Tag: book review

The Last Time I Lied

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Author: Riley Sager
Genres: Mystery, Thriller
Pub date: July 2018 (read Aug. 2018)

I didn’t read Riley Sager’s first book, Final Girls, because it sounds too disturbing for me, but The Last Time I Lied takes place at a creepy summer camp where campers start to go missing, and I love everything to do with the outdoors (even creepy mystery thrillers), so I was like, “sign me up!”

This book wasn’t as scary as I was anticipating, it has a creepy ambiance through most of the story, but I didn’t think the tension really started to build until the last 30%. But I was still totally into the mystery of the story and I was dying to know what our narrator, Emma, wasn’t telling us.

Emma was just 13 the first (and only) time she attends Camp Nightingale, a summer camp for wealthy young girls just outside of New York. Emma shows up to camp late and ends up being put in a cabin with 3 older girls – Natalie, Allison, and the enigmatic Vivian. Emma is enamoured with Vivian and quickly becomes caught up in the older girl’s drama. Vivian acts like a big sister to Emma, but as Emma discovers some of Vivian’s secrets, their friendship starts to splinter. Then, one night, Vivian, Natalie, and Allison disappear into the night, never to be seen again, forever imprinted upon Emma’s memory.

Flash forward 15 years, wealthy camp owner, Frannie, has decided to re-open the camp and invites Emma to be the camp’s art instructor. Emma decides to return to Camp Nightingale to try and find our what happened to Vivian so that she can finally move on with her life. But she quickly realizes upon arrival that everything is not as it seems at Camp Nightingale.

I was convinced I knew who had made the girls disappear, so I was thrilled when I was totally off the mark. The last 30% of this book is a wild ride and I loved the whole “person vs. nature” element on top of the character conflicts. The ending was a little too coincidental, but the last little twist Sager throws in at the very end f the novel totally blew my mind! The book also has an interesting psychological element where Emma keeps seeing things and you’re not sure what is and is not real.

Overall a solid mystery/thriller book. I’ll still probably take a pass on Final Girls, but I’m interested to see what Riley Sager writes in the future.

To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Author: Jenny Han
Genres: Young Adult
Pub date: Apr. 2014 (read Aug. 2018)

I’ve known about this book for ages, but it sounded pretty juvenile and vapid, so I decided to give it a pass. But then I saw the ad for the Netflix movie and it looked super cute, so I decided to finally pick this up and give it a read. I flew through it in my 25infive readathon, reading it in a single day. I definitely still think it’s juvenile, but it was also really cute and did have more depth than I was expecting.

The main reason I liked this is primarily because it’s about sisters. Lara Jean has 2 sisters, Margot and Kitty, and together they make up the cutest little family. Kitty was easily my favourite and I loved how this book focused so much on the relationships between the sisters, not just on boys.

The premise of the story is that whenever Lara Jean has a crush that she wants to get over, she writes them a goodbye letter (that she keeps in a hat box in her closet) and that helps her move on from her crush. Embarrassingly, one of her crushes is her friend Josh, who is now Margot’s boyfriend. But Margot and Josh break up at the start of the book when Margot moves to Scotland for University, causing a resurgence in Lara Jean’s feelings for Josh.

She vows to do nothing and move on, but then her letters somehow end up getting sent out to the 5 boys she has loved before and everything changes. Josh is totally taken aback by the letter, and to save face, Lara Jean starts a fake relationship with one her other former crushes, Peter.

I’ve read some criticisms that Lara Jean’s voice is too young for a 16 year old, but her naivete is actually one of the other things I liked about this book. She’s interested in boys, but at the same time totally scared of them and puts all her efforts into her relationships with her sisters instead. I thought it was great to showcase relationships between sisters and that not every teenage girl is just obsessed with boys.

There’s not really any surprises in this book. It’s a short, feel good YA book. Nothing groundbreaking – but a fun quick, summer read.

