Daughter of Smoke and Bone

ಠ_ಠ This book fell so flat. The flattest of flat packs. ಠ_ಠ

(╯▅╰)

I was so keen. So excited. So eager. So… I will wait until it is the perfect time to read this, because I know imam love it

(WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!?) I just wanted to enjoy it!

Skip meeting him? The butterflies, the pounding heart, the blushing? The part where you enter each other’s magnetic fields for the first time, and it’s like invisible lines of energy are drawing you together.

I enjoyed Karou. I enjoyed her, a lot. She wasn’t a dumb stupid characters. She was actually likable.

And the writing was enjoyable

And the world was enjoyable.

And all of the side Characters were enjoyable.

So, why didn’t I like this!??? (╯'□')╯︵ ┻━┻ Fuck! IT WAS BORING!!

And whys that!? Well nothing is more boring than when there is absolutely nothing to keep you reading. When the whole premise of this book sounds amazing and you have a strong start and so much potential.

And why!?????????? BECAUSE THE WHOLE MIDDLE HALF OF THIS BOOK WAS JUST HOW MUCH I ALREADY LOVE AKIVA AND HOW AKIVA LOVES ME. OHHH AKIVA YOUR EYES. AKIVA YOUR EYES. YOUR EYES WILL MAKE MY OVARIES EXPLODE. SOMETHING ABOUT THE TEETH. AKIVA YOUR ORANGE EYES. EYES, EYES, EYES.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! A SPLASH OF PLOT HERE, A DASH OF COOL AWESOME INTERESTING SIDE CHARACTERS HERE. ARHH AKIVA YOUR EYES. OHH LOOK YOU HAVE WINGS TOO AND WERE SOUL MATES EVEN THOUGH I HAVE ONLY KNOWN YOU FOR A DAY! YOUR EYES, EYES, EYES, EYES, WINGS, EYES.

INSTA-TRASH. ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ

(Has somebody counted the amount of times Akiva’s eyes were mentioned?? No? ahh I know why because it’s a frigging sshit load) (╯▅╰)

Though, yes I will continue because aside from this solid disappointment I really enjoyed the other things in the story.

1. The start of the book was strong - I loved how the concept of teeth and magic was so original.

2. The end – maybe some light at the end of the tunnel? I actually liked Madrigal and Akiva’s arc the most because it was interesting. We got intrigue, suspense and plot without sacrificing romance, not the other way around. Which is what happened to the middle of this book.

3. The writing – Taylor’s strongest point. So beautiful. If somebody could lull me into a dream it would be this lady.

4. The side Characters – Side Characters add depth and more chance of relating to a story.

In this one I feel like they were set aside. Like soap in the bath. it’s there but you don’t use it, the point is you definitely needed it so you should have because that was fine smelling soap.

Characters = they’re there but not used e.g. soap.

5. The World – Angels, monsters, magic, war. My favourites. I have a feeling the world will be explored a bit more in the second book and I am looking forward to it.

¯\_(⌣̯̀⌣́)_/¯

Dead School

Arc provided by NetGalley.

Firstly- THIS BOOK IS SOOO MUCH FUN. Please drop all of your self-administered literary professor caps and enjoy how original this book is. It’s so fun and playful, with a way of reminding me of an anime/manga.

Dead School – Girl dies, while falling off a stage ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, girl then goes to dead school! ¯\(º_o)/¯ where she finds out that she has failed her life path. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

A mountain of shame ensues ༼;´༎ຶ ۝ ༎ຶ༽…… well more denial.

That’s all I got up to. Not because I didn’t like it but I lost my NetGalley copy and can no longer download another to finish it.

Writing – the writing is not fluffy at all – there is no political correctness here. The story is told with a sense of humour and isn’t afraid to be un-lady like. Tina has a potty mouth. Which really surprised me because this reads like a middle grade because of plot, characters and writing but the language used does not suggest it. So example: people get called Bimbo, hooker, fat.

I will say that I did not enjoy some of the themes in this book. Tina was very judgemental of others and I did not like the fact that completing suicide or drowning counted as failing your life path. I found it a bit insensitive (－‸ლ) If you want more on this then there are many reviews expanding on this through NetGalley and Goodreads. (ÒДÓױ)

I’m not going to go further with my review because I find that unfair as I never finished it, but I definitely would have.

