Review: Prodigy by Marie Lu

age: ya
genre: dystopia
rating: 4/8 tentacles

This novel is the second in a trilogy.  Spoilers for Legend below.


Day and June, after preventing Day's execution, travel to Vegas seeking the Patriots' help. However, the Patriots don't give away anything for free. If Day and June want their assistance, they'll have to play a role in the assassination of the new Elector. When June meets the new leader, she discovers that he may not be the tyrant his father was, and she begins to doubt the necessity of the rebels' plot. As Day and June move forward with the assassination, both become less and less sure of who they can trust, even beginning to doubt each other.

This trust dilemma creates a deliciously ambiguous conflict. With Razor, Patriot leader, on one side, and the new Elector, Anden, on the other, Day and June are divided between destroying the government in a full revolution, or giving the new Elector a chance to steer the existing government in a more positive direction. Which way is the best way? From a reader's perspective, both of these options make sense, and it's easy to empathize with the confusion that Day and June feel, as well as their fear of being manipulated. This representation of the rebels and the ruling authority is refreshingly human, although some of the grey sharpens into black and white as new information is revealed later on.

Although the premise of the plot is intriguing and creates the potential for complexity, its execution leaves much to be desired. In my review of Legend I mentioned the author's tendency to tell rather than show. This continues in Prodigy. The narrative consists of superficial inner monologues that repeat themselves and are overrun with rhetorical questions. Here is the first example I found, flipping through the book:

If Razor thinks June is safest under Thomas's watch, then so be it. But what are they going to do with June once they've got her? What if something goes wrong, and Congress or the courts do something that Razor didn't plan for? How can he be so sure that everything will go smoothly?

There are many more instances of this, and it isn't enjoyable to read. We're told what questions we should be asking instead of being lead to consider these possibilities on our own. There are better ways of creating tension in fiction, like through sensory detail or dialogue or descriptions of the behaviors of the characters. Spelling it out like this is boring for me (and other readers, I imagine) and lazy on the part of the writer.

My other problem with Prodigy (and Legend) is June. Everyone finds her beautiful, she wins every battle she fights, she has flawless logic (she conveniently figures everything out before everyone else), her brain is basically a clock (she can tell you exactly how many minutes and seconds have passed between events), she is THE BEST student ever to attend her military college. She's not a person, she's a fantasy, and I find her incredibly flat and boring. What's the point of making her so robotic-ly perfect? If I wasn't so fond of Day, I don't think I could've made it through these two books and if June was the sole protagonist, I'd have given up long ago.

These problems existed in Legend but seem to be amplified here, like the author is giving in to her weaknesses instead of improving on them. I do love the story. I'm interested in the conflict between the Republic and the Colonies. I love Day's relationship with the people of the Republic and the dramatic irony that comes out of his execution (we know he's alive, the people don't). As I said before, I like the way that Lu deals with trust. And I will read Champion as soon as it's released, but I'm crossing my fingers hoping that Lu will learn and grow as a writer because I'm not satisfied with the level of skill exhibited here.

Review: Ghost Knight by Cornelia Funke

genre: fantasy
age: children's
rating: 4/8 tentacles

Ghost Knight is a fun story filled with murderous ghosts, medieval history, and school children sneaking around ancient cathedrals and dark crumbling cemeteries in the dead of night (no pun intended). After behaving badly towards his mother's new boyfriend, Jon Whitcroft is sent off to boarding school, where four ominous ghostly figures call him by his mother's maiden name and threaten his life. His endeavors to escape them lead to a friendship with beautiful Ella, daughter of a local ghost tour guide, and together they work to solve the mystery of the ghosts' determination to hunt Jon.

Some of Cornelia Funke's other works (the Inkheart series, The Thief Lord, and Reckless) have become favorites of mine, but Ghost Knight just didn't measure up. I'm not sure if Funke was targeting a younger age group, but it lacked the complexity of her other works and failed to conjure up a vivid illusion. The story seemed a little hazy, which made it difficult for me to feel as if I was experiencing its unfolding events along with the characters. For example, Jon attends an old cathedral boarding school, but we hardly see any of this part of his life. We watch him sneaking out of his bedroom window at night and we witness brief, ultimately meaningless conversations between Jon and his roommates, but get nothing of life at a boarding school. I think the story needed this scenic backdrop, this context, to anchor it.  I suppose there is much more telling than showing.

Funke seems to leap from event to ghostly event with little build up between. Many opportunities to create suspense weren't taken advantage of. We're just told, "Here's this guy and this is what happened to him." There's very little mystery, nothing to keep us wondering. No drama, no build-up, no suspense. We are simply pelted with ghosts.

