JESS JUST READS

A BOOK REVIEW BLOG

Yellow by Megan Jacobson

The main character in Yellow is fourteen year old Kirra, whose friends bully her, whose mum is an alcoholic, and whose father has run off with another woman one street over. And Kirra has started communicating with a ghost called Boogie through a broken telephone box.

Yellow is set in the mid 90s and is a beautifully written young adult novel not so much like a coming of age story, but more like a coming of self story. Kirra doesn’t realise how horrible her friends are and she doesn’t know what to do about her alcoholic mother. She’s going through an early life crisis, and it seems that this ghost she’s started talking to could help with her problems. Boogie’s promised to help her with her life if she helps prove who murdered him twenty years earlier.

As Kirra slowly starts to understand who she is and what she is capable of, she’s thrust into the uncertainty of high school and teenage life. She befriends a girl in her school who she’d never thought to even acknowledge, and she starts to rekindle a friendship with a boy in her neighbourhood. The small coastal town that this book is set in uses the beach as a backdrop to highlight just how small Kirra’s world is and the unlikelihood of her — or anyone else in her life — escaping this small town and making something of themselves outside of it.

Megan uses unreliable characters to make the reader question the plot and question Kirra’s actions, because we start to doubt what is real and what isn’t. The relationships and friendships at Kirra’s school mirror modern society and the social dynamic between everyone in the town resembles that of real-life small towns: everyone knows everyone and everybody’s business is talked about. And if you’re trouble, or if you’re bad news, you’re ignored by everyone in the town and merely cast aside as being hopeless and not worthy of their time. It is merely understood that you will go nowhere. And it seems that Kirra has grown up surrounded by people who have gone nowhere and achieved nothing, so she’s not aware of what she’s capable of. And Megan uses the character Boogie to catapult Kirra into realisation and personal growth.

Despite the fact that the pace of the story is a little fast and there is a bit of telling where there could be showing, Megan has crafted a lovely young adult story whilst weaving in pieces of a supernatural sub-plot, and Megan juggles these two elements of the story perfectly.

My Score: 8/10

Rebel of the Sands by Alwyn Hamilton

Tell me that and we’ll go. Right now. Save ourselves and leave this place to burn. Tell me that’s how you want your story to go and we’ll write it straight across the sand.

Rebel of the Sands is the first novel in a YA/fantasy trilogy about Amani, who lives in the unforgiving, dead-end town of Dustwalk. She meets a mysterious stranger, and together, they leave Dustwalk to escape and to find something better. With Amani’s extremely accurate shooting skills and the stranger’s mysterious past, this book is like the YA, dystopian version of Aladdin.

Amani is a great main character, and she provides a breath of fresh air within this genre. Rebel of the Sands is set in the desert, with harsh heat and windy days and dry, long summers. Amani’s parents are both dead and her distant relatives are planning on marrying her off. She is desperate, impulsive, ruthless, and at times, naïve. But she’s a fantastic YA lead character because she takes control of the scene and she has backbone.

The first in a trilogy packed with shooting contests, train robberies, festivals under the stars, powerful Djinni magic and an electrifying love story.

Rebel of the Sands is set in the desert plains of some strange world, and it’s fantastic. The reader can really feel the dry, desolate desert through Alwyn’s descriptive prose, and the character interactions are believable and realistic and they intrigue the reader and make them want to finish the book and pick up the next in the series. Amani is witty and brave, but also young and impulsive, which is appropriate for her age and for what she’s going through in the book. She’s travelling to a distant city to find her Aunt, but she’s now caught up in the rebellion. There is a new Prince who is building an army to forge ‘A New Desert’ and soon, Amani becomes engulfed in this war and thrust into battles and fights with both soldiers and supernatural beings. She is forced to work together with her new allies but also trust her instincts.

Rebel of the Sands is paced well, but perhaps could move a little faster. It does a wonderful job of setting up the sequel, which I imagine will be more imbedded in how the rebellion is going to work to overthrow the current government. I imagine Amani’s enemies from when she lived in Dustwalk will also re-appear in the next novel. I look forward to reading the sequel when it comes out! Hopefully the cover for the sequel is just as stunning as the Rebel of the Sands cover.

