I guess I'm in the minority for thinking the ending of book one was perfect and realistic and bittersweet, all of which is undone in this very slow-moI guess I'm in the minority for thinking the ending of book one was perfect and realistic and bittersweet, all of which is undone in this very slow-moving 500 page trainwreck of a sequel....more
Manages to overcome an abundance of cringey dialogue and an unnecessary amount of on-the-nose pop culture references to become a satisfying - if slighManages to overcome an abundance of cringey dialogue and an unnecessary amount of on-the-nose pop culture references to become a satisfying - if slight - gay rom com....more
Funny, endearing, and ultimately kinda boring. And so I don't get messages on this review nearly half a decade after I write it (seriously are you peoFunny, endearing, and ultimately kinda boring. And so I don't get messages on this review nearly half a decade after I write it (seriously are you people still commenting on my review of The Red Pyramid? Stop giving it that much thought, Rick Riordan sure as hell didn't), that is all I am going to say about it.
Worth reading, though, for the usual biting Green quotes: "I hated sports. I hated sports, and I hated people who played them, and I hated people who watched them, and I hated people who didn't hate people who watched or played them." ...more
It's about 11 A.M. where I am now, writing this. Approximately eight hours ago I was awake, voraciously devouring the last half (about 75-ish pages) oIt's about 11 A.M. where I am now, writing this. Approximately eight hours ago I was awake, voraciously devouring the last half (about 75-ish pages) of this book - my first John Green - in one sitting. There's not a lot I can say about those last few chapters without giving away the abundant literary flourishes that John Green pulls out of his immense bag of tricks. But I can say this, and at this point I'm just another statistic falling in line, but here it is: I cried.
In the book Hazel constantly describes being on the phone with Augustus as like being in a third non-terrestrial space. Like the center of the venn diagram, somewhere only they can coexist in. It sounds like utter bullshit, right? That's John Green's greatest slight of hand here: he creates situations and dialogue that in other hands would come off as saccharine and sappy, but absolutely do not. Hazel and Augustus felt actually, honestly REAL. These are two kids that totally make sense together, you never for one moment wonder why one likes the other. And another of Mr. Green's great feats: he totally distracts you with brilliant bon mots and stupidly genius dialogue while you read, almost forgetting what the story is about.
Some of my favorites: "The world went on, as it does, without my full participation, and I only woke up from the reverie when someone said my name."
"It occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again."
"It was the kind of weather that reminds you after a long winter that while the world wasn't built for humans, we were built for the world."
This is a sixteen-year-old that easily could have come off as snotty and pretentious, and maybe some of those lines do, out of context, but Hazel is anything but. She's warm and selfless and self-aware and willing to read the novelization of a video game without question or repulsion. I guess the literary term is "layers." If it is, she has 'em. She has a bit of a monologue towards the novel's end that best displays all of this (edited for spoilers): "Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I'm likely to get. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn't trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful."
How fucking great is that?
To get back to the story: the ending, and last few chapters, are gut-wrenching. Soul crushing. Universe-ending. And totally, completely, 110% earned. Never, at any point, do you feel played or like someone is poking you in the shoulder and whispering, "Hey... this is where you cry... go on... omg yeah that line was sooo sad, right? Here's a tissue." It's the truth, Green plays his story out to the logical conclusion, and while it may be a tad predictable, it is one of the best fictional endings I've ever read.
Now, the nitpicking. I love Hazel's narration, but it occasionally dips into colloquial terminology that feels really weird against her and Augustus' normal and hilariously smart banter. Uses of words like "Doucheface", "Assclown", and "Douche" in general feel so strange juxtaposed next to gems like, "I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once." I just don't buy that the same girl that has the mental fortitude to worry about the ghettoization of scrambled eggs would ever use the word "Doucheface." But, hey, maybe that's just me.
It's not that I don't think she'd never curse, I totally could see her dropping F-bombs in frustration, so maybe it's just the YA of it all that forced Green to be more creative with the curses. But even something like "Dick", to me, would have been more believable. Especially in the conversation that "Doucheface" is used, which I won't spoil, but is the one moment in the book that the emotional gut-punch of is utterly robbed the second that word drops out of Hazel's mouth.
There are also way too many moments when Hazel comments on Augustus' features. "His strong arms pulling me into his muscular chest", "Sinewy muscles", "Powerful chest", etc. There's one excuse I'd allow for this, but it pertains to a spoiler. So I can't talk about it. I get it. She's a sixteen year old girl. I get it. And she falls in love with him for more than these attributes... I've just read way too many shitty YA books that are obsessed with stuff like this. And this book is NOT one of those, so when word choices like that crept in, it felt... jarring. Like, really, does both his arms AND chest need adjectives in the same sentence? The answer is no.
