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!

Double Review: A Thousand Nights - E.K. Johnston

A Thousand Nights
E.K. Johnston 
Series: N/A
Genre: Young Adult, Retelling, Fantasy, Romance
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Rating: Did Not Finish
Goodreads 

Thanks to Disney-Hyperion for the eARC I received via Netgalley!

I am so sad to be writing this review right now. So sad. I had really high hopes for A Thousand Nights - the cover is absolutely gorgeous, and the premise sounded really interesting. However, this one just fell flat, and for the first time ever with a book I wasn't required to read for school, I had to DNF it at 30%.

A Thousand Nights started off really strong. At the beginning of the book, I was really drawn in by the writing style - it has this folklore feeling to it that feels like magic on a page. The way Johnston sets up the story really draws the reader in and establishes the world quickly. However, after multiple chapters of this style, it started to lose its magic and felt like it was dragging along. There were moments where it seemed like something promising was going to happen, but ultimately, it mostly put me to sleep.

Basically, my feelings on this book can be summed up by the following image:

Part of me really wishes I could keep reading this - I'm intrigued by the magical elements of the plot that were set up thus far - but having just come back from not reading for several months, reading this book is kind of a chore. I'm sure there are people out there that are mesmerized by the style and continue reading, but unfortunately, it just fell flat for me.

- Kiersten

Noor's Review of A Thousand Nights
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

This book took me an entire month to read because it was just so boring. Like, when you boil it down, it was just so hard to get through because every time I thought about picking it up I would be like "or maybe I could not do that" and then I would go and do a different, more fun thing. I so desperately wanted to like it too, because I'm such a huge fan of retellings and 1001 Nights is so vast that Johnston could have done so much with it, truly. I just think it missed the mark.

I actually really liked the beginning of the book and so when I first started reading I thought it was going to be a nice, fun time. The writing style was super eloquent and kindof lilting -- it felt like the descriptions were being elegantly draped over me and I think if the prose weren't written the way it were, I couldn't have finished the book. Anyway, that's really my main positive for the book, that it's written well in terms of actual writing prowess, but I feel like Johnston spent so much time focusing on the prose that she neglected the story itself. You can't just have pretty writing for a whole book with no substance, it gets old after like 50 pages when you realize nothing is going to happen!!!

Anyway, the entire book I kept waiting for things to happen and nothing was happening. It was so stressful, honestly, because sometimes things would get teased at happening but then they wouldn't happen. Like, home girl has some magic going on in her system, right? That's not a spoiler, you know that from the back cover. And I was waiting for this facet of her being to be explored, to see what was special about her, but all I got were small little fragments. An instance of Psychic Embroidery here, a flash of sparks from her hands there. There was no exploration. The whole book felt like some kind of limbo. I wasn't sure if I was going towards a Big Important Plot Thing or if this was a relevant scene or if the "I volunteer as tribute" scene in the beginning was the biggest thing that was gonna happen -- it was a lot of waiting and very little actually happening. You could skip entire sections probably and not miss anything.

Probably 3/4 of the book had zero plot development or real content and then Relevant Things happen in like this very concentrated chunk of the end and then there's like the resolution where you tie up the ends and everything and honestly I didn't think the climax was worth suffering through the whole book for. Like it goes from 0-100 and I just was not here for that 100. It felt more like a 65 to be honest.

Also, did you notice I haven't named the protagonist in this review? That's because she has no name!! NO ONE in this book other than Lo-Melkhiin, the evil rapey demon king, has a name. At first I thought it was ~~fun and unique~~ but it got so painful to read as she kept going because she constantly wanted to wax poetic on members of her family but had no real names to call them by so you would get pages of her talking about "my father's father's father" and "my sister's mother" and "my sister's brother" and "my married brother." Imagine an entire full-length anecdote where the "hero" you're telling it about is consistently referred to as "my father's father's father." I know they apparently live in a time period where years aren't a thing and they measure age in summers so I guess language is still developing but you would think they'd have terms for grandparents???? It just got really redundant and it made the characters really unmemorable.

