newwavepolly
I only got about half way through before I had to give up. It's just nonsense really; not very clever, not very enjoyable.
I was actually kind of shocked at how much I didn't hate this???? Don't get me wrong, it wasn't that good and I wouldn't go as far as to say I liked it, but as far as current young adult fantasy/dystopic nonsense goes, this wasn't that bad. The characters, though a bit empty and one dimensional, weren't terrible or silly or too stereotypical and the plot had some good ideas. As for the writing, it wasn't great (but I had expected that).Divergent's biggest failing is the shared failing of most current YA fantasy/dystopic attempts - horrible world building. That's the thing that sets these books apart as being more juvenile and frivolous than their contemporaries like The Hunger Games and Harry Potter (I'd even group Twilight in, despite its failings, the world building is fairly well done). Instead of fantastic worlds and dystopian societies, you get very vague ideas horribly executed and under-developed. And some of these vague ideas are pretty good, with a lot of potential, but the world building is so bad and so unnatural that the stories end up trite and ridiculous.
For the first ~150-200 pages of The Other Boleyn Girl, it was a solid 3-stars. Then it meandered down to 2-stars. By page 350 it was a 1-star. The end was compelling enough to bump it back up to 2-stars. The Other Boleyn Girl can be fun, trashy entertainment. The factual basis is obviously tenuous at best (they got most of the names right!), but why focus on facts when you can have crazy drama? All this works out to what could be a nice guilty-pleasure read at first, but quickly devolves into repetitiveness and monotony. A good third of this book could be edited out or at least shaved down to be more succinct. It became such a chore to read.On a more technical/less personal enjoyment level - it's not much. The writing is atrocious, especially the dialogue. Despite its considerable length and the scale of the real-life events the narrative recounts, it's very simplistic. And the characterization is practically non-existent. Everyone's shockingly one-dimensional, despite the fact that these are all real people who have not only existed in real life but have been meticulously studied and biographed for centuries. Gregory didn't have to make these characters from scratch, she just had to write a story around the already fully formed historical figures, yet all the characters, including Anne Boleyn, were flat. The characterization relied very heavily on a Madonna/Whore dynamic between Mary and Anne. Mary is the 'best of the Boelyns' and the innocent victim despite everything, and Anne is the conniving whore relying on her looks and cunning to lure men. I recognize that an attempt is made to more fully form these characters and break out of the Madonna/Whore dynamic. And that Gregory at some points tried to present Mary and Anne as some kind of two-halves-a-whole duo. But Gregory is just not skilled enough a writer to believably pull that off.
I didn't think I could enjoy some Tudor England drama this little.
It's unsettling, to say the least. It's unsettling, lethargic, and casually disturbing. It was not as mindblowingly messed up as some reviews allowed me to believe, but it was effective. It left me feeling stilted and for lack of better word, gross. Kind of like a dead body buried in poorly mixed cement.
It took me a lot longer than expected to read this because I lost interest pretty fast and forced my self through a large chunk of this. I went in with very low expectations, yet was still shocked by how hard this was to get into, even on a trashy guilty pleasure sort of way. I get why this novel became a small phenomenon amongst the YA-set. It's every single cliché found in modern fantasy YA squeezed into one book.
Seriously. It has it all.
One dimensional characters, corny dialogue, love triangles (with a Nice Guy best friend), a kind of unhealthy main relationship (props on the incest though, that was actually the most unique thing about this book - and I'm going to need to know if these siblings make out or something. that is so Game of Thrones), an arrogant unlikable hero whose just 'misunderstood' b/c of some dumb sob story, a complete Mary Sue of a main heroine (like literally called Clary with red hair and freckles who doesn't know she's beautiful! - Cassandra Clare didn't even try with that character), a pretty girl our heroine hates, sloppy writing, silly backstory, a convoluted plot that's kind of nothing.
Any other trite YA-fantasy stereotype you can think of, it's probably in there.
It might be a little unfair for me to be critical of this book. I'm out of it's target audience's age range and I didn't really expect to like it in the first place. I pretty much just wanted to be an informed hater. I get it's appeal and I know why people eat this kind of thing up, and that's cool because it's ultimately pretty harmless (partic. in relation to a lot of other YA books right now).
but at the end of the day, it's based on a Ron/Ginny Harry Potter incest fan-fic so there's really no separating yourself from that.
Despite my aversion to most epistolary novels, Lady Susan actually benefited from the style. The story told through letters approach applied several different layers of unreliable narration and created very unique Austen characters. If this novel were more fleshed out and developed, I could have REALLY liked it. I`ve come to expect almost perfunctory endings (everyone gets paired off, the terrible characters are still terrible, everyone lived happily ever after - in the last five pages), but Lady Susan`s ending was a bit too abrupt with an epilogue that seemed almost haphazardly tacked on at the end to sum up what wasn`t even at the point of being 'loose ends'. Perhaps it's a pitfall of the epistolary style, but it feels like there are big chunks of story missing (especially at the end) and the "everything worked out and everyone was happy" ending came before the novel reached a real climax.
Goodreads could really benefit from a half-star rating. This is more of a three and a half star book.
The only thing keeping me from giving this one star is the fact that it is a pretty decent and compelling story (albeit a pretty Lifetime Movie kind of one). Besides that, narration by a 5 year old is every bit as insufferable as it sounds. And this 5 year old narration is uneven at best. A lot of the time it comes across as very forced with gratuitous pop culture references and forced simplicity of internal dialogue that doesn't sound like the thoughts of a child as much as juvenile writing. But I guess I understand the decision to write this from the point of view of a child, because that's the only thing that makes the book stand out and not fall completely into Lifetime Movie territory.
1
Basically, this guy walks around and everyone he encounters offers up their life stories and he cries about how sad they are. Then everyone praises him for crying. And that's literally it. It's not even heroic benevolence, he's just not being a complete asshole to prostitutes and poor people. I could not have cared less.
Morally, I feel like I should have given this less than three stars. I can't, in any way, get behind this story or these characters at all. Not even under the guise of good writing. But three stars feels like an apt rating because it's a bit of a non-committal rating. And I definitely do not know how to feel about The Kreutzer Sonata. On one hand, I find it kind of despicable and (as a woman) dehumanizing. On the other hand, it blatantly acknowledges (even if it excuses) the glaring hypocrisy, sexism and dehumanization of women that permeates the story and late 19th century Russian society as a whole. The theme of infidelity within marriage(and the double standard when the infidelity is committed by a woman) is dealt with in almost the exact opposite manner as Tolstoy's previous work Anna Karenina which just leaves me confused as to Tolstoy's feelings and the message he's trying to convey in both works. I just don't really know how to feel.
Well, all the vampire lore is there. The garlic, coffins, crucifixes, bats. The story itself was kind of lacking. I recognize the significance of Dracula regarding the horror genre and vampire fiction, but it really wasn't as good as I was expecting. This is, of course, heavily influenced by my aversion to the epistolary writing style as a whole.
I actually read every word of this book. I didn't skim anything or rush through, like I usually do (especially to short books I can finish in a day or two). And I thought about it a lot. I would stop in the middle of pages to form mini-essays in my head about what's going on, the characters, the themes, the symbolism. I'm probably going to keep thinking about it for a while even now that I'm finished. There have only been a handful of books I've read in the last few years that I can say I still think about a lot (Anna Karenina, Trainspotting) which automatically places them among my favourites, and I think The Hours will prove to have earned a spot on that list.
