Complaining About Books I Don't Like

The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Warning: This review contains MAJOR spoilers for The Adoration of Jenna Fox. If you haven’t read it, but are planning to, I strongly recommend you skip this review.

The Adoration of Jenna Fox is absolutely the kind of YA science fiction I’ve been bringing up recently: mature, intelligent, and literary, it uses its speculative elements to tell a quiet story of the ramifications of scientific progress rather than choosing to go the formulaic ‘teenagers rebel against their corrupt society’ route. It’s thoughtful and at times thought-provoking, although I never felt as if I was as invested in its story as I could have been.

The premise sounds like it could be from contemporary YA rather than science fiction: Jenna Fox has lost most of her memory following a year-long coma brought on by a terrible car accident…or so she thinks. It quickly becomes obvious that her parents are keeping the truth from her, and that her ‘miraculous’ recovery may have a more frightening explanation than she thought.

So yes, the first third or so of the novel is taken up with Jenna slowly beginning to learn how her parents saved her life. It’s difficult to talk too much about the payoff to all of this, since it would involve major spoilers (which I’m saving for a bit later in the review), but the mystery itself is interspersed with the everyday details of Jenna’s strange new life. She visits her neighbour, reconstructs her partially-lost vocabulary by reading the dictionary, and watches recordings of herself in the hope that it will trigger something in her memory. Pearson conveys all of this in sparse, almost dream-like prose (that description is a cliché, I know, but it’s true in this case), which perfectly conveys Jenna’s disorientation and helplessness. It’s all far more engaging than you might think given the above description.

We’re also shown brief glimpses of the kind of future world we’re dealing with here: medical technology has advanced enormously, yet is strictly controlled by the government to avoid the further creation of drug-resistant super viruses and bacteria. This is something that’s already becoming a major problem in real life, so I had no trouble with suspension of disbelief. As science fiction authors go, Pearson is admirably restrained.

The big reveal itself, however, is handled a bit less gracefully. I’ve already warned for it once, but just to be sure: MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD.

It turns out that only 10% of Jenna’s brain was saved following the crash. The rest of her is a kind of neural network/nanobot construction covered in cloned human skin, something that acts more or less like organic material while actually being completely artificial. A fascinating idea, to be sure, but Jenna’s reactions to all of this struck me as somewhat inauthentic and, to be frank, irritating.

When she first learns about how she was essentially brought back to life, she angsts. When it becomes apparent that her new body has capabilities far beyond what her father predicted (not super-hero abilities, thankfully), she angsts. Upon being told that she could potentially live for 200 years under the right conditions, she once again angsts. I can understand why anybody would be conflicted in that kind of scenario, but the sheer monotony of her limited emotional range gets tiring very fast. Worse is her apparent callousness in the face of the risks her parents took in saving her: in this future, we are told, everybody has a certain number of ‘points’ they can use to replace lost limbs or organs (which is a common necessity due to all of the deadly infections going around), and Jenna’s whole-body resurrection used up all of her allowance and then some. Many people apparently put their careers and even their freedom on the line to help her, yet she shows little indication of caring about them.

All of this sounds as if it’s leading up to some point about bioethics or scientific responsibility, yet that point remains frustratingly vague. One of Jenna’s classmates (who completely steal the limelight during every scene they appear) is a quadruple amputee due to a past infection, yet she still agrees wholeheartedly with the limits placed on medical research. Are we supposed to agree with her? I still have no idea, since Pearson seems content to sketch the vague outlines of several weighty issues without making it clear which side she comes down on – or even what the sides are. The admittedly audacious and fascinating epilogue doesn’t really help with this, since it just muddles everything that came before it.

Ultimately, your enjoyment of the novel’s philosophical ruminations will depend on your own worldview. At one point, Jenna asks her father where in her new body her soul resides. This had me rolling my eyes and wondering when she was going to get her priorities straight (I’d be a bit more worried about that whole ‘You’ll die if you go somewhere too cold’ thing, myself), but others might find it a more compelling question.

The Adoration of Jenna Fox calls to mind authors like Kazuo Ishiguro and Meg Rosoff, who combine speculative elements with a very literary sensibility to create something that almost feels like a new genre. It’s the kind of thing YA desperately needs more of, which means I’m willing to overlook some of its annoyances and recommend it without much hesitation. If you like Ishiguro and Rosoff, you’ll probably like this. (And if you haven’t read anything by either of those people, it might be time for a trip to Amazon.)

