REVIEW (well, sort of): Salt to the Sea - Ruta Sepetys

*COURTESY OF NETGALLEY*

I will never get tired of reading historical fiction. Just when you think you've read enough on WWII from all angles, a book like this comes along and nudges you to look even closer to see things your so-called experienced eyes have missed.

Sepetys says that 'stories of strength through struggle' inspire her work, especially since she's the daughter of a refugee. That's what birthed this book - a successor to her Between Shades of Gray; the book that introduced me to this phenomenon that is her. She wants the world to know and remember what layers of debris resulting from the more flamboyant historical fallout, have hidden underneath and I am very much smitten with her for it.

I admit my shameful ignorance of the Wilhelm Gustloff and thank Sepetys for remedying it. But the truth is that that's not what shocked me the most in this book. What truly horrified me was not the sheer scale of the atrocity, but the less flashy, more relatable kinds of horrors, like - 

Or this - 

But I'm jumping ahead of myself. This book follows the lives of a very interesting motley of refugees. And that of one psychopath-in-training,

Initially, I was mightily creeped out by Alfred's POV accounts and dreaded his chapters. I kept questioning its purpose throughout the book and it was only towards the end that it struck me that even he needs a voice. It's not enough psychopaths like him and Hitler roared all they liked on radios and megaphones - we need to know what really went inside their heads where they were held captives so that we can give them our pity.

But back to Joana and Florian and Emilia and the Shoe Poet and the Orphan Boy and Eva and Ingrid. This is where the book triumphs in the story it is trying to tell. When humanity shines through even when all else is lost. 

So even after I've waxed eloquent about this book, I feel like I'd be lying if I won't admit that I didn't love this book to pieces like I prophesied to myself. I had the same problem with BSoG. The endings of both books left me mildly dissatisfied. This pretty much feels like blasphemy, but I'm missing out on the magic Sepetys did with Out of the Easy. Maybe she felt a pressured need to give justice to the characters in BSoG and SttS and not offend in any way, but I sense a restraint in her writing in this book, unlike in OotE. I don't want to sound pretentious - there's a 150% chance I'm wrong - I was just going out on a limb here.

The last paragraph is a personal opinion; you probably won't find it anywhere else. There's a 150% chance you'll love this book to pieces though.

VERDICT: 4 stars

REVIEW: Tell The Wolves I'm Home - Carol Rifka Brunt

This is the second time I’m reading this book. The first time I read it (which I did at lightning speed – like I do for most books – because I don’t have the patience to endure the suspense of the ending), I thought all that the book had going for it was the plot and the characters – which is more than enough for me and which is everything that the blurb advertises.

My most grievous fault.

If you do a basic Google search about this book, you’ll come across numerous posts that have written odes to everything that’s beautiful about this book on the surface. The plot is set in the late 1980s, a time when America was in the grip of homophobia and AIDS was in the headlines all too often. It introduces to us a fourteen-year-old, who finds herself lost after her godfather, confidant, best friend, and uncle, Finn passes away. That’s also when she learns there’s a lot of Finn that she didn’t know about.

That’s not all. There’s Greta – the ace kid in the family – and once upon a time, together they used to be the Elbus girls. Then June learns that her mother – the boring accountant who, together with her accountant husband, orphans their kids during their tax season – has a past that June has trouble wrapping her head around.

And then there’s Toby. And then there’s Toby.

The book explores more issues than I thought it would. Apart from the obvious that you can glean from the blurb, it also delves into the realms of forbidden love and sibling estrangement.  I actually had problems with June. I will not hide my initial disgust when I realized the nature of June’s feelings for her uncle. Nor my annoyance at how flippantly June mentions her newly acquired habit of smoking and occasional drinking. Nor my anger at her decision to accept the invitation to visit an apparent stranger and go places with him.

She does a lot of stupid things. Granted. But that’s also what I liked about the book. It isn’t trying to teach lessons about Stranger Danger or Smoking is Injurious to Health or Falling in Love with Relatives and this is not the book I would recommend as the solution to any of the above. Brunt neither condones nor condemns it – she merely talks about it. That is what struck me – you can’t detect the mature adult author acting as the conscience in the morally-compromised teenage narrator. Because there isn’t. It’s up to you to decide if that’s good or bad.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the imagery. Motifs like wolves, rain, butterflies, Mozart’s Requiem, trains, woods, a beautiful Russian teapot, and negative spaces in paintings show up now and then. I didn’t know that this book was a lot of work and is thus a prime candidate for book club discussions. I didn’t know that you had to read some lines twice and thrice to understand if there was a deeper meaning to what seems on the surface. There are some that you’ll miss if you blink like Finn’s chess set, or the painting Nurse Feeding Sick Man from the Book of Days.

Like I already mentioned, the characters are not whom they seem on the surface. There are layers upon layers on them. You would have peel them off slowly and carefully, to get a look at who they are underneath all of it. And underneath all of it, you'll find that they’re just people, not some characters in a book.

This book is work. But once you get to the end, you'll just remain curled up, hugging it to your chest. 