But all that crap doesn't matter. This is a good book. A great book, actually. It isn't perfect, but it's easy to overlook its imperfections because of its awesome and endearing totality. Just another Cancer Perk, I guess....more
Let's start with a question: why are people eating this book up like it's anything on par with quality YA titles like Hunger Games? Or any book so humLet's start with a question: why are people eating this book up like it's anything on par with quality YA titles like Hunger Games? Or any book so humbly mentioned on the dust jacket like The Passage or Ender's Game? Here's my honest answer: I don't know. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but when I see a sheet carved out of an Entertainment Weekly and covered in praise such as "a modern sci-fi masterpiece" and "nothing short of amazing" I have to start wondering who's playing a practical joke on me. Because this is just plain bad.
So the gist of the plot is that Earth has been invaded by aliens who do terrible things in "waves." They knock out the power, they flood the coasts, they decimate us with plagues, they trick us with alien/human hybrids, and the major mystery of the book is what the eponymous "Fifth Wave" will be. It's the most interesting part of the entire thing but it also shares the burden in being the only original part of the book. In a heap of sci-fi stereotypes - from aliens that look like us to a floating mothership and a resistance of scraggy-but-hopeful humans - the hope that an unexpected Fifth Wave could come along and burst these predictable plot threads is almost enough to pull you through the book. Almost.
But here's the problem with it: the protagonist sucks. Cassie is a so-called "hardcore" chick who shoots and kills more innocent people in this book than aliens and bitches and whines and pities herself in what sees more page real-estate than actual, meaningful character development or plot. Her basic character traits never make sense. The first half of the book we see her taking care of herself (while still reminiscing about hot guys from before the invasion) but at least she has the potential to be endearing because we know in the end she is alone and responsible for her own further existence.
Then halfway through the book she completely loses all common sense when a hot guy with a six pack and "arms of steel" whisks her away to a cabin in the woods to broodily stare at her and sponge bathe her. Seriously. That happens. And as a reader we see the twist coming upon the first mention of the size of his chest, but Cassie stays in an annoyingly complacent state of ignorance for nearly 100 pages. Why should I like this girl who probably wouldn't have given Evan two glances if he had been some average-looking guy with skinny arms and bad skin? Why should I care if she lives or dies? Not to mention the fact that when she's being snarky for about the first third of the book, it's to herself and it comes off as oddly self-serving and arrogant. Like she's preparing a comedy show before a live audience. I get that she's a teenage girl but in the light of half of the species dying all of this "witty" chatter comes off as annoyingly glib.
There are parts that shine through the idiocy, fortunately, and some writing that isn't fully out-and-out bad. Like when Cassie mentions how quiet it is and how "Sometimes in my tent, late at night, I think I can hear the stars scraping against the sky. That's how quiet it is." That's quite nice, a real human moment from a character who, for the most part, feels like they're pretending to be human.
But then you get lines like this, spoken from one of the few other points-of-view characters: "Before the alien Armageddon happened, I was known for my smile. Not bragging too much but I had to be careful never to smile while I drove: it had the capacity to blind oncoming traffic." Hearing a character explain to another character what makes them likable is the epitome of lazy-ass character development. Show me him being charming, give me a scene of him being snarky in the face of alien drama, make me want to like him. Don't just tell me why I should and assume I will. It's like the literary version of pulling my arm up against my back and not letting go until I cry uncle and promise to be as weak-in-the-knees towards him as the other idiotic protagonist is.
There's just not much to recommend here. Yancy seems unable to handle the point-of-view of a teenage girl (and boy, for that matter) and saying the love moments in this book fall flat would be an understatement. It's a sci-fi book where all of the sci-fi elements are built as a road-map to get the protagonists in what are supposed to be emotional moments of discovery but end up being dull as dirt, exposing in the process how little thought out the sci-fi elements are to begin with.
Listen, this book is not bad. It has a brilliant storytelling device, a believably emotional main character (Clay, not Hannah) and tackles suicide heaListen, this book is not bad. It has a brilliant storytelling device, a believably emotional main character (Clay, not Hannah) and tackles suicide head-on. But I could not get over how much I was annoyed at the whole fact the plot existed was one selfish, idiotic girl. Listen, I'm not trying to lash out at suicide-cases, but Hannah chooses to react to the events that lead up to her death a certain way. Clay does ground these events by thinking the way I do, being that she could have done something else, but the fact was that she didn't. She decided to end her life because of a few bad pranks and one particularly bad event. I just couldn't see anything from her viewpoint as being logical, and since that most of the characterizations and descriptions come from her, it all has a bad taste of being biased and one-sided most of the time.
