Review: Spare and Found Parts - Sarah Maria Griffin

Spare and Found Parts
Sarah Maria Griffin
Series: N/A
Genre: Young Adult, Science Fiction
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Rating: DNF // 2.5 out of 5 stars
Goodreads 

I would just like to start out by saying that Sarah Maria Griffin's prose was so elegant that I had to give some stars to a book I DNF'd 40% of the way through. I didn't feel right not leaving it with a rating.

The writing was just so florid and poetic and really leapt off the page. Every word was so heavy with meaning. I think my favorite line was the very second one: "Never sure if it was just something your grief stitched together from the parts of her you remember and the questions still in your throat."

So why DNF? Even beautiful prose cannot make up for awful pacing.

I am going to back up a little. For those unfamiliar, Spare and Found Parts is the story of a girl -- Nell -- in a post-apocalyptic city where everyone has augmented biomechanical limbs. Nell's limb, however, is a little different from everyone else's in that it's on the inside -- her heart. And it ticks. While she goes through a whole existential crisis about this stuff, she's also gotta contribute to the rebuilding of the city -- which she does through a robot, using technology her people fear. Sounds cool, right?

Right. When I saw the blurb for this book I was immediately hooked. It seemed like such a unique, interesting concept. And then the first few pages were full of such beautiful writing, I thought I'd love the whole thing. The more I read though, the more bored I kept getting and the harder it was to stay focused. How could I be bored reading a story about a post-apocalyptic world rebuilding itself from nothing???

I actually started this book weeks ago and have been trying to convince myself to read it between classes every day, hoping one of these days I will push myself to power through and finish, or will read a bit and reach a really interesting part, but so far neither has happened. The book just moves so slowly. I've read 40% and so far nothing has happened and no characters have really developed much personality. The book seems like it's heading in a direction where it'll take like 70% of the book for anything to happen and then ~So Many Things~ will happen in the last 30% but I don't like that. It's really hard for me to read a book that doesn't have a consistent (or captivating) pacing.

Also, I mentioned that the prose was really lovely, but the dialogue is honestly hit-or-miss. There are some really powerful pieces of dialogue and I appreciate them but there are also some really awkward lines that I pray were removed between the time I got my ARC and the final copy went out.

Honestly, I think I probably will come back to this book eventually, because it's such a freaking cool concept and I do want to see how it plays out, but for now I have so many books to read -- including the ones I impulse-ordered from Amazon that'll be here by the time this post goes up -- that I do not have any more weeks to spend trying to read 250 more pages of Nell sitting around brooding and doing nothing.

If you could replace one part of yourself, what would it be?

Let us know in the comments!

Review: Poisoned Blade - Kate Elliot

Poisoned Blade
Kate Elliott
Series:Court of Fives, #2
Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young readers
Rating: DNF
Goodreads 

I honestly cannot remember the last time I DNF'ed a book. I've finished books so bad they took me a month to bring myself to read, but I finished. I'm actually a little surprised that this is the book that I finally ended up DNFing because from what I read, I didn't totally hate and utterly despise it or anything. I've finished (and reviewed) way worse books. But oh well, c'est la vie.

If you have no idea what this book is about, I reviewed the first book in the series with Amrutha last year and you can read that here! Basically, it's about a girl who lives in a world with major class divisions and lots of political ~~shadiness~~ and also there's a Prince and and some Games and some other stuff. In my Court of Fives review I'm a little on the fence about how much I like the book, but in my experience the second book in a trilogy is often the strongest so I was optimistic about this one.

The book picked up right where the first book ended, which would have been cool if I hadn't forgotten half the plot and had to piece it together as I read Poisoned Blade. That's not a point against the book or anything because it's pretty biased toward my own memory, but now you know what I had to go through. Moving on, one of my grievances is against the characters, which I'm pretty sure was also a grievance in the first book. I liked Jessamy -- the protagonist -- in Court of Fives, but in this book she seems more annoying and introspective. I also wasn't all that impressed by any development of her sisters -- they still felt like stock characters to me -- though I'm sure that could have changed by the end of the book. Also Kalliarkos was kind of irritating as well -- I can understand it a little because Jessamy did him dirty but also homeboy's gotta stop being petty.

Speaking of Kalliarkos, I mentioned in my review of the previous book that I wasn't all that into their romance and it holds true for this one. Their interactions were even weirder here than in Court of Fives. I'm lowkey hoping that in the last few pages some previously unknown second love interest comes out of the woodwork because I'm really not feeling this.

In general, the book was just hard to get through. The writing itself wasn't bad, but I would get bored very quickly and not come back for a long while and I like to read books in long uninterrupted chunks when I can, so the way I read it (which was a result of the content, not like...laziness or something) just added to the lack of enthusiasm for reading it. I still can't pinpoint what exactly it is about the book that makes it this way. It was a lot more heavy with the ~politics~ but I actually liked that and found it one of the things that kept me interested. I think the main issue is that there was so much going on and so many plots that eventually it got a little bit all over the place and ended up becoming uninteresting.

There are so many 4/5 star reviews for this on Goodreads that I think I might give this another chance in a few (many) months and see if I just read it at the wrong time or something, but for now I'm just going to accept that this series is not for me.

Side note: Can we appreciate that I tend to ramble so much that I basically wrote a full length review for a DNF book?

- Noor

Do you DNF books often?
Let us know in the comments!