VERDICT: 5 stars

REVIEW: Rose Under Fire - Elizabeth Wein

Elizabeth Wein is a hero. If the act of merely reading her books is sufficient enough to make me feel like I’m choking on air, I can’t even imagine what’s it like for her to conceive her books in her head and bleed life into the pages with her fingers. Code Name Verity damn near killed me. The companion novel Rose Under Fire killed me. Even though CNV is not a reading prerequisite for RUF, it will help many a haplessly clueless reader ease into unfamiliar territory.  

I completed RUF some time back. At that time, I felt I was in an emotionally compromised state to write a coherent review. Deciding to put some time between the reading and the reviewing is one of my more brilliant ideas. If this book is on your TBR pile as well, you’ll know why eventually.

Anyway, being an Ignorant American Schoolgirl gives me an open ticket to ask brazen questions, and I’d already put my foot in my mouth, so I just went on.

“What is a concentration camp, Fliss?”

Given an opportunity, I have never failed to manage to squeeze in a reminder that I love historical fiction. Consequently, I have greatly taken advantage of fiction under the backdrop of the World Wars and the Holocaust, whether in print or on screen. I thought I knew what concentration camps are. I thought I knew what went on in there. I thought I was better than Rosie.

My mistake.

Rose Justice is an ATA pilot – out of America and in England, chasing her love for planes. For her, the horrors happening in Germany and elsewhere was an abstract idea – she knew people were dying and they needed saving. For her, the real tragedy lay in Doodlebug Brides and couples getting married in haste and boys fiddling with unexploded bombs in the hopes they can defuse them. Then again, she’s just eighteen years old crazily in love with flying in the sky and writing poems.

Everywhere I go I meet people who are hunting for husbands, mothers, children, brothers, sisters, cousins, friends, lovers, and they are all gone.

Your friend Rose has evaporated with them. I don’t know what else to tell you Maddie.

Then the horror accounts start. How they start by taking away your name and giving you a number. We hear about fleas who are in league with the SS. About 50,000 women locked inside a prison half a mile wide and a quarter of a mile across with no toilets. We learn of Rabbits. Our lives are changed forever.

When you lost hope, you turned into a schmootzich, one of the mindless beggars who were the bottom-crawlers of that entire scummy camp, or you died.

If you think this book is one of those books that preach nothing but morbidity and mortal moroseness in the name of empathy, you are dead wrong. This is not one of those books. This is that book that inspires awe. Awe at how much life and hope and dreams can thrive even in places that seem beyond despair.

It took me a long time to write ‘The Subtle Briar’, but it was translated into three languages in a day. Every time it got passed on I got another bread ration. Oh God, we needed something to cling to. We were scared.

The technical bits about bombs and planes, the poems and the characters are what sets the book apart from its peers. Many might feel the tech stuff is infodump but I lived for it. The Subtle Briar and Playing Statues are my favourites. Róza, Irina, Karolina, Lisette, Micheline, Elodie are my favourites. Even Anna. And Nick from the Nick stories. You will be rendered unable to label them fictional characters because of the sheer depth Wein has endowed them with, which is an accomplishment considering the number of characters this book is peppered with.

When you’re flying, the changing balance of lift and weight pulls you up and down. But another pair of forces pulls you forward or backwards through air: thrust and drag.

From Kite Flying: four principles of flight (by Rose Justice)

I think what made me love this book is the fact that there are no unnecessary deaths. (And by that, I am in no way claiming that the deaths that do happen were necessary.) I have noticed a disturbingly common authorial tendency to wantonly disregard fictional characters’ lives. Like they think killing off someone we love in our faces and the tears and heartbreak that inevitably follow is the price of loving a book. But Rose Under Fire does not resort to any such cheap tricks even though it could have and I love it all the more for it.

VERDICT: Freaking Five Stars

REVIEW: The Wrath and The Dawn - Renee Ahdieh

My cheeks are pink and raw. My hand stings from all the slapping my cheeks endured. I catch sight of my roommates as they exchange worried glances at my increased tendencies to inflict harm upon self while reading this book.

I have not learnt my lesson and never will. A book’s ranking in my TBR list is still highly influenced by the book’s performance evaluated using standards defined by the mass. Which is why I picked up this book when I found space to breathe in between my exams, since everyone can’t stop flailing about it. And once I started reading it, promptly started faulting with it.
I avoid hate-reading as much as I can. But if everyone is swooning around the book, and I’m not, I stick around till the very end to see if the book redeems itself and if magically I’ll love the book too.

That didn’t happen here.

WARNING: Proceed with caution. I won’t spoil the potential reader; but once I start, it is difficult to contain my vehemence and fury at being scammed. Also, this is a 1000+ words review, sorry.

I am a sucker for the writing style. Disappoint me and the poor book will have incurred my wrath. I started out by liking the way the story was writing itself. About a chapter in, I quickly revised my assessment. The writing is annoyingly repetitive. The reader is kept entertained with regular weather reports and the menu cards for every meal. I go weak in the knees for books that employ a cinematic approach to the story which was why I laboured under the delusion I will like this one as well, since it has a similar objective but tragically fails at fulfilling it. The book didn’t have a cinematic writing mood – it was over-the-top dramatic and too pretentious for my taste. I felt like I was watching a fucking Bollywood movie; one in which everything happens in slow-motion, moral dilemmas are stretched on for hours, doors (both physical and emotional) are slammed when the central character wants a theatrical exit and lovers quarrel. In addition, no one is allowed to question the soundness of the plot, you just go along with the ebb and tide of it.