By the end of the book, even the writing that I found enchanting in the beginning had started to annoy me and just sounded like she was trying too hard to sound ~authentic~. Like, at one point she's talking to someone and says "I had to come at him like the wadi, with its meandering lines. I could not come at him as the sand-crow flew," and then a chapter or two before that she'd written "The wadi's path through the desert was not straight as the sand-crow flies, but it was a safer path," referring to an are about to be settled. I swear this isn't me nitpicking a redundancy or anything, but not everything has to be compared to wadis and sand-crows and sheep. It simply felt like trying too hard. (Side note: not that I'm a bird expert, or a sand-crow expert, but what kind of bird flies straight enough paths to be used as a simile for straightness?)

Anyway, I think I'm rambling at this point so some final thoughts:

• I was unsatisfied and a little uncomfortable with the ending and I didn't think it was worth plowing through so much nothing for that little bit of action (and disappointing conclusion). 
• The narrator didn't really have much personality beyond "loves her sister." 
• The pretty writing was not enough to distract from the fact that there was no real content. 
• There are so many ways to draw from 1001 Nights and I think it didn't deliver on the way it attempted.
• The cover is still pretty and I still appreciate it.

- Noor

Have you wrongly judged a book by its cover?

Let us know in the comments!

Review: Love, Lex - Avery Aster

Love, Lex
Avery Aster
Series: The Undergrad Years, #1
Genre: Young Adult, More-like-adult-romance
Rating: -7 (0) out of 5 stars
Word Rating: Literally repulsive
Goodreads | Amazon

I received this book for the exchange of an honest review.

Unfortunately, I was unable to finish this book, because it was honestly just so awful. The writing is sad, the characters drive me nuts, the plot is all over the place.

The book begins with Alexandra Easton, or Lex, who is apparently so chubby that her boyfriend tells her she needs to lose weight before he dare have sex with her. lol. what. Okay, so this girl who is apparently going to Columbia in the fall and has movie star parents has a low enough self esteem to sit there and take this kind of emotional abuse. Alright, I guess. So then, when she's finally getting close to losing the weight necessary to lose her "Lady V" (virginity), she comes home, to find what? Her mom and boyfriend going at it. I guess after this her (whatever was left of her) self respect kicked in, and she decides to dump her boyfriend.

Now comes the real kicker. After she breaks up with her boyfriend, for no real reason, she decides to burn a dress and some pictures in the bathroom OF A NEW YORK CITY PENTHOUSE. Clearly little Miss Columbia isn't as smart as we thought. Anyway, I guess her mom had 02 tanks around her house to help with her youth and beauty or some equivalent bullshit, and boom, her house blows up, and Lex and her friends are arrested.

While she's getting arrested, by the way, she flirts with the cop.

Because after a few weeks of trying, I was unable to finish the book, I figured I'd skip to the last few chapters to find out if the book had a chance of getting any better. Hint: it didn't, it turned into some sick version of mommy porn that no one should ever have to be subjected to reading.

I'll tell you right now, don't read this book if you want your eyesight to work fully afterwards. The poor writing style combined with the way too out there plot and the most annoying characters on the planet manifests itself in this book, Love, Lex. Hopefully I am able to avoid all Avery Aster books in the process.

This book is marked DNF, for did not finish. (Note: This is the first book in over 6 years I have not finished).

I received this book for the exchange of an honest review.

- Amrutha

What are some books you did not finish? Why not?

Let us know in the comments!

Review: The Magicians - Lev Grossman

The Magicians
Lev Grossman
Series: The Magicians, #1
Genre: Fantasy, Magic
Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars
Word Rating: Well, Different.
On Goodreads

DNF.

Don't hound me, I do have reasons. I would have kept reading, and I really did want to but I'm sorry, I just couldn't anymore

This book does have some good qualities, which is why I haven't shut it down completely.

It's light and reads fairly easily to read. There's lots of sarcasm! Some of the lines are just absolutely brilliant and some of the scenes are thoroughly exciting and well transitioned and oh so fluid. The commentary on Harry Potter through the modern, realistic eyes of our narrator is pretty cool. The school and Quentin's obsession with Fillory are fantastically portrayed.

And that's where it stops. I can't simply praise and love a book for the few gold nuggets it contains.

The reason it's light and reads easily is because there is no 'showing', there's just a hell of a lot of info dumping, description, delineation, so that the book becomes more or less completely perceptive to the surrounding of the book, rather than placing the reader in the active plot. So it's the anti-contemporary Fantasy novel, yeah? Yeah. There are different ways to critique and display a different style of writing from the genre of the book you are writing . . . this is not one of those ways. It conflicts with one of the main tenants of such a book: the reader has to be engaged.

