Saltwater Vampires

Saltwater Vampires by Kirsty Eagar
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Barely.


So, Saltwater vampires.... as opposed to freshwater vampires?


Kirsty Eagar's Raw Blue was probably one of the best YA fiction I read this year but this book is just a NO for me.


First of all, it is unclear to me what this book exactly wanted to be: did it want to be a dark, paranormal novel à la Anne Rice where some rebel bad-ass vampires try to become all-powerful?

Did it want to be YA fiction about some kids who love surfing but who end up in a big, messy trouble?

Or did it want to be a thriller where a secret society plots to annihilate said bad-ass vampires and to restore peace and perpetuate its secrecy?

There were three distinct plot threads going on at the same time and let me tell you that the whole thing was complicated and distracting.


The parts where the book wanted to be a paranormal novel reminded me a lot of one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, except the pirates, in this case, were vampires. The whole book is about them stealing a flask of super ancient vampire blood in order to perform a ritual and be able to:

a - walk in daylight again, so basically being nostalgic of the time they were humans;

b - travel through time to go back to the time of the shipwreck of the Batavia and look for Lucretia. WHAT? A bloodsucking predator with a romantic heart? Did I miss something there?


The parts were the book wanted to be YA fiction were certainly the best, we know Eagar excels in the field. Lots of surfing, like in Raw Blue, and a set of quirky, funny characters trying to solve their inner conflicts and, simultaneously, fight off the horde of monsters come to town. I loved those scenes, the surfing and the dialogue but it put a lull in the building-up of the plot, making the pauses excessively long. Midway through, it lost momentum and it started to get tedious.

The final scene is really adventurous and spectacular but I'm not sure if readers will actually get that far in the book. I did, out of sheer stubbornness.


The part where it wanted to be thriller and the secret society was involved were fairly predictable, both in regard to Clifford's motives and as to how it would end for him. And how could said centuries-old secret society be so inept at locating the bad guys?


The writing is, true to Eagar's style, flawless, although this book could surely have been (should have been) shorter, in my opinion.

It is its hybrid character that really didn't sit well with me.


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Pink

Pink by Lili Wilkinson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

2.5 stars

It all starts with a pink cashmere sweater.
That's what Ava wants to wear instead of her usual goth all-black attire. Because, you see, Ava is a lesbian and a feminist and does not wear pink. Or maybe she isn't. What is sure is that Ava is in the middle of a crisis, with her girlfriend, with her beliefs, with her sexual orientation.
By applying to a posh private school, she hopes to get a fresh start and be able to experiment being someone else from whom she is usually expected to be.
Things don't work out exactly as Ava expected though, and soon enough she is caught in a spiral of lies, betrayals and humiliations which she will have a hard time disentangling herself from.
Will Ava eventually find her true self?

There is one specific reason why I thought this book was just above ok but could not completely like it: it really, really goes against who I am.

I do NOT like parents (Ava's) who, under a faux intelligentsia liberalism, really mask their snobbish, compartmentalized elitism and constrict their children in this overachieving, supposedly progressive but really just... discriminating lifestyle.

I do NOT like supposedly emancipated lesbian bitches girlfriends (Chloe) who want to stand out so much from the flock, that they fall right back into it as a caricature.

Most of all I do not like a spineless MC, who not only is close to being devoid of personality - actually a natural result of being subjected to the pressure of my two above-mentioned dislikes - but who is unable to stand up for herself and needs to lie, hurt other people and just be hypocritical for a good part of the book.

Much less do I like to read about them.

These were my biggest problems with Pink.

Add to that the fact that the school Ava decides to move to is really a joke, populated by these unrealistically clichéd students such as Ethan and Alexis OR that I found the turn of events with Alexis and the moviethon fairly unbelievable and you got yourself the explanation for my rating.

What I did like though was the writing, smooth and effortless, and some of the characters, namely the Screws, who were the most likable and the most believable, in my opinion.
The dialogues between Ava and Sam were pretty brilliant and I liked Sam quite a lot. Actually, part of my enjoyment started when Ava's castle of lies began to miserably crash and, end in end, she got a - partial - redemption. In fact, I quite liked her closing speech. But it was way, way too late for me to take back my general annoyance.
I don't know if the author made all the characters purposefully so unlikable in order to build a climax and then give us a long-agonized happy ending, but if it is so, it was too stretched and too... agonized, for me at least.

But you know what? In retrospect, I should have known it wouldn't work for me. When I read the dedication at the beginning of the book to David Levithan and then the author pulls a musical in the plot, I should have suspected.

Book, are you Australian? Because I really didn't notice.


