JESS JUST READS

A BOOK REVIEW BLOG

Playlist for the Dead by Michelle Falkoff

Here’s what Sam knows: There was a party. There was a fight. The next morning, his best friend, Hayden, was dead. And all he left Sam was a playlist of songs, and a suicide note: For Sam—listen and you’ll understand.

As he listens to song after song, Sam tries to face up to what happened the night Hayden killed himself. But it’s only by taking out his earbuds and opening his eyes to the people around him that he will finally be able to piece together his best friend’s story. And maybe have a chance to change his own.

I think this is the first YA novel I’ve read in a long time where the main character is male – it was refreshing. Sam is confused and hurt at the beginning of the novel. His best friend is dead, and as the novel progresses and he meets people who knew Hayden, he realises that perhaps he didn’t know his best friend as well as he thought he did.

This book is flawed, but it does build suspense well and it does intrigue the reader to want to keep reading. Sam knows more about the night before Hayden died than he tells us, so we keep reading because we too want to know why Hayden killed himself.

The songs in this book were kind of irrelevant. The playlist was supposed to help Sam understand why Hayden killed himself. But he listened to them, pondered the lyrics, and then moved on. So, you could’ve taken the songs and the playlist out of the entire story and the novel would’ve been fine, which is not a good thing.

I don’t think the playlist really helped Sam at all – the characters did. Their interactions with Hayden and their social experiences with Sam helped him understand it all and attempt to move on. That being said, the characters in this novel seemed like cardboard cut outs. Sure, I kept reading because I was curious, but I was not reading because I sympathised for the characters. I didn’t really feel anything for them, to be honest. Sam told us all about his feelings and his thoughts and his doubts, and I think that this can stop the reader from actually caring for him.

The character’s motivations seemed impulsive and without authenticity. I think that the author was so determined to construct a mystery around Hayden’s death and the three bullies that she forgot to construct a more three dimensional protagonist.

My Score: 5/10
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The Ice Twins by S.K. Tremayne

A year after one of their identical twin daughters, Lydia, dies in an accident, Angus and Sarah Moorcraft move to the tiny Scottish island Angus inherited from his grandmother, hoping to put together the pieces of their shattered lives.

But when their surviving daughter, Kirstie, claims they have mistaken her identity – that she, in fact, is Lydia – their world comes crashing down once again.

As winter encroaches, Angus is forced to travel away from the island for work, Sarah is feeling isolated, and Kirstie (or is it Lydia?) is growing more disturbed. When a violent storm leaves Sarah and her daughter stranded, Sarah finds herself tortured by the past – what really happened on that fateful day one of her daughters died?

I heard rave reviews about this title, but I must admit that I was really disappointed. Overall, the book isn’t as ‘haunting’ or ‘gripping’ as described. I kept waiting for a twist or for a shocking scene where I’d be desperate to get to the end, but this just didn’t happen. The ‘revelation’ at the end isn’t really that shocking because most of the book is pretty predictable and I saw it coming.

The book is from the point of view of the mother, Sarah, and she’s just not a likeable character. She has too much internal dialogue and she doesn’t let the reader realise anything for themselves. She’s also really naïve and delicate, and she asks too many rhetorical questions. She comes across as slightly neurotic, and the reader doesn’t like her enough to disregard her flaws.

I quite liked the husband, Angus. He was authentic and his societal reactions were realistic and effective to the plot. You are positioned to hate him in the novel because his daughter is supposedly ‘scared of him’, but it’s quite clear that he’s not the bad guy.

The setting in the novel helps to isolate the characters and force the reader to really focus on the plot and the relations between Angus and Sarah. I think the author did well to pace the story so that it didn’t move too quickly but it didn’t move too slowly either.

I do think it was missing something – the story just didn’t grab me. Maybe it was the characters and the circumstances. Maybe it was the setting. Or maybe it was the farfetched nature of the premise that disappointed me.