Yes, I understand there is a small group who wish to be floored with the 'tell' aspect. Yes, I understand that being anti-fantasy is all this book is about, but one has to be deceptive about an anti-book. Grossman simply scares us off with this, makes the first half of the book, the "Harry Potter" half, much more awkward than it has to be. I can't even gather myself to analyze this anymore it's so frustrating.

The entirety of the first half reads like this: "Here's something I didn't like in Harry Potter. Here's my cool, modern version. Ooh let's talk about something else, like Quentin's alcoholism. What a guy, eh?"
Literally, check it out . . . I'm too mad to copy lines from this book, I can't look at it anymore.

And the worst part of this whole anti-genre crap? There is no social message. You won't walk away thinking "wow that guy really had something to say about the fantastical and fallacious portrayal of human beings". Here's a hint: he doesn't. He takes the saying "people never change" and stretches it to the sun and back. Fantasy novels portray humans of all kinds, the best and the worst, and we usually find ourselves in the eyes of the 'best', growing alongside them, however dark it may become or they may become. Human nature is not so facile to be reduced to Quentin Coldwater's less-than-tepid selfish arrogant buttfacery.

See, I know that people suck. I'm not an idiot. People like to think they are the centers of the universe, or in the opposite, that they don't matter at all. People like to just suck. But that's not the point. Grossman had a chance here. A wonderful opportunity to portray Quentin slowly realizing the fallacy of the fantasy world he's being chucked in. But no, he's just a little prick and dresses it up as depression, which it isn't, ruining it for anyone who suffers. He's a cynic, and dresses it up as skepticism, which ruins it for any freethinkers . . . I just don't understand what Grossman was trying to do. He seems to be tackling so much that it just collapses.

I predicted the end and couldn't bring myself to finish, I'm sorry. I quit.

- Marlon

I'm anti-question so no questions. Ha!*

Let us know in the comments!
I'm still angry about this book.

Review: Dream Girl - S.J. Lomas

Dream Girl
S.J. Lomas
Series: N/A
Genre: Young Adult, Romance, Fantasy
Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
Word Rating: No.
On Goodreads

I'm giving two stars for what I've read so far (around a hundred, hundred-fifty pages), but I'm sorry. I can't anymore. I can't finish this nonsense.

This book has secret agents, a boy that has a bad reputation, and for goodness sake, dream travel. How do you go wrong with that?

When Gabriel and Christine meet, they simply fall into each other's 'electrifying' eyes. That's it. No development. What the hell is with Romance these days thinking that love at first sight happens so freaking often? I understand if they found each other attractive but Christine acts like this is Prince Charming + Flynn Rider without knowing him . . . I just can't. Furthermore, she dumps her friends that she's known since forever for this guy she's just met and SOMEONE PLEASE TELL THE ROMANCE INDUSTRY THAT THIS ISN'T INDICATIVE OF A HAPPY OR HEALTHY RELATIONSHIP IT'S ACTUALLY JUST INSANE. Putting aside the endless list of other illogical things she does, of course.

Like, Jace and Clary from TMI have a fantastic instant connection, that actually is relevant to the plot overall and has ties to not only their character development, but pretty much everyone in the main cast. Alec opens himself up, Simon goes through just about every character phase ever, etc. That's a sensible insta-love. This is not.

I won't bother you with quotes from the book, as the writing itself is mildly irritating. Especially the narration . . . there was hardly a distinction between Gabriel and Christine's points of view. While I understand that there are effeminate males, myself being one, Gabriel doesn't come off as that . . . he's basically a girl with lots of muscles but Christine thinks he's adherent to a few boy stereotypes. Did the author consult any guys before writing in this perspective? It furthermore makes him unrelateable (not that Christine is any better what with acting like she's a more selfish and far older version of Bella). He's a bloody librarian, he has to be at least bookish, or strange or something, don't fit characters into social conventions that you don't understand dammit.

I can't even with the plot . . . halfway through and I literally had no idea what was going on. They'd gone into the woods, he wrote her letters about his dreams (after seeing her once) and worked up the courage to just ask her to read them (little bitch) and then some random bs: a top secret government agency gets involved and at that point, the plot just fell apart and I gave up.

- Marlon

What kind of weird dreams have you had lately?

Let us know in the comments!