Also, the novelty of the book loses steam pretty early on, and never recovers from it. I can see why people like this sort of thing, but it obviously wasn't written for someone like me....more
We've all had our fill of dystopia-infused YA literature in the past couple of years. From the trilogy that seemed to have sparked its massive popularWe've all had our fill of dystopia-infused YA literature in the past couple of years. From the trilogy that seemed to have sparked its massive popularity much like the books that sparked the vampire craze, it's been hard to distinguish the rest of the pack from poor imitators. Dark Life, the first novel by college professor Kat Falls, is no imitator: here is a true, original, fun and fascinating dystopic tale fueled with imagination, relatable characters and a beautifully realized undersea setting.
Falls nails that sense of location from the first paragraph, where we see Ty, born and raised subsea at his family's homestead, navigating the fallen ruins of New York City that fell into the ocean during "the Rising." No detail is given to this apocalyptic event, but that plays to the book's favor. This is very much a book about characters in a strange setting, which just happens to be a dystopic future; Falls never bangs over your head the rules of the government or makes them seem evil in any way. Their actions over the course of the book bring that to light all by its self; it's a beautiful way to ingratiate a reader into a new world.
But the setting had me sold from the get-go. Essentially a wild-west/frontier tale with a future/sci-fi twist superimposed over it, Falls nails everything that one would expect of living on the ocean floor in such a weirdly descriptive way I wonder how she came up with some of it. The Dark Life (people living on the ocean's floor) fled Topside's crowded living space, much like the brave pioneers who fled west.
Between the cool tech (subsea architecture, bubble fences, manta boards, liquigen) and the imaginative ways they were introduced and the silky-smooth writing, the book is ferociously readable. The only thing I would knock it for is its brevity: not even 300 pages. It really felt like half a book, despite a satisfying resolution to most of the hanging plot threads.
The sheer originality on display here warrants reading alone. I can NOT WAIT for Rip Tide....more
A really cool premise, about a world where relics of a past super-intelligent race still emit power and are wanted by bad guys and protected by the goA really cool premise, about a world where relics of a past super-intelligent race still emit power and are wanted by bad guys and protected by the good, gets kneecapped almost immediately. Mostly due to an increasingly juvenile writing style (Dear Ms. Fischer, when it comes to exclamation points, less is more) and an under-development of characters.
Not even the overall story entices me enough to keep on, which sucks, because it was the one series in existence that I would not have to wait years to finish, being that it's being super-rushed to bookstores this summer....more
It's been five years since this series started. I read the first book way back in my first semester of college, weaving it between forced-to-read bookIt's been five years since this series started. I read the first book way back in my first semester of college, weaving it between forced-to-read books about the Dust Bowl and Shakespeare. I loved it, and I still think it's one of the best-paced and plotted YA books out there. And here we are at the end of the series already. Some questions answered and some others apparently completely forgotten.
Light, the puzzlingly titled final book of the GONE series, continues Fear's tradition of being a just sorta-okay book with a straightforward plot, predictable outcomes, and excess mayhem that borders on torture-porn at this point. But it's still fun, in some really confusing way. At this point in the series, with five books of character development and build-up, you know who these people are. You know their beats and emotions and thought-processes and you root for them easily. But there's no surprises left in them. Sam is brave. Astrid is smart. Dekka is brash. Breeze is self-fullfilled but courageous. The only one of these that I'd say does show a spark of change is Astrid, and that's only in one disgustingly awesome scene in the final pages of the book.
And it's the same for the overall plot. What you think will happen happens. It is the final book in the series and it knows that. It goes about its business hitting all the required points - the characters are discouraged and separated in the beginning, a tragic occurrence herds them together in the middle, the villain is beaten but not destroyed and comes back for final vengeance in the end. It's all here. It's still well-written and impressive that Grant kept it all straight and managed to end it at ALL, so that's something. But there's no final twist, no big AH-HA moment that brings back something from earlier books and forces you to think of it all differently. There's a final conversation between two characters that ends the book and teases you with a big final revelation or something unknown, but nope - nothing. Just a rehash of an info-dump that the reader already knew about but that one character didn't. And then it just ends.
For that matter I think too much time is spent on the aftermath of the FAYZ and not enough on that overused word "endgame." The final confrontation with this all-knowing and all-evil alien monster lasts about five sentences and then we see Sam and friends marvel at stuff on the outside for fifty-something pages. Water bottles! Bed sheets! MCDONALDS! This is all well and fine but better-fitted to a ten-or-so page epilogue, not nearly 1/4 of the book.