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Across the Universe by Beth Revis

We need more YA science fiction. I don’t think that’s a proposition that many people are likely to dispute. As a publishing category, YA is all but drowning in fantasy and (usually paranormal-) romance, but ‘real’ science fiction is remarkably hard to come by.

If you’ve been keeping up with YA, that paragraph will likely make you immediately think of recent releases like Matched or XVI or the upcoming Divergent, but I’d argue that ‘dystopian’ and ‘science fiction’ are not the same thing. A dystopian can incorporate elements of speculative science or technology into its plot; science fiction must incorporate such elements, because the story would unravel without them. The go-to example is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, probably the first ever science fiction novel: without the (admittedly very outdated) ‘science’ at its core, the story would fall apart completely. An easier example is Star Trek: take away the spaceships, and all you’re left with is a very questionably-rendered far future Earth.

So yes, we need more YA science fiction, which is why I was eagerly looking forward to Beth Revis’ Across the Universe. On paper at least, it sounds like exactly the kind of ‘real’ SF I’m talking about: it’s set on a generation ship, it hinges on the idea of placing people in frozen stasis, and its main characters are among the first generation of human to travel to, and attempt to colonise, another star system (in this case Alpha Centauri, our second/third-closest star depending on which half of the binary pair you’re talking about).

Sounds awesome? Yes, indeed.

And in general, Revis delivers the goods. The scene where Amy (one of the two viewpoint characters) is frozen and put in suspended animation manages to be affecting, fascinating and disturbing all at once – we’re talking miles ahead of all of the pedestrian dystopians coming out at the moment. I was all the more impressed when it turns out that Amy’s body is frozen but her mind is not, a horrifying situation that has been the fodder for several noted science fiction short stories and novellas (even Stephen King has used it). It’s entirely possible that we’ll develop some sort of stasis technology eventually, and you can easily imagine that the possibility of this kind of thing happening would go through somebody’s mind just as they’re about to be put under. In short, the whole scene feels real, and is easily the high point of the entire book.

Which is a problem, because it’s also the first chapter.

Revis abruptly switches from Amy’s harrowing ordeal to the introduction of Elder, the second viewpoint character. Elder was born on the generation ship where the story is set, living his entire life within its enormous steel walls. He’s poised to take over leadership from Eldest, who is essentially the ship’s captain. I’ll admit, Elder took a while to endear himself to me. As he got more interesting, however, Amy became less so, to the point where I now have difficulty describing her personality.

Worse, however, is how simple the ship ultimately ends up being as a setting. It is described in its entirety early on, and then gets precious little development from that point. I was also dismayed by how faceless and downright bland the ship’s population is. All right, there are plot reasons for this, but it still means that there are only a handful of people in the entire society who are elevated to the status of proper characters – everybody else is simply a faceless member of a literally homogeneous mass…and I mean literally homogenous. The people aboard the ship are monoethnic, which makes white, red-haired Amy something of an anomaly.

Alas, Revis chooses to get this across to the reader by having a grown man reach for an improvised weapon as soon as he sees her…and then there’s an attempted-rape scene. An attempted-rape scene involving a lot of animalistic non-white men coming after our fair-skinned heroine, and I’m sure I don’t need to point out why I found that problematic (to say the least).

The plot itself is fairly pedestrian: somebody is murdering the ‘frozen’, as they’re known, and Amy must stop them before her parents are killed. You will almost certainly guess the identity of the killer a good 100 pages or more before any of the characters do.

Barring a few surprises, the rest of the plot twists are similarly easy to anticipate – and I feel I should point out that one of the ones I didn’t see coming hinges entirely on an enormous misunderstanding of how space travel works. Given how much Revis got right, I was very disappointed that she got this one thing wrong.

But for all of my complaints, I did enjoy Across the Universe. I like it well enough for what it is – a decent science fiction novel in a publishing category that desperately needs more – but I’m excited for what I hope it does for the industry. It received a truly staggering marketing push prior to its launch, and by all accounts is doing extremely well, which should hopefully put to rest the notion that YA science fiction doesn’t sell.

Oh, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t recommend a truly excellent science fiction series for young adults which has been criminally neglected by the blogging community: Patrick Ness’ Chaos Walking trilogy. It still amazes me that so few people in online YA circles even know about these books – a sure sign, if one was needed, that popular consensus is not a good barometer of quality.

