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The Bird and the BladeThe Bird and the Blade by Megan Bannen

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Disappointing execution of a disappointing concept.

I wanted to like this book. And I thought I did for about two first chapters… until the language and the way the story was told begun turning increasingly disheartening. Another good idea utterly betrayed by a very pure execution.
This book fails spectacularly regarding immersiveness and world-consistency. First, I kept feeling that more and more of geographical and historical descriptions felt somehow wrong, but decided that since it’s a fictional version of the world I shouldn’t care so much… But then I almost DNFed (I had to put it away for couple days) when I reached phrase “asset to be liquidated”. Because, seriously? Did the author even try to care about how her protagonist sounded? This and many more very modern phrases and thoughts, jump out from pages, break the immersion completely, and make it impossible to believe in the setting of 1280 Asia. I don’t know if it is carelessness, laziness, or if American YA writers are simply expected to write books like they can only be read by young girls who only care for the cheesy girly feelings and ‘unconscious cuddling,’ and not about things like writing language, consistency, and believability… (It isn’t too difficult to type ‘bullet’ into a search engine and look up the etymology and first known use, is it? Though I suppose something like common sense should tell you it’s not very appropriate for 1280 even without having to look it up… And neither is “yep” Or phrases like “thanks but no thanks”.) But it made me very sad and by the second half I was kind of skimping through a lot of text, instead of trying to enjoy submerging myself in the story (because I knew I wouldn’t be able to, and only would turn more irritated by finding other examples of questionable phrasing…)
Also, the summary is misleading. “Ghosts” have practically nothing to do with the story at all, and their very short “appearance” makes place only at the very end and felt very forced and useless. Otherwise there are only memories and dreams.
Lastly, the least it could have done is follow through with its silliness and have some sort of unexpected positive ending. But noooo, it does the most boring thing of sticking with the unpleasant ending of the original story, which became the tip on the mountain of my disappointment with this book… (The author says she was outraged with it, and than just repeats it in her own work word by word. I don’t see the logic.)

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PridePride by Ibi Zoboi

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Sweet but confusingly fickle teen love story. 

Would I pick this book up if I was browsing at a store? 99% not. (Might have something to do with very toxic pink of the inside cover of Owlcrate edition, tbh.) The themes in this book are something I have absolutely no first-hand knowledge of, and could hardly relate to (hoods, black cultures, teenage dating). Doesn’t mean I wasn’t interested in them, I love to read from perspectives of different cultures, but it does mean that for the whole duration of this book I couldn’t really tell if I should be taking it seriously (believing what it was putting down), or not. In fact, I would actually like to know how people who relate to the background of this story (who come from the area and cultures described) felt about this book. Is it relatable or is it laying it too thick?
I would have given this book more stars, because it has its own world, and the writing is pleasant and charming, if not for one thing – the main character. And I honestly couldn’t tell if this was a writing quality problem of inconsistency of presentation, or if it was a realistic representation of type of a teenage girl mentality I simply didn’t want to know anything about… One minute she is clever and responsible, the next she is arrogantly blind and annoying. Is she calling this boy a ‘home’, and saying how it is easy, comfortable, and ‘right’ to be with him, or is she only going out with him to make the other boy jealous? One minute she says ‘you gotta have your boy’s back’, the next she believes what someone else told her about him withing a second. In fact, she kind of seems to believe whoever was the last to talk to her. I love him, I hate him, I love him, we can’t be together,… every three-four pages the main character changes what she thinks and feels and if that’s how teenage girls are supposed to be I’m glad I wasn’t really around for that phase.
The reason I’m more inclined to believe that this is a writing issue is that a lot of other characters are treated in the same way. A boy who was supposed to be in love with her sister for a very long time suddenly is in love with other girl and there isn’t any explanation, a girls who was almost an antagonist and bitchy as hell is suddenly all nice and helping, there are characters who get introduced and dismissed right away, and story points that could have gone somewhere being dropped and forgotten all over the place… Everything is just so… fickle.
This book felt like it could have a lot of potential the way it began, but about half way through it’s like it was all rushed through and scrambled, like the author just had to finish it and be done with it, leveling behind undone more than half of ideas that she had at some point.