All The Light We Cannot See

Are you kidding me!? Are you absolutely bloody shitting me right now!? Did I pick up the same book as everybody else? It has the same cover and the same title and the fucking same author. BUT, I HATED THIS BOOK!!!

DNF’d at page 220. I tried

I feel like I have been utterly duped. Sold the last deliciously juicy apple in the store only to find that it’s rotted and brown on the inside.

All the light we cannot see is right. I thought this title was beautiful, but now I think it speaks volumes for how disappointed I am over this.

BOOK DISCRIPTION: A girl and a boy, One a Nazi in training and the other blind.

Girl reads all the time and is constantly stuck in a house, in Paris and in Saint-Malo, her Father is a key-holder and is also guarding a stone that really doesn’t add anything to the story.

Boy is from a coal mining town In Germany and is super-duper smart. Therefore, the Nazi take him to their very special boy’s school where he trains to be a very good robot.

Nothing much else happens, but it will take you 200 pages just to get through that, so buckle up!

“The brain is locked in total darkness, of course, children, says the voice. If floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims with colour and movement. So how children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?”

THINGS I HATED:

· The chapters were too short. Normally I like this, in fact I love it when chapters are short. It did not work for this book. Stop. Start. Stop. Start. Fast forward. Stop. Start. Rewind. (You will have no hair left to pull out).

The story was already so fragmented that pulling me out of one POV from say Marie-Laure in Paris 1941 and into another from somebody else in 1940. And, Sometimes I didn’t even know who the chapters were about. Example: I found myself reading about Warner’s Sergeant Major and had to go back a few chapter just to get the name of who the hell I was reading about. It all just disconnected me from the story as a whole.

It didn’t make it any easier with the jumping around from date to date in a not so chronological order.

All it seemed to do was take me away from the already boring story line.

· I shit you not this was like waiting for a Youtube video to buffer. It ran clear and smooth for a little while. It would stop, (on account of the distracting beautiful words and writing, or the disconnecting POV changes) you would have to let it load again and then it would stop again!

In the end, even though the content may be pretty it’s just not worth wasting your life over if you aren’t getting the whole smooth continuous story. I read 220 pages and felt like I know nothing. Everything could have been condensed to 100 pages, if that.

· In my opinion I hated that this book was written in third person. Just another way for me to feel disconnected from the story. There were no inner monologues, only what is assumed or witnessed by the omniscient observer. This made me feel like I couldn’t relate as well to the characters as what I could have if it was written in first-person. And thus, I had no sense of attachment.

THINGS THAT I LIKED BUT DIDN’T WORK FOR THE STORY:

Relating to the point above. THE CHARACTERS

· I enjoyed Warner as a character. I was just sad that this is the story he had to get the part in.

He was kind, quiet and smart. I loved that he was a tinkerer and enjoyed working with his hands. There is not enough smart mathematical brain representation in younger children.

I wanted more from his relationship with his sister, who I also adored.

· I did not like Laurie-Marie. She was blend and had no personality. The only thing that made her different and vaguely interesting was that she was blind. But, blindness is not a personality.

I loved the Blind representation and I understand what Doerr was trying to accomplish. I understand that it was a different way of “looking at the war” and having a different experience and perspective of it. I really appreciated it. I just wish Laurie-Marie had more personality and also that the book wasn’t so boring.

Make of this what you will but I feel like the only reason why this book won the Pulitzer Prize 2015 was solely because of the disability (Sorry if I offend anyone by calling it a disability) representation.

Doerr’s lexicon is amazing! He has a beautiful way with words. Even sentences. I can open any page in this book and find such beautiful writing. Example:

“A machine gun fires somewhere, a sound like a chain of beads passing through fingers.”

“She’s eating wedges of wet sunlight”

“And yet everything radiates tension, as if the city had been built upon the skin of a balloon and someone is inflating it toward the breaking point.”

Yes, His words are beautiful. An individual flower, can be mesmerising and stunning, but take a step back. A multitude of the same flower does not make a great garden. In this case a novel.

Maybe this would have been better as a short book of sentences.