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mermaidsirennikita · 7 years

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September 2017 Book Roundup

Undoubtedly, I read two standout books this September: Girls Made of Snow and Glass by Melissa Bashardoust, a sometimes-macabre retelling of Snow White (with a feminist spin) and Mari Lu’s Warcross, the story of a girl, a tech mogul, and a virtual reality game that can make or break your future. On to October--I’m going to try to read as much spooky stuff as possible.

This Is Not The End by Chandler Baker. 3/5. In the near future, a substance called “lifeblood” has made it possible for people to be resurrected even years after death, revitalized and fully healed. Laws restrict how many “resurrections” people are allowed and when they can resurrect someone--you can only resurrect one person, and you can only perform the resurrection on your eighteenth birthday. Following a terrible car accident, Lake has lost her best friend Penny and her beloved boyfriend Will. Not only is she--mere weeks from her eighteenth birthday--torn between which to resurrect; she also has already promised her resurrection to another person. This was a very quick read for me, and I found it compelling and at times moving. So many different issues are tackled--are resurrections ethical? Should people be held to promises they made--and in Lake’s case were pressured into--years ago? Hell, Baker even goes after the ethical arguments surrounding assisted suicide and the disabled. The problem is that while I understood the logic of why only one resurrection is allowed per person (population control) I couldn’t understand why someone could only have a resurrection done on their eighteenth birthday. Sure, I see why only legal adults can request resurrections, but why is the request time such a short window? More concerning was the fact that there is a romance in this. Yes, a romance between Lake--a girl who just lost the boyfriend who’d been her best friend before they dated, a guy she fantasized about marrying someday--and some other guy... weeks after said boyfriend died. I can understand having sex with someone while grieving, but this felt more like we were supposed to see Lake beginning to fall for someone else. I’m not saying that can’t happen, but it distracted from Lake’s story and the themes surrounding it.

Dress Codes for Small Towns by Courtney C. Stevens. 2/5. Billie is a preacher’s daughter in a small Kentucky town. She and her best friends--collectively known as the Hexagon--have been tightly-knit for years. But everything changes when Billie finds that Janie Lee and Woods, two of those friends, have feelings for each other. And Billie might just have feelings for both of them. “Dress Codes” is about figuring out gender and sexuality in a John Hughes sort of lens. Stevens does have a really distinct voice, and some turns of phrase were beautiful--while others were, in my opinion, a bit overwrought. A bit too forced. Billie and her friends just didn’t think or speak in a way that seemed recognizable to me as teenager-y. And while I was touched by the story, in a sense--it was also quite boring. I wish I’d loved this, but I just didn’t. I think many people would, it’s just not my cup of tea.

Girls Made of Snow and Glass by Melissa Bashardoust. 5/5. This retelling of Snow White takes on the dual perspectives of Nina, the “wicked stepmother” and Lynet, the cossetted princess. Nina’s side of the story takes place from past to present, telling the story of a girl with a heart of glass--assured by her father, the alchemist that replaced Nina’s rotting heart to save her life, that she is incapable of love and being loved. Lynet is her stepdaughter, the spitting image of her mother, protected by her father, and made of literal snow. Fate has pitted these two women against one another, despite their love for each other. Time will tell if they will fulfill their destinies. Pitched as a feminist fairy tale retelling, this book will disappoint you if you’re looking for knife-wielding assassins and monologues about how women are meant to rule. I love that it didn’t have any of that. This story is made of subtler stuff, its beautiful, sad prose focusing on the relationship between Nina and Lynet, and how they’ve not only been forced into roles they don’t want to play by men--they’ve been turned into the antagonists in each other’s stories... by men. Poetic and beautiful and not without a dash of romance--one of them featuring wlw at that--this is a must-read if you love gently dark fairy tales that will hurt your heart. (Even if it’s made of glass.)

Genuine Fraud by E. Lockhart. 2/5. I’ll be honest, I skimmed this for the most part. As someone who hasn’t seen or read The Talented Mr. Ripley, I’m told that this is basically a gender-flipped version of that, following teen criminal Jule... or is she??? The thing is that this is a story told in reverse-chronological order, and even though I figured out the twist very early on, how we got there was so confusing that I didn’t even want to figure it out.

Love Minus Eighty by Will McIntosh. 4/5. In the near future, beautiful women who’ve died young are cryogenically frozen and temporarily “awoken” for five minute sessions for men who want to talk to them--typically, men who can afford the $9,000/5 minutes fee that comes with these “dates”. If chosen to be the brides of these men, these “bridecicles” are revived permanently--making them desperate to do whatever they can to be chosen. This story focuses on three people: Mira, a bridecicle who’s been frozen for decades and longs for her lover, Jeanette; Rob, a young man who falls in love with bridecicle Winter after accidentally killing her; and Veronika, a dating coach who can’t seem to find love in this connected world. This is a sad, occasionally funny story about the perils of a world in which we’re so connected through technology that actual human technology is difficult to find. It’s not super unique in that respect, but the bridecicle concept is both fascinating and grotesque. I couldn’t put it down. With that being said, the romances in the book were a bit lackluster for me, and I at times wasn’t sure about how Veronika’s perspective connected into things. Still a really good, thought-provoking read.