I’m sorry, but I just can’t do that.

Humour me and engage in a little method-acting. Imagine your inseparable friend of many years is the last victim after so many girls have been killed with no explanation by a guy you know nothing about. After wading through denial and recurring nightmares, the justifiable anger compels you to take revenge.

You decide to destroy him.

What do you do? Probably start with collecting as much information as possible about your mark. If your mark is the Caliph of a country, you will have to extend your research to the people he is around with. Draft plans A, B and C. Decide to get close to him and then hit him at his weakest.

You want to hear Shahrzad’s A Thousand and One Nights - inspired plan? Volunteer herself as the next bride to be killed, wait for the Caliph to come to her at night, charm him with her wit and storytelling prowess and then if he lets her live, then research him and when the opportunity presents itself, kill him.

Notice any flaws?

This book would not have happened if Khalid hadn’t come to meet her on the night of her wedding, because she didn’t have Plan B. And somehow the notion that cliff-hangers can postpone a scheduled execution is a bit ludicrous. But then, miracle of miracles, the Caliph decides she’s the one to break the cycle. (I distinctly remember muffling a scream with my pillow at that point.) Then she gets a tour of the palace, courtesy of a snarky handmaiden, and she gets shocked at the security and wonders at the strength of her “plan”.

No seriously, Shazi, what did you expect to see? The King of kings living alone in a gilded palace, waiting to present his head to you on a platter?

That’s not all she’s shocked by.

“He’s the second-best swordsman in all of Khorasan? Well, damn, I didn’t cover that in my background check of him. Oh wait. I didn’t do one.”

Shahrzad is infuriating. She pretends to want archery tuitions and then promptly shoots an arrow like a pro. The next second she starts cursing herself for her “stupidity” and I’m left agape. When a particularly life-threatening episode happened, she rants against the Caliph and throws quite a tantrum. I mean, she’s literally outstaying her welcome and her life was a gift and she acted like it was a breach of trust that warranted Khalid the Where-Were-You-When-I-Was Dying interrogation. He’s still your best friend’s killer, isn’t he?

Guurl, you wanna know how to kill someone? Lemme show you how that's done.

Which brings me to my next point. We are supposed to love Shiva, the best friend mentioned above – no questions asked. No interspersed flashbacks. No nightmares. Just a lot of “Shiva, I will kill this man for you” and “Shiva, what do I do” and “Shiva, give me strength to withstand this inexplicable attraction to your killer” and other timed Shiva-tagged self-reminders that she should hate Khalid. She keeps obsessing about her “plan” for revenge half the time, and the other half is spent asking herself not to end up kissing the murderer. No actual murder attempts take place.

That’s just it. How do you fall in love with your best friend’s murderer? I’d expected answers to this question, not be left more flabbergasted than ever. This is where I admire Marie Lu with her Legend series. There, a similar quandary of a reverse nature was engineered. Boy and Girl fall in love. Boy later finds out that Girl (indirectly) was responsible for his mother’s death. He still loves her, but both realize they can’t be together. Now, that was a book.

Well, obviously Shazi is battling with the Stockholm Syndrome – a condition worsened by the fact that the Beast is not a beast (physically or otherwise) and handsome as hell to boot. With a tragic past that is often hinted at. With so many secrets. Our Shazi, pleads him to open his door so that she may see what it is that makes him a monster. “I know nothing because you fight me every step of the way”, she says. Again, dead best friend issues are kept on hold. Not even that matters when you realize all killers aren’t the heartless monsters they are generally portrayed as – that have a story too.

And then the "kiss that changes everything" happens.

Khalid is no better off – being the poor, tortured soul that he is. The book has a third person narration and Khalid gets a solitary paragraph written from his perspective, just in time to venerate “the plague of a girl” that is destroying him. I also hate him for deciding to come see Shazi that night and never before for another bride. Had he done this earlier, who knows, he may have fallen in love with another girl and the murders could have stopped way back.

The one thing that nagged at me was the frequency with which Shahrzad’s skills at seduction came into use. I personally despise characters that use sex as a weapon to wound and open up the enemy – I find that weak and underhanded. Not to mention how that strategy would fail would for us poor unglamorous mortals. Although she immediately regrets it afterwards, the fact that she did it was the last straw for me.

The plot of this book is a love story. How Inexplicable Attraction To A Murderer With A Tragic Past can change everything. I don’t mind love being a deux ex machina element in the story – I do believe love has its own magic – but this was a bit too much.
Oh and wait, did I mention a tragic love triangle involved for the sake of?