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Imaginary Girls

Imaginary Girls by Nova Ren Suma
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

2.5 stars

This is the first time that I've considered NOT rating a book. I felt, and still feel, like whatever number of stars I might give are not going to truly reflect my opinion nor do Imaginary Girls any justice.
So keep in mind that my rating in this case is just the result of a mathematical addition of factors, of things I liked and didn't like.

The story is, in a nutshell, a mystery. It's difficult for me to give you a synopsis of the plot, but suffice it to say it involves a mysterious reservoir, two sisters morbidly obsessed with one another, a dead girl in a rowboat and a series of unexplainable events.

This is one of the most distressing books I have read this year or, probably, ever and all I feel is that I just did not get it.
Let me make some comparisons that might help you out:
If it were an artistic movement, it would be Surrealism.
If it were a movie, it would be a David Lynch movie.
if it were music, it would be jazz.

Disturbingly creepy, oneiric, harrowing and full of suspense, it kept me on the edge until the very last pages. The word predictable does not exist in this author's dictionary, I'll give you that much.
But that the long awaited climax was, in the end, so anticlimactic distressed me very much.
For about 80% of the book I could not figure out, for the life of me, what was happening and why. I was expecting some paranormal element to give an explanation to all my questions but, in the end, there wasn't. It was just all surreal.

The strong points of this book are, objectively, the amazing writing style and characterization. The writing is exceptional and evocative and, thanks to that, some of the characters, Ruby in particular, come out well formed, palpable and yes, disturbing.
The fact that I could not find one likable character in this book though, really detracted from my enjoyment. Not only I could not justify the absurdity of some of the actions of the characters, but I could never, not even at the end, sympathize with any of them with the exception, maybe, of London, whose sole guilt in the whole process was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Least of all Ruby.

The obvious deduction of all these ramblings is that this book, evidently, was really not for me. I can see why it might appeal to other readers but it really didn't happen for me. I just didn't get it. It was all over the place, and it defies logic.

Definitely recommended to people who do not recognize themselves in this review, you won't be disappointed.

*** added points for the beautiful, completely relevant cover.




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Blood Red Road (Dustlands #1)

Blood Red Road by Moira Young
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

2.5 stars

There are many successful books that get turned into movies. Not necessarily good movies. Actually, it is very rare for the movie to be better than the book. But not impossible.
Blood Red Road might be one of such rare cases.
I read somewhere that this book was optioned to be become a movie even BEFORE being published. That's where the problems lies: Blood Red Road is trying too hard to be a movie before even being a book.

That means that while it's got some elements that would be of stunning effect on screen - cage fights, killer worms, a battle à la Braveheart - it falls a bit short on the elements which are needed to make it a good book. I am talking about a solid plot, characterization, worldbuilding and... well, common sense, actually.

Set in a post-apocalyptic world, we meet Saba, her twin brother Lugh, her sister Emmi and their father living in Silverlake, a place which reminded me a bit of the movie Mad Max. The mother is dead and they are experiencing a terrible drought that is making their lives really hard. When some mysterious men on horses kidnap Lugh and kill their father, Saba sets off with her little sister to rescue him.
It is during this quest that she becomes involved in spectacular cage fights, a jail breakout, a race across the desert and killer worms. With the aid of a team of rebels, Jack - a guy to who she seems to be unexplainably attracted to  - and his friends, will they succeed in their mission and save Lugh from a terrible destiny?

The beginning of the story is really promising. It has a certain The Reapers are the Angels feeling which I really like. Both the use of the language and the lack of quotation marks enrich the book and the rhythm is so fast-paced that it is pretty difficult to put it down. The narration is engrossing, the scenes spectacular and very imaginative. As I said before, it is probably going to make a nice movie. Up until about 70% I would probably have given it 4 stars.

But then things started going downhill and even the little flaws that I had spotted before and was willing to overlook - because the book was fun - started to add up and become one too many.

My first problem is with world building. In this book it's so basic that if I had to draw it on a map, it would look like one of my 4 y.o. daughter's drawings.
We set off in SilverLAKE, we pass through CrossCREEK and reach HopeTOWN. We then take horses and go meet people under some DarkTREES, cross the DarkMOUNTAINS and after a battle in the FreedomFIELDS we go live happily ever after to the BigWATER. There is no mention of other towns, of other people even existing outside of Hopetown, no hint at how this world is structured. Take the King. What is he king of? It feels like this world is populated by just a handful of people who live in a bunch landmarks.

The plot had too many holes, there are too many things which don't add up and which include - but alas, are not limited to:
-Saba's ability to fight like a pro wrestler with no prior training whatsoever;
-the unlikeliness of the all-knowing crow;
-the use of telepathy on various occasions between characters;

I was constantly asking myself questions which belong to the sphere of common sense:
-why would one take a 9 year old on a suicide rescue mission?
-why would one shoot a clearly already dead person and NOT the source of all her problems who only SEEMS to be dead?
-why would a king hold a celebration that takes place once every six years and which testifies his power in front of a bunch of slaves and not of all his subjects?
and most of all:
WHY does Jack like Saba?

