JESS JUST READS

A BOOK REVIEW BLOG

Portraits of Celina by Sue Whiting

Make him pay, Bayley. Make him pay.
It’s as if the wooden chest is luring me, urging me to open it – daring me almost. Open me up. Look inside. Come on, just for a second; it won’t hurt.
Celina O’Malley was sixteen years old when she disappeared. Now, almost forty years later, Bayley is sleeping in Celina’s room, wearing her clothes, hearing her voice. What does Celina want? And who will suffer because of it? A ghost story. A love story. A story of revenge.

I’m going to start with the positives, because there were very few (ouch!). The premise is interesting and very The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo-esque. The mystery surrounding Celina is haunting and intriguing, and Amelia (Bayley’s sister) is quite well developed and believable. The title Portraits of Celina won’t make sense until you have finished reading the book, and this title is haunting and chilling and very goosebumpy. The setting of the novel seems very enclosed and secluded, which adds to the mystery in the story. And finally, I’m so glad that this novel took place over the holidays and school was never featured in the story – school always makes a story feel very YA and would’ve undone the secluded nature of the setting.

Okay, now to the negatives. Firstly, the story is a little farfetched and unbelievable. Bayley just happens to look exactly like Celina and is of the same age AND starts having visions from Celina? That got me like:

Also, the pace of the story is lacking. It takes about 250 pages before the story starts to pick up, and I only kept reading the novel because I have this compulsive need to finish every book I start reading. I think that Bayley is not characterised well – she comes across ditzy and immature at times, but other times she seems much older. Her dialogue is not realistic of teenagers and she does a lot of telling in the story.

The number one rule of writing is show don’t tell, and there’s A LOT of telling in this story. Bayley tells you that she’s developed an obsession with Celina, when it’s already obvious (and let’s not mention how unrealistic it is that Bayley immediately develops this obsession – this would’ve been more realistic if she developed it over time). She tells you that Bud is creepy and that Oliver is good-looking/dreamy, and she tells you that she kept the family together and that their mother is a little broken and that Amelia is a little off the tracks. These things should’ve been shown.

I was given an advanced copy of this title via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

My Score: 6/10

Stone Mattress: Nine Tales by Margaret Atwood

A recently widowed fantasy writer is guided through a stormy winter evening by the voice of her late husband. An elderly lady with Charles Bonnet’s syndrome comes to terms with the little people she keeps seeing, while a newly-formed populist group gathers to burn down her retirement residence. A woman born with a genetic abnormality is mistaken for a vampire. And a crime committed long-ago is revenged in the Arctic via a 1.9 billion year old stromatalite. In these nine tales, Margaret Atwood ventures into the shadowland earlier explored by fabulists and concoctors of dark yarns such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Daphne du Maurier and Arthur Conan Doyle.

I just read the most amazing comment on Goodreads: “I would read IKEA assembly instructions if Margaret Atwood wrote them.” Margaret Atwood couldn’t ruin anything she wrote. Her stories are ripe with societal insight and character development that all other writers are envious of.

Each short story seems to include a different level of loss and despair. Some of the stories relate to each other (the first three, for example), whilst others are standalone. The first three stories seem to make up a trilogy, in the loose sense that Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and Maddadam make up a trilogy. There’s long paragraphs about the characters, which would usually deter me and cause me to skip ahead, but Margaret Atwood describes her characters using flashbacks or tangents, and it makes the piece flow easily. Her dialogue is always believable and her characters’ reactions to their situations are plausible and realistic to that character.

I will point out that the last couple of stories aren’t as good as the start of Stone Mattress. They aren’t bad; they just don’t seem to have that same feeling resonating with the reader at the end of the story. You usually read a Margaret Atwood short story and you know that you got all of the information necessary to understanding it, but you still have so many questions. Margaret is the queen of giving the reader only what they need to know and nothing more.

My Score: 9/10
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The Darkest Minds by Alexandra Bracken

When Ruby woke up on her tenth birthday, something about her had changed. Something alarming enough to make her parents lock her in the garage and call the police. Something that gets her sent to Thurmond, a brutal government “rehabilitation camp.”

Now sixteen, Ruby is one of the dangerous ones.

When the truth comes out, Ruby barely escapes Thurmond with her life. Now she’s on the run, desperate to find the one safe haven left for kids like her—East River. She joins a group of kids who escaped their own camp. Liam, their brave leader, is falling hard for Ruby.

When they arrive at East River, nothing is as it seems, least of all its mysterious leader. But there are other forces at work, people who will stop at nothing to use Ruby in their fight against the government. Ruby will be faced with a terrible choice, one that may mean giving up her only chance at a life worth living.

Finally! A refreshingly unique dystopian novel! Just kidding. This book is like the amalgamation of The Hunger Games and Divergent, with, you know, a different plot and different characters and a completely different premise. But seriously, who cares that all these dystopian YA books are flooding bookstores at the moment – they’re fantastic! And this novel, which is the first in a trilogy, is so well-written and thrilling. I love it.

My favourite genre is dystopian, so if a novel is dystopian, it’s guaranteed to at least get a 5/10. But this book is so much better than the other YA dystopias that I’ve read lately. I actually liked it more than I liked Divergent, but not as much as I liked The Hunger Games (there is such a thing as a dystopian novel hierarchy).