They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera. 2/5. Thanks to a service called Death-Cast, everyone is given 24 hours (or so) notice on the day of their death. Teenagers Mateo and Rufus have just found out that they are going to die, and though strangers, meet up through and app called Last Friend and decide to live out their last day together. Just... I don’t think Adam Silvera and I are going to be friends, y’all. First off, this world is pretty much ours aside from the weird death service, and there was really no explanation as to why everyone just took this service at face value. Sorry, I really feel like we’d fight that. Also, Rufus’s dialogue in particular was cringe as fuck. It was so uneven--he’d use slang and I got the impression that Silvera was going for “impoverished gang kid talk” with him but then he’d have a whole paragraph of dialogue in a manner totally inconsistent with “I’m in mad love with this dude” or whatever. And there were so many other points of view when Rufus and Mateo’s were the only ones that really mattered. Like, points for diversity, but nah on everything else.

Warcross by Marie Lu. 5/5. Hacker and bounty hunter Emika Chen is, like everyone else on Earth, a fan of the virtual reality game Warcross. As poor as she is, she hacks into the game--and in a desperate moment, steals an item that would fetch the money she needs on resale, using a glitch to do so. This catches the attention of Hideo Tanaka, Warcross’s billionaire creator, who flies her to Tokyo and offers her a job (that pays 10 mill, by the way): she needs to enter the Warcross Tournament--a major event--as a player and secretly act as his bounty hunter, searching for the unknown--and dangerous--Zero, a mystery to even Hideo. So this is hard to describe but damn is it good. Emi is a character who has an unlikely resume but it actually seems plausible in the context of her life and her world. Same goes for Hideo, who is probably one of my favorite characters to come out of YA this year. The stakes build as the novel does--and as Emi grows close to Hideo, which, like, obviously she was but fuckyeahI’mintoit. It’s super fast-paced, entertaining YA and I honestly enjoyed it more than Lu’s Young Elites series, which I loved in the beginning but was ultimately disappointed in. So. Hoping the rest of the series lives up to this book!

One Dark Throne by Kendare Blake. 4/5. The second in what is now a four-book series, One Dark Throne continues the story of triplet queens Mirabella, Katharine, and Arsinoe. Where Mirabella was once the clear frontrunner to be the next crowned queen, recent events have revealed that it could be anyone’s game--though the fact remains that the winner must kill her sisters. Arsinoe hides her true gift from almost everyone, pretending to be a naturalist still; Mirabella deals with having her world rocked, and questions her relationships with her sisters; and Katharine, called the “Undead Queen” grows increasingly unstable--and powerful--after her near-death experience. I can’t say that One Dark Throne was quite as compelling as Three Dark Crowns, as it was a very talky book. Furthermore, Mirabella, one of my favorites of the first book, was a shadow of her former self. Arsinoe is clearly poised as the protagonist of the sisters, but... I don’t dislike her, but I don’t find her compelling either, and I don’t care much for her friends Jules and Joseph either. They’re so typically good. Katharine is worth reading the whole book for--you never know if she’s mad or aware of some truth nobody else has caught onto. Furthermore, she has the best romance in the book--taking the form of her fraught relationship with Pietyr, a boy she loves and hates. While I still love the concept and the world and Katharine and all the poisoners really, and this was a good book, I think everyone else needs to get on my girl’s level.

There Is Someone Inside Your House by Stephanie Perkins. 3/5. New to the tiny town of Osborne, Nebraska--and hiding from a dark past--Makani lives with her grandmother, is trying to ingratiate herself her new friends, and pines for school outsider Ollie. Then kids start getting murdered, in shocking ways. As Makani struggles to avoid being next, she grows increasingly afraid of her secret being revealed. This book has been compared to Scream, and while there’s sex and blood, Scream it is not. I mean, it’s basically one of Perkins’s romance with some murder thrown in, and it disappointed me because I wanted so badly to be impressed with the genre shift. It was fun, don’t get me wrong, but like... just that. It wasn’t the genre. Shit--I thought that at least the mystery of the killer would be good, but it wasn’t. It kind of shocked me to read the author’s note about Perkins spending six years researching this and workshopping the book, and--not to be mean, but while it was entertaining, that effort did not show.

The Merciless by Danielle Vega. 1/5. Girl goes to new school. Girl makes new friends. New friends suggest performing an exorcism on another friend. And so on. I thought this would be fun gore, and while it was gory, it was... not good. So bad, really. The book was incredibly basic and boring, and took the least interesting turn regarding the exorcism possible. I hated it.

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