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No new reviews yet, but I do have one half of a post on Matched up on the Interrobangs blog. Check it out here!

The Steel Remains by Richard K. Morgan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Richard K. Morgan is apparently best known for writing very gritty, fast-paced science fiction, and does it ever show. Although it’s fantasy through and through, The Steel Remains subtly breaks enough genre conventions that I can see why some people refer to it as a SF/Fantasy hybrid (I might not agree with those people, but I can see where they’re coming from): the planet that the story takes place on has a ring system, ‘the Band’, which features in various myths and religions throughout its cultures; the characters, rather than being heroes full of untapped Destiny, are approaching middle age and ostensibly have their glory days far behind them; almost every death is described with a sort of gleeful brutality, even when it’s the good guys butchering their way through the bad guys; there is quite a bit of unromanticised sex.

If you read all of that and thought ‘Sweet, a fantasy novel for people who are bored by most fantasy novels’…well, don’t get your hopes up that high. Morgan’s SF sensibilities are undeniably refreshing, but they can just as often become grating. This becomes most problematic in the dialogue: every single character uses the word ‘fuck’ as if they’re trying to reach a quota, even if they’re a priest, an emperor, or a god, and the diction is consistently ‘modern’ in few other ways. It wasn’t strange enough to detract from the story, exactly, but it was sometimes distracting.

The plot moves along quickly, which might help to hide the fact that it remains incredibly unfocused for the novel’s first two-thirds or so. Ringil, the faded war-hero, is brought back from a life of exile in order to save his cousin from slave traders. Needless to say, there’s a lot more to it than that, but it takes a long time for the rest of the plot to show up. The most intriguing character in the novel (who is notably not any of the three main characters) shows up just in time to save things from descending into an unfocused mess, but still late enough that some people will probably have lost interest before then. Thankfully, the mythology surrounding him is compelling and unique enough to make up for virtually all of the book’s other flaws. Morgan has hit on something great here, and I sincerely hope he’ll expand on it in future volumes.

I suspect, however, that sales for the second book in the series will be smaller than for the first, at least if some of the negative reviews on Amazon are any indication. There are apparently a worrying number of people who can’t handle the idea of a stereotypically masculine fantasy hero being gay (or, indeed, a fantasy heroine being a lesbian), and Morgan’s frank handling of gay themes has upset more than a handful of critics. Bizarrely, several Amazon reviewers seem to be offended that Ringil isn’t stereotypical enough, apparently feeling that Morgan was engaging in some form of deception by not having him instantly adhere to their idea of what gay men are like.

I’ve even come across such squeamishness in positive reviews like this one, where the book is described as featuring ‘an incessant bombardment of hardcore, gay pornography’ and as pushing an ‘agenda’ (might that be the homosexual agenda, by any chance?) As a rebuttal, I’ll simply point out that there is a scene in which the reader is told precisely how many thrusts a minor character can engage in during sex before he ejaculates. Needless to say, this has been described by nobody as constituting ‘hardcore, straight pornography’.

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Matched by Ally Condie

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

***WARNING: This review contains some mild-to-moderate spoilers for Ally Condie’s Matched. It’s nothing you couldn’t figure out from reading the back cover, but readers who want to experience the book completely unspoiled should probably not continue.***

I’ll be upfront. I expected to dislike Matched. On the surface, it sounds like yet another entry in the already-homogenous YA dystopian genre: teenage character (usually a girl) lives in a restrictive future society where [something] happens on their [x]th birthday; the [something] leads her to meet a male love interest, who opens her eyes to her society’s hidden flaws. In Matched’s case, the [something] is the titular Matching Banquet, in which 17-year olds are ‘matched’ with each other according to the meticulous statistical acuity of the omnipresent Society.

So far, so standard, but Matched very quickly surprised me. I found myself caring about the events of the Matching Banquet even though I knew in advance that Cassia’s ideal Match, her best friend Xander, would be briefly replaced on her screen by her neighbour Ky Markham. On the surface, it doesn’t feel like a momentous event, particularly when you know it’s coming, and I have to applaud Ally Condie for pulling the rug out from under me and getting me invested in the story right from the beginning. A subsequent scene involving the pre-ordained death of Cassia’s grandfather cemented my opinion that Condie is far more talented than most other YA authors making their debuts at the moment.

