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

In the Skin of a Monster by Kathryn Barker

What if your identical twin sister was a murderer? Does that make you a monster too? A profound, intense, heartbreaking fantasy that tackles issues of fate versus free will, and whether you can ever truly know someone.

Caught in a dreamscape, mistaken for a killer … will Alice find a way home?

Three years ago, Alice’s identical twin sister took a gun to school and killed seven innocent kids; now Alice wears the same face as a monster. She’s struggling with her identity, and with life in the small Australian town where everyone was touched by the tragedy. Just as Alice thinks things can’t get much worse, she encounters her sister on a deserted highway. But all is not what it seems, and Alice soon discovers that she has stepped into a different reality, a dream world, where she’s trapped with the nightmares of everyone in the community. Here Alice is forced to confront the true impact of everything that happened the day her twin sister took a gun to school … and to reveal her own secret to the boy who hates her most.

I bought this book because of the cover first, blurb second. The cover is inviting, intriguing, interesting, and really stands out in a bookstore. Not only does this book appeal to a young adult and adult audience, but the cover also looks like the cover of a horror novel. The book gives you that dreaded uneasy feeling like when you’re watching a horror movie and you don’t know which characters are going to live and which ones are going to meet an awful end.

The premise of this story is fantastic. Three years earlier, Alice’s twin sister murdered seven children at their school. Even after you’ve completed In the Skin of a Monster, you never really understand why she did it. You never really understand her character, but that’s because this isn’t her story. This novel is not about Alice’s sister. This novel is about Alice, and her perception of her sister and her memory of her sister.

Alice is accustomed to abuse from people in their town. She lives in a small town with a low population, and everybody blames her for the massacre that her sister caused. Mostly because she looks exactly like the murderer, but also because they need someone to blame, and that’s Alice. And then Alice is walking along the highway and she sees her sister’s ghost. She leans forward and touches her, and they switch. Alice is thrust into an alternate dimension where she’s faced with the nightmares of every single person in their town, and Alice’s twin sister (well, an alternate version of her) is now in the real world, where she murdered seven innocent people.

I got quite confused when reading this novel. The alternate dimensions weren’t what I was expecting. After reading the blurb, I thought this book would be about Alice trying to live her life after her sister murders seven children and then kills herself. But it wasn’t. And then when Alice switched with her sister, I thought this novel might be about her sister living in Alice’s body, walking around in the small town, potentially planning another killing. But it wasn’t. This novel is about Alice coming to understand her sister’s actions. This novel is about Alice understanding how she feels about her sister and about the final weeks leading up to the massacre.

This novel is classed as young adult, but it also appeals to an adult market. It’s a disturbing novel, and there are many questions left unanswered after completing it. It’s originality is fantastic. The writing is fantastic. It’s very creepy and very disturbing, which is fantastic. Go into it with an open mind, and you’ll enjoy the read.

My Score: 8/10

Not My Father’s Son: A Family Memoir by Alan Cumming

A beloved star of stage, television, and film, Alan Cumming is a successful artist whose diversity and fearlessness is unparalleled. His success masks a painful childhood growing up under the heavy rule of an emotionally and physically abusive father—a relationship that tormented him long into adulthood.

With ribald humor, wit, and incredible insight, Alan seamlessly moves back and forth in time, integrating stories from his childhood in Scotland and his experiences today as a film, television, and theater star. At times suspenseful, deeply moving, and wickedly funny, Not My Father’s Son will make readers laugh even as it breaks their hearts.

This is a very unique memoir because it is anchored by Alan’s father. This memoir is not about his fame or his filmography or his aspirations. This memoir is about how Alan’s father shaped who he became as an adult, and how his father greatly affected him throughout his entire life. Usually, celebrity memoirs are very much ‘this is what I did when I was 6, and this is what I did when I was 13, and when I was 17, this happened, etc etc’, and although it’s fascinating if you’re a fan, there’s no core theme. There’s no anchor. There’s no angle.The anchor/angle in Alan Cumming’s memoir is his physically and mentally abusive father.