I would be doing an injustice if I didn’t commend the research that went into the world building, especially the Persian/Urdu words that cropped up like a pleasant surprise. Khorasan is a Persian land and I’ve always had a special fascination for that place ever since I became a fan of Arabian tales. I also do like the other characters – Despina’s sassiness, Jalal’s protectiveness, and another character who I started to really like and had so much scope for development and then gets killed. Three cheers to me.

I am glad though that my resolution to keep calm and carry on reading till the end of the book paid off marginally. I feel like the main plot of the series is just beginning and I like that plot. Not this soppy, messy love story that I had to endure. Usually, in the kind of series that I binge-read, people run for their lives and they fall in love sometime in between. In this one though, they fall in love first and then run for their lives.

VERDICT: 2 stars.

Posted via Blogaway

ARC REVIEW: The Merit Birds - Kelley Powell

*COURTESY OF PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY*

 Eighteen-year-old Cam Scott is angry. He's angry about his absent dad, he's angry about being angry, and he's angry that he has had to give up his Ottawa basketball team to follow his mom to her new job in Vientiane, Laos. However, Cam's anger begins to melt under the Southeast Asian sun as he finds friendship with his neighbour, Somchai, and gradually falls in love with Nok, who teaches him about building merit, or karma, by doing good deeds, such as purchasing caged "merit birds." Tragedy strikes and Cam finds himself falsely accused of a crime. His freedom depends on a person he's never met. A person who knows that the only way to restore his merit is to confess. "The Merit Birds" blends action and suspense and humour in a far-off land where things seem so different, yet deep down are so much the same.

This is my fourth attempt at an introductory paragraph for this post. I am literally clueless about where to start. Should I begin with how impressed I was with the writing? How Powell was able to capture that which makes us all human and encase it with words, plop them down in circumstances we possibly couldn’t understand, slap them with some names and introduce them to us as her characters? How, towards the end, this book became something larger, something much beyond what I expected?

(I can hear the fridge humming as I sit and stare at the blinking cursor that seems to mock at the sudden deficiency of my virtual loquacity. No, seriously, what has happened to me? There is every possibility that it’s because it’s been inexcusably long since I last wrote anything resembling a book review. That said, I’ll still shamelessly throw in my regular excuse: college life is screwing with me.)

I have read books set in places, casting people geographically, ethnically, and culturally contrasting to the author’s. While most of them treaded upon that road which was less travelled by, they did so with a sense of caution. They knew how they were susceptible to errata, and how they could multiply in terms of consequence, however meticulous their data collection might have been. And so the tragedy remained that the audience could never fully get under the layers of the characters. Books starring POC characters became the sort of thing that you had on GR shelves labelled POC and as a bullet point in Diversity In Books campaigns. This book is that rare book that goes the whole way FLAWLESSLY. I won’t pretend I know the mechanics of how Laos and its people run (I don’t) – but I could immediately relate to the characters, being Asian myself.  How Seng was fascinated by America – land of the rich, home of Hollywood. Or the picture of it in his mind. How the locals immediately resorted to head-shaking and frowning when they see a boy and a girl together. How Lao guys don’t think too much before throwing an arm around another guy’s neck. How two members of a family don’t see shame in sharing a bed together. How an individual puts his family before himself. How they can’t understand why the white-skinned people would dry-wipe their asses after having a crap. All little things, especially in the way these facts are thrown in the readers’ faces like a careless inconsequential detail. But they went a long way in defining those tricky edges of the characters.

This book teems with life. There is that boy who’s dealing with culture shock – starting with the fact that he has to shit into a hole in the ground. Like he already doesn’t have enough to deal with – anger management issues, mom issues, dad issues and homesickness. There is that girl that survives alone through all the shit life throws at her and becomes guarded to the point that she shies away from the possibility of love. There is her older brother who feels the weight of the title as the head of the family after being abandoned repeatedly – first by his parents, then his older sister. A weight further amplified by the sense of his failure in the same. Khamdeng with his loyalty. Somchai with his capacity to love. Sai with his wisdom and patience. Julia with all her sins. All merit birds. The victory of this book is that it tries to get under all the layers of most of the characters – including the ones skulking on the periphery of the main plot.

At first, I didn’t get why only Cam got a first-person. I mean, this story is as much as Seng’s and Nok’s as his, right? But then Somchai rebukes Cam for thinking only about himself, contrary to the Lao and I realized that might be it. That’s when I got my hint this story was on its way to evolving into something more.

Yes, by that I’m implying that I judged this book. It had every promise of turning into a love story spanning across borders of all sorts – and then suddenly it was not just that. In fact, somewhere around the middle I desperately wished it had stopped at a love story. At first, the plot steadily climbed the plot hill at a measured pace and then things crashed and burned. Spontaneously combusted. And I was the sole survivor – left to collect the pieces and make sense of it. That was the thing I disliked the most about this book – the incredulous rapidity with which a series of unfortunate events unfolded. The middle was the lowest point of the book – the peak of the plot hill felt staged.

Despite that and other minor failings, this book is a must read for all those who scream blood for diversity in books. This is a book that you should read at least twice – first to read the lines, second to read between them. 

VERDICT: 4 STARS

Not A Review: The Crossover - Kwame Alexander

There Are Books

that –

thump you,

choke you,

crack you up. 