Unfortunately, the narrative begins to slack off somewhere around the 100 page mark. As with so much speculative YA at the moment, the story ultimately boils down to a love triangle: will Cassia choose the safe option in Xander, her ‘official’ Match, or will she end up falling in love with the enigmatic outsider Ky? Well, take a wild guess. As a character, Xander is terminally boring up until the last 50 pages or so. Ky is far more interesting, to the point that he’s easily more compelling a character than Cassia herself. I honestly cannot figure out why the entire story wasn’t told from his point of view. Of all the characters, he has the most interesting backstory, the greatest reason for wanting to change the society he lives in, and the most to lose. Cassia felt like a secondary character in his story, which is a problem given that we spend the entire novel with her. The book’s surprisingly downbeat ending even leaves him in a very interesting situation for the sequel (Matched is, of course, the first in a trilogy), yet I have a sinking feeling that we’ll be forced to experience that sequel through Cassia’s eyes.

These kinds of issues would usually make me want to throw a book across the room, yet Condie’s writing kept me interested throughout. The sparse narration lends the book a kind of subtle gravity that lifts it above the mediocrity of its component parts, and there are some scenes and descriptions that are genuinely moving. Condie should also be congratulated for having the courage to write a slow-burning romance in the age of instant ‘true love’.

I also take some issue with the many reviewers who have criticised Condie for ripping off The Giver. All right, there are some obvious similarities, but saying that Condie lifted her story from Lois Lowry is a bit like saying that any every paranormal YA novel on the shelves actively copied from Twilight. They might have indirectly inspired each other, or they might have created a reading culture in which certain ideas are more likely to make it to the market, but that isn’t the same thing as plagiarism. And for my money, Matched is probably better than The Giver. Tastes may vary, but I don’t like my SF to be that obviously didactic.

So, how do I feel about this book overall? I’m still not entirely sure. It’s certainly better than I was expecting, and if every YA dystopian about to come onto the market ends up being this good I’d be perfectly happy, but its flaws are too great to overlook entirely. Ultimately, it’s undermined by a fatal lack of passion. Yes, holding hands and talking about vaguely forbidden things might be dangerous in her world, but in ours it certainly isn’t, and it’s difficult to become invested in the supposed danger of her situation when the stakes appear to be so low. Condie is a great writer, I just hope she uses her considerable talent on a more worthwhile story.
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After hating on Scott Westerfield’s Uglies, I was all set to have a similarly extreme reaction to Leviathan. Unfortunately, it was not to be. I wouldn’t say I liked Leviathan – in fact I enjoyed it less and less as I got further into it – but it also didn’t annoy me nearly as much as Uglies.

If you’ve been following the industry (or just been into a bookshop recently), you probably already know the plot of Leviathan: the ‘Darwinists’, who breed mutated animals for use as vehicles and weapons (including the titular airship itself), are on the brink of war with the ‘Clankers’, who are fond of steampunk-ish giant robots. Sounds kind of entertaining, right?

Unfortunately, Westerfield takes a perfectly good fantasy premise and decides to wrap it in alternate history, which is where things more or less fall apart. The Darwinists are the British empire and the rest of the Allied powers, the Clankers are Austria-Hungary and the Center powers, and the conflict is World War I. The story takes place in our own world in the year 1914, but with flying mutant airships and walking cannons awkwardly (and inexplicably) shoehorned in. After seeing the epic worldbuilding fail that is Uglies, I wasn’t entirely surprised to discover that Westerfield doesn’t have the skill to pull it off.

I’m going to make the obvious comparison here and bring up Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, which I also mentioned in my previous post. The first book of that series, Northern Lights/The Golden Compass (depending on where you live), takes place in an alternate version or our own world. It is tantalizingly familiar, yet at the same time wonderfully different and unreal, and Pullman manages to incite willing suspension of disbelief so artfully that you barely notice it’s happening. By the time the famous panserbjørne show up, you’ve been placed into the kind of mindset where wondering why no other animals in this world talk (apart from the dæmons) feels like missing the point. The world in the His Dark Materials books feels incredibly real, and an important part of that illusion is the fact that Pullman knew how far to push things into the realm of the fantastical.