Which takes me back to the last problem: characterization.
With the exception of Saba, who is a well formed, albeit unlikable character, I thought the other characters fell a bit flat. I felt that JUST AS they started to become interesting, something happened and they were interesting no more.
Take Jack for example: from cocky bastard he turns into besotted idiot. And for the life of me I could not understand why he became so enamored of Saba. She is so inconsistent and fickle, so apparently unexperienced, rather morbidly fixated with Lugh... I admired her stubbornness and her ability to hold her own but why Jack would be so in love with her... not a clue.
And I won't even talk about Lugh.

I am sure all my questions will be answered in the sequel(s) to this book, but I need them NOW. Their absence is enough not to make want to pick up the sequel to this.



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Mercy

Mercy by Rebecca Lim
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

2.5 stars and I am pissed.
This book could have been SO much better.

Let's see: the concept is interesting. Mercy is an angel who, for reasons unknown, possesses bodies of women for purposes unknown. That means that all of a sudden she wakes up in a body that is not hers and she has to live with that body for a certain period of time. In this continuous process, she tries to get to Luc, a mysterious man who she seems to want to be with.
When we meet Mercy, she wakes up in the body of Carmen Zappacosta, a timid, tiny and unattractive girl who is also a soprano and who is going with her school to an annual (?) concert hosted by another school in the tiny town of Paradise. Her host is a family, the Daleys, who's suffered a terrible event: the disappearance of their daughter two years before, Lauren, also a soprano. When she meets Ryan, Lauren's twin, Mercy quickly realizes she needs to help him search for Lauren, whom he believes to be alive. What happened to Lauren? Will Mercy unusual powers be helpful in discovering the truth? and WHO is exactly Mercy?

I'm giving this book 2.5 stars mainly for two reasons. The first is because Rebecca Lim is a talented writer. She can definitely write and her style is way, way better than most authors of paranormal YA out there. You have to check it out to know what I mean but she has a way of describing things which is really evocative and effective, even lyrical at times.
Second, Mercy is a good main character. She evolves in the course of the book, she is strong-willed and we're not really sure whether she is all good. It feels like she has a dark side and I am interested in knowing what's going to become of her.

BUT. But.
My main gripe is about the plot. Aside from the fact that she states on page 1 that when she wakes up she no longer knows anything and then, right on page 7, she starts telling who she was in her previous lives, there were a couple of passages where logic eluded me.
On their first attempt to discover where Lauren could be hidden, Ryan and Carmen/Mercy break into a reverend's house. The reverend's family is sleeping inside and they nonchalantly stroll into the house and start checking out rooms. Finding nothing of interest, they decide to look for Lauren, who nobody has seen for 2 years, in the couple's bedroom. Since the reverend and his wife are inside, they decide they need a diversion to get them out of the house. They start bickering about who should go and distract them (family still sleeping inside the room) and Ryan decides to go. So, while Carmen lurks outside the room waiting for the couple to come out, Ryan goes and.... blows up a tree!!! He pulls out a gun and sets a f*cking huge tree on fire! WTF? Isn't it, like, a bit, excessive? But it doesn't end there. Once Carmen has made sure that Lauren is not in the house, she runs out of the house. The reverend SEES her, shouts to his wife to run after her but Carmen escapes, eluding the swarm of firetrucks that are amassing outside the house. Well, this incident NEVER gets mentioned again. Carmen strolls home and that's it. No news next day, no talks in school, no police trying to apprehend the girl the reverend saw. Again: WTF?
And it goes on. At karaoke night, Carmen slurps down EIGHT cokes laced with bourbon in a couple of minutes. Sorry, but I can't believe that. She faints and while everyone wants to, obviously, take her to hospital, Ryan picks her up and takes her home. Another WTF?
But most of all, when at the end of the book, the culprit is discovered, it turns out he had a track record for stalking and harassing a soprano girl. So when ANOTHER soprano girl disappears, why nobody EVER thinks to check on him? Unbelievable.

Sorry to say these facts among others - calling Lucifer and Uriel with lame nicknames LUC and URI is just plain... lame - just irked me to no end.
So if the author could please STOP trying to channel American paranormal YA and be herself a little more, the book would have been so much better.
Because the author is Australian and this was the main reason why I picked up this book. Do we realize the story is set in Australia? NO. It could be the US. We even have a Tiffany bitchy nemesis.

I'm seeing potential in this series and I am willing to read what comes next. We all agree that, at the moment, Australia is like the hen that laid golden eggs in YA lit, so why not exploit this advantage to its fullest instead of trying to be something else?