Ruby’s characterisation is really well done – she’s a little too timid at times (to the point where the reader wants to roll their eyes at her) but she’s likeable. Also, the love story between her and Lee/Liam is subtle. Nobody wants to read a dystopian novel where the romance takes up more novel space than the world-building. Also, this trilogy has some amazing book covers. Let’s all stare in wonder at them:

I do think that Chubs is a stereotypical character – he’s like that boy in high school whose personality overcompensated for his lack of intelligence. He’s the fun one to have around. The one who can be serious at times, but is mostly cracking jokes and cheering you up. And Zu is a little confusing and mysterious, but intriguing enough that you want to know what happens to her in the next novel.

I also have to point out one more flaw: Ruby can be a little stupid sometimes. Let’s not mention that trap she fell into at the end of the novel (I’m not going to be any more specific because I don’t want to give it away. For all you know, it could be an actual trap. It’s not, but anyway). I’m hoping she smartens up in Never Fade.

I’d recommend this novel/series to anyone who is loving the dystopian YA novels being released at the moment. If you love The Hunger Games and Divergent, you’ll devour this series (I know I haven’t yet read the rest of the series, but I know I’ll love it, so yes, I’m recommending the whole thing).

My Score: 10/10
Buy HERE

Leaving Time by Jodi Picoult

For more than a decade, Jenna Metcalf has never stopped thinking about her mother, Alice, who mysteriously disappeared in the wake of a tragic accident. Refusing to believe that she would be abandoned as a young child, Jenna searches for her mother regularly online and pores over the pages of Alice’s old journals. A scientist who studied grief among elephants, Alice wrote mostly of her research among the animals she loved, yet Jenna hopes the entries will provide a clue to her mother’s whereabouts.

Desperate to find the truth, Jenna enlists two unlikely allies in her quest. The first is Serenity Jones, a psychic who rose to fame finding missing persons—only to later doubt her gifts. The second is Virgil Stanhope, a jaded private detective who originally investigated Alice’s case along with the strange, possibly linked death of one of her colleagues. As the three work together to uncover what happened to Alice, they realize that in asking hard questions, they’ll have to face even harder answers.

Holy Jesus. I finished reading this book about ten minutes ago and am furiously writing this review in an attempt to come to terms with it. It’s amazing, evocative, emotional, and just pure genius.

I’ll be honest. Five years ago, I boycotted Jodi Picoult, because I’d read about ten of her books and to me, they all seemed the same. The same, overdramatic storylines with differing points of view and overly emotional, climactic endings. Plus, I’d started studying literature at university and my time was taken up reading Raymond Carver and Ernest Hemingway.

But, when everyone on Twitter can’t stop bragging about how amazing her latest book is, it’s time to renege on your boycott and pick up Leaving Time. And I’m so glad I did. The twist at the end of the book is so left field but amazing, and you feel so stupid that you didn’t see it. And the twist was so subtly revealed, I was like:

It puts the whole book into perspective, and it highlights that Jodi Picoult is such an amazingly talented writer.

Jodi Picoult, like all of her other works, has undergone a lengthy amount of research for this book. Elephants are a major metaphor in the piece, and the setting is an elephant sanctuary. Each tangent about an elephant is relevant to the story and to the character, and Jodi Picoult uses this to develop characterisation and societal relations in the piece.

I do think that Jenna’s ‘age’ is a little misguided. At the start of the novel, she seems a little immature (which makes sense, because she’s 13), but then later in the novel, she seemed to have matured too fast. She comes across as someone who is in their late teens, and although the events in the book would cause her to grow up and mature quite quickly, the change seems a little distracting.

I cannot recommend this book to you enough. It’s amazing, and prepare yourself for that twist at the end. I’m in a comatose state at the moment because I can’t deal with the ending.

My Score: 9/10
Buy HERE

Awful Auntie by David Walliams

A page-turning, rollicking romp of a read, sparkling with Walliams’ most eccentric characters yet and full of the humour and heart that all his readers love, Awful Auntie is simply unmissable!

From larger than life, tiddlywinks obsessed Awful Aunt Alberta to her pet owl, Wagner – this is an adventure with a difference. Aunt Alberta is on a mission to cheat the young Lady Stella Saxby out of her inheritance – Saxby Hall. But with mischievous and irrepressible Soot, the cockney ghost of a chimney sweep, alongside her Stella is determined to fight back… And sometimes a special friend, however different, is all you need to win through.

Sometimes it’s hard to read a novel that’s aimed at an audience much younger than you. I’m pretty much triple the age of someone who would read Awful Auntie (that math only really works if the reader is, like, 8). And although I read a lot of Roald Dahl growing up, it was a little hard to accept that storyline. For example, when the ghost appeared in the story, I was like:

And when the BOLD CAPITAL LETTERS appeared in every second line of the story, I was like:

But perhaps I’m too old to understand the appeal.

David Walliams does know how to enclose the setting so the characters are confined and secluded – and he manages to do it for 300 pages. And the Auntie is an interesting and unique character. There’s dark issues that are briefly explored in the text (death, murder, poison etc), which is more than I can say for most children’s novels.

Stella Saxby doesn’t seem to change at all in the story. And come to think of it, none of the characters do (except perhaps Wagner). In any novel, the characters have to evolve or adapt, even in children’s novels. It’s fine for Stella to stay the same, but someone else needs to change (excluding Wagner, because he’s an animal and he doesn’t count). I was half expecting the ‘Awful Auntie’ to momentarily change her ways, but David Walliams surprised me there (sorry for the spoiler).

My Score: 7/10
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