Books that

you want to

give

to that kid

in your building,

Hey, you like basketball, don’t you?

One Day

he’ll come a-knocking,

And you’ll open,

his face like the last page –

Gratitude in his smile

and,

something more in his eyes.

Maybe,

he’ll score that basket.

The Tempo

will leave you,

puzzled,

shocked,

betrayed.

Don’t worry, love.

You can’t

help

but feel

the RhyThM

in the

WORDS –

What alchemy

can

Paint people,

Compose music,

Change lives?

2. (literary)

A mysterious

power or

magic

that can

change things.

Y’know what’s

short and sweet?

This, GOD, THIS.

REVIEW: The Here and Now - Ann Brashares

*COURTESY OF PUBLISHER THROUGH NETGALLEY*

Proceed with caution, extremely minor spoilers ahead.

Yep. Following in the footsteps of The Time Traveler’s Wife, but coming off a lot better than its predecessor; this story is another time-traveling romance, where the lovers are star-crossed due to their different coordinates in the fourth dimension. Fully aware of the risks I was taking by picking up my tablet to read this (since I hated TTTW), I decided to do it anyway because I’d read and liked Brashares’ Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (well, Book #1 at least) and was willing to give this one a chance.

Most of the time, whenever I read a sci-fi romance, I go ahead with the romance and fault with the sci-fi part of it (see These Broken Stars). I’m happy to inform you that this time it was the other way round. No, I didn’t hate Ethan and Prenna – I really do ship them. But the insta-love killed me. In the most tragic sense of the word. I may understand Ethan’s fascination with Prenna – hey, when you see a beautiful girl appear magically out of a mysterious haze while you’re out fishing and then go out of your way to help her, there is a tendency to feel possessive about her, and I get that. What I don’t get is why Prenna would feel this fascination with him – for those of you yet to read, she doesn’t remember her unearthly manifestation as was witnessed by him – so, that was, inexplicable on her part. Then, they get the chance to change the future as they know it, and they spend the days counting down to the D-Day having a great time – shopping, playing handsies on the freaking beach (although to be fair, it was only when they weren’t running for their life). 

Again, I’m prepared to accept that they aren’t like me, when I would have spent that time going through alternate action plans and rechecking a hundred times, in between biting off all my nails and turning my hair grey.

But, that was the rational, cynical me venting. The girly-girl side of me went along with the cliché scenery and the choppy route this ship was taking. Which made the whole above experience forgivable/tolerable/overlook-able. You should also know that the above-mentioned dual personalities were in agreement of the fact that the plot (while suffering from the classic unanswerable time-traveling paradoxes that openly question the soundness of the plot) was engrossing. As in stay-way-past-my-bedtime-engrossing. While Prenna isn’t exactly your average futuristic badass heroine, Ethan compensates with his aspiring - super -boyfriend talents (both romantically and ass-busting-ly, of course). The writing had the present-tense-dramatic-flair that the book demanded and I really liked it. I also loved Prenna’s letters to Julius, because it showed Prenna as a girl in need of closure and as someone still coping to the luxury of the early 2000s. I also felt like the spotlight was majorly on our ship and that none of the other characters felt as vivid, as necessary as them – like they were just woodenly acting out their roles in the script.

VERDICT: 3 stars

P.S: Can somebody please read this book and tell me if Ethan/Prenna reminded you of Ethan/Lena in the Beautiful Creatures series, like it did for me? Have I mentioned how much I loved that ship?

ARC REVIEW: Rogue Wave - Jennifer Donnelly

*COURTESY OF PUBLISHER THROUGH NETGALLEY*

 Just when you think every possible idea for the next YA fandom has already been abused (Dystopian? Unashamedly so), Jennifer Donnelly enters with her Waterfire Saga. You might want to read what I thought about Deep Blue before you continue reading what I thought about Book 2 ‘cause then I can pass on the raving episode about unconventional mermaids, POC MCs, the matriarchal society (which if my memory serves right I didn’t talk about, but is actually a huge thing here), and the awesomeness that’s Merrovingia, and focus on the finer points of Book 2.

BEHOLD a fine example of cover art

OK, so it’s no big secret that I have memory problems which is why I wait till the series finale has been released to start reading the series. Sometimes, though, I can’t wait for three years so I start anyways. Therefore, unsurprisingly, I managed to forget the finer details of Book 1 but thankfully the book reminded me here and there. But the lack of subtlety and the frequency with which those recap facts appeared pissed me off. Some were even redundant enough that a wannabe initiate into Merrovingia could just pick up Rogue Wave and still know what’s happening.

Another thing that annoyed me was how much the progression of the plot depended on someone else’s sum of experiences. The truth about who the invaders are, what they are after, and how the merls can get their hands on them before the bad guys do, are all uncovered topic-wise as a result of  someone’s storytelling, rather than something that involves a lot more adrenaline and tension.