Should probably also mention that this book is full of poetry, and it seems like it would be a big plus for those who enjoy it.

Overall, I feel like I wish this book could have been rewritten properly, with more depth and exploration, picking up all the little branches and focusing on its own details, and then I could have actually honestly liked it.

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Learning Not to DrownLearning Not to Drown by Anna Shinoda

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An account of a young soul trapped in a tiny world.

I might have built this book up a bit too much for myself in the beginning. I don’t really know why, but the first chapters made me imagine something really horrific happening, and it made me hesitant about taking it down from my bookshelf for a long time… Because of that for the first half of it I was swimming in this ‘is that it?’ confusion, and it made more sense only towards the very end. I think this book gave me an opportunity to remind myself how for a lot of people even things that seem little and insignificant to me can be real nightmares. That there are a lot of people who are trapped in very small worlds, with no one to get them out.
I actually liked that this book focused on not painting things in black and white, even though I personally tend to. Even though I felt like not a single person reacts or relates to things like I would in their place, I can relate to loving people who try to break your life in pieces and learning how to get yourself out.
I also think that the writing is quite good, though I probably would’ve preferred it if some scenes and issues were explore a bit more deeply. I think this is one of those books where it makes a lot of sense to read it once, and re-read it right after, from the new perspective.

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The impression I get from the therapy I’ve been going to these few months… Is like having a huge mess in your very long hair after you’ve slept on a giant piece of gum, and trying to untangle it by tugging on one hair at a time… And I guess I sort of imagined it be more like chopping it all off.

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No matter how many times I’ve told myself in the past to remember that ‘if you feel like your bag is uncharacteristically light, your wallet must be not in it,’ I still get caught by it…

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Cinder (The Lunar Chronicles, #1)Cinder by Marissa Meyer

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An interesting idea, yet shallow and underdeveloped.

There’s certain charm in fairytale re-tellings.
I personally like the sense of safety you get when you kind of know what where it is going to go, but read it for the experience anyway. Well, everyone knows this, it’s why we still get new movies based on fairytales all the time and watch them none the less.
This… has hints of a number of fairy tales, but they are only hints, there for no particular reason but to be there. I wouldn’t call it a re-telling in any way.
I think it has a number of interesting elements tied together by strings that seem more often than not too thin.
Story elements spring out of nowhere or die in nothingness… often enough to mildly bother me, but not often enough to actually hate it.
The whole concept of Lunars and shells and how do they work and where did they come through seemed underdeveloped, under-explained, and a bit too far-stretched.
I was sort of glad that Prince Kai was not a haughty blind (idiot) with a tone of issues like princes so often are in YA books, but on the other hand he seemed a bit too nice to be believable as an Emperor.
In fact, believability is a rather big issue with this book as a whole. The whole state of the Earth, the relationships between races, the reasons for the way cyborgs and androids are treated the way they are, Lunars, as I have already mentioned it… Hardly anything is ever explained in a believable way, and most issues are glided over in a manner that says ‘this is YA sci-fi, stop thinking and just accept things at their face value and swallow down without chewing’.
I can’t say I loved it, but I would like to see where it goes from here.

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I lived my life entirely unaware of YA and its trends, but after this year of subscribing to boxes there’s now a whole list of YA book series I vehemently don’t want to have anything to do with, even without reading them myself, even though they appear on my instagram feed every single day. It is because they seem so popular that I had to open goodreads pages to see if I would want to read them too, and after reading reviews and seeing what they were about… all I got was ‘I don’t understand humans and I’m not sure I want to’ whiplash, which sent me looking for boxes that would focus on something else.

Unfortunately, they were not easy to find. Most of those that do exist don’t ship outside US. Or don’t even include bookish items, which does take out half the fun. The Bookish Box seemed like a great choice at first, because they have an adult option, but soon enough I found out that not only the adult books are unrelated to monthly themes of their boxes, they are more often than not contemporary fiction paperbacks (and all those I received were by female authors, and at least one of the books I received was actually YA disguised as an adult novel). I just couldn’t see the reason to create an adult option if the book included would be completely unrelated, and all of the items and t-shirts would still be focused on YA fandoms.