Ten

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Rating: ⭐.5
Author: Gretchen McNeil
Genres: Young Adult, Mystery/Thriller
Pub date: Sep. 2012 (read Aug. 2018)

I picked this one up based solely on the fact that it was a YA retelling of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, which I absolutely loved. Sadly this couldn’t hold a candle to the original. In my opinion, it failed as both a retelling and a YA novel.

First of all, all of the characters in this book suck. It’s not that the characters were unlikable (they were, but I don’t have a problem with unlikable characters), it’s that they were not believable. I felt like a was reading a bad tv drama about teenagers. The tropes and stereotypes in this book were just the absolute worst. These felt like caricatures of teenagers rather than actual teenagers. Real teenagers are smart – they have depth and emotion – I felt like this was written by someone who hasn’t been a teenager in a really long time and just stole from a bunch of stupid, shallow stereotypes about young people.

I know that teenagers exaggerate everything and that stupid, trivial things can seem like a way bigger a deal than they actually are, but all of these characters were unnecessarily dramatized and I had a huge issue with how the author played around with mental illness as a plot tool in this book. Minnie is supposedly bipolar and the author purposely takes her off her meds to dramatize the plot and make everyone think she’s crazy and I just had a huge problem with that. I also really didn’t like Meg’s voice in this book, she sounded like a whiny 12 year old and I found her character totally unbelievable. I’m sorry, I don’t care how into a guy you are, no one is still actively thinking about romance after 5 people have been murdered in front of you.

I don’t think this worked as a re-write either. I read And Then There Were None last year, so the source material is still pretty fresh in my memory. I didn’t successfully guess who the killer was, so that’s good, but the plot structure was really similar and relied on a lot of the same red herrings. I would have preferred to see something a little more clever, although it was interesting how the author tied all the teenagers together in the end. I hated the ending though. That was one area where I would say if you’re going to do a re-telling, at least commit to the ending.

Anyways, needless to say this book wasn’t a win for me. I know it’s just supposed to be a fun, murder mystery/thriller, but I couldn’t excuse how vapid the characters were (there was a character named TJ, like come on!). I rarely give anything less than 2 stars, but I’m honestly at 1.5 stars for this book. I get mad just thinking about it. Avoid this and stick to Agatha Christie, she’s sold more books than any other author for a reason.

Radio Silence

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Author: Alice Oseman
Genres: Young Adult
Pub date: Feb. 2016 (read Aug. 2018)

Okay, this was pretty fantastic. I cannot believe the author is currently only 24 FREAKING YEARS OLD! I opened up this book and caught a glimpse of her author pic and was like, omg this girl looks like she’s 12. But never underestimate young people because seriously, who can write teenagers better than someone who was basically a teenager when they wrote it.

There’s a lot of really great things happening in this book, but what struck me most is how honest these characters are. After I finished this I immediately picked up a copy of Gretchen McNeil’s Ten, which is a young adult mystery/thriller, and spoiler alert, the dialogue and characters are really bad. Coming out of this book, I immediately noticed that McNeil’s characters were more like caricatures of teenagers rather than actual teenagers. This isn’t a review of Ten, but it was such a contrast to Radio Silence, that it really highlighted to me how great the characters are in this book.

Radio Silence primarily features two teens, Frances and Aled. Frances is head girl at her school and has worked insanely hard her entire life with the end goal of getting into an English Lit program at Cambridge University. Likewise, Aled felt a huge pressure from his mom to succeed in life by attending a prestigious university and has been accepted to a program starting in the fall (he is one year older than Frances).

However, Aled’s secret is that he is the creator of a mildly popular science fiction podcast called Universe City. Frances’ secret is that she’s a huge fan of the podcast and posts fan art to Tumblr under an alias. Aled and Frances both feel pressured to be different people in their real lives than they are in private and Frances regularly acknowledges that she has a school persona and a real persona. When a chance encounter leads them to discover they both love Universe City, they collaborate on the project and develop a really close friendship.