Then there is the plot. Yes, it’s turned out to be one of those “find the Deathly Hallows to save the world” stories, but even that somehow has its own indigenous flavour – what with sea-witches, dragons, shipwrecks, hot outlaws with tails, badass tribes, trawlers, and the like. I started reading at around eleven in the night and it was with a heavy heart and equally heavy eyelids that I decided to turn in for the night at around 3am. Yeah, because the plot? It’s good. Like “I-need-to-know-what-happens-next-right-now” good.

So, considering this solely as a plot-intensive novel, designed to be a really good read, this book is at least four stars. But, otherwise, taking the writing into account – meh. I am a big fan of puns and punsters (since yours truly couldn’t pun to save her life). And this book was a real treat in that respect. (Although SILT! some were just a bit too much). Then some phrases that have been considered cliché since long ago showed up here and there, which I suspect were intended to be under the Goodreads quotations tab. And I totally sympathize with the author for the quandary she was in – whether to concentrate on the finer aspects of the world building and flaunt her writing skills (for a clue as to how awesome they are, you just need to read all the songspells) and compromise on the plot or vice-versa so that we don’t end up with a massive tome on our bookshelf.  I really did wish that the other chosen merls beside Seraphina and Neela had a chance in the spotlight in this instalment though. That regrettably didn’t happen.

In fact, what happened was jaw dropping. What I thought was developing to be yet another love triangle morphed into something else entirely. I predict some hormone-driven drama in Book 3, and I decided I’m ok with that. Also, the cliff-hanger was a decent one; it didn’t make me want to storm into JD’s house and demand to know what happens next at gunpoint; just enough to make me badly want to start the next book.

VERDICT: 3 stars

REVIEW: Endgame: The Calling - James Frey and Nils Johnson-Shelton

*COURTESY OF NETGALLEY*

I’ll deal with the controversy first; get it out of the way, and then deal with the actual book. My Twitter feed was inundated with Endgame links (which appeared to be a treasure hunt) and the promotion was crazy. In order to understand what the ballyhoo was all about (as I tend to do when wary of hype surrounding anything), I googled extensively and came across the phenomenon that was James Frey. And his Full Fathom Five. And other book packaging companies. And the faux-memoir A Million Little Pieces. I was also surprised to discover that he was one half of Pittacus Lore of The Loren Legacies fame. But more than that, I guess I was shocked (and I admit, felt a little betrayed) when I realized how much the book industry is considered a business.

I am not that person who thinks that the end justifies the means. But I am also not that person who is incapable of separating the creator from that which (s)he has created. (If I didn’t, I would not have tried The Host by Stephanie Meyer and The Mediator by Meg Cabot; both of which are reasons why I am proud of myself). Once a book has been born, it’s got a life of its own – it lives simply because it has to – needs to. The creator no longer owns it – that’s my stance anyways (that’s what Walt Whitman said too). So I made up my mind to judge this book for itself and not who and how it was written – despite my opinions on either of them.   

So, yes, we’re now getting to the book. Once I finished it and scrolled through the Goodreads reviews, I realized I wasn’t the only one who felt like the concept was a la Hunger Games deja-vu. And for good reason. The blurb sure felt like one, and ultimately that is the whole plot. Twelve tribes send in their Players (who have to satisfy the age eligibility criteria) from among which, one will emerge the winner after the bloodbath. The prize is different though. Instead of nice food and a warm hearth, you get to survive the apocalypse.

I can’t remember the last time it took me this long (a week, to be exact) to finish a book. Hell, I finished the 800-something pages of HP Book 5 within 36 hours. It wasn’t that the pace was slow, there were too many characters who were fighting for page-space. Too many to keep track of. I had over-ambitious plans for this book – I’d even registered for Endgame, because I like meself a good puzzle, but it was a chore reading this one. For each sitting, there was the initial starting trouble; there always seemed to be something better to do than read the book. I thought I was going to have to mark it a DNF. It’s not very professional of me to admit this, but I can’t guess at the reason why – too many characters and the personal drama that ensued – maybe, yes – but that’s not good enough a reason. The narration written in the present tense (especially An’s distinctive POV) had the appropriate dramatic flair to it, which makes me wish for the movie version of it. I also unconsciously worked out some “clues” before the Players did and the victorious feeling that followed the epiphany is pretty nice. But I’m too high on the holiday cake and wine, and I can’t find it in me to figure the rest out, I just wanted to move on as quickly as possible. The book failed in its primary mission as far as I am concerned.

So I did what I do best. I took out my critic eyeglass and looked through it, treating The Calling as a book and not some treasure map. I should now mention that I didn’t like any of the characters, so there was no point in asking who I rooted for. And maybe that was intentional, I mean hello, they had been trained to kill since they were born. So a more valid question would be who I hated the least. The one character that I sympathised with dies in the end, and another one that I thought kicked some butt also kicked the bucket. The mortality rate is worrying, but only predictably so. I also detested the Christopher-Sarah-Jago dramaction going on. It was pretty hard to not judge them.