I’d also like to confess that I find it difficult to keep my negative opinions on the fandoms to myself. Almost every subscription box is having a ‘special box’ for the sequel of The Cruel Prince that is coming out, and they keep showing up in my feed talking about how much they loved it, and I feel like I need to clench my teeth to not write them ‘But I kind of thought it was disgusting and I don’t understand why are you acting like everyone should be hyped about it.’ (And this one was actually one of those I did read, because it was in a box last year.) On one hand, I know in my head that commenting on someone’s post to say ‘But I hate this thing you like’ is a stupid thing to do, but on the other… I kind of wish people who provide a ‘service’ like these boxes would consider opposing opinions as well. As in, as a subscriber, I would like to be able to kindly ask for them to stop only including items related to a small selection of fandoms (ACOTAR, Raven Cycle, Six of Crows, Shatter Me, etc.) and focus on something else. But as usual, I have to come to terms with the fact that my opinion will be a minority no one would care about. The clear answer would be to look for different people and services, but the selection is just not there… If you want to get pretty special editions of newly released books with goods – you’ll have to deal with people hyping out about and pushing to you a lot of fandoms you dislike. You want to have more freedom of genre selection – resign to choosing book-only subscriptions and likely older paperbacks.

Another subscription box just announced an adult fantasy option, and I for sure will try it out, but the first box is yet to arrive, so I can’t really say anything.

Also, sadly enough, 2 out of 4 of the boxes I subscribe to right now have announced their November themes and after reading the descriptions of the books to be included I was torn between skipping a month for both or giving it a shot even though both of them sounded like something I’d clearly hate to spend my time on…

In the end, I made a choice to save some money and skip… (Just to forget about my reasoning and order 2 new boxes to try out instead the next week.)

Honestly, it feels like a waste of money in more ways than one, because I clearly can’t read this fast to actually read all the books I receive and not add them to a quickly growing TBR pile, and also because I don’t even feel healthy enough to read anything but fluffy fanfiction most of the days anyway… Not to mention that YA subscription boxes more often than not focus on fandoms I have no real use for. I put away the books I don’t feel like reading, but also can’t get rid of them before I even try, and they just pile and pile… And then there’s also the fact that shipping costs as much as box itself.

But this state of my mind is also the exact reason I keep ordering them because it’s kind of like receiving a small present every time and it feels like I need that feeling to keep myself afloat every month. And the more I receive something I can’t really feel any positive emotions about, the more it makes me to look for more of boxes to order… (I know it sounds pathetic and not exactly effective, but beggars with chronic depression can’t exactly be chooser of what we use to keep ourself from the very rock bottom.)

So next month (or more like the beginning of December, considering the shipping time) I will receive 3 new boxes and will have to choose which ones I want to keep, and whether or not I want to cancel those I put on hold this month… And how to stop myself from wasting money on things I don’t need just because I’m getting brainwashed by pretty instagram pictures.

 

 

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I’m subscribed to about 4 different monthly bookish boxes (and always in the process of looking for more/exchanging for new ones).

I treat them sort of like a ‘blind date with a book’ system, and a way to get to know new releases while living in a non-English speaking country. Because usually, to buy a new English book, I would have to decide that I really want it, make an informed decision carefully, read all about it on goodreads or elsewhere, and be sure it’s worth spending that money, because ordering on Amazon from Japan is not always cheap and not always quick (they have a lot of books in stock to be delivered next day, but half of the time they ship them from UK.)

Unfortunately, even though there’s a ton of subscription book boxes out there, and there are many lists that talk about them to help you choose, I very soon found out that no matter how many there are, none of them (at least as far as I could see, having  searched online a few times) really match what I’d really want from a subscription book box.

My wishes are pretty simple:

  • Worldwide shipping.
  • Bookish goods.
  • Fantasy, sci-fi (maybe historical fiction, detectives, mysteries).
  • Preferably new releases, but not critical.
  • Not YA.

I don’t really remember how did I first found out about book subscription boxes, but then very soon they flooded my instagram and I couldn’t help but want to subscribe to more and more.

The thing is, most of subscription boxes, and certainly the most ‘loud’ ones, are all about YA. And to be honest, I don’t think I would read a single YA book if not for them.

