JESS JUST READS

A BOOK REVIEW BLOG

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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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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Leaving Time by Jodi Picoult

For more than a decade, Jenna Metcalf has never stopped thinking about her mother, Alice, who mysteriously disappeared in the wake of a tragic accident. Refusing to believe that she would be abandoned as a young child, Jenna searches for her mother regularly online and pores over the pages of Alice’s old journals. A scientist who studied grief among elephants, Alice wrote mostly of her research among the animals she loved, yet Jenna hopes the entries will provide a clue to her mother’s whereabouts.

Desperate to find the truth, Jenna enlists two unlikely allies in her quest. The first is Serenity Jones, a psychic who rose to fame finding missing persons—only to later doubt her gifts. The second is Virgil Stanhope, a jaded private detective who originally investigated Alice’s case along with the strange, possibly linked death of one of her colleagues. As the three work together to uncover what happened to Alice, they realize that in asking hard questions, they’ll have to face even harder answers.

Holy Jesus. I finished reading this book about ten minutes ago and am furiously writing this review in an attempt to come to terms with it. It’s amazing, evocative, emotional, and just pure genius.

I’ll be honest. Five years ago, I boycotted Jodi Picoult, because I’d read about ten of her books and to me, they all seemed the same. The same, overdramatic storylines with differing points of view and overly emotional, climactic endings. Plus, I’d started studying literature at university and my time was taken up reading Raymond Carver and Ernest Hemingway.

But, when everyone on Twitter can’t stop bragging about how amazing her latest book is, it’s time to renege on your boycott and pick up Leaving Time. And I’m so glad I did. The twist at the end of the book is so left field but amazing, and you feel so stupid that you didn’t see it. And the twist was so subtly revealed, I was like:

It puts the whole book into perspective, and it highlights that Jodi Picoult is such an amazingly talented writer.

Jodi Picoult, like all of her other works, has undergone a lengthy amount of research for this book. Elephants are a major metaphor in the piece, and the setting is an elephant sanctuary. Each tangent about an elephant is relevant to the story and to the character, and Jodi Picoult uses this to develop characterisation and societal relations in the piece.

I do think that Jenna’s ‘age’ is a little misguided. At the start of the novel, she seems a little immature (which makes sense, because she’s 13), but then later in the novel, she seemed to have matured too fast. She comes across as someone who is in their late teens, and although the events in the book would cause her to grow up and mature quite quickly, the change seems a little distracting.

I cannot recommend this book to you enough. It’s amazing, and prepare yourself for that twist at the end. I’m in a comatose state at the moment because I can’t deal with the ending.

My Score: 9/10
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Wild Things by Brigid Delaney

St Anton’s university college is a cradle for privileged young men and women. With its Elysian lush green lawns and buildings of golden sandstone, it seems like a place where nothing bad could ever happen. One weekend, members of the college cricket team go to the mountains for a wild weekend away. Things spiral rapidly out of control, and a young Malaysian student they dragged along with them as part of a cruel prank goes missing. When the boy is found by some bushwalkers on a rock ledge, barely clinging to life, most people think it’s because of a fall, but the St Anton’s men know better. The stress of keeping their collective secret however becomes harder and harder to bear, and even the heavy wrought-iron fences of the college can’t keep out reality… Dark, dangerous, bloody and visceral, this is a story of power, prestige and the pack mentality that forms the underbelly of campus life at a prestigious university. With overtones of The Secret History meets Brett Easton Ellis, this is the debut of a thrilling new Australian writer.

There’s something about a campus novel that just sucks me right in (I should note that I don’t actually know if ‘campus novel’ is the right name for a novel set within a university, but I’m just going to roll with it). I love that the setting of campus novels are reduced and confined. The students all live on university grounds and the story rarely strays from that. It makes the book seem intimate. If you, like me, have a slight obsession with campus novels, you should really pick up The Secret History by Donna Tartt. Actually, if you love campus novels, that should’ve been the first novel you picked up!

Wild Things builds suspense and tension really well. When the cricket team go to the mountains for a weekend away, it doesn’t go well, and the way that each of these characters try and deal with that really shows their character. One character turns to religion, and another turns to alcohol and girls. Brigid has done well to capture the personality of these boys and project them onto the page with authenticity and believability. This book is set in a university where problems are covered up and money can buy you out of those problems. Bullying occurs almost every second, and everyone turns a blind eye. Brigid’s writing is detailed and emotive, and allows the reader to really understand the characters – all of them.

Earlier in the year, I went to a public lecture where Brigid discussed her difficulties when writing this book, and it really helped me better understand the story. Originally, the young Malaysian student who goes missing was of a different nationality, but it didn’t come across as believable and Brigid had to change it. Brigid also talked about how she had to make all of the boys unique from each other because there were a lot of characters in all of the scenes and she needed them to stand out. And I think she did this really well.

Okay, so I must note a negative. Brigid keeps some things a secret for most of the novel. For the most part, we don’t know what happened to the missing student in the mountains. But throughout the novel, little details are revealed about what happened. I think Brigid revealed too much, because at the end of the novel, when it’s described what happened, it’s pretty much what we’ve already been told, so there’s nothing to shock the reader.

My Score: 8/10
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