My Score: 5/10
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See How Small by Scott Blackwood

See How Small
Scott Blackwood
January 2015

It begins one summer evening in a small Texas town. Two men walk into an ice cream shop shortly before it closes. They bind the three teenager girls working behind the counter. They set fire to the shop. They disappear.

Loosely based on the 1991 Yogurt Shop Murders in Austin, Texas, See How Small explores a community’s reactions to the brutal and seemingly random murder of these three girls. It is told through the perspectives of the community’s survivors, witnesses, suspects, and yes, the deceased girls. Above everything else is the girls’ shared narration as they watch over the community during the five years following their deaths, as they attempt to comfort their town.

The second I finished this book I went online to read other reviews of it. I thought, surely I’ve missed something here? But no, it appears everyone else was just as confused as I was after finishing it.

The first few pages really grab the reader, and I can imagine it grabbed the publisher as well. But then the pace starts to really slow. I thought the dead girls would be more involved in the story, because the blurb mentions that they live on in spirit form and watch over the people who have been left behind. However, they really only appear in a few chapters.

There are too many characters in this book. There were even some sections that I think I could’ve skipped and I still would’ve understood the book, and a reader should never be able to say that about a novel. The book jumped around way too much, and some chapters were just too short. As a result, I couldn’t sympathise for any of the characters because I didn’t really care about them.

I must say that the writing is beautiful and evocative, and Scott Blackwood is a very lyrical writer. His vocabulary and the smooth flow of his sentences painted an enriching and engaging story for the reader. It’s just a shame that the story itself wasn’t fleshed out as well as it could’ve been. The story was too non-linear, and flicked back and forth in time. Some chapters were about the time right after the murders, and sometimes the chapters went forward five years. And even though this is a spoiler, I’m going to say it anyway. There’s no resolution to this novel. None. And who wants that in a crime novel?

My Score: 5/10
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An Abundance of Katherines by John Green

Katherine V thought boys were gross
Katherine X just wanted to be friends
Katherine XVIII dumped him in an e-mail
K-19 broke his heart
When it comes to relationships, Colin Singleton’s type happens to be girls named Katherine. And when it comes to girls named Katherine, Colin is always getting dumped. Nineteen times, to be exact.

On a road trip miles from home, this anagram-happy, washed-up child prodigy has ten thousand dollars in his pocket, a bloodthirsty feral hog on his trail, and an overweight, Judge Judy-loving best friend riding shotgun–but no Katherines. Colin is on a mission to prove The Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability, which he hopes will predict the future of any relationship, avenge Dumpees everywhere, and finally win him the girl. Love, friendship, and a dead Austro-Hungarian archduke add up to surprising and heart-changing conclusions in this ingeniously layered comic novel about reinventing oneself.

I really struggled with this one. It was kind of a snoozefest. A well-written snoozefest. But let me start with some positives. All of the characters seem to suffer some kind of emotional loss, which is hard for an author to write. John Green manages to write this well and with a lot of literary subtly. The chapters are short, the novel is short, and there is a fair bit of humour in the story to break up the mundane lives of the characters. Also, there’s a certain level of maths mentioned in this book, and it all seemed legit. And this is surprising, since it was all equations and formulas. It sounded like it worked perfectly, so kudos to John Green for that.

But there were many, many negatives. Firstly, the three books I’ve read so far of John Green’s (The Fault in our Stars and Looking for Alaska) ALL seem to have characters that are emotionally lost in life. It’s getting kind of boring, and this story really dragged. Colin and Hussan were supposed to go on a road trip, but the entire story is about their first stop. That’s not really a road trip. Also, the characters aren’t really relatable, and I found them quite boring. Lindsey is unrealistic, and so is the social dynamic between Colin and Hussan. The pace of this novel is too slow and the reader will constantly wonder where the novel is going.

I only recommend this novel to avid John Green fans.

My Score: 5/10
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