Not that I was too biased, since I never really knew about them to form an opinion other than ‘it means they are for kids’. And I hardly ever read books for kids when I was one. Save for Harry Potter, but I don’t think that really counts. That is also why I didn’t really feel too cautious about YA when I ordered my first subscription box, because I simply decided that (after seeing on instagram that a lot of seemingly adult people were enjoying them) maybe I misunderstood the categorization, and people just called all new fantasy and sci-fi books YA (sort of like people in Japan call literary fiction ‘literature’ and most of genre fiction ‘light novels’).

It wasn’t before I received my first few boxes that I felt like I seriously needed to look into something that wasn’t so focused on YA. I can’t even say what exactly it is about YA… Well, to be honest I still kind of unclear on what makes YA so YA, but the books, even where I could like the story itself, seemed… too shallow, too thinly connected… more like an overly simplified summary of a book that could happen, but didn’t because someone either rushed it out or was told to make it more simple… And at first I thought that it was just those books and those authors, but after this year it seems to be the only thing that I can attribute to YA as a unifying factor. Along with tiny chapters and the feeling that it was made to resemble a movie more than a book, and to be read in few hours–take only slightly more time than it would take to watch a movie.

I can’t say that I regret subscribing to YA boxes entirely… With my current mental and emotional state, light reads that I can be done with in few hours are sometimes actually exactly what I need. And some of the books I received were exactly that. But sometimes… There is also this another thing that bothers me about YA – it’s the ‘trendy themes’ that too many of the books I receive seem to be focused on. I have mentioned some of them in reviews I’ve written: girls kept in captivity (or under someone else’s authority in other way) and humiliated by sadistic/narcissistic people; people falling in love with their former captors or with equally narcissistic jerks; palace intrigues and spies… The overall normalization, or more likely romanticization, of humiliation and lying that are featured in 90% of YA books I received (or researched after receiving a bookish item based on).

I honestly hate it and don’t even want to think about the underlying psychology of their popularity.

 

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SadieSadie by Courtney Summers

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Beautifully written heart-crashing experience

This is considered YA? Really?
There are several reasons why I doubt it. Firstly, is that that while it shares the ‘reads like a movie’ aspect with most of YA novels, its writing goes at least one lever deeper and better than any YA I have read (and yeah, maybe this is the exact reason I haven’t read enough to know otherwise). It reminded me somewhere of reading Dorothy Allison, and not only because of the obvious topics, but because of the vivid images and excellent attention to details, and especially emotional ones.
Secondly, I, at least, would consider the topic to be a bit too heavy for YA.
While I can’t call this story exactly unique or say that is shows something shocking we’ve never seen before, (it says it itself – girls go missing all the time; and again, people like Dorothy Allison immediately come to mind), especially since most people probably watch shows like Criminal Minds and LAO SVU, it is an artfully created experience.
It is not a long book, and it feels shorter still because of the podcast format most of it takes, and maybe that is why it is considered YA. But I don’t think it loses any depth because of its format, and I haven’t once felt like there were holes left in it. Its characters all come alive in front of your eyes, and you can feel every single one of them as if you are looking right at them. As does the scenery, and every town, even if you’ve never been to the States.
What I also appreciated about it, is that this was a story about love.
It would be easy to pull it apart, picking up at every human flaw and misguided decision, but… This book is written well enough to stop me from wanting to do it, and that is the most important point for me personally.

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Contagion (Contagion, #1)Contagion by Erin Bowman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Survival thriller with possibly promising sequel.

I rate it 3.5-ish, but rounded it up simply because I will actually be looking forward to see where the next book goes.

