JESS JUST READS

A BOOK REVIEW BLOG

The Book of Lost and Found by Lucy Foley

HERTFORDSHIRE, 1928
The paths of Tom and Alice collide against a haze of youthful, carefree exuberance. There’s champagne and excitement, but above all there’s the beginning of a love story that finds its feet by a lake one silvery moonlit evening.

PARIS, 1939
Alice is living in the city of light, but the pain of the last decade has already left its mark. Against the shadow that sweeps across Europe, she and Thomas Stafford – now a world famous artist – meet once more…

LONDON, 1986
Bestowed with an old charcoal portrait from her grandmother, Kate Darling can’t possibly imagine the secrets that have been lost to time. Kate’s journey takes her to Corsica, Paris and beyond, and as time melts away she is catapulted into the heart of a love story as epic as it is life changing…

I was reluctant to start this book because I really dislike the cover – it doesn’t scream LITERARY FICTION to me. But everyone else seemed to like the cover, so I’ll just move right along.

The first 100 pages are slow and hard to understand. There’s two different time periods, but for the same characters. And then there’s another time period more in the future, featuring completely different characters. It’s not until you get one third of the way through the story before you realise how the storylines connect. But, it’s worth it.

Lucy Foley captures Kate’s curiosity well. She wants to find out what happened to her maternal grandmother, but isn’t unrealistically too eager about it. And in this circumstance, her behaviour is believable. Her relationship with Thomas Stafford and his son is fleeting and polite, and her brief fling with his son is unresolved. I liked that. It makes the reader fill in the gaps left deliberately by Lucy Foley, and the reader knows that relationship never would’ve lasted anyway. It gives the relationship immortality and youth, and it gives the reader room for reverence.

I recommend this book to literary lovers – the writing is poignant, flowing, and descriptively imaginative.

My Score: 8/10
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Single, Carefree, Mellow by Katherine Heiny

Maya is in love with both her boyfriend and her boss. Sadie’s lover calls her as he drives to meet his wife at marriage counseling. Gwen pines for her roommate, a man who will hold her hand but then tells her that her palm is sweaty. And Sasha agrees to have a drink with her married lover’s wife and then immediately regrets it. These are the women of Single, Carefree, Mellow, and in these eleven sublime stories they are grappling with unwelcome houseguests, disastrous birthday parties, needy but loyal friends, and all manner of love, secrets, and betrayal.

In “Cranberry Relish” Josie’s ex—a man she met on Facebook—has a new girlfriend he found on Twitter. In “Blue Heron Bridge” Nina is more worried that the Presbyterian minister living in her garage will hear her kids swearing than about his finding out that she’s sleeping with her running partner. And in “The Rhett Butlers” a teenager loses her virginity to her history teacher and then outgrows him.

Single, Carefree, Mellow is a collection of short stories about love, deceit, and betrayal. In fact, every short story (except for one) involves a couple where the female in the relationship is having an affair. And it’s usually introduced in the opening sentence. One particular cheater is the main character in three of the short stories. That’s a lot of betrayal for one book. I didn’t actually realise this before reading it, but then got to about the third or fourth short story and started to notice a trend.

And coincidentally, the one short story I didn’t like was the one where there was no affair. I’m going to assume it’s because without the cheating and scheming that I had grown accustomed to reading from the other stories, I found this particular short story a little boring. Even though it was about this mother’s struggling need to make her son’s birthday party a success, despite the trivial scenario, it dragged on and was quite unnecessarily detailed and started to bore me.

Katherine Heiny is a skilled short story writer – she opens her stories with a reflective, but morally-challenging paragraph that draws the reader in. And then she finishes her story with enough of a conclusion that the reader is satisfied, but they’re still hoping that character turns up in a later story. It was lovely that Maya’s story returned in two other stories – it helped me follow her story through.

Katherine Heiny’s writing style is quite reflective and the characters are unapologetically flawed. I enjoyed reading them and recommend this to fiction and romance readers, even you don’t normally read short stories.

My Score: 8/10
Buy at BOOKTOPIA or BOOKWORLD

Half the World (Shattered Sea #2) by Joe Abercrombie

Sometimes a girl is touched by Mother War.
Thorn is such a girl. Desperate to avenge her dead father, she lives to fight. But she has been named a murderer by the very man who trained her to kill.

Sometimes a woman becomes a warrior.
She finds herself caught up in the schemes of Father Yarvi, Gettland’s deeply cunning minister. Crossing half the world to find allies against the ruthless High King, she learns harsh lessons of blood and deceit.

Sometimes a warrior becomes a weapon.
Beside her on the journey is Brand, a young warrior who hates to kill, a failure in his eyes and hers, but with one chance at redemption.

And weapons are made for one purpose.
Will Thorn forever be a pawn in the hands of the powerful, or can she carve her own path?

Half the World is more interesting and less cliché than the first book, Half a King. This book isn’t told from Yarvi’s point of view anymore. Although Yarvi is in the book, the main character (Thorn) is female, which I feel is rare in fantasy fiction, and she’s a badass son of a *****. She has some witty lines, come backs, and she’s confident. Thorn matures and strengthens her skills over the course of this novel, and Joe Abercrombie has written that gradual growth effectively. At times, she’s weak, and at other times, she’s strong. This sounds like a funny thing to comment on, but it’s easy for a writer to put a strong female character in a novel who doesn’t have any weaknesses. And that’s not believable. Thorn sometimes says this she shouldn’t and sometimes she’s overconfident. At times, this sets her back, believably so.