My Score: 8/10

February 2016 Wrap Up

This is my first monthly wrap up for Jess Just Reads, after an extensive overhaul of the website and complete revamping, including a new layout, structure, feature images, information, and new sections of the website (this wrap up section, for example, and also the giveaway section). Firstly, let me run through all the books I bought/borrowed in February 2016.


1. The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

I’ve borrowed this book off a friend to read, and I’m currently about half way through it. I loved Never Let Me Go (you can read the review of that HERE) and I’ve been dying to read another Ishiguro book ever since I finished that one. The Buried Giant is about a couple who leave their small village and travel to see their son, who left quite some time earlier. The book blends fantastical elements with reality, which is what initially intrigued me about it. Plus the cover of the book is stunning. Unfortunately, I might not be able to finish this one – it’s a little slow, and I’m really struggling. But we’ll see!


2. The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood

I heard so much about this book when it came out last year – Charlotte did a lot of events and signings and I heard rave reviews about how fantastic this book is. And now that I’ve read it (you can read my review by clicking on the title above), I can say that it really does deserve all the praise and all the awards. It says so much about modern society and it is so perfectly written. A masterpiece, actually.


3. When We Collided by Emery Lloyd

As a YA fan, I couldn’t pass up to opportunity to read this one. A blogger friend has lent me the proof of this book and I’m really excited to delve into it.


4. Torch by Cheryl Strayed

I loved reading Wild last year (you can read my review HERE), so I picked up Torch at the bookstore a few weeks back.


5. This Shattered World by Amie Kauffman and Meagan Spooner

This Shattered World is the sequel to a fantastic science fiction YA novel called These Broken Stars, which I finished reading a couple of weeks ago. The first book was fantastic and I’m looking forward to seeing where Amie and Meagan take the series.

 

So those are the books that I acquired in the month of February, and here’s a brief list of the various books I read in both January and February (and am in the process of writing reviews for at the moment):

Books I read in January and February:

The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood

The Art of Crash Landing by Melissa DeCarlo

Eat the Sky Drink the Ocean (a collection of short stories by many different Australian authors)

The Stars at Oktober Bend by Glenda Millard

Lost & Found by Brooke Davis

These Broken Stars by Amie Kauffman and Meagan Spooner

Rebel of the Sands by Alwyn Hamilton

 

 

The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood

She hears her own thick voice deep inside her ears when she says, ‘I need to know where I am.’ The man stands there, tall and narrow, hand still on the doorknob, surprised. He says, almost in sympathy, ‘Oh, sweetie. You need to know what you are.’

The Natural Way of Things is a poignant, heartbreaking novel that explores contemporary misogyny and corporate control, and reminds me a lot of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

This novel is about two women who awake from a drugged sleep to find themselves imprisoned in an abandoned property in the middle of a desert. Strangers to each other, they have no idea where they are or how they came to be there with eight other girls, forced to wear strange uniforms, their heads shaved, guarded by two inept yet vicious armed jailers and a ‘nurse’. Doing hard labour under a sweltering sun, the prisoners soon learn what links them: in each girl’s past is a sexual scandal with a powerful man. They pray for rescue — but when the food starts running out it becomes clear that the jailers have also become the jailed. The girls can only rescue themselves.

With beautiful prose, heartbreaking helplessness, and ruthless guards that hunt them, The Natural Way of Things is something to be admired. It is one of those novels that you finish and you’re forced to sit back and ponder over for quite some time. You feel like you understand the meaning of the story, but you know that there were so many subtle undercurrents to the tale that you haven’t fully grasped yet.

These women were shooed away from society because of their crimes, and there is no escape for them. This feminist novel highlights how women are viewed in society, especially when involved in a public sex scandal. Some of these women are innocent and some are guilty, and yet they’ve all been grouped together and deemed guilty by those above them. They are deemed unwanted, unloved, uncared for, and they soon grow mad in their circumstances and try to clutch onto any chance they have of escaping.

Charlotte Wood uses such beautiful language to craft these characters, and soon we find ourselves understanding not only the girls trapped there, but the male guards who clearly don’t fully understand the part they play in this prison. They are merely middle men, who are being told what to do and what to think and who don’t realise that they too are being repressed and moulded by society.

This novel explores humanity, misogyny, sexism, survival, feminism, hatred, and society’s tendency to blame women or accept the viewpoint of a powerful and dominant figure. A fantastic read – a must read. I recommend this to everyone, both men and women, youth and adult.