Where She Went

Where She Went by Gayle Forman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

DO NOT READ THIS REVIEW IF YOU HAVEN'T READ IF I STAY.





While reading this book, I kept on thinking about Megan McCafferty. Huh? I know this doesn't make much sense, but really, this is how I wished Perfect Fifths had been written. Don't get me wrong, I loved Perfect Fifths, loved the 80 pages conversation, the haikus, the Barry Manilow karaoke that so many people despised.

I just wish this had been the style of that book too, so to close the story with a bang. Anyway.


This book takes place three years after the events of If I Stay. Mia has left for Juilliard and left Adam, almost without a word, never coming back. He's become a rock star, gone on with his life and his music but he's wounded. Mia's left a terrible void, too many things unexplained.

Until, in New York for some interviews before leaving for a long and stressful European tour, Adam meets Mia for one more night and the dam of emotions choking inside him finally breaks, yearning for closure.


What an emotional, intense read. I was a wreck yesterday after finishing it. I read the last 40 or so pages twice because I'd rushed through them the first time. Needless to say, I loved it. There are not many authors nowadays that manage, with their words, exploiting the power of my imagination, to make a mess of me. I'm tough. So, kudos to Gayle Forman for achieving that.


While If I Stay was told from the point of view of a comatose Mia, Where She Went is told from Adam's POV. Adam is such a wounded, broken, lost person it hurt just thinking to be him. True, the real victim of that terrible accident was Mia. She lost her parents, her brother, her life as she knew it. But how would it feel to see the person you loved more than anything, that you tried to help recover from a terrible trauma, that you basically annihilated yourself for, reject you and walk away without even a glance? How do you pick up the pieces of what is left? Forman did a great job in characterizing a truly broken heart, because that is what Adam is, his heart is broken and Mia left with a piece of it.


I had conflicting emotions about Mia for a good part of the book. Just like Adam, I couldn't understand her cruelty. What happened to her was certainly life-changing and awful, but it does not forgive her behavior. She complains a lot about people giving her free passes out of pity, but that's exactly what she asks of Adam, who has to let her walk away to put together the pieces of her life by herself. The impression she left on me in this book is of a person who has to have it her way: her difficulty with Adam's gigs, her refusal to go camping because "I sleep in a bed", her ultimatum to Kim not go to school near her, speak of a difficult person. While Adam's love and dedication for Mia transpired from every single page of this book, I found myself wondering if the love she felt for Adam was as strong and as genuine as his. At times, I really thought she didn't deserve this guy.


But ultimately, the truth is I can't really judge Mia because what do I know about losing a family in the span of a few hours? What do I know about undergoing endless surgeries and running a risk of brain damage? What do I know about post traumatic stress disorder? It's difficult to say how one would react in such a situation and so, yet again, Mia gets a free pass. From me, too.


A book about love everybody should read.



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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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Shade

Shade by Jeri Smith-Ready
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

So I have this huge Post-it note I made on my computer with all the things that are wrong with this book. In fact, I pretty much hated it up to 3/4 of it. Now I find myself at a total loss for words, because, incredibly, I realized I actually liked it.


Shade is set in a world where ghosts can be seen walking around. Not by everyone, though. Only by people born after the Shift, a date when unexplainably something changed in the cosmic order of things and newborns start to acquire this terrible ability.

Aura is 16, she is born on the day of the Shift and has a side-job as a translator for ghosts in court cases. One horrible day, her boyfriend Logan, a pre-shifter musician on the verge of stardom, suddenly dies and the life she knew starts to crumble to pieces, revealing a series of mysteries that are destined to change her life for good.


I chose to read Shade because the ratings were pretty high and the reviews extremely good but, as I started it, I was immediately annoyed:


- new mysterious guy in school? Check.

- heroine with paranormal abilities? Check.

- love triangle (though with a ghost)? Check.

- science project? Bloody check.


Yes, another of THOSE books.


Furthermore, I thought the ghost thing going SHADE was a bit lame. FYI, a ghost goes shade when he becomes bitter and can't solve things he left unresolved in life and, apparently, makes post-shifters pass out and go out of their mind. Shades are captured by the shady (HA!) ghost police by means of a magic medallion and trapped, ghostbuster-like, in a little black box. If you don't want a ghost to haunt you in your bathroom while you're sitting in the toilet, you have to line it with obsidian. Mh....