Not to shift blame too much on these final chapters, because that before-mentioned final confrontation is definitely part of the problem. I'm not asking for an epic 100 page final showdown, but there's no real sense of build-up to that kill shot. No we-have-to-weaken-her-first or any such cliche; once they get to the thing they've been talking about the entire book not sure if it'd work, it works immediately. I usually like going against the grain of cliches, but it's sorta to the detriment of the story here. This thing is wam-bam-thankya-mam and done. And the actual act used in the moment, the myriad byzantine rules and laws that are never explained, and the powers on display that we've never seen before pulled out at the last second to finally put an end to the bad guy? It feels... cheap... and the ultimate disgrace: lazy. Also, and in the mix of mutated concrete children and a little girl infected with a megalomaniacal alien parasite with a god complex, kinda silly.
These "Aftermath" chapters go on too long, and wind up being utterly pointless. They build up that all the kids (well, some, anyway) will have to be tried, forced to pay for their crimes, fess up to their actions in the FAYZ. And it's all solved in a single line with ten pages left of the book. No more prison, no more lawyers, no need to face their past. It's a bullshit, easy solution and is such a cheap way out for the end of the series. Not to mention it reminded me of the "Outside" chapters of Fear that felt ultimately pointless, too. I would have rathered a finale that ended with the dome lifting and the characters walking to uncertain fates, no bow-ties on presents of resolutions. But that's just me.
The focus here is on action and violence and shocking the reader, and less on mystery and intrigue and atmosphere. The gross violence (something I hate saying I don't like, because I'm really never bothered by it in any medium) is explained and has a valid plot point here, but there's just SO MUCH of it that by the end you really don't give a flying fuck that the upteenth child has been slaughtered. The quiet moments hit harder, like when Sam thinks on how kids died in car seats in the early days - babies left alone to starve or toddlers dead from car crashes. A kid getting a yacht dropped on him running through the desert? Not so much.
I guess that's it. There are other picks I could nit, like my confusion over the early mysteries of the series (the monster kids saw when they poofed and others) and why Gaia didn't just stay invisible and slaughter everyone with a rusty knife and be done with it, but I guess I'll leave it at that. My last review of a GONE book. It was fun, it was exciting, and then it kinda wasn't anymore. These aren't contemporary masterpieces by any means, but I still really like this series and would recommend it to those looking for a solid and generally exciting sci-fi read. Because you can call this series many things, but one thing it ain't is boring....more
Goodreads defines a 2/5 rating as "It was okay." And that is the perfect sentence to use in describing the fifth chapter in the GONE series.
It was... Goodreads defines a 2/5 rating as "It was okay." And that is the perfect sentence to use in describing the fifth chapter in the GONE series.
It was... okay.
Trying to figure out why I didn't undyingly love it like the other books is hard. Maybe because of the promise of the set up and lack of payoff. Diana's baby, the impending darkness, the inevitable battle with Drake. The way I thought each of these things would end ended exactly that way. It felt predictable and anti-climactic and so disappointing being the penultimate book in the series. The stakes feel low and unimportant going into the final book.
And, finally, what I feared would happen as this series progressed is finally happening. A lack of answers is gnawing away at my ability to give any fucks. I read an interview with Grant where he said "I give a lot of the answers up in FEAR." I can't tell you a single thing I learned that I didn't already know from previous books. Petey caused the anomaly. Diana's baby will be evil. The adults are okay outside the dome. And maybe it's not so much a lack of answers but a lack of compounding on the answers we already know. HOW did Petey do this? WHY were the kids developing powers before the FAYZ? What the hell kind of rip in the fabric in time and space resulted in Petey's omniscient and ethereal magical god powers after he died? AND WHAT DOES ANY OF THIS HAVE TO DO WITH THE DOME GROWING DARK?
Even patterns from previous books are growing evident: Drake will get away in the end after a mild scuffle, random unimportant children will die horribly but have no emotional impact, someone will be bitching about SOMETHING (this time it's lack of darkness).
And those "Outside" chapters? In the beginning they were cool and fun and different and exciting. But there is something huge that is supposed to happen that just kinda never does and it makes all of these tangents to the outside world feel pointless. Okay Sam's mom misses him. Okay she's sleeping with some military dude. These people have absolutely NO idea what is going on with the dome, either. So what does any of it matter?
I don't know what's gonna happen in LIGHT, but I hope something does. FEAR felt like a blind person meandering aimlessly through the desert in pitch black darkness. OH, wait! That is what most of the characters do for 75% of this book....more
Less fun, scary and entertaining than Lockdown, and being about 50 pages shorter than that book (which was already under 300), I'm getting tired of thLess fun, scary and entertaining than Lockdown, and being about 50 pages shorter than that book (which was already under 300), I'm getting tired of the mini-cliffhangers. And of Alex's snide trying-so-hard-to-be-funny-in-the-face-of-terror narration.
