Tag Archives: young adult

Book Review of Susan Ee’s Angelfall

Angelfall

I picked up a copy go Susan Ee‘s YA novel, Angelfall from the KDP free list.

Description from Goodreads:
It’s been six weeks since angels of the apocalypse descended to demolish the modern world. Street gangs rule the day while fear and superstition rule the night. When warrior angels fly away with a helpless little girl, her seventeen-year-old sister Penryn will do anything to get her back.

Anything, including making a deal with an enemy angel.

Raffe is a warrior who lies broken and wingless on the street. After eons of fighting his own battles, he finds himself being rescued from a desperate situation by a half-starved teenage girl.

Traveling through a dark and twisted Northern California, they have only each other to rely on for survival. Together, they journey toward the angels’ stronghold in San Francisco where she’ll risk everything to rescue her sister and he’ll put himself at the mercy of his greatest enemies for the chance to be made whole again.

Review:
I thought that this was a pretty good read. There were some really great parts. Such as the paranoid schizophrenic mother who forced her daughter to take numerous self-defence classes, in case the daughter should ever need to defend herself from HER. That does something moving to my insides. I also liked Penryn and Raffie, as well as Obi and his crew.

I did occasionally wonder where all the normal people were. I mean there had to be a few non-homicidal or non-victimised people out there. There just had to be. But Penryn only seemed to meet up with potential murders or completely broken people. That didn’t feel particularly realistic to me. Sure there’d obviously be some, even a lot, but EVERYONE?

That’s a small quibble though. I only have two real complaints. One is that the whole thing had a bit of a ‘we did this, then I did this, and then this happened’ feel to it. This is often hard to avoid with any first person, present tense narrative, but I REALLY felt it here. What’s more, it felt very much like we were JUST getting an accounting of what Penryn was doing, without feeling like it was also leading up to anything. It felt like it just so happened that this minute to minute accounting of her life occurred in the midst of a post-apocalyptic dystopian future, as opposed to this future angelic war zone and her contributions to it being pivotal to it in any way. Interesting, but unimportant to the whole. I’m not saying that was the case, just that it felt that way.

The second is that the question of WHY is never addressed. It’s a bit like reading a novel set during D-Day without anyone knowing or telling the reader what World War II was about or why June 6th, 1944 was important. This lack of understanding stole a bit of the gravity from the story.

On the whole, however, I read it in a day and enjoyed it. I’d even be interested in picking up the sequel at some point.

Silent Symmetry

Book Review of J.B. Dutton’s Silent Symmetry (The Embodied Trilogy #1)

Silent SymmetryAuthor, J.B. Dutton sent me an ecopy of his novel Silent Symmetry.

Long Description from Goodreads:
The Embodied glide through the busy streets of New York, uttering barely a sound.

Their eerie beauty comes from their perfect symmetry. Are they flawless humans, the epitome of evolution? Are they a genetically modified super-race? Are they extra-terrestrials? Once prep school student Kari Marriner becomes aware of their existence, she is driven to find the answer and finds herself ensnared in a web that reaches further than she could possibly have imagined.

Kari’s earliest memory is her father’s death in a car crash back in small-town Wisconsin. Now, 12 years later, her mother has been hired by a pseudo-religious organization in Manhattan called the Temple of Truth (a.k.a. the ToT). At Chelsea Prep, Kari develops a crush on classmate Cruz. But when she realizes that Noon, another attractive guy at school, is involved with the ToT, her curiosity gets the better of her.

Kari stumbles upon a secret tunnel leading from her apartment to another in the building, where an ancient book holds images she can scarcely believe, and a cavernous room contains… something inexplicable. As Kari pieces together the incredible evidence, she discovers that the ToT is run by other-worldly beings called The Embodied who influence human behavior and have established a global long-term human breeding program. But why? And what is her role in all this?

Just as she starts wondering whether the love she feels for Cruz is genuine or if her emotions are being controlled by The Embodied, her mother is kidnapped and Kari has to figure out who is human, who is Embodied, and who she can count on to help rescue her mother.

Somewhat spoilerish Review:
Silent Symmetry has an interesting premise and I enjoyed that about it. I also enjoyed Mr. Dutton’s writing. However, there were also quite a few aspects of the book that left me baffled.