My main problem with this book is that I had a hard time liking Aura. When Logan dies, she seems to get over it very quickly, thinking too soon about Zachary. It made me want to strangle her. Your boyfriend dies, for god's sake, where is the grief, the mourning?? I just kept thinking what a selfish b!tch she was, feeling attracted to Zachary and drawing star charts with him mere days after Logan's death. Unreal. Now, not liking your main character is not exactly a good sign in a book.


But then, as I read on, I started to realize that I actually like the rather darker nuance that this book has: there's drugs, there's drinking, not everything is perfect in these guys lives and I felt more and more connected to the characters. It felt a bit more like my teenage years, rather than the usual loveatfirstsight, illloveyouforeverandever routine.

Thankfully there's quite a bit of character development also on Aura's side and I gradually started to rethink my opinion on her, even though I am still not completely convinced. I'm leaving her with the benefit of doubt for further developments.


There are quite a few threads left unsolved in this book, the mysteries surrounding Aura and Zachary's births are still pretty much undisclosed and so is Logan's role in the matter but I really think I'll pick up the next book in this series.

For me it wasn't bad at all, oscillating between a 1 and 2 stars for the first part but a solid 4 stars as the story developed. So I'm giving it a 3 and I hope that, from here on, the story will only get better. Second installment Shift came out this month. Give it a try.


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Beyond the Highland Mist

Beyond the Highland Mist by Karen Marie Moning
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

What did I think? I thought thank god I read the Fever series before this or I would have never picked it up and would have mocked anyone who recommended it to me.
There isn't much to say about this book except the fact that this is not the Karen Marie Moning I am used to. Yet, some things have actually acquired a certain clarity; she is certainly a veteran in writing hot steamy sex scenes and the Highlander series has been, for all intents and purposes, her training camp, leading to the Fever series.

I decided to read these books - yes, I was planning to read the whole thing - to fill in the gaps that Shadowfever left me with. Who is Adam Black? Where do the MacKeltars come from and what is their story?
I knew this was much more on the paranormal romance side, yet I did not expect it to be bordering on erotica.

Let me make an example taken right from page 1, the Prologue:

"They say his manhood at half-mast would make a stallion envious."

or imagine my shock when I read these words coming from the mysterious Adam Black's mouth (who is really none other than Puck/Robin Goodfellow, FYI), right on page 45:

"Is there a service I might perform for you, my fair queen? Perhaps you have something in need of a heated shaping and molding? Or perhaps I might reshape my steel lance in the heat of your forge, milady?"

From here on is an escalation of bodice ripping scenes and infuriating similies - woman/mare, woman/falcon to tame, woman/ whatever animal to mount comes to mind, and believe me, if I never hear the words silken nub or throbbing shaft ever again, it'll be too soon.

So yeah, this book was so not for me. I think I was hoping to find Jericho Barrons hidden somewhere in the pages, but alas, he appears to be unrepeatable.


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Eon: Dragoneye Reborn

Eon: Dragoneye Reborn by Alison Goodman


My rating: 4 of 5 stars


What a distressing, distressing book.


My first reaction after reading the last page was DISSECTION. I wanted to put this book on my cutting board, nicely slice it into three neat parts, set aside the first and third parts which are keepers, chop the middle into tiny, tiny pieces and throw them to the pigeons who lurk outside in my gardern waiting for something to eat.
Ah, the frustration!

But let's start with what I found amazing. I fell in love with the world building. The Oriental setting is a total winner for me and I felt catapulted into this mix of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Memoirs of a Geisha kind of world. Lovely. I loved how the author used the dragon element in relation to the story. I am getting a bit weary of the whole Eragon's approach to dragons, so this new cut was really welcome. True, the world Goodman creates is pretty articulated and not really easy to digest at first but eventually I got used to it and I stopped asking myself questions on how the dragons' system worked.
Also, the whole transgender theme was appreciated, even though this brings me to the shredding of pages.

What really irked me, what frustrated me in the middle section, were the characters. No, scratch that. Just one. I could have strangled Eon on various occasions. Eon is, evidently, not the sharpest tool in the shed. The whole thing with the Sun drug and the ghost tea? I think 100% of readers realized what was wrong with it after about 100 pages. But Eon/a distressingly and quite stubbornly keeps on f*cking up for about another 350 pages. WTF??? I'm not sure she deserved what she got. If I had been her dragon, I would have incinerated her by page 200.