That's the thing I didn't like about this book. It's a light and entertaining read, but it led me to believe I was getting a ghost story, and I didn't. Ghost Knight was rushed. It was shallow. I never felt like I got to know anyone besides Jon and Funke failed to cultivate that eerie mood where fear creeps around you like a mist and it always seems that someone (or something) is just out of sight, watching and waiting. My favorite thing about ghost stories is the mystery, and Ghost Knight provided very little of this.

Review: City of Lost Souls by Cassandra Clare

genre: paranormal
age: YA
rating: 4/8 tentacles

*OH, RIGHT.  THIS IS THE FIFTH BOOK IN A SERIES. THERE MAY OR MAY NOT BE SPOILERS FOR PREVIOUS BOOKS.  PROBABLY NOT BUT YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.*

I have mixed feelings about City of Lost Souls, mainly because it didn't meet the expectations built up by the previous four books in The Mortal Instruments series. This fifth installment reads more like fan-fiction than professional writing. Clare spends way too much time on cliched descriptions of make-out sessions and telling us what her characters are wearing. Really, there is no need to provide detailed descriptions of a character's ensemble every single time he or she enters a scene. Maybe a few times is okay, if the outfit is relevant or contributes to characterization, but lines like this are too much:

"As she came in, Alec looked up and saw her, and sprang to his feet, hurrying barefoot across the room--he was wearing black sweatpants and a white t-shirt with a torn collar--to put his arms around her."

I don't think the color of Alec's sweatpants is important enough to warrant interrupting the action to tell us. Shoving that in there ruins the sentence.

It's one example of the many ways that this novel lacks focus. I often found myself thinking, "What, this again? Get to the good part!" Mostly during the scenes between Maia and Jordan. I felt like there was an inordinate amount of time spent on the trivial exploits of secondary characters. Maia and Jordan's scenes were all pretty much gooey teen romance, which I can't stomach, especially when they're written without any originality. My public library put a sticker on the book's spine with a spooky ghost and the word "Horror." A more accurate sticker might have shown the torso of a man whose muscles rippled under his tightly fitted shirt. There's a couple of those floating around CLS.

The plot--Clary and friends' attempts to find Jace and Sebastian and then stop Sebastian's nefarious scheme--often got bogged down with the aforementioned makeout sessions and fashion commentary, but when it wasn't, when we were right in the thick of things--the book was pretty good. There was a lot of interesting development with Sebastian's character and his relationship with Clary. My favorite scenes were with Sebastian. He's a fantastic--I don't want to say villain, because Clare makes things nice and grey for us. A very dark grey, but grey nonetheless.

To sum up: entertaining plot, surprisingly amateurish writing. Could have used some more editing to really reach its potential, I think.

I'm being a little generous with my tentacles.  According to my chart, poor quality of writing, even with a decent story, deserves a 3 out of 8 but because I'm a fan of the series and it did get a little better towards the end, I'll throw in one more, out of the goodness of my heart.

Review: Delirium by Lauren Oliver

genre: romance in dystopian world (emphasis on romance)
age: YA
rating: 5/8 tentacles

In the future, scientists have recognized love, or “amor deliria nervosa,” as a mental illness… and they have found a cure. All eighteen-year-olds undergo a procedure that promises to relieve them of the threat of love’s horrifying symptoms: obsessive attachment to another person, sweating palms and fluttering hearts, and the irrational behavior often triggered by this madness. Lena Holoway’s eighteenth birthday approaches and she can’t wait to have the procedure, to be safe from the strange behaviors exhibited by her own mother before she eventually succumbed to madness and then death. Lena is desperate to escape the risk of this horrible disease—whose effects she has witnessed firsthand—and is counting down the days until the moment she will be examined, cured, and then assigned a partner in what will be a loveless marriage of convenience.

Delirium’s premise is far-fetched, but intriguing and I was curious to see where Lauren Oliver would go with it. Generally, the story takes the most obvious route: girl thinks love is disease, girl wants cure for disease, girl meets boy, girl likes boy, girl’s heart stops (Is she dead? No, in love!), girl realizes love is good! But underneath this extremely predictable plot line, there is a government that advocates a medical cure for love (why?), that fights to keep “un-cured” rebels at bay, and that harbors great secrets, and a conclusion that is not quite as predictable as the course the novel takes to reach it.

Delirium struck me as having a similar premise as Matched because both plots rely heavily on a dystopian system where individuals are evaluated and assigned spouses. Oliver’s take on this idea is much more thoughtful and better written than Condie’s effort, with its fluid prose and strong, vivid descriptions. For example:

It’s only slightly better than the other word that followed me for years after my mom’s death, a snakelike hiss, undulating, leaving its trail of poison: Suicide. A sideways word, a word that people whisper and mutter and cough: a word that must be squeezed out behind cupped palms of murmured behind closed doors. It was only in my dreams that I heard the word shouted, screamed.