Westerfield could have done with following his example. Anybody who possesses even a passing familiarity with 20th century European history will find Leviathan a painful experience, and God help you if you know anything about the history of science: in the book, it is ‘explained’ that Darwin not only discovered common descent, but also genetics, DNA, and the secret to directly manipulating an animal’s genetic code using Victorian-era technology. (And no, it doesn’t help that everyone calls DNA ‘life-chains’.) Westerfield himself seems to have realized how half-baked the whole thing is, which probably explains why nobody ever talks in too much detail about how the British Empire’s biological ‘fabrications’ are actually made.

I wish I could say that the book’s main characters make up for the shortcomings of its premise, but they really don’t. It doesn’t help that they’re both cliches: Aleksander is the newly-orphaned son of a murdered Austrian diplomat (yes, this is the incident that starts the war, and no, it isn’t clever) who must pass himself off as a commoner in order to survive a fairly grandiose assassination attempt, while Deryl is a girl pretending to be a boy so she can join the army. Nothing original is done with either character: Aleksander realizes that he’s out of touch with his country’s peasantry, while Deryl…well, she doesn’t do anything, really. The practical details of her masquerade are handled in the most superficial way imaginable, which simultaneously robs her plotline of any suspense while also making it impossible for Westerfield to say anything meaningful or interesting about her situation. Add to this the fact that the rest of the Leviathan’s crew are completely uninteresting and you get a recipe for boredom.

Aleksander is slightly more interesting, mostly because his predicament feels genuinely dangerous. Unlike Deryl, who is more or less completely safe for the first half of the book, Alek (as he’s known) is constantly hounded by people who are after his head, which makes for some fairly exciting action scenes. Once again, however, Westerfield treats Alek’s character and plot in a maddeningly superficial way. His parents are dead, but he conveniently suppresses his grief so that it never becomes an issue; he accidentally kills a young soldier, but manages to get over the potential trauma this might have caused with remarkable ease. None of it ever seems to add up to anything, and I found myself skimming by the halfway mark.

For all of my complaining, though, Leviathan isn’t necessarily a bad book. Westerfield’s writing is solid, and the plot barrels along at a good pace, it’s just hard to care about any of it. To go back to my previous comparison, Phillip Pullman had something to say when he created his world(s), while Westerfield apparently didn’t put much thought into Leviathan beyond ‘Hey, how awesome would it be if WWI-era Britain had airships that were made out of whales?!‘. Even more so than Uglies, it is MG through and through, and I can’t help but feel that it’s being marketed as YA solely because YA is what sells at the moment. If you’re over a certain age or level of reading sophistication, you’re going to be hard-pressed to find anything worthwhile here, but anybody who falls into its real (as opposed to perceived) demographic will probably enjoy the ride.

Finally, I should say something about the much-publicised illustrations. They got a lot of attention both for their attractiveness and because it’s fairly unusual to see illustrations in YA (which, again, this isn’t), but I honestly don’t think they added much to the book. They’re nice to look at and they aren’t intrusive despite their frequency, but I doubt I’d care if they were taken out.

Rating: 5/10

Buy it at: Amazon – Amazon UK – The Book Depository

Have you ever had the feeling that you’re the only person on Earth who absolutely hated a certain book? If not, good for you. It can be absolutely infuriating to see the entire internet singing the praises of something you thought was either overrated or downright terrible, an experience I had several months ago with Scott Westerfield’s Uglies. I had heard that it was fun, well-written, thought-provoking and deep, thus proving that 99% of the human population has terrible taste. (I was right!)

Uglies is bad. It’s really, really bad. I thought it was so bad, in fact, that I initially decided not to review it. That was before he started making waves again with Leviathan and its sequel, both of which look more like my style. I decided to give them a try, which led me to realize that I was inevitably going to end up comparing them to Uglies – hence this review. I’ll cover Leviathan as soon as I’ve finished it, then get back to analyzing Evermore chapter-by-agonizing-chapter.

Uglies is not a YA book. I realize a statement like that is likely to spark all sorts of angsting over genre/publishing category conventions, so let me be upfront and say that I define YA as ‘involving teenage protagonists in a way that deals heavily with their interiority’. So Harry Potter would be MG/Fantasy, depending on which book you’re talking about, something like Twilight is definitely YA because it deals heavily with Bella’s inner life (for better or for worse), and I’d classify  the His Dark Materials books as straight-up fantasy, particularly by the time you hit The Amber Spyglass.