Then the author inaccuracies turned up. I have lived in Dubai for close to two decades and I didn’t realize that sandstorms were this popular here. I mean, wherever did Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol get that idea too, eh? Dubai also doesn't allow boyfriends and girlfriends to share a hotel room, someone please tell that to Kala and Christopher. Also, the Harappan, Shari Chopra (who is seventeen years old), already has a kid named Alice (which sounds pretty Christian to me) with her husband Jamal (which is a popular Muslim name). The circumstances that could have led to such a family are remote – especially if she was trained in the family – which is obviously upper caste –  who would have married her off only after she was at least 18, and that too, to another Hindu boy. She couldn’t have eloped; not if she was a Player.

But let me put this right. This is a good read. I have a feeling that maybe it was supposed to be as good and un-put-downable as a Dan Brown thriller and for reasons inexpressible, it didn’t make that cut, but comes close enough. There has evidently been a lot of research done and sleep sacrificed and I acknowledge that. And the talent required to handle these many characters simultaneously, giving them individual voices, is laudable.

VERDICT: 3 STARS

REVIEW: After The End - Bonnie Dee

*COURTESY OF NETGALLEY*

I have defined myself a reading comfort zone, much like any bookworm I know. And I have put up NO ENTRY TRESPASSERS BEWARE OF SCATHING REVIEWS signs all over its perimeter for any genre that doesn’t meet the eligibility specifications.

I have a “thing” against contemporary horror, be it movies or books – I hated Goosebumps when I was younger and the last horror movie that I saw till the credits rolled in was The Ring (it was not even in English and that shitty movie still managed to scare the pants of the poor seventh grader me). Even now when people ask me my favourite horror movie, I scoff and snort and say it’s against My Principle. Only people who know me best know it’s because even my fourth grader cousin can still manage to make me scream when she says BOO out of nowhere.

And we’re back to the main story after that bit of prerequisite knowledge.

I wasn’t blind. I did read the blurb before I started reading this book and I knew it was all about a zombie apocalypse. ZOMBIES. And somehow I also knew that this was going to be different from Warm Bodies (which I loved – YOU GO R) and I thought –

I needed to take risks. I needed to get out of my comfort zone. SO SHOULD YOU (if you haven’t done already).

Again. Back to the main story. (SERIOUSLY. GET A HOLD OF YOURSELF, A)

This book is a How To Survive A Zombie Apocalypse For Dummies reference book for your survival kit in preparation for Doomsday. It had a methodical style of narration, treating the plot as a case study for some zombie apocalypse drills, in case you wanted to try it. And I actually didn’t have a problem with that – I even admired it for not over-dramatizing it. And there were plenty of rational observations here and there – like ‘how people have a tendency to cling to something while the world fell apart’, how people automatically look for authority when they are in shock and don’t know how to deal with it, and how the possibility for sexual tensions developing between two people is still an inconvenient reality to be reckoned with – after all “A person would cling to any flotsam after a shipwreck”.

It was evident that every detail had been taken care of – whenever the suspicious critic reared its ugly head, that point would be justified quickly. For example, I was beginning to seethe about how the impromptu band of survivors had quickly divided themselves into the stay-at-home-females cooking and home-making, while the men went out for the hunting and raiding and Lila observed how the “gender roles reared their ugly heads in a crisis” and I was happy again, because it was a conscious plot development rather than a prejudiced one, and the most important – dealing with Survivor’s Guilt.

Of course, there were a lot of “Bleargh” personal moments in response to some cliché dialogues and cheesy love declarations, and they were soon followed by another character’s observation that I was indeed right.

But then, the third-person POV really pissed me off at times – whenever it cast a certain character in a negative light. If it was first-person, it wouldn’t have been a problem since the judgement of a character could be chalked up to his judgemental charcter. But when third-person is used, the judgement reads like a fact, and then it feels like the reader isn’t allowed to have an alternate opinion of that character.

Which sucks. Because as far as I know, even “bitchy sluts” care about someone.

VERDICT: 3.5 stars

ARC REVIEW: The Melody of Light - M. L. Rice

*COURTESY OF NETGALLEY*

View the blurb on Goodreads

You know what it was about this book that took my breath away? Had this plot arc originated in my head, I would have it written the exact same way. That doesn’t mean I loved this book to the ends of the earth and depths of hell, no. I just shared a fun fact with you.

Allow me to paraphrase: I don’t really like the way I write (with regards to a full-fledged novel) and I’m still trying to find my voice. But hey, tomorrow NaNoWriMo’s beginning, and I’m living in eternal hope.

Moving on.

Since I started with the writing style of this book, I might as well get over with it. I liked it (yay!) but didn’t love it – it felt like a really long short story. There was a prologue-ish sort of intro to the first chapter, and then the plot continues in a very thespian fashion – the whole novel is a flashback that brings the book to a full circle. The third person narrative brings in the drama-esque flair to the novel.  Only Aidan and Beth and to an extent Tori and Koji are actually fleshed out satisfyingly well; the others were merely acting their parts, and I couldn’t get a read on them. Maybe that’s the way it was intended to be, so no major judgement there. 

And The Melody of Light.You have no idea how much I’ve been berated, damned, harangued for my instinct to assume everything is crap and then search for proof that it’s good and find it and only then like it. So obviously, I mistrusted the title’s seemingly overly pandering title, until – wait for it – I found the reason to like it (and that reason made me go “Oh!”). I love the title now.