EVENTUALLY, she painstakingly realizes what had been clear to the whole wide world for a while but yeah, she's not the most likable of characters in my opinion - slow on the uptake, a coward and quite the liar. And with her behavior, she gets killed a few people and puts EVERYBODY in deep sh*t.

Still, great book, great story and hopefully Eon/a will redeem him/herself in the sequel that I already ordered.





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Just One of the Guys

Just One Of The Guys by Kristan Higgins


My rating: 3 of 5 stars





Chastity is a tall, big, healthy girl - a journalist, who comes back to her native town of Eaton Falls after a decade of studying and working in New York. She is also part of a big family of firefighters, the youngest sisters of four equally tall, big and healthy brothers. Chastity is ready to settle down, find a husband and start popping out some kids, but her rather domineering looks do not help in her quest. When she starts dating Ryan - a doctor, perfect husband material - she thinks she's found her perfect candidate, if not for the constant nagging thought in her mind of Trevor Meade, her childood friend and sweetheart, whom she's loved forever but doesn't seem to be interested in her romantically.
FOREWARNING: Unfortunately I am not going to do this book any justice. Fate has wanted me to pick this up mere days after having finished Bachelor Boys and they're too bloody similar in so many ways to be objective about it. I'll be honest and say I preferred Bachelor Boys because, aside from being simply chick lit, goes also a bit deeper into the dynamics of family, love and friendship.

Don't get me wrong, this is great chick lit. Of the laugh out loud kind. I really had a good time reading this book and never once I put it down groaning because of some dumb scene - well, except at the very end for the sappiness, but I do that with all books that feature said scenes. It was completely hilarious at times, I even kind of started picturing Katherine Heigl as Chastity, in one of those exhilarating chick flicks she does, like 27 dresses. The characters are really well developed and the dialogues are witty and fun.
The only thing that bothered me - as in Bachelor Boys, by the way - were the premises. The whole plot rotates around the fact that Chastity is desperately looking for a husband in order to reproduce because she is 31 and she feels it's about time.
This is a load of old, backward bullshit, sorry to say. I can't believe an emancipated woman with a master's degree in Journalism who's lived in the big city would actually think like that. And this coming from a stay at home mom with a degree in translation English/Russian. That would be me.

For this reason I had a few issues empathizing with Chastity at the beginning but, eventually, she came through, because she is extremely funny.

If you need to relax and have a good laugh, this is the book for you. I'll be certainly reading more of Kristan Higgins's books for therapeutic purposes.





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Saving Francesca

Saving Francesca by Melina Marchetta


My rating: 5 of 5 stars


It's not as if I didn't know that this book was good - it was made pretty clear to me not only by the awards it won but also by endless book recommendations and raving reviews from fellow Goodreaders. AND I actually should have expected it from first hand experience - I loved, loved, loved On the Jellicoe Road.


Still, I'm in awe. How does she do it? How does she take an utterly banal plot - it's the story of a teenage girl during her Junior year in high school and her struggles through social difficulties but, most importantly, through her mother's depression - and makes it a jewel of unforgettable friendships, familial love, pearls of wisdom, deep truths in life that just makes me want to highlight passages, read them countless times to memorize them and make them mine?

Well, it's easy to answer. Through vivid characterization, stunningly beautiful writing and witty amazing dialogues. I mean, the characters ARE truly amazing, every single one of them, down to Mr. Brolin. The story is touching, sad, intelligent, REAL.

As far as writing style is concerned I am going to put Marchetta up there, with Megan McCafferty and her Jessica Darling - which, by the way, kind of reminded me of Francesca at times - among my favorite writers.

The only little mole in this great texture of a book was the choice of surnames for some of the character. I´m Italian, you know. Why would you want to call your protagonist Francesca Spinelli? It means spliff, for god's sake. And Trombal has a suspicious assonance to the slang term for f*ck. Was it intentional?

I hope Australia will give us more of these fabulous writers it's nurturing lately because I am really impressed, not only by Marchetta who beats them all but also by Alison Goodman and Lucy Christopher. Fair dinkum!








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