Uglies fits rather neatly into what I’d call ‘adventure MG’, or plot-driven MG. Yes, main character Tally Youngblood is stated to be 15 going on 16, but she could just as easily have been 13. Apart from a brief part at the beginning of the book, the reader is rarely afforded any great insight into her thoughts and her development as a character is only superficially dealt with as the plot moves forward. YA, for me, is less about what happens and more about who it happens to, which is why my automatic impulse is to classify Uglies as MG.

Of course, that doesn’t make the book bad;  the terrible writing, flat characterization, shoddy world-building and boring plot all conspire to do that. You’re probably already familiar with the premise: in a vaguely drawn post-apocalyptic America (I think), everybody is an ‘Ugly’ until their sixteenth birthday. At that point they become a ‘Pretty’, and go off to live in ‘New Prettytown’, where they seem to do nothing but attend parties 24/7. Nobody seems to have parents, a point that isn’t addressed properly for a maddeningly long  time, and ‘Littlies’ are raised according to strict guidelines that will make them conform to society’s norms.

If you read the above and thought ‘Wow, none of that makes sense, and also that slang sounds teeth-grindingly annoying’, congratulations! You may have what it takes to join the super-exclusive (and, sadly, small) ‘People who dislike Uglies‘ club. Things don’t get any better where the book’s technology is involved; hardly anything is explained, everything that is explained is explained poorly, and Westerfield reveals himself to be a third-rate SF writer by sticking the word ‘hover’ in front of everything so we don’t forget we’re in The Future. This last point also results in Tally’s rebellious friend Shay uttering the line ‘All that glitters is not hovery’ as part of a half-baked explanation for how hoverboards work, something I hope Westerfield never manages to live down.

You can probably guess the plot yourself: there is a rebellion, which objects to people being beautiful and blissfully happy for…some reason*, they live out in the wilderness (or the ‘Rusty Ruins’, a phrase that gets increasingly irritatingly with every usage), Tally joins them, but wait she’s a spy for the authorities, she has to decide between the world she knows and her bland love interest among the rebels, and it’s all painfully, painfully predictable.

(*All right, all right, we discover that the operation which turns people into Pretties also makes them stupid and obedient, but I would have thought the rebels would be against just that part and not the rest of the fairly Utopian society.)

Uglies is the kind of book people have in mind when they look at you funny and ask why you don’t read ‘real books’. Its science fiction would never pass muster in the world of adult literature, its characters are just barely two dimensional, and its world-building is condescendingly sloppy. I don’t like to cast aspersions on other writers, but I honestly can’t help but think that Westerfield hammered this out as quickly as he could in the belief that its target audience would be too young or unsophisticated or both to notice its crippling flaws.

The sad part is that he was apparently right.

Rating: 2/10

Buy it at: Amazon – Amazon UK – The Book Depository

I like to be fairly analytical about why I do or don’t like a book, but in the case of Skin Hunger I’m going to be brief. I didn’t enjoy it, and I can narrow in on two very specific reasons why.

The book is composed of two alternating narratives: Sadima lives during a period where magic is outlawed (according to the back cover…it’s never made entirely clear in the story itself) while Hahp lives an indeterminate amount of time later, when magic has been restored. Herein lies the book’s downfall. There’s nothing inherently wrong with telling a story this way, and in fact it was one of the reasons why I was looking forward to reading Skin Hunger for so long. I love it when an author can use a technique like this to weave two narratives together in a way that enriches both of them.

Unfortunately, the tapestry is undone by the fact that the twin stories feel as if they were originally intended to inhabit separate books. This becomes particularly obvious when you realize that their pacing is going to be wildly divergent: Sadima’s tale begins on the day of her birth before giving us snapshots of her life up to the age of seventeen, while Hahp’s story opens just before his arrival at a draconian Academy of Magic before moving along in something approaching real-time. We’ll get a few pages covering about an hour of his time before jumping back to Sadima to find that five years have passed since her last chapter, then it’s back to Hahp where things continue from the point we last saw him…it’s disorienting, to say the least, and takes up far too much of the beginning of the novel.

My second problem had to do with the characters themselves. Sadima starts out interesting as a child – right up until the moment she begins an incredibly tepid romance with Franklin, one half a mysterious wizard duo. I stopped caring about either of them as soon as the coy ‘Does he like her the way she likes him?’ nonsense kicked off and never recovered my interest. (I should also point out that Franklin’s characterization is a bit…odd, to say the least. He seems to be your ideal Fantasy-Land Gentleman upon first meeting Sadima, but then he starts coming on to her heavily and kisses her on the forehead after they’ve known each other for all of five minutes. This is while she’s about fourteen, if I remember correctly. I still have no idea how this scene was supposed to read, but it just came off as extremely creepy.)