Riley and Beth make a very realistic couple (not that I have any idea about the mechanics of lesbian couples, but these two rock the mechanics of a general realistic couple – I suspect that’s the author’s experience working out the finer details there). There is no shortage of soppy dialogues and everyone knows it (at one point Riley appoints Beth as the “beacon of light” in her dark life and then says, “it’s cheeseball, but true.”) But, I didn’t cringe at them, since they made sense. (Although I do wish they could have been phrased in a way that wasn’t cheeseball-ish.)

And Aidan. AIDAN. I could write poems and epics glorifying his name. He is the combination of what all the Weasley boys are (yes, I use present tense, I refuse to accept Fred’s dead, okay?) to Ginny, he is the Atticus and Jem double combo to Scout, he is the Darry and Soda to a (okay, forgive me) girly- Ponyboy. He ticks every box of “Are you the Perfect Older Brother to Problematic Sister?” and I LOVE him. Don’t worry, my feelings are very chaste and sisterly.

And then the ending happened, which should not have made me leak two tears because:

a) Hello, I read Chapter One, so I should have predicted this.

b) It gave me a la “Roth Was Trying To Create A Sensation When She Killed Off Tris In Allegiant” deja-vu. 

You know, when we are speaking of unnecessary deaths in YA-famous literature and all.

On that note, Happy Halloween people. I am virtually celebrating a Hollywood-Glorified-Almost-International-Observance-Because-India-Doesn’t-Effing-Observe-One. 

Can you see my Hermione Granger costume through that screen of yours? I treated myself with a laddoo, so ha.

VERDICT: 3.5 stars

ARC REVIEW: Puppet - Pauline C. Harris

*COURTESY OF NETGALLEY*

(Blurb from Goodreads) Penelope lives in a world of advanced technology but many claim society has yet to catch up. Marionettes have advanced in the form of robots; lifelike creations remote controlled to perform super human tasks.

When Penelope makes a deal with Jed, a marionette-obsessed scientist, she doesn’t fully realize what she’s getting herself into. In order for Jed to take her away from the orphanage she lives in, she must first agree to undergo his experiments and tests, ultimately creating something no one ever dreamed possible; the first living marionette.

As Jed shows off his scientific creation to the world, concerns arise surrounding Penelope’s abilities and what she’s capable of doing. Ordered to somehow lessen her abilities, Jed makes a desperate attempt to change Penelope to make her more human, more vulnerable. After Penelope lies to the officials about her past, Jed makes sure it’s the last one she’ll ever utter. The truth is now the only thing she is capable of telling.

As Penelope struggles with her past, her disturbingly new present, and her uncertain future, she is thrust into a magically twisted world of mayhem in search of the one thing she wants, but knows she can never have. The chance to be just a girl again. To be normal. To be real.

Retellings are literary remixes. I have limited experience in them because my basic instinct is to distrust them. Music remixes rarely top the original for me. Film remakes are bigger disasters. As far as literary retellings go, they can be MINDBLOWING (Across a Star-Swept sea – The Scarlet Pimpernel remix), or “hmm, that was nice” (Towering – Rapunzel remix) or FAIL (Puppet – Pinocchio remix apparently)

If this wasn’t being advertised as a Pinocchio retelling, I could like it more. Because this book deserves it, trust me. I even liked the cover (SURPRISE! the book cover nazi approves). I loved Pen’s voice – she sounds like a closet philosopher, wondering about the secrets of marionettes and trying to figure out humans. The book wasn’t crowded with characters, and within very few pages, Harris manages to fledge out the main characters satisfyingly – not just the Boy and the Girl. The pacing, although it started out slow, quickened up and before you know it, you’ve reached The End. However, that might also be due to the plot lacking masala.

Let’s still pretend this book’s got nothing to do with Pinocchio. Thankfully, there isn’t much infodumping happening, but I also couldn’t get how dystopian the Portum is – I couldn’t see much advancement technology-wise other than the marionettes and a government with the Head Devere and administrators. And I kept getting confused with Pen’s brief instances of sheer stupidity.  

That’s where the tagline “Pinocchio retelling” comes in. When Pen lied about her background to the freaking government which is famous for its meddling in everyone’s affairs, I couldn’t believe Pen – my cousin swears she saw me making a face at the book. Then I remembered A Pinocchio Retelling and his lying problem. When he did it, it wasn’t unnecessary or unbelievable; the context here made it a total fail.

Where else did Pinocchio come in picture? Whenever the word “marionette” was mentioned. And Jed is the Portum version of Gepetto.  That’s the end of Pinocchio references.

When I reached The End, I felt conned.  There was no NOSE ENLARGEMENT. There was no Fox or Cat or Fairy or any talk of money, unless they have been disguised under heavy metaphors (in which case I apologize for my under-sight). If you’ve read the original tale of Pinocchio, you have no reason to read this book.

Wow, that sounds cold. But if you ignore the “Pinocchio retelling” tagline, there’s a chance you will like this book.

VERDICT: (It actually pains me to say this) 2 stars