There seem to be a few parallel storylines in this memoir. Alan uses flashbacks to tell stories about how his father would physically abuse him and torment him and make him feel worthless and useless. Alan’s father seems psychotic and perhaps mentally ill. These flashbacks are heartbreaking to read, but they also make you respect Alan Cumming even more than you already did, because he grew up and he worked really hard to understand his childhood and understand his non-existent relationship with his father.

The other storyline in the book is Alan in around 2010, when he was asked to be on the show Who do you think you are? Alan agrees, and this opens up a family mystery involving his grandfather, who died under suspicious circumstances in the early 1950s. Throughout the memoir, Alan, with the help of the show, finds out what happened to his grandfather almost 50 years earlier.

Another part of Alan’s life that is explored in this memoir is his relationship with his father in the present (around 2010-2011, when Alan started writing the memoir). His father continues to mentally torment Alan, almost unknowingly. Alan finds out that his father is not his real father, and that his mother had an affair. This parallels the flashback chapters where Alan talks about all the affairs his father had while his parents were still married.

Alan’s childhood seemed tragic. Despite having a loving relationship with his mother and his brother, he lived in fear because of his father’s abuse. He was made to feel useless and his father always set him impossible tasks and then yelled at him when he couldn’t complete them. Alan’s traumatic childhood greatly affected him later in life, but as the reader can sense upon completing the memoir, Alan does the best he can to live his life without the shadow of his father looming over him.

This is a great memoir, and readers who don’t usually read non-fiction will love it. I also recommend this memoir to people who are a fan of Alan Cumming. Although he doesn’t mention his acting and his movie experiences in this memoir as much as I would’ve wanted, it is still interesting reading about this other side to him that I assume very few people in his life were aware of.

My Score: 8/10

Spark by Rachael Craw

Evie doesn’t have a choice.

One day she’s an ordinary seventeen year old, grieving for her mother. The next, she’s a Shield, the result of a decades-old experiment gone wrong, bound by DNA to defend her best friend from an unknown killer.

The threat could come at home, at school, anywhere. All Evie knows is that it will be a fight to the death.

And then there’s Jamie. irresistible. off-limits.

Firstly, this cover is amazing. The colours and the design work really well together, and it’s quite a unique book cover for a young adult/fantasy novel. And I love the book even more for that.

The premise of this novel is immediately engaging. Evie is trying to deal with the death of her mother AND her DNA-bound responsibility to save Kitty, who happens to be her best friend. She develops enhanced abilities that help her defend Kitty. A few examples of this are: her hearing improves, she can see inside someone’s mind and replay their memories, and she can heal. She’s a strong character and she’s determined and bold and compassionate and very likeable.

The concept behind the story was interesting. Because of DNA manipulation from earlier generations, Evie ‘sparked’ and became a shield to Kitty, who is being hunted by a ‘Stray’, aka someone who was also a victim of the DNA manipulation and is destined to murder. I feel like this kind of storyline hasn’t been done yet in a YA setting. And YES, this novel is probably considered to be a fantasy/science fiction novel BEFORE being considered a YA novel, but let’s face it, it’s half-half. And I definitely haven’t yet read a YA novel with any kind of similar premise.

That being said, it took about 50 pages for me to get into the storyline, mostly because I was confused as hell and I really couldn’t work out the DNA thing or the Spark thing or the anything, really. Maybe there was too much description too early on? Or maybe there was one tiny sentence I missed and therefore it took a lot longer for me to understand anything? Either way, it took some time for me to engage with the story, but when I did I couldn’t stop reading the novel and now I must get the next novel in the series, Stray (which also has a stunning cover, by the way. My respect goes to the designer who made these covers).

The romance between Evie and Jamie is well-developed. Jamie is both protective and loving, and the relationship in this novel doesn’t overpower the main storyline. This book is very plot-driven, but the budding relationship between Evie and James works well to provide readers with a momentary break from the fast-paced plot.

I recommend this book to YA and fantasy readers. Spark is a mix of both genres, and once you grasp the concept behind the series, you’ll devour it in one sitting.

My Score: 8/10