These moments of sharply poetic prose provide useful and striking descriptions of Lena’s thoughts and world. Key word: useful. (I’m looking at you, Condie and Steifvater.)

Despite the lovely writing, I had some issues with melodrama, continuity, and annoying boys. Delirium definitely contains some of that melodramatic fluttering heart garbage that is really becoming one of my biggest pet peeves. This is partly because I do not like romance novels. I enjoy romance as a subplot, but the main plot has to be something more creative, more original, more interesting (no, I don’t find two people sighing and drooling over each other at all interesting). And although Delirium is set against a dystopian backdrop, it is, at its palpitating heart, a romance novel. I generally steer clear of romance novels, but I am occasionally fooled into mistaking one for, oh, I don’t know, a dystopia. Once I get sucked into reading them, the obsession with abnormal heart activity and tingling body parts makes me fake gag and roll my eyes. This close attention to the bodily indications of attraction reminds me of a hypochondriac tracking his symptoms (Which is kind of funny when you remember the topic of this book. Maybe romance novels are a disease). In short, I do not find these types of descriptions romantic at all. So maybe it isn’t that I dislike romance, but that its common portrayal in literature fails to appeal to my particular romantic sensibilities. Especially the overly angstified romance rampant in YA. Yuck.

Contributing to my dislike of the romance is the rather ordinary, uninteresting love interest, golden-eyed Alex. I didn’t like him or his weird habit of laughing with his head tipped back so that Lena can see the roof of his mouth. What is he, an animated super-villain?

Something about Delirium, despite its attempts to conquer the deep and complicated topic of love, feels superficial and contrived. Lena is presented to us as an intelligent person who is somehow more discerning than her peers, somehow, deeper. She has a “poetic” soul (supposedly). But these qualities that allow her to transcend the oppressive norm are presented to us in very superficial ways. Her favorite color, for instance, is gray, as opposed to the acceptable blue… adopted by mindless drones everywhere? Maybe this is meant to be symbolic of the phrase “shades of gray” and how they are no longer accepted in Lena’s society, but when I read this part, I rolled my eyes.  Reciting poetry and enjoying the color gray doesn’t tell me that a character has more emotional depth than her peers. It tells me that the author is trying really hard to make her seem like she does.

I do like the descriptions of Lena’s struggle to put on an act for the world and I think a lot of people will be able to relate to the pressure she felt to stamp down her personality in favor of a socially approved persona.

Sometimes I feel there are two me’s, one coasting directly on top of the other. The superficial me, who nods when she’s supposed to nod and says what she’s supposed to say, and some other, deeper part, the part that worries and dreams and says “Gray.” Most of the time they move along in sync and I hardly notice the split, but sometimes it feels as though I’m two whole different people and I could rip apart at any second.

This book certainly has its pros and cons, but overall I’m left with a kind of “eh” feeling.

I did enjoy Oliver’s writing, and I kind of want to know how other aspects of the story pan out… So although this did not make it into my favorites, I will be reading the sequel. Probably.

Review: Across the Universe by Beth Revis

genre: sci-fi, dystopia, Giver-copycat
age: YA
recommend to: people who like to read the same dystopian setup over and over
rating: 4/8 tentacles



It took me a really long time to pick this book up because the cover and title led me to believe it was somehow connected to Julie Taymor’s Beatles musical, so I avoided it. Love the movie, didn’t feel like reading about it. Finally, I realized Across the Universe was a Sci-Fi novel set on a spaceship. I’m not sure the Beatles reference does Revis any favors. It’s very literal and also mildly misleading.

If I had to pick one word to describe Across the Universe, I would choose “slow.” The action lagged often (on page 35 the plot stalls for pages of exposition: boring!) and the characters were a bit slow in the head. I figured out what was going on hundreds of pages before they even had an inkling. Perhaps this book is another sufferer of Series Syndrome, in which authors put the brakes on their plots and/or write incomplete stories in order to leave material for their unnecessary sequels. Apart from that, this book presents an interesting sci-fi scenario.

Across the Universe is divided between the perspectives of Amy, who has been frozen and loaded onto a spaceship with her parents for a 300 year journey, and Elder, who is being trained by the crotchety and distrusting current leader—Eldest—to be leader of the ship’s next generation. Red-headed Amy in space? All I could think of was Amy Pond.

There’s quite a bit of suspense on Elder’s side of things as he begins to realize that Eldest has been lying to him. The downside is, a lot of the answers to his questions are so obvious that instead of becoming eagerly invested in Elder’s search for the truth, I became overwhelmed by a desire to repeatedly slam his head into the spaceship walls and shout, “ARE YOU BLIND? HOW DO YOU NOT SEE WHAT’S GOING ON?” There was one exciting twist at the end that I did not see coming.