Oh, and really? 3/4 of this thing takes place in a hole. I'll give the author credit for trying, and I know it services the world of Furnace, but C'MON! That was NEVER going to be exciting. Alex's "oh no I'm going crazy, oh no I'm seeing ghosts, oh no I think I ate poop" monologues got real boring real quick.
I'll give Death Sentence a try when it comes out in August on these shores, but if I find the same frustrating one step forward, but two steps back plot, boring characters and failed escape attempts; ta-ta Furnace, forever.
Alex Sawyer gets committed to Furnace Penitentiary for murdering his friend. But he didn't do it, some huge, hulking bastard with crazy eyes did it, tAlex Sawyer gets committed to Furnace Penitentiary for murdering his friend. But he didn't do it, some huge, hulking bastard with crazy eyes did it, then framed him. And ever since those kids went crazy and mass-murdered thousands, the government has a zero-tolerance policy on kid violence. (The actual year isn't told, but Alex makes a reference to the "seventh Indiana Jones movie", so it's decades at the least.)
And when Alex gets to Furnace, and discovers these giants are the guards of the place, and that most people have the same story as him, he begins to wonder if the Prison is creating crimes to fill its walls.
I loved the conspiracy edge presented here, and the pretty nerve-wracking prison break tale it becomes towards the end. Just not much happened for a while, only really kicking into gear when the plan to escape comes into fruition. But it's filled with enough creepy images (gas masked "wheezers" who come to mark your cell at night and drag you, kicking and screaming to an unknown fate) to push along at a nice pace.
Brutal, fun and pretty entertaining. The (literal) cliffhanger of an ending will definitely have me crawling back into the evil hellhole that is Furnace....more
I borrowed this one from my best friend about two years ago now, and finally got to it this week. It may be that sense of to-little-too-late, but therI borrowed this one from my best friend about two years ago now, and finally got to it this week. It may be that sense of to-little-too-late, but there was a pervading uncomfortable sense of disappointment as I read this techno-geek rebellion story.
The characters are good.. in general, but that's not where my main problem laid. It's the believability. The story is so ingrained in a real-world-gone-awry plot, that you have to be able to believe all that's going on to truly become ingratiated with the characters. I didn't. Okay, terrorists sure can bomb San Fran. But the book felt SO heavy-handed and one sided (against the Department of Homeland Security) that I became sort of annoyed by it. When Marcus would blow up for his dad stating it was his civic responsibility to be questioned 5 times a day so the cops could eventually find terrorists, I slowly lost care for his character. It's like I can get why he feels so inflamed by the book's opening events to be mad, but they were never really enough in my book to declare war on the government.
Honestly, I think I was just expecting more of a Spy Kids type of vibe; more ethereal and fantastic than attempts at uber-believability that fall flat. These kids don't fight, and reviewers who use the phrase "action-packed" need to have a head examination. It just stumbles from one overlong monologue of techno-babble to the next, with some well-written dialogue and plot devices thrown in.
I didn't hate it, I didn't love it. If you're in to the world of technology and hacker subculture, you will adore it. I am one of those things, and I just could not suspend my disbelief enough to actually believe the events of the story and the resolution of the plot....more
I'm surprised at how good this was. It looks kiddie, and is kinda kiddie, but the story is well thought out and the bad guys are enjoyably evil, andI'm surprised at how good this was. It looks kiddie, and is kinda kiddie, but the story is well thought out and the bad guys are enjoyably evil, and i just kinda loved it. Basically its the story of this kid, Garth, that finds himself in the afterlife. One problem, he's still alive. In this afterlife, there are seven kingdoms at the hub of which, Ghostopolis sits, all led by the evil Vaugner.
Whats really cool about it is the magic system. Basically humans in the ghost world don't abide by afterlife physics, so they can walk through walls, fly, shoot plasma beams from their hands, anything they imagine. Its a constantly fun and surprising aspect of the book. Especially in the final battle, where Garth and Vaugner literally morph their bodies into the buildings of Ghostopolis and battle Transformers-like.
Someone needs to show Tim Burton this book, like now. From the gothic landscapes, to the zombified townsfolk and the confused and terminally ill main character, this entire book is a future Hot Topic shirt waiting to happen. Him and Henry Selick (the guy that did The Nightmare Before Christmas and the amazing Coraline ) could work wonders with this story. I just think it really lends itself worthy to a big screen adaptation. That awesome....more
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