First and foremost, the clues that Kari followed in order to recognise that there was a mystery to the Emboldened seemed nonexistent. I get that a lot of it was supposed to be gut instinct, the lizard brain so to speak, on Kari’s part. Though that left very little for the reader to follow and go, ‘oh yea, that is weird, I wonder…’ I had the exact same response to her feelings for both Cruz and Noon. They glanced at each other and BAM! Suddenly there were emotions flying all over the place, abrupt kisses, and even the occasional he “cares about me.” Um…how does she know? Again, that lizard brain is whispering to her, but it left me lost. 

The character descriptions seemed a bit on the light side too. I honestly don’t know what a single one of them was supposed to look like, except that Cruz was of Puerto Rican decent and therefore dark complected. As a result, I had a hard time visualising any of them. 

Next, some of the language made me want to scratch my eyes out. Things like Oh. Em. Gee—Not OMG or Oh My God, but Oh. Em. Gee. Yes, it’s teenager speak, but it’s wrong teenager speak (in my opinion, at least). Then there was the whole Eff thing. Eff or Effing was used instead of Fuck or Fuckin’. Every time this came up I found it jarring. Not just because it seemed out of place, or because it was so frequently used, or even because that’s kind of a linguistic habit one person might have, but not multiple characters, but because other curse words were used without alteration. I counted crazy-ass, ass, shit and shitting. So why not Fuck?

Lastly, since this is the first in a series the book ended without me feeling like I had any real resolution. I kind of followed who the Emboldened were, but not really what they wanted with Kari. Is it the same thing that the Rebels wanted with her? If so, what was all the fighting about? And what of poor Cruz? Is his position secure? What of Emily? The book ended on a cliffhanger, not a seriously precipitous one, but still too early for the reader to feel any real sense of conclusion. This never makes me happy. 

Again, the book is well written. I don’t remember any real editorial issues. The plot seems interesting and the cover is eye catching. So even though I have some complaints I’m not really disparaging the book. It’s worth picking up.

Book Review of Shevi Arnold’s Why My Love Life Sucks

Why My Life SucksAuthor, Shevi Arnold, sent me a copy of her novel Why My Life Sucks (The Legend of Gilbert the Fixer).

Description from Goodreads:
Gilbert Garfinkle is the ultimate tech geek. He has a compulsive need to take apart, figure out, and fix things; and he dreams of one day fixing the world. But a funny thing happens on the way to the future. Gilbert encounters the one thing he’ll never be able to figure out: a gorgeous, teenage vampire girl named Amber, who wants to turn Gilbert into her platonic BFF–literally forever! This leaves the ultimate geek pondering life’s ultimate question: “Why me?”

Review:
I have to admit to being caught completely off guard by this one. While I wasn’t expecting it to be bad or anything, otherwise why read it, I was expecting it to be really juvenile. (In he sense of written for younger readers, not written by a juvenile writer or someone with juvenile skill.) And while I have no doubt tweens could read and enjoy the book, as a 35 year old woman I did too.

Gilbert has a royal sense of humour that works really well as a narrator. He got quite a few laughs out of me. I also really liked him as a character. He is an über geek and comfortable with that. It’s a persona he cultivates and enjoys. It would be really hard not to like him. That pretty much made up for the fact that I so disliked Amber. She is well written and the author gave her just enough history to be forgivable. I think the reader was supposed to buy into the idea that she was so desperately in need of protection that her actions were excusable. But I didn’t like her. Personally I never was able to let go of her determined naivety and amazingly selfish behaviour and mindset—borderline narcissistic really. She made herself a sugar daddy (or maybe just a father) as far as I was concerned, though I’m fairly sure I wasn’t supposed to see it this way. I think it was supposed to appear preordained and therefor the ends would have justified the means. Bah!

I also quite enjoyed all of the geeky media references. There are a lot of them and some are quite subtle. I probably didn’t even catch all of them. I did think Gil’s genius and tech were a little over the top. Good for for comedic value but too advanced to be believable. I really look forward to the next in this series. There is definitely something hinky about Uncle Ian and the Liebermans. I have my guess and I can’t wait to see if I’m right.

On a side note: the cover does make sense after reading the book.