Hahp doesn’t fare much better in terms of endearing himself to the reader. When we first meet him he contemplates suicide in order to escape from his overbearing father, then spends a good long time berating himself for being too much of a coward to go through with it. He continues to be incredibly irritating until about midway through the book. Compounding this problem is the fact that he has almost nobody else to interact with. His room-mate at the Academy, the enigmatic pauper Gerrard, is a complete non-entity for far too long and comes across as something of an asshole on the few occasions he and Hahp actually talk to each other. With nobody to distract him from the neverending torments of the Academy, Hahp literally has nothing to do for most of the first half of the book except whine to himself. In first-person.

Things do eventually pick up, and the plot is interesting when it decides to show itself, but I had long stopped caring by that point. The writing is patchy at best, with far too many declarative sentences spoiling what could have been serviceable prose.

I wanted to like Skin Hunger, but in the end it’s very difficult to recommend.

Rating: 4/10

Buy It At: Amazon – Amazon UK – The Book Depository

I think it’s time to accept that the YA Paranormal genre is just never going to appeal to me. I’ve tried to like it, going so far as to seek out examples that I think I’d like (Shiver was one of those, in case you’re wondering), but something always turns me away. Maybe it’s the ubiquitous American High School setting or the fact that the main romantic pairing tends to be obvious from the very beginning (if you’re in any doubt, just check the blurb on the back cover!), but I find myself getting bored of every paranormal book I try within 100 pages.

Beautiful Creatures was, alas, no exception. I thought it might be; the usual gender setup is reversed for one thing, with our male viewpoint character by the name of Ethan Wate swooning over the mysterious Lena Deschannes, and the book’s mythos is invented rather than relying on a well-established fantasy trope. Unfortunately, every spark of originality I came across was rapidly extinguished by one of several massive clichés that killed my interest in the story long before it had time to get started.

My first major problem was the setting. No, not the small town with a long memory and a few dark secrets – that was fine, although the overtly ‘Southern’ aspects felt more like window dressing than anything else. What irritated me was Ethan’s high school, which felt less like a real place and more like a backdrop from a low-rent Disney movie. You know the kind of thing I’m talking about: all the girls are either cheerleaders and Popular or nerds and Unpopular, all the guys are either jocks and Popular or nerds and Unpopular, all the…well, that’s it, really. We know immediately that Lena isn’t going to fit in because she wears black clothes (gasp), is pale rather than meticulously suntanned (the horror) and enjoys reading To Kill A Mockingbird (good heavens). The whole setup is pushed from stereotypical to ludicrous by the fact that Lena is apparently the only student in the entire school to disrupt the social order; literally every other named character in Ethan’s class is either an airhead cheerleader if female or a thick-headed basketball player if male.

I’m sorry, but I have serious trouble believing that American high schools are actually like this. (And what the hell is so weird about liking To Kill A Mockingbird? That book is awesome. When I did it in secondary school my class of mostly non-readers got really into it.) Could we get some nuance to this kind of setting, please? Or, better yet, dispense with it altogether. There are more interesting places for your characters to meet supernatural oddities.

Actually, that brings me to the second issue I had with the book, and this is one that it shares with most other Paranormal romances I’ve checked out: the supernatural oddities eclipse everything else in the story, at least in the part I got to before giving up. There’s a potentially fascinating subplot about Ethan’s strained relationship with his father, who stays cooped up in his study ever since his wife’s death some years before. The way their (brief) scenes are written works far better than the rather bland interactions between Ethan and Lena – guess which of the two receives more attention?

I suspect Ethan’s father (and all of his friends) are more or less pushed under the rug for the same reason that the setting is so paper-thin: because the main point of the story is Lena and her attendant mysteries. That would be fine if those mysteries were interesting, but they aren’t. The writing also can’t keep up with them; the prose becomes painfully stilted every time something strange happens, particularly in one important scene involving a magically-induced flashback.

That’s where I stopped reading. The genre just isn’t for me, I’m afraid, just as epic fantasy and a lot of adult science-fiction isn’t for me. It’s a shame, because I really want to like some of these books (again, Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater), I’m just incapable of getting into them.