Amy’s point of view covers some of the time she spent frozen and mostly dead asleep which seems like it would be extremely boring, but the descriptions of her thoughts and fears have a pleasant poetry to them and I enjoyed reading these segments.

The two threads of the story—Amy’s and Elder’s—are completely separate until someone mysteriously unplugs Amy’s icebox and she wakes up. When she did, I was disconcerted by her description of Elder who we find out is much older that he sounds in his own narration. He is a ten year old living in a sixteen year-old’s body. It’s weird.

Ultimately, this book is another YA dystopia following in the now formulaic footsteps of The Giver. It features a community living blissfully unaware of history and its horrors… all except for two individuals who have been selected to lead. Sound familiar yet? Revis’s space community even has a secret method of “releasing” old people. But this is in outer space so it’s different. It’s not terrible, but it’s nothing original or exciting either.


Sequel, A Million Suns, available January 2012.

Review: As Simple As Snow by Gregory Galloway

genre: mystery
age: YA
rating: 4/8 tentacles

Good, but not nearly as good as I’d hoped it would be, and with an extremely dissatisfying conclusion. I heard this was John Green’s inspiration for Paper Towns, which is why I picked it up. IMO, Paper Towns is significantly better.

I started out being really interested in Anna and how her oddness and ravenous curiosity would affect our nameless narrator. I enjoyed her mysteriousness, her codes, her postcards. But after finishing the book, I kind of hate her.

There was a moment in the narrator’s first conversation with Anna that made me angry and although I just brushed it aside at the time, I now see this moment as a glimpse of Anna’s true personality. They meet in the school library. She makes some snooty recommendations to the narrator, finds the couple of books she was looking for, and then stands around while he checks his books out. As they walk toward the door he asks isn’t she going to check hers out too? No. She’ll put them back when she’s done. Entitled little brat.

Maybe this got on my nerves because I work in a library and I know how frustrating it is when books aren’t where they’re supposed to be. Does she think she’s the only one that uses the library? The only reader who matters? Does she think that because she’s read avidly that she’s more intelligent and has more right to the books than other students? Does she think the rules don’t apply to her? It annoyed me even more that her behavior seemed to be presented as this admirable rebelliousness when she’s really just being selfish and inconsiderate.

Warning: the mystery is never solved. Is that cryptic enough to imply that this novel provides a dissatisfying resolution without giving anything away? There isn’t really anything to give away. I think if someone had warned me of this, I might not have read the book.

I’ve always liked mysteries. I like the way they let readers in on a secret. They ask a question, and the plot twists and turns as if it were a pathway through a labyrinth, leading readers along, and then finally we stumble into the center of the maze and there is the answer. I love knowing that however complicated the question is, no matter how tangled and confusing it gets, I will always—by the end of the story—understand.

Unless a writer cops out on me and doesn’t bother to really finish the story. Maybe sometimes ambiguous endings work. Maybe sometimes they are satisfying (I can’t think of any examples) but they do not work in mysteries. Setting up a mystery is almost like signing a contract with the reader, promising, “This seems awfully puzzling now, but just wait until you get to the end! Then everything will make sense and you will be kicking yourself for not figuring it out sooner.” When I don’t get answers at the end of a mystery I feel lied to; I feel tricked.

I read this book quickly, but I was never hooked on it, as I was Paper Towns. It’s just okay. If you are thinking of picking this up, I recommend just getting Paper Towns instead.

Review: The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson

genre: sci-fi, mystery
age: YA
rating: 4/8 tentacles

This novel starts out with great promise. Jenna wakes up from a coma with no memories of her life or family. A strange woman who introduces herself as “mother” claims that Jenna’s memory loss is the result of an accident, but no one bothers to elaborate any further. Jenna begins to notice other things that don’t add up and when she questions them, her mother answers vaguely and quickly changes the subject.

At this point, I am super excited. What is going on!? Are these people her real family? Was she really in a coma? Why has she been hidden away in a neighborhood where no one knows her? Where are the rest of the people that were surely in her life before the “accident”? I love a good mystery, especially when it smacks of conspiracy.

Sadly, the story goes downhill from here. All my crazy conspiracy expectations get dashed to the ground. The real answers are pretty interesting, but the author doesn’t do nearly as much as she could with them. To top it off, the book doesn’t even have a legitimate climax, which significantly contributed to my “that’s it?” feeling. Also, the incessant quoting of Walden annoyed me. If I wanted to read Walden, I would have bought Walden.

I did like Jenna as a character. She comes off as almost robotically unfeeling in the beginning. The people around her have known and loved her for her whole life, and she is just meeting them now. It is understandable for her emotionlessness to stand out in contrast. As the story moves forward, we see Jenna learn and grow, become curious and independent, and develop new emotional connections. I just wish that Pearson delved a little deeper into the novel’s world and took Jenna (and us) much further.