JESS JUST READS

A BOOK REVIEW BLOG

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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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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The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

First published in 1993, The Virgin Suicides announced the arrival of a major new American novelist. In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters — beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boys–commit suicide one by one over the course of a single year. As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece together the mystery of the family’s fatal melancholy, in this hypnotic and unforgettable novel of adolescent love, disquiet, and death. Jeffrey Eugenides evokes the emotions of youth with haunting sensitivity and dark humor and creates a coming-of-age story unlike any of our time. Adapted into a critically acclaimed film by Sofia Coppola, The Virgin Suicides is a modern classic, a lyrical and timeless tale of sex and suicide that transforms and mythologizes suburban middle-American life.

I finally found the time to reread this amazing book! And if you’re reading this review but haven’t read the book, hurry up and buy it. It’s beautifully written and incredibly insightful. I still can’t believe it’s been almost 25 years since it was first published. Jeffrey Eugenides understood school-aged children even back then.

This book doesn’t say more than it does say. You really have to read between the lines to understand the meaning of this story. It emphasises to the reader that suicide – and more specifically suicide pacts – don’t make sense. They affect many people, not just those involved, and the mental spiral into depression can be clear from the outside, if you’re close enough to see it. The boys in the story watched the girls very closely, and they note the restricted nature of the Lisbon mother. And the deterioration of the Lisbon house highlights how the Lisbon girls are mentally deteriorating themselves.

This book is told from the POV of a group of boys who live across the street from the Lisbon girls. All the girls kill themselves within the same year, and these boys are transfixed by the girls. The greatest stylistic element to this story is that you never fully understand the girls. You never know what they’re thinking or feeling – you only get glimpses of their world from notes or messages that they leave for other people.

The boys ask other people about their experiences with the girls, so everything feels very distanced. And because of that, you still don’t understand why the girls killed themselves. You can sit there and reread the book, but Eugenides has left out so much about the girls that they remain mysterious. And their youth transcends time until the boys are all much older and they’re still obsessing about the girls. They’re still trying to understand why the girls reached out to the boys and what they thought, and yet the reader knows that those boys will never find that out.

This book is brilliant. I recommend it to everyone.

My Score: 10/10
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The Paper Magician by Charlie N. Holmberg

Ceony Twill arrives at the cottage of Magician Emery Thane with a broken heart. Having graduated at the top of her class from the Tagis Praff School for the Magically Inclined, Ceony is assigned an apprenticeship in paper magic despite her dreams of bespelling metal. And once she’s bonded to paper, that will be her only magic… forever.

Yet the spells Ceony learns under the strange yet kind Thane turn out to be more marvelous than she could have ever imagined — animating paper creatures, bringing stories to life via ghostly images, even reading fortunes. But as she discovers these wonders, Ceony also learns of the extraordinary dangers of forbidden magic.

An Excisioner — a practitioner of dark, flesh magic — invades the cottage and rips Thane’s heart from his chest. To save her teacher’s life, Ceony must face the evil magician and embark on an unbelievable adventure that will take her into the chambers of Thane’s still-beating heart—and reveal the very soul of the man.

First of all, the cover is amazing. However, I still don’t quite know what to think of this novel. I liked the idea and I liked the magic/folding, but I don’t think the development of the story was quite what it could have been.

Let’s start off with what the positives of the novel. Ceony is insightful and mature (at most points in the novel), and the romance in the novel is very subtle. It’s not shoved down your throat like a lot of other YA/Fantasy novels. Also, the novel is set in a location that seems very excluded from the rest of the world. This is great, and it makes the protagonist seem isolated and lost. The magic in the novel is unique and interesting and the flashbacks about Magician Thane’s earlier life really add depth to his character.

About halfway through the novel, the main character becomes trapped inside Thane’s heart. I’ll admit, this is a little strange. At first I thought I’d just roll with it, but the idea of her walking through the chambers of his heart, trying to get out, is kind of creepy. And it doesn’t really make sense in relation to the rest of the novel.

I mentioned above that the romance in the novel is subtle, but there are some flaws to it. When Magician Thane first came into the story, I imagined a Dumbledore-ish man. Maybe it’s because of the magician thing, but then I realised he’s actually in his thirties and the main character (who is early twenties) falls in love with him? This didn’t seem real. She didn’t get to spend much actual, face to face time to Magician Thane, and falls in love with him too quickly. Oh and I just can’t get past one part in the novel. When Magician Thane’s heart is ripped out of his chest, Ceony is distraught, and she yells out “You’re too nice to die!”

I think I’ll leave this review at that.

I’d recommend this book to YA lovers, not fantasy lovers. This is book #1 in The Paper Magician Trilogy.

My Score: 7/10
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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
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