I must say, this books gets better towards the end, and not because you might think (not because that’s where the real action in this kind of books begins to happen).
Unfortunately, I almost missed it, because I had a lot of trouble getting through the first half, and here’s why:
1) “A bunch of screw-ups and kids-who-don’t-deserve-it get thrown into a deadly dangerous situation without responsible adult supervision. Who do you think will survive, if anyone?’ is how it reads for the whole first half, and I kept thinking “well, isn’t it ironic that this book tries to make fun of stupid horror movie stories and then basically follows in their steps”? Enter a dozen of unbelievably stupid decisions that are likely to make a few of less tolerant people close this book forever.
2) The writing is inconsistent at best. Sometimes it bordered on the ‘okay, yeah, fine’, with an occasional sentence making my editing fingers and eyebrows twitch, and sometimes it fell entirely into the field of ‘someone really should have edited this a few more times before getting it out…’. It’s the odd word and phrase choices that don’t really fit and ruin immersion, it’s the fact that the interludes feel like they weren’t thought through enough to feel organic… It was simply speaking… too rough to be read smoothly, and it irritated me a lot.
3) More even than the surface lack of polish in writing, it really bothered me how this book treats character development descriptions. It tries to raise some issues and give its characters interesting back stories, but it kind of fails to do a good job of it – it fails to do it organically. It chews on everything extensively, explaining what people feel and why exactly, instead of showing it. Ideally, a book is supposed make its reader aware of a character’s ‘issues’ without actually spelling them out in a way that gets you thinking ‘does it really make sense that this person is aware of all their inner issues and actually name them to themselves, yet still behave the way they do…?’.
In short, it does this thing where, for the most of the story, instead of letting readers pick up on things on their own, it says ‘here, I’ll spell every psychological issue out for you, name it and explain every little thing, like you’re too stupid to understand on your own’. It tries to employ interesting issues, but pretty much fails to present them correctly.

It’s hard to talk about this genre without much spoilers. So I’ll probably leave it here.
Overall, while some of the story decisions I find questionable, it gets actually interesting enough to make you want to read the sequel, even if only out of curiosity, and that is what matters.

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Mirage (Mirage, #1)Mirage by Somaiya Daud

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

 

Confusing world-building and all chicle YA trends in one bottle.

I will be honest: as a rule I do not read summaries and descriptions when I receive books, because I don’t want to be spoiled. And if I did, I don’t think I would have even opened this book.

At first, I was actually excited to begin to read it – I liked the writing, I liked the world and how it was described, I liked the feeling of it, I thought it was something unique and new.
It lasted for about 30 pages, until I understood that this just YET ANOTHER book about a ‘girl captured to be humiliated, kicked around, and used in one way or another, so that she can be “strong” about it’. Yet another YA novel about nasty royals who like to be sadistic to people. Yet another story abut losing freedom and learning to play in palace intrigues.
I don’t understand, is it the most popular kink among young people nowadays, or what is the deal here? Haven’t we had enough of this same topic chewed on over and over?

Another point that didn’t really sit with me, is how emphasized women were in this story. I simply genuinely don’t like it when one gender is put above the other in writing like this (like saying ‘oh, bad white male literature focused on men so much, so now we must do the exact opposite!).
In this book, everything seems to be about women. Most of important characters (good or bad) are women, including important religious figures. It is all ‘my father’s whimsy, and my mother’s strength’. And most of the male characters, including the love interest, appear almost faceless, insignificant, and soft-spined compared to women. Or at least that was the impression I received.
Not that I’m saying it is bad to focus on female characters, it is just that the whole idea of ‘women are much stronger, more interesting, and important than men’ was so ‘in your face’ it was very tiring.

After the first half of the book the world I thought was interisting and original turned very confusing, in a way that it was difficult to remember if this was supposed to be sci-fi or fantasy… The elements of ‘old’ and ‘new’ are mixed in such a way that it feels inconsistent at best.

I’m giving this 2 stars and not 1 mostly because of the writing and the world-building in the very beginning, they were very good. I couldn’t stop thinking that I wish I could read a different kind of story written in this way, but alas…

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got stuck in the bathroom
because I couldn’t find any strength to get out of the bathtub
(or deal with the fact that the air was colder than the water)

almost threw up when I finally did get out

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got tired of saying ‘shit’ 50 times a day, so I switched to ‘Scheisse’

I also shout ‘funya funya!’ in angry intonations when I really need to swear but don’t want to

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was cutting some hand shapes for a painting
and don’t even want to count how many times during these days I freaked out a little when some dark hand silhouette looked at me from some corner where I dropped it
or how many times I walked around the room saying “where is my hand?!” and “where did my hand go?!”
a theatre of one without the audience