Rating: Did Not Finish

Buy it at: Amazon – Amazon UK – The Book Depository

NOTE: I first read The Hunger Games back when it was initially garnering a lot of serious attention from reviewers. I ended up being fairly disappointed with it, which prompted me to post a 2-star review on Amazon some months later. With the anticipation over Mockingjay reaching stratospheric levels, I thought I’d repost that review here before expanding on a few of its main points. Needless to say, die-hard fans of the series who aren’t interested in seeing me complain about it for 800 words should look elsewhere.

***

The Hunger Games is one of those painful books, an excellent premise ruined (or almost ruined) by very flawed execution. The story sounds promising: 16-year old Katniss Everdeen (yes, really) is forced to compete in the titular Games, which involves 12 boys and 12 girls fighting to the death on live television. The world that this grisly tournament takes place in is suitably distopyian, and there are a few scenes near the beginning of the book that manage to effortlessly create a sense of tension and unease.

Unfortunately, things go downhill from there. The story is told in first-person present tense, which I’m assuming was meant to leave the reader in doubt as to Katniss’s ultimate fate. If that was the case, it didn’t work, and I found myself wishing I could take a break from living inside Katniss’s head. She isn’t the most endearing character in the world, and her frequent (and intrusive) flashbacks do little to flesh out her personality. It doesn’t help that the writing can be stilted in places, particularly during the action scenes.

There are further disappointments when we get to see the Games themselves. The other Tributes, or contestants, are mostly given quite sparse characterization, which makes it difficult to care (with a few exceptions) when they start dropping like flies. The pseudo-love triangle between Katniss, her fellow Tribute Peeta and her longtime friend Gale also feels extremely forced and unnecessary, as if the author felt the need to put it in because she thought readers would expect it.

Actually, that explains another of the book’s major flaws: its status as a trilogy. It’s painfully obvious throughout that certain plot points won’t be explained until future volumes, but the story itself feels as if it should be self-contained. Did we really need the subplot about the Avox girl, which comes out of nowhere and just sits on the page lifelessly for the rest of the book? And what about the Capitol’s ‘muttations’?

***

Since writing that, I’ve watched on the sidelines as the second book has been released and gotten even more positive attention than the first. To be honest, I’m baffled; The Hunger Games had a lot of flaws, and by all accounts it sounds as if Catching Fire recapitulates a lot of them. Usually when a series becomes this popular I can at least see where its fans are coming from (yes, even with Twilight), but the this one eludes me completely.

The main issue I had with the first book is something that I didn’t really explore on in the Amazon review: the world it takes place in never felt ‘real’ to me. It’s the exact same problem I had with Uglies, although it’s not nearly as bad in The Hunger Games as it is there. And the biggest problem isn’t even that I found it difficult to imagine why the Games themselves came to be or how they were sustained, it was that the trappings of the world felt too immature.

There is much space in the narration given over to describing the capitol’s bizarre and excessive fashions and tastes, a sort of conspicuous consumption taken to ridiculous extremes. I’ve always thought that this is the most simplistic way of making a society seem ‘evil’ or corrupt. It’s very easy to play the poor, down-to-earth peripheral culture off against the wealthy and excessive dominating capital and have the latter come across as evil by default, but that’s only because most of us have a bias in favor of the impoverished underdogs. There is nothing to say that a downtrodden, ‘simple’ people cannot be as vicious or unpleasant in their own way as the ones doing the oppressing (unless you’re James Camerson, apparently). At the very least, I like having some ambiguity in this kind of story; it gets old very fast if one side is automatically evil (to the point of looking ‘evil’) and the other is automatically virtuous and good. In The Hunger Games there is never any suggestion that the relationship between the Capitol and the Districts could be more complex than it first appears.

This kind of simplicity extends to most aspects of the book. The characters are pretty evenly divided between those who are good and those who aren’t (I was never in any doubt as to who I was supposed to be rooting for) and Katniss gets through the games far too easily. Sure, some pretty horrible things happen to her, but she manages to maintain her integrity and morals throughout without suffering any truly negative consequences because of it.

All things considered, The Hunger Games feels like a complex premise grafted to a very straightforward story. I might get around to reading the sequel if Mockingjay turns out to be truly stellar, but until/unless that happens I’m going to have to remain in the dark over the series’ popularity.

Rating: 3/10

Buy it at: Amazon – Amazon UK – The Book Depository