This book features a super diverse cast of characters, both in racial and sexual identity. But my favourite part of the book was the platonic relationship between Frances and Aled. Oseman tells us from the start that this will not be a love story. It’s such a brilliant move because it acknowledges all of the different types of relationships that exist between people and that you don’t have to write a romantic relationship to write a good story. Frances and Aled genuinely both really cared about each other and I loved that this novel showcased that.

My second favourite part of this book was the realistic portrayal of the amount of stress society places on young people to go to university and succeed academically. I suspect there’s a large contingent of people out there that can’t relate to Frances and Aled’s need to be top of their class and the pressure to go to an ivy league university, but I’m sure there are a lot of people out there that don’t excel academically and are made to feel inferior by either not getting into university or not wanting to go.

In some way or another, I think everyone feels insecure in high school. Some people feel the need to excel in academia, others in sports or in the arts. Some people don’t care about any of that and just want a group of people in which to belong or an escape from their sometimes less than ideal home situation. We have a tendency to compare ourselves to those around us, especially in the social media age, and there’s a huge amount of pressure to fit in. There are not many novels written about college or the transition to college, and I thought this was a wonderful portrayal about that period.

In addition to Frances and Aled, Radio Silence features a wonderful cast of secondary characters. I thought Frances’ mom was wonderful and I loved how she supported Frances and in return, how Frances was always very open and honest with her. I loved how the friendships developed in this novel and how Frances eventually came to be close with both Daniel and Raine as well.

Overall I thought this was a fantastic book. It’s captivating in it’s honesty. Every character was portrayed so well and I had no problem believing in the authenticity of each of these people. Well done Alice Oseman, I’m excited to check out her new book, I Was Born For This.

Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Author: Jessica Townsend
Genres: Fantasy, Middle Grade
Pub date: Oct. 2017 (read Aug. 2018)

I’ve been seeing Nevermoor pop up on Booktube and for some reason decided I didn’t have an interest in it. But I recently heard it labelled as the “next Harry Potter” and that there were a lot of comparisons that could be made between the two, so of course I finally had to pick up a copy. Best decision ever because this book was so much fun from start to finish!

Morrigan Crow is eleven years old and has the unfortunate bad luck of being born on Eventide. As a result, she’s considered a cursed child in the Wintersea Republic and is blamed for every bad thing that happens in her village. But her real bad luck is that cursed children always die on the eve of the next Eventide, which happens to be the day after Morrigan’s eleventh birthday.

Morrigan just wants to be remembered, but when the next Eventide is announced, it’s obvious her family is already preparing to move on and forget about her. However, before death can catch her, Morrigan is whisked away to Nevermoor, the free state, by the enigmatic Jupiter North, who selects Morrigan to be his first ever candidate for the Wundrous Society. But in order to be admitted to the Society, Morrigan must complete her trials and be selected by the judges.

What made this book fantastic was that it had so many layers. It’s been a long time since I read a book like this and it made me realize how much I miss clever fantasy stories with a strong mystery element. This has obvious parallels to Harry Potter with the 11 year old being whisked away to another world, the magical elements, her wise mentor figure, the foreboding unnamed villain, and the humourous moments woven throughout the story. But it’s the larger mystery of this story and the complex world building that made this such a good book and worthy of being compared to Harry Potter.

This was a 450 page book and I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of this world. It was a brilliant debut with just the right balance of world-building, character development, and whimsy. Townsend doesn’t give up all her secrets and I know there’s so many more surprises and quirks to be developed in this series. I don’t really know where the author plans to take the plot, but I get the feeling that it will have a lot more depth than what we’ve been introduced to in the first book.

I really wouldn’t change anything about this book. I have so many questions, yet I was still satisfied by the ending. I can’t wait to find out more about the Wundrous Society and what mischief Morrigan and Hawthorne will get up to in the next book. There were so many intriguing characters in this book and I can’t wait to learn more about Jupiter, Jack, Fen, Cadence, Noelle, and of course, the Wundersmith.

Book 2 can’t come soon enough! Everyone should read this!