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Slave to Sensation (Psy-changeling #1)

Slave to Sensation by Nalini Singh
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

2.5 stars.


In this first installment of her Psy-changeling series, Nalini Singh introduces us to this reality where Psy - superior being with psychic powers who have been conditioned to become emotionless - and Changelings - shapeshifters - rule the world. Regular humans are inconsequential in this book.

Sascha Duncan is a Psy with the task to infiltrate the Changeling community to glimpse more info about its structure. Her cover is a joint venture with the RiverDark clan's construction company to build new houses for the Changelings and that's where she meets the head of the clan, hunk Lucas Hunter. The Changeling's secret agenda is to discover a Psy serial killer who is decimating their female population and they need the help of cold-as-ice Sascha Duncan to find the responsible of the killings. Except Sascha is not as emotionless as she seems and has a secret she needs to keep safe, a secret that could cost her her life.


Unfortunately, as soon as I started the book, Nalini Singh immediately got on my wrong side, for personal reasons. See, when I was living in Russia a few years ago I had a good friend whose name was - is -Nikita. I love that name. So much so that I always thought I would call my son like that, did I get to have one. Yes, my son. Because in Russian speaking countries, Nikita is a masculine name. Unfortunately, in the rest of the world this name seems to have mutated - thanks also to a fortunate French movie and to a British song - to the feminine gender. So, when a few years later my son was born, much to my chagrin, I had to give in and I called him Noah (which, by the way, here in Italy still gets confused as a feminine name).

So, even though it is not solely her fault, I resent the author for perpetuating this misconception that Nikita is a proper female name by calling Sascha's mother like that. This feeling is reinforced by the fact that Nikita Duncan is the daughter of a Dmitri Kukovich, clearly a Slavic name, which would make it very unlikely for her to be christened like that. End of personal rant.


Aside from the above mentioned annoyance, I expected this book to be of more substance. I like paranormal romance books and I enjoy steamy sex scenes but these people were thinking about sex from page one till back cover - when they were not doing it. I'm not saying that the plot was thin or uninteresting, I actually appreciated this new race, the Psy, as a change from regular old vampires, but it certainly got obliterated by the continuous sex dance between Sascha and Lucas, followed by the sappy scenes you're-my-mate-for-life-we're-two-bodies-and-one-soul when I actually had to go brush my teeth. Seriously, some paranormal romance books beat YA literature when sap and happily-ever-afters are concerned. This is one of them


I'd say this would be a sure must read book for lovers of J.R. Ward and her Black Dagger Brotherhood series.


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Will Grayson, Will Grayson

Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I'm kind of ashamed to give this book such a poor rating because, clearly, everybody else liked it. I wouldn't even have given it 2 stars if not for the fact that it made laugh a couple of times.
I think this book is SO not for me.
First off, I'm not quite sure why it's called Will Grayson, Will Grayson because, clearly again, this book is not about either Wills. It's about Tiny Cooper, a humongous, self-centered, selfish, loud and super clichéd gay guy. This guy is so self-centered that the plot of the book is basically about him staging a musical about himself. WTF? I thought it would be more about the two Graysons, interacting with each other but they are actually connected only through Tiny.
And, truth be said, I didn't like either of them. Will #1 (Green's) is a nerdy straight guy whose two main rules in life are: 1) don't care; and 2) shut up. I couldn't empathize. He's passive, subject to Tiny's whims and still he loves him. His romance with Jane felt contrived and popped out all of a sudden.
Will #2 (Levithan's) is even worse. He's gay, emo, chronically depressed, tormented by his parent's divorce and perpetually in a bad mood. He's kind of the worst case scenario for a teenager.
Both Wills ramble a lot, there's a lot of IM in the book and weird pointless conversations. Even the whole musical scene at the end was just plain silly. I don't really know who would care about a musical about Tiny Cooper's gay love life. I wouldn't and didn't. I kept thinking: maybe there's some weird symbolism I'm not getting here? I have no clue, I felt this book to be surreal at times. AND I don't really see how Will #2 managed to make other people with the same name go to a stupid musical in a couple of hours. Why would THEY care?

So, again, it might be this book might be better appreciated by real teenagers - not teen at heart like me -but truly, if not for some rather startlingly genius  passages like this:

"you know, how people say it's good luck if a bird shits on you? and people believe it! i just want to grab them and say, 'dude, don't you realize this whole superstition was made up because no one could think of anything else good to say to a person who'd just been shit upon?"

or this:

<3. you think that looks like  heart? if you do, it's only because you've never seen a scrotum.
(rofl? what? are you really rolling on the floor laughing? well, please stay down there a sec while I KICK YOUR ASS.)

this would book would have not got even that extra star from me. But, obviously, it must be me because check out the awards it got!
Sorry, Green and Levithan, you're just not my cup of tea.


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