety along with Lina, but it bothered me when I'd be reading something and suddenly we're in a flashback. The flashbacks were never completely random--they always related to what was happening at that time in the story--but I just think some of them were unnecessary.
Andrius and Lina's romance. I can't say I ever felt that.  I didn't feel like there was a whole lot of build-up, and for a good while either Lina hated Andrius or Andrius hated Lina, and then it was just like boom, they're kissing, boom, they love each other, etc.  And then he was gone for the last, like, seventy pages.  I'm not saying that she shouldn't have included their romance--I think it's sort of nice to realize that some of the deportees found love in all that darkness. I just wish she could've developed it a bit better.
Sometimes, and this is sort of related to what I just said, I felt like there wasn't enough foreshadowing for things.  I felt like they just fell upon us, sitting here, unaware.  I can't name any specific times without giving some spoilers, but that just bothered me a bit.
Last nitpick(I promise): the ending. On the one hand, the ending was beautiful. It really was. But on the other hand, I would've liked a little bit more closure.  While some might argue that it's better as it is, I would've at least liked to know what happened to Jonas and her papa, if not some of the other more prominent characters who survived.  
But in the end, I can do nothing but congratulate Sepetys on this plot. For her debut novel, she tackled an incredibly difficult, powerful subject, and she did it well.


Overall
Now, I realize I've had a lot of nitpicks.  But I'm typically very harsh with book reviews. The fact that I had a lot of problems does not diminish the fact that, in the end, this is a very moving book.  And because of that, I am giving it four stars.