And this is what’s great about the Shattered Sea novels – all of the characters are flawed and sometimes deformed. Yarvi is half a king, and the other main character, Brand, is the opposite of Thorn. He doubts himself and he’s not a warrior. Over the course of the novel, he develops feelings for Thorn, and at first I thought this a little strange. I didn’t sense an attraction there in the first third of the novel. And then at the end of the novel when they…you know…I seemed a little jarred from it. It didn’t seem organic to have a sex scene between them in this novel.

This book felt like a lot of travel/journey to me, and although a lot of unexpected events occurred, it definitely felt like the novel was in place just to set things up to happen in the final novel, Half a War (due out in August 2015). I think Half the World, which is 500 pages, could’ve been trimmed down a bit. It definitely jumps between the characters a little too often.

I would recommend this to fiction and fantasy lovers, but make sure you read the first in the trilogy.

My Score: 8/10
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Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling

Harry Potter is lucky to reach the age of thirteen, since he has already survived the murderous attacks of the feared Dark Lord on more than one occasion. But his hopes for a quiet term concentrating on Quidditch are dashed when a maniacal mass-murderer escapes from Azkaban, pursued by the soul-sucking Dementors who guard the prison. It’s assumed that Hogwarts is the safest place for Harry to be. But is it a coincidence that he can feel eyes watching him in the dark, and should he be taking Professor Trelawney’s ghoulish predictions seriously?

It’s hard to review these books and find different things to say about each one – it’s too easy to talk about plot instead of writing style.

This story is definitely the most intriguing so far because – unlike the first two – Voldemort doesn’t feature in the book. Sure, Voldemort is mentioned in the book and the events directly RELATE to Voldemort, but he doesn’t actually appear in the book. And this novel is where we finally get some background information about Harry’s parents and their murder.

The twist at the end with Sirius Black and Peter Pettigrew is a real shock for first-time readers, and it’s nice that Harry finds a family member in this novel (even if it’s only short-lived). The time turner is a nice plot device that J.K. Rowling used, and it really helped to tie in all of the questions/mysteries/confusions at the end of the book.

There were a few things about this third instalment that I disagreed with. Firstly, Harry seems to conveniently overhear all of these important conversations. He just HAPPENS to be in the right place at the right time, almost every time. And I know that sometimes he’s under his invisibility cloak, but these people seem to have these important conversations in easily accessible locations. For example, Harry, Hermione, and Ron go for Butterbeer at Hogsmeade and the teachers are at the next table talking about how Sirius Black is Harry’s Godfather. That seems a little too easy.

In the later novels, Harry gets visibly annoyed at Dumbledore because he knows SO MUCH but really doesn’t help Harry or share information with Harry as often as he could. Readers get the first inclination of that in this novel. At the end of the novel, Dumbledore hints to Hermione that she can use the Time Turner for good, but if they hadn’t of done it, or if Harry and Hermione were unconscious from the attack, would Dumbledore have done it himself? Or left it for the others still? Dumbledore seems all-knowing all the time, but doesn’t seem to actually help Harry that often.

My Score: 8/10
Buy HERE

The Walls Around Us by Nova Ren Suma

The Walls Around Us is a ghostly story of suspense told in two voices—one still living and one long dead. On the outside, there’s Violet, an eighteen-year-old dancer days away from the life of her dreams when something threatens to expose the shocking truth of her achievement. On the inside, within the walls of a girls’ juvenile detention center, there’s Amber, locked up for so long she can’t imagine freedom. Tying these two worlds together is Orianna, who holds the key to unlocking all the girls’ darkest mysteries.

We hear Amber’s story and Violet’s, and through them Orianna’s, first from one angle, then from another, until gradually we begin to get the whole picture—which is not necessarily the one that either Amber or Violet wants us to see.

This novel is haunting and extremely well-written. For a young adult novel, it’s provoking and unique and engaging, and Nova has done an exceptional job at crafting this story. The cover art is amazing – the colours really invite the reader in. Although, that being said, the cover art doesn’t actually give any indication on what the book is about and may put off some readers. The storyline is different, and all of the different POVs weave together towards the end to give the reader an ‘Ahhh’ moment (or many moments). There are multiple twists that the reader is blindsided by, and when the reader thinks they know what’s happened or how the three characters are connected, something happens and they doubt their reading of the book.

The best part about this novel is definitely the writing style. Nova’s writing is fluid and believable. The premise is interesting, and I feel that a novel set in a female juvenile detention centre (especially for the young adult genre) hasn’t really been done before. Well done to Nova for finding the gap in the YA market and filling it. The chapters are a good length, and they end on such a suspenseful sentence each time. I kept wanting to take a break after reading a chapter, but found myself turning the page until I’d read the whole story.

Now I have to talk about the negatives. Sometimes the storylines seem a little scattered, and the opening few pages of the novel make it seem a little dystopian. It took a couple of pages before I fully comprehended what was happening. Also, let’s not mention how CONFUSING the ending is. Was anyone else confused? I had to reread it a few times to attempt to understand it. It’s one of those endings where you think you understand it, but deep down you know you’re probably wrong. Lastly, the twist involving the murder of the two girls behind the theatre is a little predictable, and I think Nova gave away too much information about that earlier in the novel.

I’d recommend this novel for any reader, even if you don’t usually read young adult. I received an ecopy of this novel from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

My Score: 8/10